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.

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.

First post

I start a new blog here to replace my existing blog on wordpress. I find the mixture of programming and woodworking post a bit clunky. I lost interest in coding for fun in the last few years, and do not really feel like looking at these anymore.

This being said, I am in the process of buying a new houses, which would take my 11'X12' shop into a 21'X24' one. Needless to say, this is pretty exciting stuff. However, the deal can still fall through and I prefer not to get too excited about this for now.

With all of the real estate stuff going on, my time in the shop is severely restricted. Somehow, I find that writing about this makes it slightly better: it takes a few minutes to post something that no one is expected to read, which is still better than no time spent thinking about my next projects.

The forced hiatus keeps on going.

Still no tablesaw... but I got around all this with a pair of handsaw and a rethink of my workflow to involve the bandsaw and jointer. What is really getting in the way of woodworking now is that we have decided to get our tiny house on the market. So, instead of cutting mortices by hand, I ferry stuff into storage. The upside is that getting a workshop 2-3 bigger than I have now is a hard requirement for the new house.

So I tell myself as I walk by the pack of pimento burl veneer, hoping to get to it soon enough.