Woodturning Mineral Inlay Followup and Shop Update

So this is a quick follow-up on the inlay experiment. This is what I came up with my finished product, as you can remember, and this is the one that I've tried my parting tool on, which was obviously a failure. So what I have here today is a couple of discs that I bought in my last visit to the hardware shop, and these are diamond coated cutting wheels, and I'm going to try them. These are the cheapest that you can find, or at least the cheapest I could find. I don't know the real difference between the cheap ones and the expensive ones. Is it the hardness of the diamonds? I don't know. Is it the density or the particle size? There must be a difference, but I'm not here to find that difference and make that comparison. So I'm going to run this, and my first test will be to grind those from the top and see what it does, and then I think I want to try coming directly from the side and simply cutting them. So that would be an interesting experiment. Obviously whenever I'm dealing with the power tools of this magnitude, I'm wearing gloves, I'm wearing hearing protection, a respirator obviously, and my face mask, so don't forget these. Okay, so I've brought you in close to look at the results, and I think that this little small cheap diamond wheel really, really does the job well, and really quickly also. Of course I will have to send this to see if I manage to get all the scratches out, but I'm pretty sure those are going to send out. I also would like to thank all my Facebook friends and the people commenting on the videos. Your suggestions are very valuable to me, and helping me also on deciding on different next projects and things to do. So these are our two blanks done, as you can see. Let me show you a little bit the differences between them. This is the original one, you can see with the glare of the lighting, the surface that I was able to achieve here. And then the new one, which has been ground with a diamond wheel, and then I filled in the top with a thick bead of medium CA, this one, and I let it cure, and then sanded this down to 1500 and applied the finish. As you can see, this is a completely different story. Let me show you a little bit with a close-up how this looks. This previous attempt, much of the gaps between the stones have remained completely open, and there's some visible gaps here between the stones and the wood that's just bed glue up. And to compare this one with the new version, there we go. Now, would you look at the difference in those. This is absolutely a different level of finish that actually looks so good. I like the green and the yellow just the same. Okay, so let me show you a couple of other things I've worked on during the past couple of weeks. All right, so what I have here is a pen press. I took a couple of pictures from the internet, obviously, and marked out the general shapes of the different components, trying to figure out their sizes and measurements, and then eventually I've made this press. So, this was the first out of two presses I've made, and this press actually worked fine. I turned six pens, and I used it to mount all the pieces of the pen, and it worked okay. The advantages in this design that I chose and made is in this piece, which is the counterpiece, I've made it one side flat and the other one concave, and that actually means I can switch from those two modes by simply turning the thing around. The problem with this kind of design is that it relies on two pins, so it means that if the pins are not distanced exactly correctly, then you will have a hard time putting in your piece. Like, these two holes just doesn't go in, they don't match. Also, if they are not aligned on the other axis, then you have a problem where it sits in an angle. So, I learned from that one, and I changed that design. Another thing that failed in this design was that I used the nails as the axles for all the components. Now, here it held up fine, and here it also held up quite well, but in here, I'm going to try to show you, it actually bent out completely out of shape. It still works, by the way, but it just wasn't enough. These were like a millimeter, a millimeter, a millimeter and a half nails, it wasn't enough. So, this gave birth to its slightly larger brother, which is this press. Let me put them together. So, as you can see, the second pen press is a little bit larger, the components themselves are all larger, and they're also finished much better, because this was the finished version, the last version. So, the handle is also sanded, and it's a little bit more comfortable to handle. This press, obviously, it's a little bit more robust. Let me bring it to the front, so we could see the changes in the design that I've made. So, if in this press, I actually made just a small concave hole here, in this front piece. In the new press, I actually drilled a hole almost completely through. I'm sorry, let me see if I can show it to you. Let me get these pieces up. Okay, so, as you can see, I drilled a hole almost all the way through, and that will hold the head of the pen. Also, another design change was that my counterpieces, and here I made two, a flat counterpiece, as you can see, and the concave counterpiece, and those actually are based on a single pin. So, the distances don't matter that much, and they will be self-centering, meaning that if I place it like this, but I give it a pressure from the front, it will tend to straighten out by itself. So, it's self-straightening, and also, more than that, I drilled the holes much more accurately, which actually gives me the possibilities, if I want to, I can always lock the counterpiece in place with a screw that simply goes in and locks it in place. As you can see, it works perfectly. Another large change that I've done in the larger version was giving it much larger pins as hinges. These are 6mm pins, and those, I'm pretty sure, will not bend out of shape no matter how much pressure I will apply on them. They are also not glued inside, they are held by a very slight pressure. I can take these pieces off completely in about 10 seconds. As you can see, it works perfectly, very smooth action. Another thing that I might add is that, relative to the size, I placed the hinge of this plate on the handle a little bit lower than the other one, and what this means is that I'm going to have more power over a little bit shorter distance. So, I sacrificed a couple of centimeters of distance, which I don't really need, to have much more power when I press the press. So, as you can see, that is how it is meant to work. Another thing I've done this couple of weeks was building this cyclone separator. What basically I've done is, I've used the bucket that I bought at the hardware store, some plywood, scrap plywood, some t-nuts with bolts to capture it from below, obviously a traffic cone, and again plywood for the top, and some tubing to connect everything up. I want to thank you for joining me in this week's video, and I hope to see you back in my shop really soon.