A REALLY BIG RIG

I don't know how I missed it! A friend posted photos several weeks back of a 1917 IHC "Titan," in as-new condition, and I've just now found them. Have a look. And if you're into the numbers, try these on for size: two cylinders, 9 3/4" bores, 14" strokes. Now that's big iron indeed.

WINDOW SEAT

I've been wanting to add some seating and storage to the dining room/library at my house (Roseholme Cottage) and when an extra sheet of oak-veneer plywood turned up, the chance seemed too good to miss. After only a month or six weeks of as-you-find-it spare time, it was ready to put in place yesterday:Here it is as installed. The sides are "coped" to fit the window; available materials worked out to slightly less than full width of the window frame; this is actually a good thing, as you'll see. (That's a Device on it, a partially-restored 5-meter radiotelephone transceiver, a sort of 1930s cellphone). The tall bookshelves are what the room will eventually be lined with. The shorter ones are temporary and about twenty years old.The reverse angle shows the stenciling (all hand-cut by yours truly. Yes, it does say "Airship Parts, and why not?) and "decal," which is an iron-on inkjet printer transfer for cloth, a trick that worked better than I expected. If it seems a little familiar, that's because it's the old Railway Express (the FedEx and UPS of their day) logo.

In that photo and the next, you can see how it just fits in the inside width of the window frame.

With the cushion in place -- a folded comforter -- it has enormous cat-magnetism. The width works out just right for a Full size comforter.Construction detals: It's pretty much a box sitting on another box; the base is just (nominal) 2" x 8" pine from the scrap-wood pile, butt-jointed; glue and big deck screws hold it together. It clears the baseboard at the back.

More scrap, 2" x 6", extends the base horizontally at front and back, trimmed flush with the base on the inside after assembly. This provides a toe-kick overhang at the front and baseboard clearance at the back.

The upper part is a three-sided box, open at the back, held to the 2" x 6"s with more deck screws (hidden behind the oak trim) and held to the sides by shallow "Kreg" screws. The open back is framed with 2" x 4" wood for strength, with vertical posts and a front-to-back 2" x 4" at the center and another 2" x 4" centered under the hinges to support the seat (you don't rely on the hinges!).

It is heavy, but not as heavy as you'd think. The hinged seat feels solid when you sit or relax on it. Worked out pretty well for something I mostly made up as I went along. I had dimensions in mind but that was about all.

A CLASSIC PENCIL RETURNS

Boing Boing has the details. Eberhard Faber's quirky Blackwing 602 went the way of the Ford Model T back in 1998, leaving a fan base nearly as devoted -- and now it has come back, the design licensed to another pencil maker (no word on the balky machinery that got it dropped in the first place).

What's so special? High-quality lead, for one thing; but the feature I suspect won it the most fans is the eraser, a nice, wide slab with a tiny slider to lift up more when it gets worn down. Maybe it's just the way I write, but I run out of eraser long before the pencil's too short to use (without a holder, that is).

It even gets passing mention in Henry Petroski's marvelous The Pencil: "...the steel-black hexagonal Faber Blackwing, a dignified-looking fifty-cent pencil with distinctive flat ferrule (The Blackwing's extra soft lead makes it so smooth and easy to write with that the pencil has been imprinted with the slogan, 'half the pressure, twice the speed.')" [page 354]

There's a particular pleasure in using a really good pencil; if you liked the old Blackwing, be on the lookout for the new ones.

(For The Pencil and other Petroski books, try the Amazon.com link at Tam's)

RCA HAM TIPS

Scanned in and available online thanks to a kindly ham (N4TRB), a nice collection of "RCA Ham Tips" from the 1930s onwards. These were little flyers featuring a single project using RCA tubes (or later, transistors), nicely built and written up by genuine RCA engineers, usually amateur radio operators themselves. Most are as buildable now as they were when new, and every bit as much fun.

FOR THE GENTLEMEN

I was browsing the Field Notes site (very nice classic pocket notebooks, and none of this famous-authors guff, either, they're like the ones you used to get down at the Farm Bureau Co-Op), and in their map of local dealers, I see there's a dot on Indianapolis.

So I scrolled down, and it's a...barber shop?

Yes, that it is, and not just any barbershop, either: Red's Barber Shop, as classic a place for you gents to get your hair cut as could be imagined. Reminds me of the ones I used to have to wait in, mornings Dad was looking after the kids and he and my baby brother were due to get the hair trimmed off the back of their neck and tops of their ears. (Dad was a Vitalis guy, thick black hair combed up and back just like a movie hero).

If you're local, or passin' through town on The Cardinal train or down from Chicago on The Hoosier State run, you might want to check Red's out.

