Stanley No. 78 - After

There were much less work to do in this project that I anticipated. This is mostly due to the awesome efficiency of a product called Evaporust. I don't want to turn this post into an infomercial, but it worked perfectly, didn't need to be handled with gloves and can be reused apparently a few more time. If you are a chemist geek, the secret is a chelator targeting only iron in the salt form and not the metallic form.

So let's have a before and after moment:

Before

After.

I'm still too impatient to truly polish this to a mirror surface.

I soaked all the parts in evaporust overnight, and rinsed them off  with minimal scrubbing using a toothbrush. I then lapped the sole using a dead flat piece of MDF and two successice grit of sand paper (100, 220). I was expecting that a plane that has been welded back together like this would be out of alignment. To my amazement: no. I don't know how my wife's grand-father managed to do this, but this plane was welded back with more precision than the flatness of my last blockplane right out of the box! The 100-grit sand paper proved to be unnecessary. A little sanding on all three sides and this bad boy was back into business.

This is it, the blade was very sharp, despite some 30 years or more of inactivity. I worked on it until the bevel was very flat and honed to a razor's edge. I can't wait to have to plane a rabbet by hand. 

I think that this plane date from anywhere between 1903 and 1913. This is a perfectly functional, 100 years old hand tool.

Stanley No.78 - Before

This is it, it is time to get this Stanley No.78 back to its maiden appearance. This plane, despite its rough edges, saved me hours of work when I made the buttons for the Hayrake Table. I'm twice as motivated to add this bad boy to my toolbox.

Inside face. Notice the welded seam at the top.

Outter face with fence.

What? Something was ever made in Canada?

Taken apart. Only a few parts involved.

This doesn't look great, but the sole actually looks flat.

The Hayrake table is done!

After some odd 70 hours of work (or so), the Hayrake table is finally done. Well, almost as I need to make the buttons to fasten the top to the stretcher. However, for now we'll assume that gravity will keep this nearly 100lb table top in place.

The design is based on finewoodworking.com 's design. The difficulty level was "intermediate", which was much warranted by the complexity of the joinery underneath. The $12 design were useful, although I had to wing most measurements to fit the vagaries of working with rough lumber AND getting the table to be a whole 14" longer than designed.

The stretcher is made of hard maple while the tabletop is made of quatersawn white oak (which looks red to me). Milling the oak in all of its 8' length was impossible on a 6" jointer, so I had to improvise and joint on the tablesaw using a 8' melamine shelf as a sleigh (and some weird clamps that I found at busy bee tools). Overall, the table top is fine although I find it a bit rough. I have to say that I learned how to properly used the No.5 Handplane on the job. Some 6 hours of intense aerobic exercise were needed to bring the top to a reasonable flatness. I also had never dealt with such a large surface to finish: two danish oils and 5 Polyurethane coats later, I thing that I'm getting a feel for the process.

Flat and shiny... 

Chloe, ready to baptize this bad boy.

I'm glad to be done and look forward to finish my ambitious TV stand. It is nice to know that this table will be used every days, for decades to come, to have dinner with my family, spill wine, pass the salad, violently roll our eyes, etc.

Here are a few more pictures:

Hayrake table, progress

The hammer and the finger a few days later. It doesn't look
10% as grotesque as I felt when it happened... 

After a week off playing full time furniture maker, I did make a lot of progress toward the Hayrake table. Sadly, wednesday was partially wasted by an accident where I hit my nail as hard as I could with a mortising hammer. The nail tore in the middle and most of the blood drained through. If you never have done this, it hurts a lot. I duly walked to the bathroom where I passed out for about a minute. Strangely, there is very few evidence left of this embarrassing episode as of Saturday night...

The stretcher was a very challenging piece of joinery. It contains two round end-caps, each with three joints at 45 degrees relative to each other. The end-caps connect to two stretchers at 45 degrees with the central stretcher. Pfew, it took me three days to cut all the joints. In the end, they came together without a real fight and I'm now a lot more precise and fast at it. Yet, I added a mortising machine to my dream list of tools. 

With the legs pretending to be assembled.

Some 37 hours later, I have most of the joinery done for the table, and look forward to add the apron, finish the structure with a cherry stain (to match the chairs and China cabinet), and finally tackle the monster job of jointing the tabletop with my small equipment (I've got a McGiver-style plan for that!). My 50 hours estimate for the overall project will be an underestimate, but not by a lot.

