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: