Woodworking Stuff

Euro Cabs trois

2011-05-12T12:42:00.000-04:00

I see some MDF, I want it painted black.

Note drawers are fitted/ installed. Have to paint the fronts, install hinges and pulls, and they're ready to go. The blue tape on the corners was for marking reveals to measure against to cut everything.

Euro cabs - biscuited drawers

2011-04-26T11:54:00.000-04:00

Don't have a router table yet, so the drawers are getting biscuits. Here're the parts with the insides pre-finished. Pre-finishing the inside of the drawers will save the nightmare of trying to get an even, drip/ run-free finish applied in all those corners. Note the short biscuit slots in in the end (taped off from finish to keep bare wood where the glue will go), and the full-length slot close to one edge of each.

One side installed: the drawer bottom is leaning against it. The slots close to the bottom edge will capture the drawer bottom. The un-finished wood left close the ends (where the biscuit slots are) will accept glue.

Bottom fitted into the slot. Note how sticks up ~1/4" higher than the side - that will fit into the slot in the other drawer side. The drawer bottoms are sized to be 1/4" bigger (on each side, 1/2" total) than the inside of the drawer. The slots in the sides are 1/4" deep - if all goes well, when glued up it will be one solid "piece" of wood. Since this is all plywood, the bottoms will be glued in - there's no need to allow for wood expansion/ contraction in plywood this small.

Other side installed, biscuits in place. The last side can be dropped on. The side parts' biscuit slots, bottom-edge slot, and bare wood areas make sense when you see this pic.


Lather, rinse, repeat.

Euro Cabs deux

2011-04-24T15:06:00.000-04:00

Four of the five cabs glued up and staged.

Note the drawer slides sitting in the bottom of cab 2 (from the left), and the stack of drawer parts ready to go on the TS. Drawers should be done today.

Underestimated the amount of edge-banding I'd need. I guesstimated about 50', bought a 50' roll, and was very mindful of keeping the offcuts small. Ran out on the LAST side of the last cab - I'm 30" short. Did some math to figure out if the roll was short, somehow you're looking at 49 + feet of banding in this pic, and I have 30" (of 60" needed) still left. They didn't short me, they over-ed me.

Closing on the sandwich...

2011-04-17T17:38:00.000-04:00

Room to work: 4 or 5 cabinets layed out for finish.

The sink base dry fit.

OMG

2010-08-09T11:02:00.002-04:00

Planning a move to a house with... a.... THREE.... car... detached... garage. Power, heat, lights, water, loft.

Woodworking '10-'11 season may be the best ever.

Goodbye, desk. Goodbye, house. Goodbye, woodworking

2010-04-21T13:46:00.003-04:00

Here's one of the first "in our house" projects to come out of the shop: a "built-in" desk set-up that Wife commissioned for our home office. She took over the office and the desk was banished to the formal living room.
Here it is loaded on the back of a truck, going to a new owner in New Jersey.

All of last WWing season was lost moving our business, now our house is on the market. The desk was the first of several big chunks of furniture we're trying to get rid of to go.

Not clear whether I'll have a shop for much longer, and if I don't, if I'll store tools or sell everything off.

: (

Uh... hmmm...

2010-04-13T00:52:00.001-04:00

Time is the enemy

2010-03-14T22:42:00.009-04:00

I've vowed to never post worthless musings. I break that vow today for a few notes for my own memory.
1. Attended the Reading, PA woodshow with Kent last Sunday. It was more about the ride than the woodworking, but I hoped to meet a few woodnet guys there. I wound up spending most of my time there with Chuck Bender. Chuck, it turns out, knows his stuff. He builds, he designs, he teaches, and is about as approachable a woodworking guru as I've ever had the pleasure of meeting.

2. Chuck was doing a hand-cut dovetail demo and offering to let some spectators in on the action. Despite my "scribing like a girl" (Chuck's exact words), excavating a cave between my tails, and being the world's worst hand-sawyer (which Chuck fixed in two or three sentences), I was able to produce... let's call them "passable"... thruDT's in pine.

Note the saw marks on the inside surfaces of the pins and tails - they fit together right off the saw - no trimming/fitting:3. I was stoked to see a series of articles about design on Chuck's blog, and also that he teaches carving - a class I'd love to take. His shop is in or near Pottstown - certainly do-able.

4. Armed with new desire to own an actual, for real, DT saw, I slathered over the Veritas DT in 20 tooth rip, and made a few ridiculously perfect, effortless cuts with it at the Veritas booth. If you're reading this, and you have $65, you should buy this saw and send it to me.

5. Give the job to a busy person: today is my second day off since about November 2009. By "off," I mean I left work at 11AM. Since then I scrubbed the kitchen, entry way, and powder room floors; folded a bunch of laundry and did a load; had lunch and did a load of dishes; installed the 18T front sprocket on the Vee; and still had time to single-handedly get this monster down the basement stairs and largely assembled (it runs):
It looks considerably more ridiculous in the context of a tiny shop which already has a table saw stuffed in it:

It's smoooooth. I can hardly wait, altho there's much to do, and no time to do it in, before it will make any dust.

Like a rock

2010-01-14T20:46:00.004-05:00

Granite top table saw.... 447lbs... shipped in a welded steel cage. The 10' from the trailer to the garage never seemed so far.

Woodworking season's over

2009-07-25T22:43:00.001-04:00

... it's RIDING season!!

See you again when it starts getting cold.

Closing on the sandwich

2009-05-04T19:10:00.005-04:00

Painted headboard in weird lighting.

Waiting for the rain to stop so I can clear out enough room for a trial assembly.

The hardware's installed.

Too late to help

2009-05-03T14:09:00.003-04:00

Top: HF 43430 HVLP stock 1.4 needle.
Bottom: PC PSH1 HVLP accessory 2.2 needle.

Now that I've brushed out the bed, my new tip and needle for shooting latex has arrived.

Finishing

2009-04-26T04:15:00.004-04:00

My fancy spray booth is very sensitive to weather conditions. Apparently hooking up a spray gun and charging the compressor pleases the wind god, who rewards the user with intermittent gusts and breezes - no matter how calm the day's been to that point.
Luckily a lot of stuff is in bloom so there's plenty of little petals and pollen to get thrown against the wet paint.

