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.