A Bit of a Rant

I recently purchased a couple of Tracey Owens scrapers made by Henry Taylor. They're expensive at almost £38 each. At that price one should expect that the grinding of the steel would be reasonable. It isn't. I don't expect any cutting tool to be ready to use 'out of the box' but a little effort from the manufacturer certainly doesn't damage their reputation. I nearly returned them. It took me a couple of hours to sand the flat with 80 grit, polish on a twelve inch mdf disk with Flexcut compound, re-grind the bevels and hone with a diamond file.

The scraper on the top is polished prior to grinding the bevel, the bottom is as it came. They now cut as they should. The couple of hours it took me should have paid for one of them!

Yarn Swift

This was a simple project that made a nice gift for my wife at Christmas. I had some small bits of scrap cherry and yew lying around for the parts; all I had to buy was a £4.00 lazy susan bearing from Axminster.

The turned parts were two disks of cherry (one with a recess cut on one face to accommodate most of the thickness of the bearing), four shaker style pegs, and a knob with an M6 screw glued at the end. A threaded insert is screwed into the underside of the top disk. The two arms are yew with a half-lap joint in the middle and a series of holes for placing the pegs at different diameters.

Click here for a higher rez video on youtube.

A simple project for anyone you know who knits!

p.s. Forgive the mumbling nature of the narration.