That diagonal dark line is the shadow from the garage roof.

Ready for finish

2009-04-23T23:22:00.003-04:00

Headboard's in the clamps - woodworking is done.

A lot of stuff happened tonight:
Routed a dado on the inside of each leg to accept the panel (edge guide + plunge router).
Laid out the panel and table/ jig sawed it out.
Laid out the V-grooves to simulate the individual boards and routed them on the new router table.
Planed / chamfered all the faces / edges of the legs and rails.
Rough sanded all the headboard parts.
Glued it up.

If I didn't have to work tomorrow, it would be done. I don't see how I'm going to get multiple coats of paint on it and get it delivered tomorrow night when I'll be working most of the day.

Still more bed stuff

2009-04-22T22:42:00.009-04:00

That shorter piece on top has been glued up to the wider piece. The curve was marked out (using a template from a previous project), and a jigsaw was used to cut close to the line.

The template is hot-glued to the rail and used to guide a pattern bit in the router.

The window jig was used to route mortises for floating tenons in the top rail and the legs. A slot-cutter was used to route a dado to accept the panel. I only have one bearing for the slot-cutter, so without jigging up something on the router table the depth of cut is limited to the difference between the bit's radius and the bearing's radius. As luck would have it, that depth intruded into the tenon space a little. With all that tenon glue area and the fact that the panel will be glue in (its MDF), I'm not concerned about it.

Headboard dry-fit. Still have to route dados in the legs between the mortises to accept the panel, then fab a panel and glue it all up. It's not much more work, but it's getting too late to make noise.

More bed stuff

2009-04-18T12:46:00.006-04:00

Deja vu round three.

The screws that hold the hardware to the rails are driven into the endgrain, which doesn't really hold screws well. Some dowels behind the screws will give the threads something to grab.

No dowel stock on hand, so I turned some.

Here they are glued in, sawed off, and planed flush. As I look at this now, I realize I forgot to orient the dowel stock with the grain running perpendicular to the rail. It'll still be much, much better than not having them there, but some screws will be going into edge or rift grain instead of face grain when they encounter those dowels.

After milling up stock for cleats, they're glued and screwed to the inside of the rails. These cleats will support the platform which in turn supports the sleeping human.

The woodworking on the rails and footboard is done. There's a little to do yet on the headboard - maybe another day - then it's ready for paint.

Bed progress

2009-04-12T18:52:00.005-04:00

Glued up the foot board today.

...and yet more DEJA VU.

The looking-worse-for-wear window jig yet again - this time mortising the rails for the bed hardware.

Hardware mortises squared by hand and holes marked and drilled. The extra hole on the right side of the mortise in the board on top and the left side of the mortise in the board on the bottom denote the top edge of the rail.

Floating tenons

2009-04-11T16:46:00.006-04:00

Using floating tenons the same size as the bed hardware allows the router "window" template to be used again. This time the mortises are 1" deep, and there will be mortises in both the legs ...

...and the rails. Note there are some scraps hot-glued to the back of the window template to align the window properly over the end-grain of the rails.

A scrap is cut to width, planed down, and the edges are rounded over. Once sliced up...

they're the loose tenons that will connect the rails to the legs.

Taper sled reprise

2009-04-07T17:29:00.006-04:00

Deja vu all over again: tapering legs is tapering legs.
Here's the jig set up for the shorter taper and taller stock.

Blah, blah, blah.

After marking out the top chamfers and doodling with a hand saw, a pair of planes, and a sanding wheel on the ShopSmith, it finally dawned on me I could just miter them on the table saw.

Shaping's done. Still have to do mortises for the panel and footboard.

Bed hardware mortises

2009-04-06T19:28:00.006-04:00

BTDT.
This is the same process as linked above - in fact, the other "half" of the process.

The bottom of the pic is the router base. The brass bushing and a 1/2" straight bit can be seen poking up from the base. The rectangular 'hole' is a window template, and the little race track inside is the cut that results from that brass bushing following the rectangular template window.

Setting the depth of cut: the hardware is rested on either side of the window, and the router is set on top. The cutter is lowered until it makes contact with the work (thru the window). That makes the cutter projection = the height of the window + the height of the hardware. When the hardware is removed and the routing commences, the depth of cut will be equal to the height of the hardware, so the hardware will sit in the resulting mortise flush.

The mortises have round ends because they were cut with a round bit. They're squared up with a chisel.

The hardware is fit to mark the holes. Notice that there are more mortises underneath the cut-outs. These mortises accept the metal fingers on the mating hardware.

Leg blanks

2009-04-04T15:41:00.003-04:00

To get from rough boards to these 4-square leg blanks has already involved: sawing, jointing, gluing/clamping, re-sawing, jointing, planing, and cutting to length. AKA: milling.

Some math + some scrap = a window template to make the mortises for the bed hardware. I still have the template that I used on my last bed, but it's getting beat up.

Odds and ends

2009-04-02T22:34:00.005-04:00

Leg blanks glued up for Colin's bed.

WoofWorld gate v1.0 skinned, but before the (uhmw plastic) top cap was installed. V2.0 is 2" wider and has less innards to make it lighter. This one was installed and has been in service for a few weeks now.

After what must be months chucked in the lathe, I parted the darning egg off today and got some finish on the parted end.

Another bed

2009-04-01T09:09:00.002-04:00

Sketchup model

Clamping big stuff

2009-03-01T09:44:00.005-05:00

Here's a 2x4 clamped to the end of the assembly table with a glue-up too large for my clamp arsenal.

Another 2x4 is clamped to the table at the other end (left side of pic). Reversing the heads on the "quick clamps" converts them from "clamps" into "spreaders." Then, they can bear against a caul which puts the clamping force where it's needed.

"Quick clamps" don't provide a whole lot of clamping force, but this assembly is going to be skinned with sheet goods anyway. Supposedly, the glue joint between the sheet and this framework is more important to hold this assembly together.

Darning egg v2.1

2009-02-24T18:36:00.003-05:00

This was supposed to be a quick, easy, project. Some pithy turning stock and a wobble in my lathe have really kicked my butt on this. Turning is one of those things that looks so easy and fun when you see someone who knows how to do it performing. Every time I turn, I get a refresher course in how much I DON'T know about turning, tho.
It's not out of the woods yet, either. I still have to part it off, and I'm a little scared I'll somehow manage to screw even that up.

