I found some time to do a bit more work on my wall clock. I followed Paul’s method of pillowing the front panel so the slight unevenness in my planeing was resolved. I’m quite please with the way it turned out. I also worked on the beading and added a couple of extra bits. I finally added a shadow line to the two rails where they meet the top and bottom parts – just a personal preference.

I’ve got plenty of hole cutting gear from my Dalek building. A 4″ hole cutter is one of the first tools any Dalek builder buys and the clock I’ll be fitting is a 4″ one so I can afford to glue the clock up and then cut out the hole later.

So, one photo of the clock just before glue up and another of it as it is now – all clamped up waiting for the morning. I’ve mixed up a new batch of Garnet Shellac so everything is ready for tomorrow afternoon.

Thanks for the kind comments guys.

George: I’d normally have gone for blonde shellac but the timber from Wickes looked a bit numb so I decided to warm it up a tad. Last time I used garnet it was on White Oak. I’d fumed the Oak with ammonia and it had gone a tad green so the warmed the Oak back up again without it going all dark brown.
It has made the pine go a bit more yellow than I’d have liked but the piece looks good in the final location. I’m glad I tried things out on some scrap first so I could adjust things; the first two coats are garnet but any subsequent coats will be blond to stop the clock looking overly coloured.

Dan: I’m currently keeping two journals: one is a sort of scrap book version where I will scribble things down and paste pictures of things that inspire me. The other is the one shown here. I call it my Wainwrght Journal because all the pen and ink drawings remind me of those walkers guide books written by ALfred Wainwright.

Hi David,

I mix my own shellac. I buy the shellac from here…
http://www.workshopheaven.com/tools/Garnet_Shellac_Flakes_100g.html
I buy my meths from B&Q. The purple stain they add to the stuff doesn’t have any impact on the final colour. I like the flakes because I only have to mix up what I need and there’s no waste (also, if I want to mix two colours together, I get a pretty god idea of how it’ll look before I add the meths). The flakes can sit on the shelf pretty much forever too whereas mixed shellac has a pretty short shelf life (at least that’s what I understand to be the case).

Daleks: I originally built the Dalek because it was a childhood dream to own one (who doesn’t want to own their very own life sized Dalek?). I then found out that there are a lot of Dalek owners who use them for charity fundraising so I joined a group near to me and have raised money for Air Ambulance, Marie Curie, British Heart Foundation, Dogs Trust and about a dozen or so other charities. I named my Dalek ‘Nimrod’ and if you Google ‘Dalek Nimrod’ you’ll find him easily enough.

Photo attached of him in his current paint job (well, he is partially made out of wood).
He’s currently in retirement as I can’t afford the Public Liability Insurance at the moment. But one day HE-WILL-Re-TUURRRRNN!!! 😉