Signing off!

Week of woodworking

The stretcher system taking form.

This week is off and the main objective is to get the dining room table done. I don't know whether this is going to happen, but I'll try as hard as I can. This being said, I spent the day with the girls hiking and eating in a fine Japanese restaurant. I rest my case.

The Hayrake table is a nice learning project, rated as intermediate in terms of skills. There is a lot of angled joinery such as these shown on the picture to the right. Tomorrow, I'm getting started on the rounded end-cap, with the most challenging joinery details.

Here is a sample of the stretcher with a somewhat similar end-cap.

A sample of a hayrake table.

Jointing long boards with the tablesaw

I'm making a dining room table which should fit at least 8 people. This is a lot of table, and this very long stock must be jointed somehow. In a way, I'm glad that I encounter this snag while I'm working on the stretcher part of the table because jointing for edge gluing will be taking this seemingly impossible task to a whole new height.

Method 1 - Roller stand to extend the jointer's in/outfeed. 
This simply doesn't work: there seems to be no way to align the roller stand suitably. The more I joint, the more stock I lose near the ends of the board. I've got a 6" jointer, and must joint a 7' board.

Method 2 - Handplane!
With my largest handplane a No.5, I do not feel confident that I can remove curvatures over longer length than the length of the place (which is shorter because of the angle of attack). In hinsight, I guess that I could make a planing guide with a straightedge... mmm, I already have moved-on.

Method 3 - Tablesaw!
Here is the idea: I screw a straight piece of sheet good to my board (luckily I have some waste where this can be done). This melamine extends beyond the far edge to be jointed so that it is the only point of contact with the tablesaw fence. I then set the fence to take light passes until the jointed edge is completely straight. Once I've got one good edge, I can use this edge to mill The other side.

After action report
I tried method #3 and got decent results. The 4" melanine guide was bending a bit (maybe 1/32" in the middle), so a third screw in the midpoint would have made it more stable. This was good enough for my current piece because I was cutting down to smaller parts and re-jointing. However, this is not going to be good enough to joint for edge gluing the components of my table top. 

Make your own bandsaw...

This series is very interesting. The guy makes a large bandsaw with softwood and other easily source-able material:

http://woodgears.ca/bandsaw/homemade.html

Stanley No 78

A picture of a No. 78, but in better condition than mine.

My father in law gave me a Stanley No 78 to play with. It came from the same heirloom toolbox as the Record No. 5 plane, and is pretty much in the same condition as the No.5 as well. I can feel a little restoration project coming to me!

I wonder whether I can bring this "old rusty" back into a functional rabbet plane.  This made my day, on top of being probably one of the day that I spent the most time working in the shop ever... I've got cuts on my hands to prove it. These cuts are not even caused by my tools, but by the wicked hard edges that Hard Maple can keep on these through mortises cut across 3" of wild grained stock!

Craftex CT146 - A preliminary review

There is not a lot of information on the CRAFTEX brand of tools. This is so because it is exclusively sold at Busy Bee, which is Canadian. In the US, the same would be sold under Grizzly (I think). Most of my stationary tools are Craftex tools. The main reasons is that it is nearly impossible to get any other brand in Halifax, NS, Canada. Nonetheless, everything Craftex that I own is working great for what I need them for. 

Is that sawdust on the tabletop?

Setup
I followed the assembly instructions in the manual. I had to take the saw from the upstairs garage where it was delivered to the downstairs shop. At 284lbs, this was a head scratcher. However, the heaviest piece in the box must have been no more than 100lbs. Two people could easily get this down a flight of stairs. Getting the table from an upside-down position on to its feet required 3 people, and could have used a 4th one.

Plan 3-4 hours to get the table ready to go, but the process was simple. I really like how each screw/nuts'washers were organized in a large punchable package with labels for each item. Surprisingly, the amount of machine grease was small and I didn't ended up smelling like petroleum products for days like I did when I assembled a bandsaw, a jointer and a drill press in one go.

