Author Archives: Brian

About Brian

I'm a guy named Brian Ward in the San Francisco Bay area who does woodworking with hand tools. If you'd like to send email, the address is bri (at) aem7.net.

Nightstands v2: Making Drawer Bottoms

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It’s been so long since I talked about the second nightstand project that I sometimes wonder if I’m making any progress. So I looked back at that last post and realized that since then, I’ve done the following:

  • Made the rest of the cabinet components.
  • Glued up the cabinets.
  • Made all of the drawer sides, fronts, and backs.
  • Resawed and milled the pieces for the drawer bottoms.
  • Milled half of the tops and roughed out the other half.

The drawer sides and backs were a pain because for some bizarre reason, I chose birch to be my secondary wood. Don’t do this. Use yellow-poplar, pine, or something that people who should know better would use. The stock I had a ridiculous number of grain reversals, leading to a lot of tearout when planing, so milling this stuff took forever. It also dulled my plane blades quickly, so I was constantly resharpening. But even after I milled it, the dovetails took longer than they should have because it seemed like I needed to sharpen my chisels after every couple of swipes.

So it took forever, but I finished, and that left the drawer bottoms. I haven’t really talked much about how I’ve been making drawer bottoms, though I did one particular post that kind of touched on panels in the tool cabinet. So I figure I could post something on that.

First, I mill the wood to thickness, preferably a little thicker than the grooves that they’ll fit in. I always need to glue them together.

Next, I saw the glued-up panel to rough depth–about a half-inch wider than it will eventually be. In the following photo, I ran out of wood in one board of western redcedar and had to use another very differently-colored board for the last little bit at the end. The rip panel saw that I use is on top.

Now I plane the top of the panel to remove excess glue and get a finished surface. I do this after trimming the depth because I often use the cutoff somewhere else, so I want that cutoff to be as thick as possible to start.

I used a Taiwanese plane for this because it was sharp and the blade is nice and wide.

With the surface planing done, I trim one of the sides square to the front with a plane. I used a Milllers Falls #11 (this is like a Stanley 5 1/4) because it’s easy to control (and its blade happened to be sharp).

Then I take the drawer front and mark off the width:

I mark this side square to the front as well, and after verifying that it is in fact square, I trim it off as well.

As I mentioned earlier, the panels are typically a little thicker than the grooves that will house them. I don’t measure them because I care only about the face side being reasonably flat. Now it’s time to get three of the edges to fit into the grooves.

To do this, I make a rabbet. I was thrilled to be able to use my new Taiwanese rabbet plane so soon:

I start with the sides, going across the grain. Every so often, I check the thickness by seeing if the rabbeted edge fits in the groove that I’ve plowed in the drawer side. When going across the grain, it definitely helps to take out a little bit of the end of the rabbet with a chisel so that you don’t blow out the grain.

I then make an identical rabbet on the other side, and then do it for the front edge, this time checking against the groove in the front drawer.

Now it’s time to trim the panel/bottom to final depth. I assemble the drawer front and sides without the back, and slip the panel in. (This is also a good time to verify that the panel isn’t too long.) I make sure that the panel goes all the way into the groove on the drawer front. Then, I mark off where I think I should cut the panel:

I make marks on both sides, draw a line between them, and then saw and/or plane to that line. Then I test-fit the panel into the 3/4 assembly again, and measure the depth with my double square:

With the square set, I drop this end into the groove on the rear of the drawer to see how close I am to the bottom:

You can see the gap; you want a gap so that the panel has room to expand in the groove. I usually go for somewhere around 1/16″-3/32″, but it’s never exact, just the kind of thing you know when you see it.

With the final depth trimmed with a plane, I rabbet the underside of the rear panel edge like I did earlier for the sides and front.

Then, the final test-fit comes; here’s the view inside showing the face surface:

and here’s the underside that no one sees, with the rabbets and the saw marks that I’m too lazy to clean up:

So there are the drawer bottoms. I have two done and I’ll do the other two when I get back from the ski trip I’m on now.

I’m also making some progress with the tops. Here are the pieces that will form the tops. I had to do a lot of sawing around defects to get to this point:

 

Yearly Tool Haul 2012: Japan and Taiwan

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This year’s annual transpacific trip included Japan as well as Taiwan. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to see too much in the way of wood/woodworking stuff; there was just too much on the agenda.

However, I did get to go to the Meiji Jingu shrine, and the second gate (torii) on the path there is one of the largest wooden ones around, and happens to be made of Taiwan Yellow Cypress:

(The sign says “hinoki from Taiwan”–They consider the wood to be interchangeable.)