A box

2009-02-24T18:18:00.005-05:00

Sketchup model of the innards of a gate for the dog daycare.
The boxes at each end will receive hinge and latch screws - they're there just to provide some substance to screw to when they're installed. It doesn't seem like it should work, but I'm taking on faith the torsion box "science" of the skin doing almost all the work. The guts just need to hold the skins apart... I hope.

Woopty-do. The only plus is stuff like this goes together insanely quickly: this represents a few repetive rips out of plywood and some biscuits - probably about 30 minutes' efforts.

What's next?

2009-02-08T21:46:00.001-05:00

I wish I knew...

I have a few projects in mind for our house, but the coffers are dry. Anyone want to donate some wood and a picture of something they want built?

In the meantime, dig the slideshow over there ----->

Painted hall table

2009-01-30T13:35:00.000-05:00

"Here is a piece I made with cherry and soft maple, finished it with Waterlox and black paint, and I enjoyed making it."

...

Painted hall table progress

2009-01-29T11:25:00.001-05:00

I finally got some shop time in, so here's a few more little things:
- a second coat of black on the base and drawer fronts
- attached the top
- the drawer fronts are being glued on (in the pic)

Left to do:
- glue in the knobs
- plug the holes inside the drawers

More finishing hatred

2009-01-26T11:51:00.001-05:00

Ok, I just couldn't get the finish to where I was happy with it so I decided to start over. Here it is with most of my previous labor sanded off.

Finishing, take two: no messing around with brushes, no traditional product, no multi-step finishing schedule - black oil-based paint, where I should've started in the first place.
Tomorrow this will be ready for the second, and hopefully the last, coat.

Spraying

2009-01-23T14:03:00.000-05:00

A view when you walk into the garage from the house, looking out towards the driveway: the light is coming from the windows in the overhead door.

If you step on the other side of that plastic and look up, you see the point of all of this...

is to spend an hour fiddling around getting plastic up and running air hoses so you can spend a minute and a half spraying... followed by 15 minutes of cleaning the gun up.

On the plus side, it's all set up. This will either look great or it will be easy enough to shoot another coat.

Darned darning egg

2009-01-15T13:24:00.001-05:00

That black spot is pith - the very center of the growth rings. You can see them converging to it by the end grain on the top surface. The only thing that will get rid of it is turning it out - reducing the diameter until it's all gone. This is already at the finished diamter, tho.

The pith runs almost vertically thru it, so it's at the other end, too. Worse yet, there are cracks radiating from it. I planned for this to be the handle end, because it looks like there's enough un-cracked meat at the center to fit a handle in there.

This is half of a bigger piece of walnut that I started with - maybe the other half will work.

Really, really, close to finished... maybe

2009-01-11T21:20:00.001-05:00

First: a practice darning egg in cherry. Some things were learned. Note the backdrop.

The top might overhang the pulls. It's hard to tell, and the top isn't screwed down yet. More on that in a minute.

The drawer pulls were turned with tennons. My plan was to have the tennon run all the way thru to the inside of the drawer and then split them with a contrasting wedge. Two of my tennons are too short, but I have a plan...

...not obvious in this pic but the gloss isn't uniform, and there are some dings in the drawer fronts. I'm not sure if I should do another topcoat, strip it and do it over, or spray it with something else. Brushing finish is definitely not my strong suit.

Turning knobs

2009-01-10T18:52:00.000-05:00

Here's how to turn knobs:
First, chuck up a blank.

Turn it round.

Mark the location of the cove.

Turn the cove and start reducing the diameter behind the cove.

Then mash the tool rest into the almost-finished knob, throw it away, and start over.

On the second go-round, you wind up turning the blank into a knob.

Repeat that 3 more times, clean up, put all the tools away, then dip the knobs in some finish to discover that one is a dramatically different color than the others. Give up and blog about it.

Here's the view when you leave the shop in frustration.

Finishing

2009-01-08T11:33:00.001-05:00

Two coats of black milk paint and a wet coat of satin Waterlox.

I see a table....

2009-01-07T21:31:00.001-05:00

... and I want it painted black.

The only "woodworking" that's left is to turn the pulls and attach the drawer fronts to the drawers. Before the drawer fronts can be attached, I have to make everything that's going to be black, black.

Table progress

2009-01-07T21:16:00.000-05:00

This morning I sanded the underside of the top and did coat #1.

I can't remember if it was last night or the night before, but I finished the glue-up. Here the drawer fronts are clamped on to locate them and check out the pull locations.

I also got the drawer runners and kickers in. This is the left side of the left drawer looking down thru the invisible table top.

Looking down at the center kickers and runners - those are the drawer fronts in the foreground, and the figured wood at the top of the pic is the inside (back) of the drawers. I know exactly what I'm looking at, and this pic STILL doesn't make that much sense to me.

Glue up begins

2009-01-05T11:23:00.001-05:00

I'll spare you the adrenaline rush that is hand-sanding and just jump right to the glue-up: even without the added complexity of the kickers and runners, this glue up is worth breaking down into stages.

Even more exciting than sanding and watching glue dry: wet coat #3 on the top.

Edge profile

2009-01-04T21:11:00.001-05:00

Routing the profile on the top: at the end of an end grain cut, it's common for the cutter to tear out some of the wood fibers. A scrap is clamped on so the cut ends in the scrap, not the keeper piece.

That chunk of missing wood on the end of the scrap would have been in the keeper piece if the scrap wasn't there. Such a small amount of tear-out would have been routed off when doing the long sides anyway, but better safe than sorry.

After some sanding, the first coat of finish goes on the top.

Table top edge profile

2009-01-03T20:25:00.001-05:00

Left, or right?

Right

Left

Kickers and runners

2009-01-03T13:25:00.001-05:00

After marking out the locations, a straight edge is clamped to the apron stock to locate the biscuit jointer. Note the slot cut close to the right edge of the board...

... to receive the table top fasteners. This little bracket gets screwed to the top and engages that slot. That allows the top to expand and contract with humidity changes without pulling the whole table along with it. More on this slot in a minute.

