Parquet - or par-chaos?

My wife nipped out for a few things a week ago and in that time by the time she got back, The Stupid Fat Bloke had lifted the carpet in the front hall. Then the underlay. Then the lovely 1960s linoleum tiles (black, with some red, yellow and white). And finally revealed the original parquet floor. It's in pretty good nick, considering, although there are large gaps where previously there was a toilet and some vandal also lifted blocks, filling the gaps with screeding.

Hmm. Lovely, lovely linoleum 

These turn out to be Appalachian Oak, from Ritter of West Virginia, USA. It seems that they were quite well known back in the 1930s when this house was built, although it seems surprising they didn't use British flooring, as there must surely have been plenty about.

One area that lacks original parquet is where the kahrsi used to be, under the stairs:

New joists:

...and 22mm plywood:

The new / old (recycled) blocks have arrived. Cut down to the same dims. Looks as if they cam from and old school hall or gym:

Reproducing the original layout pattern:

The floor sanders have arrived. Start with the edges:

Before lifting the loose blocks I need to refix, out with the chalks. Don't want to lose their places.

These ones made it back home ok.

Ditto:

This will take some time to resolve......

Another 3D printer - Elegoo Centaur Carbon

I tried to get the Cetus3D 3D printer running recently so that I could flash up a bearing shroud to cover the thrust bearing I decided to fit to the Paramo #3 vise I've just overhauled. 

Obviously the only solution would be to buy a replacement. I looked at a few possibilities, including:

• Bambu Labs P1S £340
• Qiqi Q2 £560
• Creality K2 £469
• Prusa Core One £919
• Elegoo Centaur Carbon £259

The Bambu is the market leader at the low cost end of the market. The Qiqi and Elegoo seem to be sort of clones of the Bambu. The Creality is sort of trying to be there too but seems to be expensive and not a wonderful success. Prusa seems to be trading on its early market presence and the pricing seems to have got away from them without any obvious advantage in terms of quality or technology.

Some offer multi colour printing but that ties you to an expensive machine and it appears that the colour changing process is very wasteful of filament. Elegoo seems to have pissed off many of their early adoptors by promising a multi colour option - then abandoning it. 

But at £260 delivered (within 36 hours of ordering) and with generally pretty good reviews, the Elegoo it is. It's sitting in its box awaiting opening tomorrow (Xmas Day). After ~30 mins of assembly, it is good to go, almost right out of the box.

Yuk - more Brown Stuff - and a thicknesser / planer

Yuk. The horrible floor sanders were a ordeal, pretty much as I recall from my previous 2 encounters with their ilk, back in the late 90s.

The HT7 (edging sander) and HT8 (floor sander) are big, crude beasts. The larger HT8 "lawn mower" device uses a giant brushed universal motor that runs a cylindrical drum at something like 4000rpm, with a large piece of emery paper wrapped around it. If not secured correctly with the shitty little slot headed screws, the paper will come off in use, grenading and making a godawful mess. Of course, if a previous user has bent one of the fixings screws, it becomes quite difficult to tighten up the clamp sufficiently to avoid said issue. Furthermore, if the supplied abrasive is made of paper, rather than fabric, it just wants to tear and grenade when you just look at it.

The edging sander was a bit better and we ended up using it for about half of the bulk sanding. The problem with that is that the disc is about 10" diameter and spins at a silly speed too, so is prone to burning any paint or wood that offers any degree of resistance. All in all, not ideal.

So, I've invested in a Makita 9040 belt sander for £290 and a Titan planer thicknesser for £190. Given that the sanders cost me ~£150 for 3-4 days of usable time, and given how shit they were, this isn't such a big deal. 

The replacement blocks were £1566 plus £122 for a pallet delivery. The originals were 2-1/4" x 10-1/4" and although there's no standard size for parquet floors, there certainly wasn't any chance of finding anything the right size. The Antique Flooring Company who supplied the flooring supplied them cut down to size but that didn't include reducing the height to exactly match the originals. I'd sort of planned to sand them down using the aforementioned floor sanders but that's looking rather naive with hindsight. Hence the thicknesser, which will both reduce them to the correct thickness and also remove the shitty varnish and paint which would otherwise clog up the abrasives in no time.

I collected the thicknesser from Screwfix at the weekend (Titan is their own brand, although it's also sold under other brand names). This is a decent looking device and seems to have been in production for almost a decade now, to generally good reviews.

The makita belt sander is the biggest they sell and the consensus seems to be that it's a benchmark for the other belt sanders out there, apart from the top end professional machines. With 1010W claimed power, it's slightly less powerful than its sister (the 9030) but offers variable speed, which could be helpful to avoid burning the blocks.

It's Xmas Eve today, so probably best not to crank up either machine yet. That can wait until Boxing Day or later.

Not keen on having so many woodworking tools clogging up the workshop but needs must etc.

I have many vises....

Back in September 2023 I investigated rust eaters for no particular reason other than to avoid getting ripped off by market leading proprietary brands (aka Evapo-Rust). In order to challenge my solution to this problem (sorry), I used an old vise I found rusting away in my mother in law's garage. 

This was fairly convincing, although it was in a royal mess to start with. It finished up looking a lot better than it started out but still looked pretty sorry.

What it needs is some wire brush action and a lick of paint.

That's better.

The jaws came off easily. Bizarrely, one of the screws sheared off, yet it was easy to remove the remnant. I'm not complaining!

Bizarrely, the jaws are not parallel but slightly tapered. Is this really intentional??

This needs some attention from the belt sander:

There.

I found a supplier of hard jaws for these Paramo vises (this is a No3 model). And I've ordered some blue spray paint. We are now masked up and ready for a bit of painting action:

There we go.....

Just needs that set of jaws and the unnecessary roller thrust bearing I ordered yesterday, and we should be good to go.

Here's the leadscrew and tommy bar. I may need to machine a washer to spread the thrust load and possibly a cup to shield the bearing from dust and grit. I'll deal with that later on, after I've got the bearing in my hands.