The pull that may never be

I spent about an hour fashioning this pull from a chip of swiss pear. I'm afraid that it will not work: it is too small and hard to grasp. Before I discard the piece into my bin of forgotten parts, and I thought that I'd at least take a picture. Do you often discard neat components that you like but just won't work out well?

Sophie head and her freshly milled exotic wood boards.

 A danish cord seat is born!

Der finished benchen,
 impractically on top of one's workbench.

After something like 6 months, much of which spent just walking by the bench and running my fingers along its rough parts, the bench is finally now complete!

I started with a design from FineWoodWorking.com, which was a designed made as a capstone project from a student graduating from a fine furniture making school. I should have clued in on that before I started making the joinery: I've never made joints more intricate than what is in this bench. For those of you curious, the strength in these small joints comes from the fact that the tenons split into two parallel tenons with a 3/16" space in between, and that the inner tenon is shorter than the outter one on all four legs.

Regardless, it just tool more time to get them done and certainly gave me a chance to hone my hand joinery skills (and my hand tool honing skills as well). Cherry is a great species of hardwood to work with: I'm going to get back to it for another project soon (health allowing). I dealt with a bit of heterogeneity in the heartwood/sapwood front, but I oriented the prices such that the sapwood will not be visible when the bench will be sitting where it is meant to in the lobby. Now, if this is not customizing furniture, nothing ever will.

The danish cord weave turned out well. 

Weaving was another challenge. I considered getting it done professionally, but in the end it wasn't that bad. The seat is very comfortable, and working with woven cord fibers was actually easier than I thought. Sophie, my daughter extraordinaire, helped with the second part yesterday and got her share of blisters to prove it. I'm very glad that she is interested in working with wood. I'll show her how to do relief carving as a payment for her hard work (not that I know a lot about it, but I'll share the little that I do).

It took about 7 hours to weave the whole thing.

Finishing was my simple recipe: some solvent-free boiled linseed oil and three coats of rubbed-on polyurethane to protect against wet boots and dripping jackets.

Sophie and Mr. Bandsaw.

Santa's present this year...

Was a nice mitre gauge for the table saw... And a book on basic box design. Could there be a method to all this?

Long overdue post

Long overdue but not particularly insightful.

Turbine gun by Earlex

Winter has gone by, the two shelf units has gone from sketchup to real things. I'm now at the finishing stage, minus the back of the two top cabinet. I primed the lower cabinets using a brand new spray gun that my mother-in-law and I have purchased as a joint venture.

Spraying Zinsser primer with the Earlex 5500

It took me a few minutes before feeling like I kindof knew what I was doing. But hey, a few minutes isn't bad. It will take a while longer before I get a good sense of how the spray gun behaves when working on complex 3D structures like shelves. 

The gun was not as noisy as I though it would be when I tried it indoor. Overspray was limited to no more than 3 meters from the workpiece at most. Setting up is a chore, but once you are spraying, it is worth the effort. Cleaning was no more difficult that to clean brushes according to the exacting standards of my mother-in-law.

What is on the TODO list (short term)

I need to put together a spray booth so work can be done indoor in the garage. This is uninspiring work, but it has to be done. I'm going to go with the design from FineWoodWorking.com . All I need is to get around to buy the stuff, and get it done. Grumble.

There is a light at the end of this tunnel

I want to get a dent into the Danish cord seat. The cherry is there and certainly acclimatised to the workshop. My wife wants a back to the piece, which made me pause for a bit as I'm not sure how to integrate a back without breaking the aesthetics and simplicity. 

New Project - Dining room shelves

Sketchup of one unit

That is it, I had to put the TV stand away for a few weeks. It is technically very demanding and I find it hard to do it as well as I'd like. So, thanks to my mother in law, I got into a brand new project which should be fast and fun.

Working with plywood turned out to be a surprise: it is stable and already down to thickness. The tablesaw tear cleanly through it like butter. The only downside is that large pieces are awkward to handle. The other downside is that I missed a little bit the temperamental nature of rough lumber.

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.