Operation
The biggest shock for me is the fence: it seems to reliably set itself to the square of the blade AND the distance scale is very precise. The fence got my mark with something like 1/64" from manual setup, and a 3" thick board of hard maple got cut with less drift than a sharp pencil line. What's more, the cut was very clean and hardly blade marks were left to smooth after this demanding cut. Feeding too fast made the blade stop without noises or vibrations. This is night and day with the performance that I got from my jobsite RIDGID tablesaw. The tabletop is very flat and wide enough to allow 36" ripcuts. The engine jerks a bit when turned on, but I think that I'll convert it to 220V soon to smooth out the initial peak.

I provided the disclaimer that this is a preliminary review. I have it running now for only one day. I'll follow up later when I have clocked a lot more time on the machine.

A knitter's end Table - design

Following up on yesterday’s post. Since every single tools are packed away in the garage, the only way to DO woodworking is with a pencil and a mouse. Well, a pencil for today. I bounced some ideas to my knitting wife. After a bit of discussion, I brooded all day on this until tonight. Here is how I imagine the end table to look like:

Orthographic drawing of the end table

I’m not sure about the sides, but I will use light colored slats in the back (similar to the TV stand) with the rest in dark Cabernet stain.

The sketch cleared with the ultimate user. I guess that the next step is to figure out the joinery and make a scale model with Sketchup.

A knitter's end Table - research

Specifications

Here is what my wife and I came up with for requirement prior to design:

1. Table top at shoulder height when sitting down. (say, 29″)
2. Square shape from top, 14″ or 16″ wide/deep.
3. A drawer for needles and other flat tools (scissors, etc.)
4. Room for papers and patterns.
5. Room for 3-4 projects (yarn, needles, in-progress pieces).

 So I’m thinking of putting together a narrow but fairly tall end-table, with 1-2 drawers and a cabinet underneath that will have 2 or 3 dividers.  Let’s see what there is on Fine Woodworking.

Fine Woodworking Arts & Craft end table.

 This is too wide, but brought to a square top profile, and closing down the sides and back, add dividers and make the drawer shallower to stack two of them, and this could fit the bill. A variation with mission-style sides:

Mission-Style End table

 This one is missing the drawer and needs some height. It has an open side that I was thinking about in the first end table. I wonder whether I could use a similar style to create partitions in the bottom cabinet.

Googling “kitting end table” lead to this handcrafted cabinet that is a bit heavier than I have in mind, but it is worth the addition in this post:

Two drawers and one compartment cabinet.

The cabinet looks nice, but is too deep, and the top compartment is useful only if the tabletop can be freed of clutter. I can already see my wife roll her eyes on that last assumption. Here is another one making similar assumptions on my family inability to leave clear any horizontal surfaces.

So, what’s next? Enters Google Sketchup… (but this is stuff for another post).

Back at it!

After weeks of moving, taking down the tools and subsequently setting them up again, I began working on hardwood again tonight. I'm making a Hayrake Table, which design from from an editor of the Fine Woodworking magazine.  The modification to the basic design is that the structure is made of hard maple while the table top is still made of quatersawn white oak. This will be more consistent with the China Cabinet and chairs that are going to be in the dining room. Another reason why this is so is because I couldn't source anything but 4/4 stock of oak in this cut style, and thus it would have made it very tedious to prepare the legs and stretchers (it calls for 8/4 and even some 12/4 stock).

I spend the best of 1-2 hours with my daughter doing the initial milling of the legs (with 12/4 stock), which was a good work-out for my new roller stand and a good test for the ducts going to the dust-collector. Everything seems to be working as expected. Life is good.

Tomorrow, I'm finally getting a 10" contractor saw from busybee.  The only tool not yet delivered is the DW618K 2HP router that will be the workhorse for a router table. When will this router table be made? Good question, but it is good to know that the most critical component will be in the shop.

Father's day...

Spent putting tools into boxes, and taking down electric motors from machinery. The big move is going to begin on the 24th and run non-stop until the 27th. With this in mind, everything else looks like an after thought. However, I managed to brand a small purchase into a Father's day thing this morning.

I was glad to see that my eyeball and square setup for the jointer and power saws (bandsaw, tablesaw and miter saw) were all very much within 0.1 degree.

That's all for me for now. I plan to shop for bamboo flooring again tomorrow. With a bit of self deception, I could convince myself that working with  bamboo will dull my mitersaw blade enough to finally buy a better one when I get back to furniture making.

A computer Scientist designing a woodshop

Now that my shop is partially in boxes and crates, there is nothing fun left to do until the move is done... and will begin only in 12 days. With nothing better to do than spend time on the laptop, here is a workflow diagram that I came up with.



White nodes are things that I already have, gray nodes are things that I'll add to the new shop. An arrow indicates that I commonly go from one place to the other. The blue node represents the Dust collector (the arrow direction is meaningless).  The point of this diagram is to identify the "hub" nodes and the relationship between stations to minimize movement around stuff with material in my hands.  Since I'm taking over a big workshop, I've got a lot of space to deal with and thus I have the option of designing rather than just making it fit. The result is a bit messy, but there is some things that can be said.

Findings

The main hub of the shop is the project parts shelf. I've wanted to have a dedicated spot to store project components. It is fairly clear that these shelves are common to the milling and joinery equipment. As a result: it will be in the middle of things, even more than the bench and tablesaw.  The second hub is unsurprisingly the bench. The tablesaw is adjacent to the bench (acting as an outfeed anyway).

To minimize the dust collector ducting, I'll keep the bandsaw, drill press and router table near the tablesaw in-floor duct and cluster the other tools (planer, miter) near the collector beside the lumber/milling area.

The assembly area needs only to be adjacent to the tablesaw/parts shelf and the finish shelves and sink, at the other end of the room.

I created a glue-up monster

... and the villagers are heading down to the manor with torches and pitchforks.

With the current house buying/selling upheaval, I developed a habit to wake up at 4:40AM. This isn't good for my health, but there is nothing that I can do about it, apparently. So, instead of lying in bed trying to sleep, I decided to head down the olde neglected shoppe and do something fun. I'm still working on the TV stand, while designing the mega diner table for my ever expanding immediate family.

Today, I needed to do a bit of dry fitting to identify the places where I need to plane, sand and compensate for the difference in moisture between now and when I cut the joinery. The middle part of the TV stand is this fairly complex piece, with a number of shelves, some curved, mounted on a .... goodness, here is a picture.


I designed it so almost all of the grain is in the same axis and thus will move together. This is a lesson learned from project #1 and project #0 (sigh). The whole thing will be very solid once glued... the issue is to get the workflow right. This is 18 dowels and 8 mortices/tenons in one monolithic step. No new ground will be broken for an experienced woodworker, but there will be some breaking for me.

With this problem in mind, enhanced by sleep deprivation and spring allergies, I started rehearsing. I'm hesitating to try too often as I don't want to loosen the fit with repetitive ins and outs in the joinery. I think that I will go about by gluing the three shelves to one side first and let this cure while clamped. I'll then recruit my surgeon-handed bookbinding wife and miniature painting first-born to help apply the glue and clamp the whole thing down. I'll use Titebond III as it seems to cure more slowly than my usual LePage yellow glue.

I may be overthinking this too much, but I can't emotionally afford to screw up at this stage after countless hours of hand cutting joinery.

On a side note, I now have precise measurements for the front doors and drawer front which I will be veneering. That pimento burl is going to be a fun thing to veneer: I made my softener last week, got a veneering hammer and some hide glue, renamed an old pancake hotplate as ShopMaster Hot plate 2000 (tm). Nothing can stop me now...

...other than to have to move my entire household from point A to point B in 4 weeks.

Stain test

I only had a bit less than an hour to put into fun today, so I decided to try the gel stain on a piece larger than a scrap.



I'm glad that I tried to stain one of the least visible shelf first as I learned a few things:

• Sand thouroughly even if it looks fine. Stain isn't going to be kind to irregularity
• Get rid of glue patches. This isn't a huge deal in this case but it doesn't take much to cause a blemish.
• Change cloth and gloves often! These spots of stain spread everywhere... quick.

This is brief, but that's all for now.

To assemble then stain, or the other way around.

I've been back into the woodshop a bit more in the last few days. Getting the house ready to go on the market turns out to be a major drain upfront and every time that there is a showing scheduled. If only someone would buy it and I could move on to my new, 700 sq. ft. woodshop (with a house built around it).

Let's recapitulate, here is the design.

The project seems straightforward when shown like this.

and the final look:

Front view. The dark colour wood is stained sugar maple while the light coloured wood will be figured Pimento veneer.