HAMMERS

TOOLS MATTER
It is said -- and rightly so -- that a poor workman blames his tools. Elsewhere, the hobby woodworker with a collection of expensive tools but no skill is a familiar stereotype and we've all heard the story of a fellow who, with nothing more than a rock, a pocketknife and scrap lumber, produces wonders.

You can find real-life examples of all of this; they're all points on a graph. Most of us are well inside those limits.

Me, for years I owned one hammer. It was my Dad's, then it was his second-best hammer, then it migrated into my toolbox and when I moved out, well, it came along. It's a fine, smooth-face, medium-sized general-purpose claw hammer, probably made some time in the first half of the last century, and it did all the little craft-type projects I wanted or needed to do. When my library reached the point of either learning how to build bookcases or start selling books (the horror!), it did that, too.

Then I got a little better at it and a wooden mallet to tap things together looked like a good idea; learned leatherwork and needed a different mallet for that. Started paying a little more attention to fit & finish of my bookshelves and... H'mm, no tack hammer.

As a child, I didn't so much get along with the classic tack hammer Mom used when reupholstering; somehow the long skinny head always found my tender fingers. And there were these other hammers....
What you see there is my Old Dependable hammer at the bottom (you don't get wood and metal those hues without using them for a long, long time) and above it, a couple of cross pein* or Warrington-pattern hammers. Handiest small hammers I own. I've been using the larger of the two when fastening trim pieces to the window seat I'm working on; the smaller one (especially good for wire brads) is known to British woodworkers as a "telephone hammer" to this very day, supposedly because they were used to nail together the old wooden-type wall telephones, which were usually sent out as a kind of a kit, in order to take up less space on the installers wagon or bicycle.

Could I use different hammer (I use glue, too. Perhaps that's overkill but it seems to work) to tack oak trim to oak plywood? Sure. But this one fits the job. And that's the real secret: knowing which tool to pick up for a particular task. The right one can make your work a pleasure.
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* Or "peen" or even "pane." One story even claims the name comes from nailing together frames for multi-pane windows, in which the narrow "pane" end is used to minimize the risk of breaking glass. --In which case, was the ball-peen hammer for breaking the glass?

OLD & ADVANCED

There are some features not often found in a full-sized drill press that'd be nice to have -- continuously-variable speed, for instance, and maybe a torque-limited drive. And don't you just hate the ones where the heavy table is just clamped to the column, ready to take out a toe if you slip while adjusting the height?

It turns out those concerns were already addressed -- in the 19th Century. Meet the W.B. & J. Barnes No. 0 Drill, a smallish, elegant camelback drill that uses an unusual ninety-degree friction drive:Yes, it's an eBay listing; the photos and first link should take you right to the page for as long as it lasts. I don't think the seller or auction site will mind and if they do -- editing's easy.True, it's set up for line-shaft drive; not too big a challenge for anyone with the skills to restore it and the desire to do so. The simplest item to fix would be the missing lever(s) from the quill control; it may also have a broken quill spring or counterweight, it appears the friction disc and wheel are going to need new leather and all the bearings are condition unknown; expect babbitt, not ball- or roller-bearings.

Despite all those things, the price is good; camelback drill presses generally command excellent prices on the used market and offer a number of advantages. High on the list is one of my pet peeves: most modern drill presses are set up way too fast; every time I have to use one at work, I find myself resetting it to the slowest set of pulleys (or, rarely, one step up). "Faster" is not "better;" it's how you overheat and/or break your drills (sigh, drill "bits," for the language-impaired). Camelbacks were set up for a slower range of speeds. The present example is a little different; instead of the usual three or four-step belt-drive pulley, the setting of the friction-drive wheel determines the speed -- there's a rod behind the main shaft that carries its bearing and a handscrew, barely visible at the upper right in the photo above, that secures it at the selected height along the radius of the friction disc.

Table-height adjustment is not visible in my screencaps. It's an Acme-thread leadscrew with a crank at about the same height as the quill knob, plus the usual clamping arrangement to secure the table at the selected height.

Looks like the press was set up for Morse (or similar....) taper arbors; there's a characteristic slot in the spindle where one would tap in a wedge to remove the chuck. You might not much want to -- it already has a modern-looking three-jaw chuck installed.

The whole thing looks as if it stayed in service well into the 20th Century. Not a lot of rust and no signs of overt abuse past the usual line of spots where the table's been drilled into.

Patent dates, per the seller, are all 1880s - 1890s.

There are some hints of various bits and bobs from the original drive -- a fitting on the column and a cast-in saddle at the base. If I was in Columbus, Ohio, I'd be tempted to have a look; if I knew how to rebabbitt bearings, I might do more than look.