Christmas Update

It's been a nice 11 days off from work for the Holidays. I promised everyone some updates, so here's the first.

Christmas was very nice. We spent Christmas Eve with my sister & brother-in-law. This was only the second Christmas since my mother passed away, so I'm sure she would have been happy to see us keeping up the old traditions. Christmas Day was spent with my wife's family. She's the middle child of 5, 4 girls & one boy. My brother-in-law lives in Saratoga Springs, so we didn't see him & his family, but the rest of us had a good time at my sister-in-law's house.

As far as presents, I had received a holiday catalog from Lee Valley a few weeks before Christmas. While perusing the catalog, I made a list of various inexpensive items that I wanted, and I made the list's existence known to my wife.

I figured that Mary would order one or two of them & stick them in my stocking, or something. To my surprise, she ended up ordering everything on the list! Here's what I got:

• A Veritas bevel setter
• A Veritas miter saddle
• A Veritas pull shave
• A Veritas saddle square
• A Veritas sliding square
• A transfer punch set
• A package of painter's pyramids
• All 15 Tadpole sanding grip profiles
• And Christopher Schwarz' book, Workbenches From Design & Theory to Construction & Use

The saddle square has already come in handy in my woodworking, as have the sanding grips. More on those in upcoming posts. I had thought the pull shave was a scraper and didn't realize what it was until I had it in my hands. It's very well made & the wood handles are impressive. I'll find a use for it, I'm sure.

I know that the bevel setter will be useful the next time I need to set the table saw bevel or the band saw table to some angle & I want to make absolutely sure the angle is correct. While I have the Wixey angle gauge, I just don't trust it to be absolutely perfect.

I have already finished reading the Workbench book, and I've learned a lot that I'm looking forward to use one day. I hope to build a new shop, either as a new garage addition to the house or as a separate building in the back yard. Once I've done that, I'll probably build the Roubo bench.

In any event, my next post will be an update on the project.