I didn’t have enough time to research tool shops in Japan, much less visit them, so I limited tool-buying to the home center-style stuff. To be honest, little odds and ends are all I really need right now. That’s a lucky thing, too, because the tools you get at the home center there are about a million times better than the ones you get in the US. Here’s the first batch:

At the top, a small mallet (wanted to see what it would do as a plane adjuster, plus I break the Thagomizer on a regular basis now–need to make another). Then there’s one of those milled-tooth files, that I’m going to try out as a half-round complement to the Shinto saw rasp that I like so much. Next is a diamond feather-edge file, because it looked like it might come in handy. And on the bottom is a general-purpose knife that I’m going to try out in my seemingly endless search for a marking knife that I like. That knife is nothing special, just the kind that a schoolkid might have used for sharpening pencils as described in Odate’s book.

Next is a couple of small squares:

The 4″ Lee Valley double square is at the top for size comparison. The 10x5cm square seemed like a handy size to me, and the tiny try square (made in Sanjo City) was too cute to resist. Note that even though these tools were not bought from a specialty shop, their accuracy is still guaranteed, and indeed, both are right on. You just can’t get that kind of thing from a home center in the US, and the price of these squares really isn’t excessive. We’re talking about $10 here.

I wish I could have gotten one of those larger framing squares that have the beveled face, but it would have not survived the airport baggage-handling gorillas. I suppose I can get those here, anyway.

Next up is a couple of sharpening implements:

I really have no idea what that thing on the top is, but it was cheap and it’s really coarse, so I figured that if nothing else, it could maybe be used to rough up the surface of my Sigma Power #120. I got the diamond plate on the bottom primarily for conditioning my waterstones.

Oh yeah, I got some shoji paper, too.

After leaving Japan, I went to the now-familiar tool shop in Taipei, and it turned out that I wasn’t quite done with Japan yet. I decided to buy my first Japanese chisel there for the hell of it (and to make Wilbur Pan gloat or something):

And I was looking for a smallish/medium smoothing plane, and got this typical Japanese-blade/Taiwanese body hybrid:

Annoyingly, the face of the blade on this thing was not flat when I got it–it had a very (very) slight convexity on one half of the edge. For those of you familiar with this kind of steel, though, you know that lapping it away is basically an exercise in futility, and it took me an embarrasingly long time to remember this.

So I tapped it out. I’d never done that before, and it was as nerve-wracking as everyone says it is, but I have to say that it worked like a charm.

Finally, the tool I was most looking forward to buying was a plain-jane Taiwanese-made rabbet plane:

Why? Because I’m fed up with my Stanley #78–a torturer of left hands since 1885. The one here doesn’t have a depth stop, though I could make one or clamp one on. And it seems that the convexity demon from the blade on the preceding plane infected this one, too. So I tapped out this one, too, this time with a little more confidence. Yay!

The maybe-not-so-strange thing about this plane is that it’s designed to be used left-to-right. I’m not sure it’s going to make much of a difference, but it might give me an excuse to buy an antique Western rabbet plane to complement it.

Five Years of Galoototron

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It’s been five years since I made my first post on this blog. At that time, it was on Livejournal, and I was doing it just because it seemed like a good idea at the time. Apparently, I’m still posting, so because it’s been a nice “even” number of years since I started, I figure I ought to do a review post because I have nothing better to do.

(You won’t see too many of these posts on this blog, so bear with me.)

Before starting, I should mention something about the name of the blog. It doesn’t mean anything. It was just something that rolled off my tongue. It is a dippy name, it’s difficult to remember, and I’ve always been open to changing it. Unfortunately, I couldn’t think of anything better at the time, and that condition persists to this day.

The first post is my introduction, but perhaps there’s a little more that I can add to it. At that point, I had never done anything resembling semi-advanced woodworking. In hindsight, this was a natural time for me to start because I’d finally gotten some measure of stability in my life after years of grad school, moving across the country, working in crazy environments, and living in cramped places. I’d moved into that particular San Francisco apartment not too long before. It was nice and roomy, I lived alone, and I finally had some extra time. Sure, I’d like to have started earlier in life. I didn’t, so there’s no point in thinking about that.

Regarding tools: I don’t know what was going on in my mind, but I must have been researching old tools quite a bit. For example, how did I know that I needed to sharpen my own saws at that time? My initial tool list wasn’t too far-off. I still haven’t bought a shoulder plane unless you want to count the mini Veritas version. And although I have a miter box, I haven’t used it (I haven’t even sharpened the saw). But I had one special tool right-on, and that was the Winchester handsaw I’d picked up (but never used) in 2003, three years before starting. It was a long time before I actually sharpened that thing, but ever since, it’s really been one of my favorite tools.

