davepolaschek

Had another half-hour in the shop this morning. Got the tenons double-checked and cut, and they’re each just a hair too big for their respective handle, which is exactly what I wanted.

Needed to take 15/64 off both sides in this direction...

And 13/32 off each side in this direction.

The finished tenons, both of which are about 1/64 inch too large to fit into their respective mortises. I’ll fine-tune the fit using a float, and then I can start rounding the shafts. Also note that I've marked the shafts as “A” and “B”, and once I've fine-tuned the fit, each handle will also be marked and will stay with its respective shaft from here on.

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Another hour in the shop this morning. Trimmed the layer of granadillo after marking the rough diameter I plan to finish it to. Not perfect, but close enough, I hope.

1) make a stick that fits tightly in the mortise, and fine-tune the mortise. It’s really easy to have the mortise too small in the middle, and only discover that when everything has glue on it, which it too late to be fixing that problem.

2) scribe a circle roughly the diameter of the finished shaft. My dividers did a good enough job, but I came back and added a pencil line to reduce the chances of a mistake.

3) inspect the circle. Yup! Looks round enough.

4) use a dovetail saw to make angled cuts in the excess, then chisel away the excess to the cut lines. More cleanup to be done yet, but this is good enough that I can shape the handle without getting into trouble by removing too much of the granadillo.

And that’s it for this morning. Hoping to have a neighbor help me cut the shafts this afternoon.

Micro-update: The shafts are cut. My neighbor stopped by and helped cut a 1¼ inch by 12/4 x 4 foot strip off the edge of my ash slab. I cut that into two shafts, marked the tenons on them, deciding grain direction and which end is up and such, and then called it an evening after just a half-hour. Will double check my math before cutting the tenons tomorrow morning.

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I got a little more time this evening, and spent a half hour making two trenails out of four ⅜ inch square scraps of live oak I got from Nathan. Split them out using a chisel, then whittle the end pointy and round-ish, then bash them through a dowel plate with a 2# hand-sledge (holes of ½, ⅜, 5/16, and then ¼ inch).

Of the four attempts, two suffered from mis-hits and broke, but two came out nice and straight (at least matching the grain) and should be way stronger than will be needed to hold the handle to the cane shaft.

I’ve decided the holes in the tenons on the ends of the shafts will be offset by between 1mm and 1/16 inch. I’ll boil these pegs just before doing the joinery, and once everything dries, the joint should last multiple lifetimes. I’ll also make a couple backups from other scraps in case I break one trying to drive it home.

About 3-3½ hours in so far. Really glad I decided to make a pair of canes, rather than just one, since doing just one would’ve saved me about an hour so far.

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Not much progress today, but even slow progress is progress.

I finished chopping the mortise on the second handle. Went pretty smoothly except for one tiny bit of blowout in the granadillo. I pushed it back into place and hit it with a little glue, so should be fine.

With that done, I put the handles in the cross-slide vise on the post drill and lined up and drilled the ¼ inch holes where the shaft will be drawbored into the handle. I needed to drill these now while I still had flat surfaces to index from.

Tomorrow I’m hoping my neighbor will have time to help me rip the handles off my larger chunk of ash. It’s about 12/4 square by 4 feet long, so it’s right at the limit for what I’m supposed to be lifting, and I’d rather not screw up my healing and end up needing another surgery, so I’m trying to be good. I did drag it from one side of the shop to the other, but I never actually picked it off the floor, so that doesn’t count, right?

I also found an oak scrap with nice straight grain that I’m going to split down for the ¼ inch pins. Maybe tomorrow morning depending on when my neighbor’s available.

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I grabbed another 45 minutes in the shop this afternoon, and got one handle mortised.

Started by drilling a pair of ¼ inch holes through the mortise using my post drill. That was a pretty good workout, and the cross-slide vise worked just as intended to get my holes in a straight line. Wasn’t quite bold enough to drill two ⅜ holes to try and get everything in one shot, though.

Next up was using a ¼ inch and ⅜ inch chisel to chop most of the way through. I used the ⅜ from the top in the relatively softer ash.

Then started from the bottom using the ¼ inch chisel, as granadillo is harder and more brittle, and I didn’t want big blowout, even though this end of the joint will be completely hidden by the shoulder of the cane’s shaft.

Finally, I used a ¼ inch and ¾ inch float to clean up the edges a little, then headed inside for dinner.

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On Friday, we went to the local farmers market for the first time since my back surgery. I brought the cane I made for myself in 2016 before getting my knees replaced, since the parking lot where the market is held is uneven and I didn’t want to trip and fall.

One of the guys who’s there every week noticed my cane, and asked me where I had found it, since he’s also a large gentleman, and has had real problems finding a cane that’s rated for his weight. I told him that I had made it for myself as my first woodworking project, and my guesstimate was that it might support a 500 pound person, so I probably had a decent safety margin at 280.

“Could you make one for me?” “Sure, though I’m not sure when it’ll be done.” “No hurry.”

But the farmers market is done for the year on the first Friday of October, so that’s my deadline.

