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.

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...).

NaD TV stand - Day 1

I got extra time to get things started today (thanks wifey). I meant to put up the pictures of the wood before I start for reference. I kind of enjoy looking back at a finished project by remembering how it looked before I did anything.

2"X12"X6' piece of Ash for the back slats.

Six nice boards of sugar maple, too rough to show their true beauty yet.

What was done today

Other than the sled and the tenoning jig, I got two of the maple board milled and stickered. I'll let them settle for a few days and then milled them down to the actual sizes. Milling can be hard work. I discovered that my garage's ceiling is less than 8', which made handling the boards quite awkward. I resorted to making the initial cut to length using my handsaw... to realise that this handsaw is working very well: it probably took a minute instead of 5 seconds, but in the end I'm in for the journey rather than the destination.

Tomorrow...

The big day has arrived! Sophie (my middle child and prime enthusiast woodworker) and I will be making a cutting board together.

Night-and-Day TV stand

The new project is a TV stand design to hold as many DVDs as possible, the Wii, the cable modem and the DVD player. I could not find an existing design that fit this bill, so I bit the bullet and learned to properly use Sketchup. There is a great website that convinced me that Sketchup was an option for woodworking and furniture design. Taunton also has a E-Book on the topic which is much worth the $10.

The wood was picked up some two weeks ago, the loom is now out of the way. I can now dive into this new project. Here are some Sketchup diagram of the project.

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

The exciting bits in this project is the veneering, which I've never done before. Another aspect are the three slightly bent pieces that are near the top of the stand. Bending is another scary thing to try, but I'm doing a very slight bending job here, and if all else fail I can always NOT bend them and pretend that it was not part of the original design (and edit out this paragraph).

I'm working through making diagrams of various sections of the project, but I think that I'll end-up just bringing the laptop in the woodshop rather than to fine-tune each layout for hard copy printing.

Next stop: making a table saw sled which will help with all the dadoing work, decide whether I should make, buy or bypass the tenoning jig, sharpen a few chisels back to mirror polish. Can't wait.