That a very common style of saw is special to me may provide some insight into the type of woodworking that I like to do now. I feel that I went after too many planes in the beginning, and did not realize the amount of work that saws do. In time, I began to appreciate saws more and more, and even made a few of my own.

I thought that I would be very project-oriented when I first started. I had the idea to make bookshelves–perhaps I believed that I’d make them within a year? I was wrong. I still haven’t made a set of bookshelves (I did make a prototype). What I did instead was learn the process of milling wood and basic joints. The first larger thing that I put together was my workbench, followed by tools such as my mallet and scrub plane.

But about a year and a half into the process, I slowly made a dovetailed box, and that got things rolling. Though I didn’t have much time to work on it, that box went together more smoothly than I expected, and I still use it. By this time, things were changing in my life, and soon enough, I moved from the apartment to a house that actually had room for a shop. I spent the first few months trying to get organized there:

Then I started to build projects in earnest. The first big one was the shoe rack, which took some time but ultimately was a success. That was followed by the prototype bookshelf, the stool, and the first nightstand–I did all three of those projects in less than a year. At the same time, I made some shop improvements such as the saw till.

Incidentally, I switched the blog to the galoototron.com domain about a half-year after I moved to this shop. It was September 2009, and this shoe rack post was the first on the new domain. Before the switch, no one other than some family and friends knew about the blog, but then I started to tell a few more people (such as Luke Townsley at unpluggedshop.com) about it. Suddenly a lot more people than I really ever expected were reading this thing. That’s about as far as I ever went to promote it, though, and I don’t have plans to change that. I do appreciate all of the comments that I get from fellow woodworkers.

In retrospect, the two years I had in that shop were pivotal. I went from dorking around with tools and wood on a somewhat irregular basis to building projects. I gained speed and confidence in my joinery. The shop itself had a lot to do with this. No longer did I have to be completely fastidious about cleaning up after each session–I could leave a small amount of shavings or sawdust on the floor and it didn’t matter. Because I had enough room, I could put down my work at any time and pick it up again whenever I had the chance. This helped me establish a work pattern; I’d come home from work and have fun with a project for as little as 10 minutes or as much as an hour and a half before finishing for the day. I could even do a little in the morning before I went to work.

Of the projects I built in that shop, the nightstand seems like an obvious choice for a favorite, and it is. However, the little stool is a co-favorite:

The nightstand was the last project I completed there. Then, in the span of a few months, life got really busy, and after that, I moved again.

The new place also had room for a shop but it was more “raw”–as part of a garage, I really had to work to define the space. The old shop had room for me to put tools on tables all over the place. It was mostly disorganized, but I sort of knew where everything was, so I managed. There was no room for that in the new shop. To make up for it, I was allowed to hang cabinets, racks, and hooks on the walls and ceiling to my heart’s desire.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get the new shop organized quickly enough for my taste. Part of this was a chicken-and-egg problem; the tool cabinet is an example of this. My first task in the new shop was to get some of the tools on the walls, and I had to finish the cabinet so that I could put tools in there. Unfortunately, my tools were all packed away in boxes (from the move) that surrounded the workbench. I really had no idea where anything in particular was and I didn’t have places to put them temporarily.

At the same time, I also had more furniture to make. The second nightstand project kicked off this year, and it turned out to be far more complicated and time-consuming than I expected. (And I’m still working on it, but I’m almost done.)

Every now and then, I add to the wall storage in the shop. That situation isn’t fully resolved (see below), but it is much better. Things are getting done, and I have to say that I prefer the new shop to the old one.

Also, I’m making a concerted effort to work out some of the annoying little stumbling blocks that I have to deal with from time to time. The two biggest problems I come across are tool and project storage (both temporary and permanent) and workholding. I have plans to solve those soon.

Going forward with projects, I have a long list in front of me. The most pressing, according to those in the know, is an entertainment center. We’re also looking at the rest of the living room–coffee table, bookshelves, who knows what. With the exception of our couch, the living room furniture is crap and it makes sense to concentrate on that room. Whatever I do, I’ve decided that I’m not going to make anything as brutally complicated as the second nightstand project(s) for a while.

But then again, I may just make more complicated things. Here’s how.

The title of this blog is no lie. Everything I do is by hand, and that includes stock preparation. I didn’t go down this road out of principle or some other similarly silly reason. I did it primarily out of interest and necessity–the apartment I once lived in was no place for power tools.

Unfortunately, it turns out that flattening, thicknessing, and resawing by hand is a lot of work. A large majority of my time and effort goes into stock preparation. That’s not even mentioning how much time I spend sharpening plane blades as I go. It’s getting out of hand. I can flatten a board quickly now (and wow am I glad I learned), resawing isn’t so incredibly horrible when you keep your saw blade sharp, but that last step of getting down to final thickness is totally bogus when you have to repeat it dozens of times, even with my scrub plane that can take off 1/16″ at a time.