The runners biscuited...

...and fit together.

The kickers can't be biscuited in because that slot for the table top fasteners is right where the biscuits would go. So, the kickers have tongues made to fit the slot.

In theory, the drawers could be fit to this arrangement with absolutely no slop in their operation. We'll see...

Hall table progress

2009-01-02T13:16:00.001-05:00

The beading bit buried in a scrap of plywood. The bearing sits in a hole drilled for clearance.

The apron stock beaded.
Bondo in a knothole.

A few coats of shellac on the drawers.

Drawers, Pt 2

2009-01-01T21:47:00.000-05:00

My pinboards were about 1/16" long, so I trimmed a little off each end. This makes the already-routed pockets shallower such that the tails won't fully seat. Rather than try to repeat the router set-up, I just chopped the pins a little deeper by hand. Since this is buried in the joint, appearance doesn't matter much.
Also, note the stopped dado in the pinboard and thru dado in the tailboard. The end of the pinboard will show, so the dado has to be stopped or it would be visible.

With the dovetail assembled, the dados line up to accept the drawer bottom.

Glued up.

Not very interesting, but since all the joinery is "fitted," I want to keep track of what goes where. I don't know when I started doing this, but for a long time I've been numbering and marking joints in an unseen location (the table top will cover the top of the legs) by punching dots in with an awl. It's not hard to sand or solvent off pencil marks - these won't go away.

Drawers

2008-12-28T14:12:00.001-05:00

An annoying amount of jointing, planing, ripping and cutting to length results in sides, fronts, and backs for two small drawers. I'll be dovetailing them using my Incra TS fence on the router table. Another annoying amount time of setting up the bit height, centering the stock, and choosing a dovetail pattern leads to the first cutting step: putting a dovetail-shaped rabbet on the back of the tailboards.

The tailboards are stacked up vertically, clamped to my homebrew right-angle fixture, and fed thru the dovetail bit...

...which results in this very pretty pattern. Note that the pretty pattern has "closed" cuts on the tailboards. The Incra dovetail pins have round interiors, so the tailboard has to end on "open" cuts. I remembered this was important when I was picking a pattern, but I didn't think about it enough before cutting. These are worthless...

...or are they? In order to end on an "open cut", I routed off the outside tails. That left one big tail in the center which somehow didn't seem right, so I split the big center tail.

The pins are routed by feeding the stock into the bit laying flat. The block on the left limits the depth of cut.
Since I was "off the template," I had to figure the pin cuts manually, and it was wierd: there were two cuts from the template, but then I had to back 1/32" off what I assume was half-way to the following template cuts. Translation: it took a lot of head scratching, scribbling, and a few test cuts to place the pin cuts - it may look like there's just two passes here, but each one of those pockets is wider than the cutter, so it takes four passes on each pinboard to get to this point.

A fairly odd-looking joint. They're not pressed together fully, because they are snug enough that I'm concerned I'd split the tails off trying to get them back apart (they need to be dadoed for the bottom before glue-up).

Now that I'm looking at it, another problem is that the bottom dado cut will have to be stopped on each end of the pinboard: if the bottom dado is located over a tail, you can do thru cuts because the "open" ends of the pinboard dado are buried under a tail (the "open" end of the tailboard dado cut terminates either inside the pin pocket or butts against the inside face of the pinboard). As it is now, if I fall asleep again when routing the dadoes, there will be a little rectangular hole in the end grain of the pinboard below the lower tail.

Maybe I'll just start over and do them right.

First dry fit

2008-12-27T18:24:00.000-05:00

After choosing how to assemble the parts, each tenon is tweaked to fit its mortise - a great job for hand-tools (specifically, my Stanley #92 shoulder plane). Here's the left apron pushed halfway into the left front leg.

All the legs and aprons dry-fit together, with the rough top thrown on for effect. The only thing holding it together at this point is the friction between the mortises and tenons.

Another view. The blue tape is to label the location of each part: from this point on, it only goes together "one way."

Tenons

2008-12-27T17:55:00.000-05:00

To make the tenons on the ends of the apron parts, I used the table saw. The fence acts as a stop so all the shoulder cuts are (hopefully) in the same plane. The height of the blade determines how much will get removed from each side - do one side, flip it over, do the other. I nibbled away the material between the initial shoulder cut and the end of the tenon by making several passes over the blade, moving a little farther from the fence with each pass.

Another batch job: there's no set-up change, so the parts crank thru pretty quickly. Here are the half-formed tenons on the apron stock.

To make the edge shoulder cuts, the blade is raised, the stock is fed on edge, and the process repeated.

The roughed-out tenons on the apron stock.

I usually use a "combo" blade on my table saw. The "combo" refers to it being used for both rips (with the grain) and cross-cuts (across the grain). One compromise of a combo blade is that the grind on the teeth is not flat - it has points on the outboard sides of alternate teeth which prevent tear-out on cross-cuts, but which leave ridges on non-thru cuts. That's what makes the tenon look so rough after table-sawing.

One of my woodworking epiphanies was that hand tools more than earn a place in a modern shop: they're essential tools. A few swipes of this shoulder plane...

Cleans up the tenon surfaces really, really efficiently.

Mortises

2008-12-27T17:43:00.000-05:00

The benchtop mortiser: a little fiddly to set up, but it makes square holes pretty quickly thereafter. The mortises in these legs are off-center, so you can only do half of them with one set-up. Note in this pic, the stop block is clamped on the right side of the fence. Half the job had the stop block clamped on the left side.

A mortise after a little hasty cleaning up with a chisel. They are never visible in the finished product, so I don't waste a whole lot time making them beautiful.

The off-center mortises on two sides of each leg (before cleaning up by hand). The tapers are cut on the same side as the mortises, so you have to pay attention: a common "oops" is to mortise one (or more) legs on the wrong side. Been there, done that.

Aprons

2008-12-27T14:06:00.001-05:00

Apron parts roughed out. The front apron needs to have two rectangular holes in it for drawers - the easiest approach is to glue it up from smaller pieces.

The two blocks on the end of the front apron are biscuited to the top and bottom rail. The center block is too narrow for even my smallest (#10) biscuits, so none are used there. Surprisingly, I thought to check BEFORE cutting slots which would have exposed the biscuit's corners in the drawer opening. I drove some brads in the edge of the top and bottom rails and clipped the heads off to keep the center block from skidding around under glue/ clamping pressure.

Dry fit.

Glued up.

Note: since this will painted, I cut the blocks to minimize waste. If it were going to have a clear finish, I would have cut the blocks from the offcut of ripping the rails so that the grain would flow across the glue joints - giving the illusion that the rectangular holes had been cut out of a single board instead of pieced together.

Tapered legs

2008-12-26T11:57:00.004-05:00

Make a line on the leg blank which represents the taper. Clamp the leg to the taper jig (a scrap of plywood) with the marked line aligned to the edge of the board. The part of the leg which sticks up above the plywood is the part which will be removed.

Lay the whole thing down (with the clamps hanging off the end of the table), and butt some cleats up against the side and end of the leg and screw them down. A few hold-down clamps (only one's installed so far) keep everything snug while moving thru the saw.

After removing the bar clamps and the leg, set the table saw fence so the edge of the jig is against the blade...

... then load a leg blank and check to make sure the face is square to the table. If it isn't, the taper will be a compound angle. I learned that the hard way the first time I used a jig like this.

The leg and the offcut after a push thru the table saw.

... and after 8 more passes, all 4 legs are tapered on two sides.

I find it hard to visualize what a taper will look like from just layout lines, but one of the nice things about tapering is that it's not hard to move the cleats on the jig and take a little more off. I always start conservatively: it's a lot easier to taper a little more off than to add a little back on to "stiletto" legs.

Bedside tables

2008-12-24T09:43:00.001-05:00

I'm no photographer, so I just take a bunch of pics with different settings, with and without flash, and pick the ones that don't look too bad.

Ready for delivery on Christmas, but the finish will still be soft for a few days/weeks.

Painted hall table begins

2008-12-23T00:01:00.001-05:00

My brother-in-law Larry and I went on a wood quest this morning and I found a clear piece of 4/4 cherry about 9' long and 12 1/2" wide! A few trips thru the planer and table saw netted this one-piece solid top. It was too bulky to edge-joint so I did the first edge with a hand plane. Much to my surprise, it came out square to the face and I pulled full-width full-length shavings from it.
Even more to my surprise, I also managed to pull full-width, full-length shavings on the end grain with my super-duper LN LA block plane - what a great feeling.

Soft maple for the legs, aprons, and drawer fronts. The board standing up is still in the rough - those are saw marks, not figure. On top of the jointer: milled up apron stock, and squared, glued-up blanks for the legs.

I hate finishing

2008-12-22T23:58:00.001-05:00

More wet finish...

After jerking around trying to get them perfect (and just making it worse), I finally just sanded it down and put another coat on the tops. Hopefully this will be "it."

No fun

2008-12-20T15:11:00.000-05:00

It's not that I haven't been working on the tables, it's that it's (literally) as fun as watching paint dry. Here're the parts wet with coat #4. You have to wait a day between coats, so this gets pretty boring.

Also, with all that wet finish sitting out for a day you can't really make any dust - so, no more woodworking until the finish on these is done. Finishing always seem to fall on a weekend when I have big chunks of time available to do woodworking, so I'm hog-tied: twenty minutes of brushing then a day of sitting around = no fun.

What's next?

2008-12-17T00:37:00.001-05:00

Updated to include changes - click pic for bigger image.

...and a fly-around.

Woodworking injury!

2008-12-15T01:29:00.001-05:00

Forgot to put this up: my first WWing injury - and hopefully the last.

When you're still veneering at 3AM... and you feel like it's OK to work tired because you're not using power tools... and you're holding an iron upside-down in your left hand to heat up the glue so you can work the seam with your right hand....

Assembly

2008-12-14T22:49:00.000-05:00

From left:
1. Hanger bolt - the wood threads will drive into the pedestal, the machine threads will receive the threaded insert.
2. The brass threaded insert which will go in the top.
3. The jig to set the insert: a pair jam nuts with the insert threaded on. This will allow driving the insert into the top with a wrench (the wrench turns the top jam nut which spins the whole thing).
4. A few test holes and a practice drive.

I'd much rather chuck a piece of all-thread with the jam nuts and insert in the drill press. The drill press holds it all vertical/ perpendicular to the work so it threads in straight (you don't want the insert to thread in on an angle for obvious reasons). The drill press is too small for the tops, tho, so I'll be threading them in by hand/eye - hence the practice run.

Success. Twice, even.

Same deal with the pedestals: it's a pretty deep hole and you don't want it on an angle. Again, I'm taking my chances here by hand/eye, using the square as a guide. I probably could've made this work on the drill press but I was on a roll. I lucked out two more times.

I used the jam nuts again to drive the the threaded portion of the hanger bolt into the pedestals, being careful to leave the right amount sticking out. I have my doubts about threading into MDF - it's not the strongest stuff for holding threads. My original plan was to drill out the center of the peds, glue a solid wood plug in, and the thread the hanger bolt into the wood plug. That attachment would only be as strong as the glue, this one is only as strong as the MDF. If this gets wobbly, strips out, or otherwise fails, I'll go with the wood plug plan.

I drilled a center hole thru the bottom solid elements and another deep hole in the bottom of each ped. A giant lag bolt runs up from the bottom. I got the wrong size lags, tho, so I have to make another trip to the hardware store.

Some of the color variation you're seeing here is because some of the parts are sanded and some aren't. The top on the left, e.g., looks a lot lighter because it was sanded. Sanding dulls the gloss and leaves a white dust.

Right now my finishing plan is to spray them with shellac and see how they look. If they're too glossy, I'll shoot some Waterlox satin on them and see how that looks - the same stuff I used on the bed. Spraying finish is a little weather-dependent for me, because I spray in the garage (out into the driveway). Daylight is a big plus, too.

My brother-in-law is a professional painter with LOTS of spraying experience. He's due in for a week long visit this Thursday, so maybe I'll wait and recruit him to do it.

Gyrations of a noob

2008-12-11T14:04:00.000-05:00

Lest you think I know what I'm doing, here are two relevant threads in which I got inspiration, guidance, and a healthy push to do the veneering.