The design changed a bit since the time I made it up in sketchup: the doors are shorter and there will be a drawer in the lower part of the middle section (it is a hinge clearance issue). All parts are made, except for the top, the drawer, the doors and the back slats. I think that it is better to stain before assembly, but I'm afraid that I'll seal the pores and prevent the glue to work as well as it should. Taping the glue-up area is an option, but I see this as a tricky thing, especially around the dowels, etc.

In the end, I think that I'll stain first as it will be easier to control the wiping process of the gel stain. however, I'll probably keep the wipe-on poly for after the piece is assembled.

First post

I start a new blog here to replace my existing blog on wordpress. I find the mixture of programming and woodworking post a bit clunky. I lost interest in coding for fun in the last few years, and do not really feel like looking at these anymore.

This being said, I am in the process of buying a new houses, which would take my 11'X12' shop into a 21'X24' one. Needless to say, this is pretty exciting stuff. However, the deal can still fall through and I prefer not to get too excited about this for now.

With all of the real estate stuff going on, my time in the shop is severely restricted. Somehow, I find that writing about this makes it slightly better: it takes a few minutes to post something that no one is expected to read, which is still better than no time spent thinking about my next projects.

The forced hiatus keeps on going.

Still no tablesaw... but I got around all this with a pair of handsaw and a rethink of my workflow to involve the bandsaw and jointer. What is really getting in the way of woodworking now is that we have decided to get our tiny house on the market. So, instead of cutting mortices by hand, I ferry stuff into storage. The upside is that getting a workshop 2-3 bigger than I have now is a hard requirement for the new house.

So I tell myself as I walk by the pack of pimento burl veneer, hoping to get to it soon enough.

Tablesaw woes

I haven't posted in a bit, and this is mostly because the switch on my tablesaw unexpectedly died while I was in the middle of a highly productive streak. Worst than that, I took a day off to get some headway on my TV stand, and the tablesaw failed about 40 minutes into that "day off". I thus spent the rest of the days either cleaning up the thing, or taking it to the service centre to test RIDGID's warranty.  Two weeks later, still no tablesaw in the shop as the RIDGID service centre is not a RIDGID dealer, doesn't keep an inventory of parts and has little to no interest in having me as a client. Grr.

The upside is that I decided to venture into hand tools in the meanwhile. I was quite hesitant to start with a new system now that I had established a works with the tablesaw. However, I bought two small joinery saw from Lee Valley (20 tpi RIP and 16tpi CROSSCUT). To my surprise, I seem to be able to get almost the same level of precision by hand than using my machine (almost). What is left outstanding now is how I will handle long rip cuts with my simple stanley general purpose saw. However, I think that the teeth pattern with this saw is more rip than cross cut.... I suspect that I better cut generous and finish the cuts on the jointer...

More to come. With winter drawing to an end, I'm afraid that my perfect dry fit 40 pieces skeleton will start to swell. I better get the cabinet part assembled before this happens.

TV stand, slow and steady wins the race.

The DVD boxes are there to condition the lumber to its future purpose. Now, on to fitting these guys together.

Although I haven't been posting much in the last few weeks, the TV stand is coming along. I'm now at the fitting phase of the two set of shelves on the sides.

Making dados with a regular tablesaw blade was a bit time-consuming, but compared to the heddle from the previous project, it was a snap! The good thing about making this heddle is that nothing will ever feel tedious unless I get into clock making.

There is one thing that I miss about working with Sapele: the smell. I was naïvely hoping that maple would smell like the faint smell that you have in a sugar shack.

I've purchased all that I need for veneering and for steam bending. The next few posts should be on my first dabble into steam bending, using aptly a turkey roaster and the kitchen's oven as steam box.  This will be great fun ahead.

Now, let's look at the original design:



To maximize the storage, I decided to turn the lower shelf in the center to a drawer where two rows of DVD cases will coexist side by side. The whole thing is complicated by the fact that the Blum Hinges have to have some clearance to function. As a result, I will probably need to widen the centre part by 1-2 inches to make it all happen. The slight change in width may have large impact on my cut list... Mmm, I guess that I need to get back to sketchup to figure things out soon! With the drawer, the piece should be able to store at least 126 DVD cases (which sadly is less than the number of DVDs that we own...).