So here we go.

Yesterday I started the build. Found a 1½ inch square ash offcut (from chair legs for my even-slower moving Jimmy Possum chair) with straight grain. Measured it, and it’s just long enough to make two cane handles, so I cut it in half, and started shaping it with my bandsaw, a coarse (12 inch 6 grain) rasp, and a spokeshave.

Once I had most of the shaping done around the top and bottom, I glued a small scrap of granadillo onto the bottom of the handle, where the shaft of the cane will be mortised in, and then marked it for drilling the mortise. The flat piece of granadillo will rest on the bed of my post drill, giving me a flat surface to index on, and the flat sides of the handle will let me clamp it securely in place. It also will make a dark band just below the handle, which ought to look nice.

I then repeated all these steps with a second handle. Tomorrow I’ll drill and chop the mortise while I still have flat surfaces to work with. I’ll also try to grab one of my neighbors to help hold my slab of ash so I can rip a 1⅜ inch piece off the side of it with the table saw, and make two cane shafts from that, since I’m limited to lifting no more than 10 pounds until my spine heals more.

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In late August, 2025, I built a cane† for an acquaintance from the Eldorado Farmers Market. Since I was recovering from surgery at the time, and couldn't spend too much time in the shop, I documented the build extremely thoroughly. Here's the build notes. Note that these are basically a (short) day of work each, though in some cases, two of these make up a calendar day.

1. Roughing the handle
2. Mortising the handle
3. Finishing the mortises, drilling drawbore holes
4. Making trenails
5. Mortise cleanup and trimming the trim
6. Cutting tenons on the shafts
7. Fine-tuning tenons & octagonalizing the shafts
8. Rounding the shafts
9. Hole for the peg, shaping begins
10. Shaping the handle
11. Shaping the handle more, grain-filling, and fitting the tip and 11a: A sidebar on cane physics
12. Finishing the handle, carving on the shaft
13. Finished the carving, finishing
14. Joining the pieces
15. The final product

† I actually built two canes, since it was easier to do all the operations twice, rather than having to remember everything later when someone else asked me for another cane.

#buildblog

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Nothing very special about this, I just kept forgetting exactly what the ingredients were so I wrote them down.

Ingredients

• 1 C Water
• ¼ C soy sauce
• 5 tsp packed brown sugar
• ½ tsp ground ginger
• ¼ tsp garlic powder

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• 2 Tbsp corn starch
• ¼ C cold water

Directions

• Mix first set of ingredients together in a sauce-pan and put over medium heat. Heat to just short of a boil.
• Mix corn starch and cold water together in a cup, and stir until dissolved.
• Add corn starch mixture to pan, and cook until thickened, about 5-7 minutes.

#recipe #sauce

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Quick and easy, and I usually have all the ingredients on-hand in case I need to “use up” some leftover rice (which I almost always have after making a meal that includes rice, because I make a big batch so I have leftovers).

Ingredients

• 3-4 Cups cooked rice
• 1½ Cup milk (or 1 14oz can lite Coconut milk)
• 1 (14 oz) can sweetened condensed milk (sweetened condensed coconut milk works)
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 1 egg (you really only need the yolk, but what do you do with one egg white at that point?)

Directions

• Rice, milk, and sweetened condensed milk all go in a pan on low heat.
• While that warms, beat the egg and vanilla and set aside.
• Stir rice and milk frequently.
• When milk comes to a simmer, spoon about ¼ cup of milk into the egg, whisking continually until mixed, then pour back into the pan, stirring until it's all mixed.
• Lower heat and stir for another 5-10 minutes until pudding is almost as thick as you'd like. It will thicken more as it cools.
• Serve hot. Or cool. Or cold.

Notes

• If you don't eat it all immediately, you can also take leftover cold rice pudding, shape it into patties, coat it with batter, and pan-fry it to have delicious fried treats.

#recipe #dessert #rice

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Ingredients

• 1 Box dairy-free yellow cake mix (Duncan Hines, for example) plus the ingredients it calls for.

Streusel Ingredients

• ½ Cup cold vegan butter (I prefer coconut-oil based for desserts)
• 1⅓ Cup general-purpose flour
• ½ Cup white sugar

Rhubarb Ingredients

• 2 Pounds (6 cups) chopped rhubarb (½ inch long pieces)
• ⅓ Cup white sugar

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Directions

• Preheat oven to 350F.
• Wash and chop rhubarb. Put in a large bowl and sprinkle with sugar. Let it sit while you prep everything else.
• Mix cake batter according to instructions, but prepare a second pan. This will make two 8” square cakes very easily.
• Mix streusel ingredients with a fork until crumbly.
• Pour cake batter into pans.
• Drain any liquid from the rhubarb (save it for something else!) and put rhubarb on top of batter.
• Sprinkle streusel over the rhubarb.
• Bake cakes for 3-5 minutes longer than the cake mix box calls for, until streusel is golden-brown and delicious.
• Let cake cool.
• Enjoy!

#recipe #dessert #rhubarb

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