1. WoodNet - before I decided to do the veneer at all.
2. Woodworker's Zone - mentor's forum post.

Squaring a large blank (in a small shop)

2008-12-11T12:11:00.000-05:00

The large blank for pedestal 2 has to be squared up. Here I cut an edge on the table saw, then flipped it the to make the other side parallel. The blade doesn't reach even halfway thru, so it has to be cut from from both sides. Once it's flipped over onto the other face, tho, the table saw fence won't work anymore to index the next cut: the fence is too short, but more importantly, the surface I want to index from is closer to the blade than the fence is.

Another fancy jig - an offset fence. This will allow the blank to be indexed off that recessed, already-trued face.

Self-explanatory when you see it in action.

But since the blade can't reach even halfway, there's still an uncut section down the middle.

I'm not sure this qualifies as a jig, but putting two sticks of the same size along either side of the ridge gives the router a way to register to that flat face without encountering the ridge. It's pretty easy to set the cutting depth for the bit, too: just lower it until it touches a section that's been cut by the table saw.

Then that whole ridge is easy converted into a ludicrous amount of obnoxious, and I mean really, really, obnoxious MDF dust.

I had a little offset after routing, so I hit it with a hand plane. I checked the faces for square and lucked out.

To square the ends you use a cross-cut sled or miter gauge, but again you have the problem of the blade not reaching all the way thru. Here it's been cut, rotated 90 degrees, cut, rotated, etc. until you've reached in as far as the blade can from each face, leaving the center uncut. The big faces that have been cut are square to the blank provide a nice surface to register a chisel against. While it feels weird hand-tooling MDF, it works well enough.

All that produces a big, square block of MDF....

... which is then marked out with the template, and takes 4 trips thru the bandsaw...

.... twins!!

Best shop day ever

2008-12-07T20:16:00.000-05:00

Got a few washes of shellac on pedestal 1 - the color match is going to be OK, I think. This is the worst face, grain-wise. I was careful to center the bookmatches on the pedestal's center lines, but the right face pictured above was a slip-match.

Remember: "the chatoyance may be off, but who cares?" - the big stripe down the center of the right face is the caused by the chatoyance mis-match in the adjacent flitches of veneer. It's very analogous to wiping your hand the wrong way on suede. I recently learned that this effect is called "barber pole," and it's the same thing that caused the "racing stripes" that were on the headboard after the first washes of finish.
It shouldn't be this dramatic when it's complete - just like on the bed.

Melissa commissioned another Skin Candy display this afternoon, so I did that while I was waiting for the finish to dry on the pedestal. The 'snoot factor' on this is that I did it without my tape measure, because I couldn't find it.

And since things were going so well today, I got cocky and glued up all ten pieces for pedestal 2 in one shot - with Elmer's glue, even.

It's amazing how productive you can be when Murphy takes the day off.

More veneer

2008-12-07T14:01:00.001-05:00

Waiting for glue to warm up gives lots of down-time to take pics. Here's the last face getting ready to go on.

Close-up of the intersection. The right veneer face overlays the left one. The veneer is only .020" thick so I was pretty worried about sanding thru. I lucked out.

Finish and assembly, and table 1 is done. That crap about it not taking much longer to do two of something than one of something doesn't apply to veneer, by the way. I've yet to start on the pedestal for 2 - hopefully it will be quicker and easier following the experience of doing this one.

Table progress

2008-12-06T16:10:00.000-05:00

A happy accident that if you flip the veneer pattern end-for-end, you can nest them and minimize waste out of the veneer sheet. The chatoyance might be wrong, but who cares.

High-tech 3000 year-old glue recipe.

First face veneered (not trimmed yet). A little fiddly, but do-able.

First veneer attempts

2008-12-05T12:23:00.000-05:00

I tried my hand at veneering one of the offcuts, but it's hard to photograph. A few little problems, not least of which is that my hide glue jar tipped over in the double boiler and filled with water.

Pedestal cores

2008-12-03T22:21:00.001-05:00

A half sheet of MDF in block form, with the profile marked out on 2 sides.

A trip thru the band saw. Note the slices are facing up.

Another trip thru the saw. Slices still facing up.

The two offcuts from that last step are taped back on. The slices are now facing sideways. I drew a pencil line down the top kerf (the left side when the slices were facing up) so it could be seen in the photo. The bottom kerf is there, it's just hard to see.

Two more trips thru the band saw produce another left and right offcut, but this time those offcuts have the cuts from the first two trips thru the band saw in them.

The right offcut falls back into its now 3 pieces.

Peel the other offcuts apart, and the pedestal core reveals itself.

The first real idea of what this thing's going to look like.

As of yesterday at 5:51PM, the veneer is in Germantown, WI.

Pedestal blanks

2008-11-30T21:41:00.000-05:00

I cut down some MDF on my ludicrously-sized TS sled.

Made a half-template of the pedestal profile by marking out some key points and squeezing a thin strip between some blocks clamped at those marks. On the right is a trial with a scrap of plywood (the scrap came out of the headboard template, btw).

Another exciting picture of glue drying - this time a stack of MDF. This stack is half of the glue-up for one pedestal - I'm gluing up to end up with a 7 1/2" square by 24" long blank.

Not the greatest visualization, but the blank is giving the height while that plywood scrap is giving an idea of the profile. If it's too "bowling pin-ish," now's the time to say so.

More feet

2008-11-27T12:10:00.001-05:00

After remembering I had a screw center for the lathe, I decided to turn the feet instead of routing them. The downside of that is that a thin dry section like this is likely to "blow up" on the lathe when I inevitably have a chisel catch. Luckily I had no spares so I had to make a few more blanks.

Some turkey-day turning. It took longer to mount/demount than the turning on each one.

A preview of the finished base.

Aside: I don't like the new camera!

Feet feat

2008-11-26T12:25:00.001-05:00

After thicknessing, the fly-cutter roughed out the feet.

...which left these little ridges since the cutter has an angle to it. I didn't think about it, maybe I could've reversed the cutter - not sure the spin direction would allow it or not. Anyway, to pattern route those ridges off...

...would put my fingers really close to the bit, so here's another crazy jig. The drill bit is the same size as the fly cutter center bit. I drilled a hole in a scrap of flooring and it presses together snugly to allow me to feed the stock around the bit while keeping my hands comfortably distant. Do a little, turn it a little, repeat.