Adventure in veneering part I - Research

This is mostly a note to self posting that contains links relevant to my research on hammer veneering:

Useful video on hammer veneering crotch walnut. Part one covers softening and initial layout. Part two deals with bubbles and repairs.

FineWoodworking thread on glue and softening. And a related PDF on hammer veneering (must be a subscriber to FWW to open).

A shockingly thorough resource on veneering can be found here.

Nine months of woodworking

This article reflects on my first 9 months of woodworking. Most resources for beginning woodworkers focus on techniques.  However, technical details are only part of the full story. In this article, I'm covering another side of taking on the chisel. For me, the biggest theme over the last 9 months was about building my workshop and my skills within the reach of my financial means and free time. There is no youtube.com video on this topic.

It all started like that...

It all started with seven poorly finished maple steps in my split entry townhouse. We wanted to put the house on the market and the wood had over the years turned dull and dirty.  I borrowed a palm sander from my mother-in-law and got to work. The smell of sawdust was my first hook. I then loved how it got clean, smooth, then how dramatic the grain shone through once I applied a few coats of finish.  The house didn't go on the market and I still enjoy these stairs every single day.

One casualty of the house overhaul was the computer desk. The particle board monster was a bland piece of junk. But with a 1" particle board top, it now makes a solid base for my compound miter saw. Making two computer desks became my very first project.

Motivation

I woodwork for fun and to get away from the computer. I go to my garage shop in bouts of 1 hour or so. I read about woodworking, shop for material, keep my patient spouse abreast of my plans, and blog sporadically. I design everything that I build, for the better and for the worst. I get surprised every time that I try to do something and it works exactly as expected.  I'd like to make things on commission at some point, but I need to build a portfolio and my skillset.

Finding Information

In 2011, the challenge isn't to find information but to parse it. My reference is the FineWoodworking.com website, which is worth the $35 annual fee a few times over. I find something on almost all topics, then search around with Youtube and Google. Public libraries have some print material as well, and I found that a few key items from Tautons such as "Basic Skills" series,  "Foolproof Wood Finishing" and "Power tool techniques" makes fun reading on the bus (where there are no internet on my laptop).

Reading and listening cuts down on the error part of learning by trial-and-error. I'd argue that spending most of my free time not in the shop reading or watching videos saves me a pile of money, time and made the hobby rewarding since day one. When confronted with the dilema of watching PBS's "Rough Cuts" show or working in the shop, the shop won (sorry Tommy, maybe next year). Newcomers may enjoy the show, however.

Buying tools: Pandora, meet the box.

Tool buying is a bottomless pit. Most woodworkers joke about this, but the money needed to get going and keep on buying tools and material is very real. I've come up with some guidelines for myself which worked so far. The reader should keep in mind that a toolbox varies a lot from person to person: I'm interested in everything so the cost is higher.

• The reality check : In hindsight, it is not worth considering general woodworking if you can't put a few thousands of dollars into your shop in the first year, and if you can't afford to spend a hundred here and there from month to month. Otherwise, you'll torture yourself over what you don't have. If you can limit the number of tools and techniques to use, you can probably scale down these numbers.
• The incremental rule : I use what I have, and buy only what I need. I select the  next project to use all/most of my tools, but includes a technique which requires something new. This gives the chance to develop my skills, appreciate what I've got, and amortize the cost over a long period of time.
• The informed customer rule : I keep in mind that tools reviews may be written by professionals who are making a much heavier use of their tools than I ever will. Some entry level tools are going to work great for me (my RYOBI compound-mitre saw),  but bigger ticket items benefit from a slightly larger investment (my bandsaw). Ah and oh yes, some reviewers dislike anything made in China, no matter whether it is good (for you) or not.
• The leap of faith : I initially enjoyed working with HomeDepot lumber because I didn't know any better.  I eventually wanted to move to hardwood and rough lumber. It is cheaper, more flexible and versatile and way more beautiful. To mill lumber, I needed to apply what my wife coined as the "band-aid solution": buy all tools in on quick move. This set me back by $2k-$3K to get a 14+"bandsaw, a 6" jointer and a 13" planer. I threw in a drill press (you should too) while I was at it. Anything smaller than this is a bad investment, and larger may just be a waste of money for now. Make this jump only if you are really serious about it because you are about to burn a whole in your pocket, and bring home some 600 lb of steel and cast iron. I got all that I needed at BusyBee tools.
• The silent budget items : Hand tools are often as expensive as power tools. They are important, and great to work with. These can be bought as I go, and makes excellent birthday/Christmas presents. By default, I look first in the catalogs of high-end tools such as Lie-Nielsen and Lee Valley, then I check out other great places like Rockler.com and the local hardware stores. Unlike power tools, you buy hand tools to last you a lifetime.
• The lucidity rule : I keep tabs of expenses so I can start to budget properly later down the road. At first, budgeting isn't likely to make sense. I save all receipts and fill in these annoying warranty papers just in case that it matters later on.
• Cover all your bases : It helps to have a spouse who appreciates woodworking. Mine is great, and often talk me into buying what I think we can't afford. It helps that she is the main user of my projects. You can't change your spouse, but you can make your work be appreciated by selecting the right projects to work on.

Lessons learned

I'm glad to report that none of these lessons were learned by making catastrophic mistakes. This section isn't meant to cover how to do things: there are already a lot of very good resources for this. These lessons are more about less technical items that I realized from experience.

Each piece of wood is unique

Material is at the heart of woodworking. I played a bit with jewelery in the past and really liked how metalworking can be seen as "reversible": you can add, refill scratches, bend and unbend. Wood isn't like this. Wood is heterogeneous and anisotropic. You need to learn to read wood, find the best angle to cut, sand, joint or plane based on the grain and figuring patterns. Unlike metal, wood will not forgive a deep scratch. My first lesson in woodworking was that each piece of wood is unique and, although this sounds esoteric and fluffy, you better learn to care about it or else you are in for frustrations, tearouts and wood failures. I'll know that I'm good at woodworking when I'll start to look at wood grain for its aesthetic strength rather than its quirks.

Tolerating errors

How much error can one tolerate when joining two pieces of wood that are, say, two feet long: 1/8", 1/16", 1/64", 1/1000"? The eye is a sensitive sensor and tolerates no error, period. It is hard to believe, but the 1/1000" deep snipe left by my thickness planer is all that I can see when I mill a board. An important factoid about woodworking is that, with care, planning, tool maintenance and calibration, it is possible to be extremely precise. Whatever you do, do not tolerate errors until it is irreversibly glued. Dry fit everything, sand, sand, pare, scrape and sand some more. Once it is glued, however, move on because there is nothing that you can do about it anymore. One thing that I've learned is that the dent that bother you is likely not visible to the eye of anyone but yourself. And don't point out to others what is wrong with your work, people don't really want to know about that.

Be your most difficult customer but set some reasonable standards. There is no such thing as wasting time unless you are trying to make money.

Finishing: A scary beast

A subpar finish can negate all of your hard work in shaping a piece. Finishing is often seen as a fiddly and time consuming aside to woodworking. This doesn't need to be like this:

1. Read enough about finishing to regard it to be something worth getting excellent at it. This is not an exercise in doublespeak: just like woodworking, finishing is highly technical, creative and the results are very rewarding.
2. Test all finishing techniques on scraps. This will spare big surprises when you work on your real components.
3. Finish before you assemble: it is easier, faster, more enjoyable. And if things go bad, you only need to scrap one component instead of the whole project.

Get the right tool for a job

The opposite not only will not be fun, but will probably give subpar results. My view is that if I don't have the tool, and can't afford to get it now, then I delay the project until I can. If you use the right tool, you will be amazed to see the work getting done before your eyes. I got some of these happy moments the first time that I sliced some veneer with the bandsaw, or cut a perfect mortise with a mortising chisel.

Design like an artist that thinks like an engineer

1. Learn to use Sketch-up and build your design completely in 3D. Although I've modeled using Blender3D in the past, I needed to go through these awesome tutorials before I could do anything with Sketch-up. This means that I can now do woodworking even when there is no shop around! It is important to see the volumes and proportions clearly. Another important aspect is to plan how each piece will be joined with others. Of course, you can use pen and papers, but resizing and altering becomes a real burden. I've given up on paper already.
2. Design with the assembly process in mind. Once the components are designed, the most important thing to figure out is the sequence in which they should be created, finished and assembled. The trickiest part to think about are the glue-ups: some parts have to be done simultaneously, and must be done fast. The last two conditions are somewhat contradictory.
3. Keep things simple, but include one design element that you'll be proud to show once the piece is done.

