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.

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).

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.

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...).

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.

Designing a Heddle for a loom

I'm designing a Heddle for a loom for my wife. I would like to build the heddle with 1/16" veneer strips (1/4" wide). One option is to laminate three strips, one with a 1/4" gap in the middle to make the heddle's eye. The results is thus four blade per inch if we account for a 1/16" gap between the triad of strips. Here is a sketchup of the heddle:

Twelve inches of weaving space made of laminated veneer. This will work if I can find 1/16" veneer...

The question is whether there such thing as 1/16" stock available anywhere.

This post is mainly so I can link the picture to a post on FineWoodWorking.com

Stupid heat wave

This is what happens after 2 weeks in the great big
sauna called North-America

That is it, I get to experience the effect of moisture in wood first hand.

My shiny 20" tabletop made of joined pine boards has expanded under the steaming temperature of the last two weeks.

The discrepancy is still less than 1mm, and the shadow exaggerates the effect, but we're apparently in for a few more weeks of this. I am wondering what will happen when the humidity dies out and winter rolls in.