A few wash coats of shellac to seal and protect the completed parts is bringing out what will be the finished color. Lack of photo skills + a mix of florescent and incandescent shop lights + the color settings on different monitors means this is probably far from exact color reproduction, but you get the idea.

Some more progress on tables

2008-11-22T20:00:00.000-05:00

Profiled the table edges, cut and beveled the base blocks, sanded. Shellac is cooking.

Hard to get a good pic of the profile, but it's a thumbnail on top and a bit of round-over on the bottom. Meh.

Cut the bevels on the base blocks with a block plane, just because. They can always be made bigger, so I started small.

Feet, pedestals, and finish remain.

Table progress

2008-11-21T00:00:00.001-05:00

Glued up more base stock.

The tops were already starting to cup a little. Added some cross-grain battens to the underside - screws in elongated holes.

Router table #2

2008-11-20T23:49:00.000-05:00

Took off the left wing of the table saw and added another router table.

...underneath which hangs the Milwaukee monster on which I got a screaming online deal a few months back. If this router can't swing it, it's a shaper knife.
Note the third hole on the right, thru which height adjustments can be made from ABOVE the table.

Drum Sander

2008-11-16T18:32:00.001-05:00

Square the blank, cut the dado, fit the filler strip. Ash and shellac.

1000 words

2008-11-14T13:23:00.000-05:00

This was a plan to build the MDF cores for the table pedestals. One of my online WW'ing heroes shot this down as a waste of time and effort. Current plan is glue up a solid block and band-saw it out a-la cabriole leg.

Design questions

2008-11-09T22:16:00.000-05:00

Object now or forever hold your peace.

Ignore all the lines on the base - it was drawn by doing 1/4 of it and copying/flipping/rotating the pieces together. I don't know how to get rid of the lines joining them.

Edge profile on the top is a swag. Note the feet on the bottom of the base. This is to give it some height and prevent it wobbling. They can easily be changed, or pitched entirely.

Chip out repair

2008-11-08T18:21:00.000-05:00

Review: corner chipped out when pattern routing in a few spots due to grain orientation.

Hand-planed it down and glued on a little repair block.

Some routing, filing, and sanding later.

As good as I can get it.

Base chip-out repair

2008-11-02T22:49:00.001-05:00

In a few spots the bases chipped out pretty badly. In retrospect, this was easily predictable/ avoidable but I didn't think first. A great woodworker, they say, is not one who never makes mistakes but one who can hide them well.

I hand planed the rough chipped-off edge flat, which allowed a few scraps to be glued on. After gluing, I trimmed the excess off to get it a little closer. I'll clean these up by sanding to the final shape so as to not chip out the repair.

It's very ugly right now, but the grain match on the face is what matters at this point. Everything else will sand out flush.

Table Tops

2008-11-02T22:38:00.000-05:00

Super-fancy circle cutting jig: there's that pin again, strategically placed with respect to where the router plunge base is carpet-taped to a scrap of flooring from our family room remodel.

The two blanks were different thicknesses - since no one has gifted me a wide industrial planer, I'm sweaty and hip-deep in more of this stuff.

Viola.

Top blanks

2008-10-29T22:22:00.001-04:00

The blanks for the tops. Again, there's significant work involved in making rough lumber into the boards out of which you make stuff.
Each of these blanks is glued-up from five sticks; each of those sticks was cut, planed, jointed, and grain-matched before they were glued up.

Once glued up, they have to be leveled again - the sticks weren't exactly the same size (my planer's knives are a little slanted, I think), there's a glue line, and there's the imperfection of aligning the faces in the same plane while gluing up.

Normally, not a big deal - just another few trips thru the planer... unless the blank is 10" wider than your planer in which case...

Notice all that fluffy stuff behind them?...

...and on the floor, and behind the bench, and on the floor on the left end of the bench, and in my shoes, and on my shirt, and leading from the basement to the chair in which I now sit typing?

There's something really satisfying about hand-planing stock: you feel like a "real" woodworker - for the first ten minutes or so. After that, it just feels like manual labor.

Table base trauma

2008-10-29T22:07:00.001-04:00

This is one of the things I hate about WWing: there are sooo many little details to remember at every step. Forget one little detail, and you've ruined lots of effort. The forgotten thing here: pay attention to grain orientation.

The corners on this thing are oriented with the grain direction such that it's easily split off.... even when taking really shallow passes with the router. I'm thinking there's an order of cuts or a feed direction that mitigates this, but I can never remember when the chips start flying. Plan: cut off the corners, glue fresh stock on, try again with increased wisdom.

Note that there's a lot of effort (besides making the template) to get to this point: that piece of wood didn't start out all nice, flat, smooth, and of sufficient width to make these bases.

Everything looks better from higher up. I think the square peds need to be smaller and higher. More milling and gluing, yeah!

Table base template, continued

2008-10-26T13:57:00.001-04:00

The router has been fitted to the plunge base, which is in turn double-stick taped to my homebrew circle cutting jig (dark, triangle-shaped thing sticking out from under the router). A large scrap of plywood (one of the templates from the bed) has been clamped to the table. This raises the router base up to the height of the work, and to gives something to pin the jig to.

Note the little metal pin midway between the the router body and the dowel "handle" on the end of that dark triangle. That's the pivot pin. The pin has been strategically placed with respect to the circle (which is still on it's original pin from when it was cut out) to get the right amount of arc.

The router will swing around that pin, intersecting the circle and creating an arc. Note the router is pinned and swinging around to make a circle - in the previous step (making the circle), the router was fixed (under the table) and the work was swung around. 6 vs. half-dozen.

Since I want 4 equally-spaced arcs cut out of that circle, I have to index after each cut. A mark on the table lines up to marks 1 of 4 marks on the circle (a big "X" on the circle, really).
Since I don't want the circle to move while I'm cutting the arcs, it's clamped down.

A few swings later and the first arc is described on the circle. In this pic, the circle has been rotated 90* (to the next index mark), to prepare for cutting the next arc. The router is pivoted all the way to the right of the circle.