Love your jigs

A jig is a piece that will not end in your final project. It can be as simple as a stop block and as complex as a sleigh for mitered splines in the corner of a box. Some jigs are versatile, and other are made for a single purpose. I really thought that making jigs was a major distraction from woodworking. However, a well designed jig will ensure precise and repeatable cuts and greatly enhance your results. When I began, I didn't have much scraps to use and had to buy lumber specifically for making jigs. This felt like a terrible waste of money. However, it doesn't take long before there is enough random scraps to go around. MDF is a composite material which is extremely cheap and works great for jigs.  I usually make sure that I've got a few square feet of it in the shop just in case.

The tablesaw commends respect

Without the proper precautions, an accident can happen on the tablesaw without any warning signs. These are called kickbacks. Arm yourself with knowledge on tablesaw safety.  At first I was truly afraid of my tablesaw, so I read as much as I could. Eventually, I ended up feeling that I knew enough to use it safely. It sends shivers down my spine to think that I could have started working on it before researching carefully on the topic. I rarely read manuals unless things don't work properly. I can attest that, without a riving knife, I would have seen some solid pieces of lumber flying in my direction on two occasions. If you are not inclined to read manuals, you don't have to change but simply make an exception for power tools.

Know your tools before you plug them in, treat no cut as routine, cut no corners on safety.

Dust, noise, chips, hazards and fumes

This is not particularly insightful comments, but they are worth repeating.

1. Dust : At first, I though that the dust and the shavings were cute. I liked their smell and didn't mind sweeping them. This changes overnight when I started using the thickness planer. I plan to get a central vac system, or dust management system in the lingo, over the next nine months... that's a $300-$500 dollars to budget.
2. Chips : A good face protector is something that doesn't fog up. I have yet to find one but it is on my list. For now, I often get fed up and put my goggles down because the fog makes it more dangerous than wearing nothing.
3. Noise : Protect your ears at all time. If you don't think that you need it, do it just to cut the noise from the world and work while in your own bubbles.
4. Fumes : At first I didn't care. I thought that the smell of VOCs was part of the fun. However, after a few hours smelling this stuff, I bough a chemical respirator. I now consider speaking like Dark Vader to be more entertaining.

Outlook

It is interesting to see what kind of wisdom I thought to be worth noting in this post. I tried to stay away from technical lessons learned as many could be articles in their own right. I hope that my focus will shift from acquiring to creating with increasingly familiar tools and techniques.

Things coming together

The burl veneer arrived. It is quite a bit darker than the picture on the store's website. But I'll make it work in my design. The boards meant to be bent are also milled and ready to go. I now have to decide how I'll be getting them to temperature.  Since they are fairly small (9" and 18"), I'm thinking that all that I'll need is to steam them in the oven in a large turkey roaster filled with a few inches of water. Making a steambox, and rigging a steam source (probably the camping stove) in -5C temperature doesn't sound too attractive at the moment.

Applying Wood Veneer and Veneering

Here is a link to a resource for my upcoming veneering work on the cabinet doors of the TV stand.

Applying Wood Veneer and Veneering.

Veneer procuring woes

Sigh, I'm trying to get my hand on some burl veneer for the TV stand project. Beautiful veneer goes for a reasonable price, but shipping more than doubles the cost ($35 of Pimento burl ends up costing $85). I spend the day groaning about that, wondering whether I should just make my own veneer (which couldn't be the nice rotary stuff from burls).  My wife, who does the budgeting, offered the simple solution of drowning the shipping cost by ordering more veneer. Isn't it simple? I'm lucky to have access to a range of woodworking stores and hardwood sawmills, but I'm totally out of luck for veneer.

Shoveling wood shavings

Ah, the milling is now in full gear. It is surprising to see how much shavings the planer/jointer pair generate. I get a kick out of using a shovel to dispose of all this fluffy stuff. The problem now is whether there will be enough room in the compost bin for the biweekly disposal, or I should elect a spot in the backyard to become our own compost pile.