Lather, rinse, repeat... In this pic, the router happens to be pivoted all the way to the left of the circle. If I wanted to, I could pivot the router thru a full revolution and continue to cut the circle thru the scrap on which the router/pivot is mounted.

Viola.

Bedside table, base template

2008-10-26T13:08:00.002-04:00

A board with a nail in it the desired distance (radius) from the router bit.

Drill a hole in another board, stick it on the nail, a few spins, and...

Shop storage

2008-10-26T12:40:00.001-04:00

Under the bench top-to-bottom: misc often-used stuff, files, chisels, sharpening stuff, drilling stuff
Pipe clamps overhead on the left side of the bench. Quick clamps over the right side (not pictured).
A grinder and sawzall hanging up in the joist spaces between some overhead boxes.
Overhead joist boxes down left-to-right: biscuit jointer, nailers, ROS/jigsaw. Hard to see, but extra jigsaw blades live in pocket holes at top of box.
Overhead boxes stowed "up".

Column question

2008-07-30T20:56:00.001-04:00

Tables

2008-07-30T16:04:00.001-04:00

Drawer box progress

2008-06-19T21:02:00.001-04:00

Carcase parts cut to size, lots of biscuit slots cut.

Ass'y table drawer box

2008-06-19T21:00:00.001-04:00

Assembly table progress

2008-06-19T20:50:00.000-04:00

As drawn: a box of drawers supports the torsion box (top). The legs are long, skinny, plywood boxes which nest into each other to allow telescoping. Spaced thru-holes will house pins to lock the table at different heights. Depending on how the legs are fixed to the top, this would enable tilting the top. A tilting top might be nice to have: drawing, having gravity hold stuff down against a rail mounted on the edges of the top, etc .
A lift (not pictured) will manage the heavy lifting. Harbor Freight, $99.

Assembly Table: torsion box top

2008-05-24T12:02:00.001-04:00

Jointed 2x4's on leveled sawhorses and a stack of parts.

Outside frame and long ribs done.

All but the last row of short ribs in. The last row of short ribs needs to be trimmed a little - apparently the SU calculations weren't exact, as the "~" in "~3 13/16" implied.

Some more pics

2008-05-11T19:04:00.001-04:00

...and since it's Mother's Day: that blur birthed me.

Queen-sized arched bed

2008-05-10T20:08:00.003-04:00

YouTube slideshow HERE

Link-tacular, and blogging

2008-05-07T20:39:00.000-04:00

I started this blog to host pics of projects and tools to add to my posts at the woodworking forum I haunt. I started posting Sketchup models for my sister to review when I started her bed. To quell her badgering, I started adding progress updates - I wrote posts "to" her. Occasionally I add something I don't want to forget, or so I can access it from any computer I might be using.

Recently, my HS class blog had a post about monitoring traffic to the website using www.123stat.com. I thought it might be useful for the business website which Melissa runs, so I installed the tracking on this site to fiddle with it.

I was very surprised to see that people occasionally visit here - and even more surprised to find that the tracking software identified external links to this blog.

There's a Toolcrib article which quotes much of a post I made on the forum, and there's another blogger who linked to me. In both cases, had I not been tracking I wouldn't have had a clue.

Another suprise:
In the past 7 days, this page has been viewed from the UK, Portugal, Algeria, Belgium, "EU" (not specified), Canada, and from cities all around the US (especially in Texas).

I've always viewed this blog as a picture hosting site, notepad, and place to keep my "client" up-to-date. I know my ISP is not jammed with traffic clamoring to this blog, but it still feels a bit odd to think that people would land here.

The world is really getting small.

...and bored, apparently.

I'm a little concerned that I'm making a "bloggy" post here and vow to never do it again. No one's going to read all this crap.

Round table

2008-05-07T19:15:00.000-04:00

... from a few different angles. This is about as simple as a round table can be. Could add a shelf or stretchers.

CS strip ripping jig

2008-05-05T18:27:00.001-04:00

...to rip a large number of 2 1/2" strips for torsion box ribs from a full sheet of MDF (impractical to do on my table saw). Since the strips are narrower than the shoe-blade distance on the circular saw, this "fence board" can just be clamped on instead of drilling the CS shoe and screwing.

Torsion Boxes

2008-04-28T20:48:00.000-04:00

Delivery

2008-04-27T21:18:00.001-04:00

Noting date of bed delivery. Hopefully some pics of it in it's new home will follow. Hopefully it doesn't fall apart.

Wierd spraying issue

2008-04-18T20:24:00.000-04:00

Note the "stripe," which is where the grain direction changes on the slip-match.

Spraying

2008-04-17T20:41:00.000-04:00

Hard to picture in a dark garage. Note that everything is hanging from the ceiling. Luckily, some of the plaster from the freshly installed hanging hooks dropped into the wet finish.

Flaws are starting to show up.

Bed progress

2008-04-15T17:44:00.001-04:00

Note that these are sitting in a clean (or largely emptied of stuff, rather) garage, and there's a compressor in the background. Hopefully they'll get shot tomorrow.

Skin Candy shelves

2008-04-15T17:40:00.000-04:00

Started cutting Saturday, finished woodworking Sunday, painted Monday, installed Tuesday. Not "fine woodworking," but I have a happy wife.

Have to sneak this in

2008-03-27T21:12:00.001-04:00

... prior to bed completion

Equipment failure!!!

2008-03-12T18:40:00.000-04:00

Noting date for shoulder injury.
Milwaukee 5625 received yesterday.

Finials

2008-03-09T19:01:00.001-04:00

The sketchup model
Yet another jig - this one to clip the corners on the finial blanks. It will index off the table saw fence.
The jig in action making the last clip on this piece.
All the finial blanks' corners clipped. Note that each stack is a different sized square, and of different thickness. The dowels in the foreground which the blanks will be stacked on are the wooden handles of the foam brushes used to do the finishing on the rest of the bed.
...and another jig. This one to make the chamfers on the top of the finial. It also indexes from the fence enabling very fine tweaking of cut depth.
The chamfer jig in action.
Four sides chamfered, four to go...

Routing small pieces is a potentially dangerous job, so I completely ignore feed rate for safety - which led to the cuts burning a little. Whatever scraping/sanding doesn't fix, I'm sure black ink will. Here's the rough results stacked on a dowel.