So I think I’m going to get myself a stupid lunchbox-style thickness planer sometime in the new year. I’ll continue to flatten stuff by hand–it’s a great way to get to know the wood and the board that you’re about to use–but when it comes to getting that other side down to something reasonable, I won’t think twice about feeding it to a machine. I’ve got furniture to build and I do not have the time to lollygag.

However, the blog remains the same. The preceding paragraph (I hope) will be the only mention. I don’t plan to write about it when it happens, and I’ll continue to do all joinery by hand.

At this point, it would be remiss not to mention that I’ve had help. Schwarz says that the modern woodworker works alone and I think he’s wrong. Even if one never meets another woodworker in person, and even if one never takes part on a discussion forum online, the modern woodworker has an incredible resource mass available. It’s sometimes easy to overlook that a person wrote what’s on your screen, and when you learn something from someone, that person is very much with you in spirit as you work.

And wow, have a lot of people been working with me in spirit in my shop. There are just too many to list, but I’d really like to thank anyone who’s written anything that I’ve learned from or even read.

Also, there are the BAGs (Bay Area Galoots). Several of you have really helped me out in more direct ways–lending me tools, giving advice, being generally cool, that sort of thing.

Now, back to the work on the new nightstand projects. Progress has been (inexplicably) made.

Goofs Illustrated: Repairing Grooves

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I thought I would be posting about the glue-up on the current twin nightstand project at this point, but there was one remaining thing that was really bugging me.

It turns out that I’d carelessly torn out the sides of a couple of grooves when I was cutting them, and although it wasn’t severe, with the panels fit, the shadow there would stick out like a sore thumb whenever I saw it. Unfortunately, I did it in a prominent area, and at the exact same place on each of the nightstands. So I wouldn’t be able to hide from it, and since I plan to use these things for a long time, I’d have a constant reminder of when I messed that up. Something needed to be done.

I started by marking out the repair area with a cutting gauge. In the following photo, the tearout isn’t easy to spot at first (it’s on the near edge of the groove), but if you look closely, it will be apparent.

Note also that I’m taking all of these photos with a macro lens so that you can see everything a bit better. For reference, that’s a 1/4″ groove.

Then I clamped a flat piece of stock right up against the mark I’d just made and started wasting out the repair area. You have to do this really carefully–use a small chisel diagonally (or a gouge) to avoid tearing out your repair area when you’re starting.

The photo below shows the last part of the wasting step–registering the chisel back against the scrap and paring out the last little bit.

Your chisel has to be very sharp and the back must be flat for this to work properly. For most chisel operations, the back may not need to be flat, but this is an exception.

I also gratuitously used my new Veritas miniature router plane in the repair area. It probably wasn’t necessary.

Now at this point, I was lucky enough to have not made it look any worse than it did at the beginning, so I carefully milled a small piece of wood two-square and pared down the length until it was the length of the repair area. I also made sure that this piece would have the same grain direction as the wood in the original. If I’d been smarter, I would have also matched the vector of the medullary rays, but I wasn’t, so I didn’t.

I glued it in place and banged in a couple of pine wedges to “clamp” it:

After letting it dry overnight, I pulled out the wedges and removed most of the material on the repair that was proud of the surface and groove (again, carefully).

For the final touches, I used planes. This was the very first time I got to use the side rabbet plane that I got from Veritas when they first released it:

It was very handy for this, but as they say, it’s a plane you don’t want to have to use.

After doing the sides, I planed off the top and the repair was complete:

There’s a tiny little nick at the top of this one where I accidentally dented the edge of the repair area, but I can live with that. I’ll only notice it every now and then and it’s something that I should notice occasionally. The important part is how it looks with its panel in place, and that seems to be OK:

The moral of the story? Don’t ever have to do this. I had thought that I was careful enough when I made the grooves; I’d marked the grain with a mortise gauge and worked the area with a chisel beforehand. But I still tore it up with my router plane because I was just too ham-fisted. If I’d spent an extra 30 seconds total being just a bit more careful, this would have never happened and I would have saved the hour that it took to do these repairs.

 

Nightstands v2: Rear Panels and Alignment Guide

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Since my last update, I smoothed and fitted the side panels to the main cabinets, which left just the back panels before I could glue up the cabinets. I’d resawed the western redcedar for these panels, but I hadn’t cut them to size to fit them to the grooves that I also did in the last week or so.

The top section (backing the shelf) was easy–I just sliced the panel to width, cut the rabbets, and test-fit. Then I started on the backing panel for the first drawer. That opening is 5.5″; add about 1/8″ on each side for the housing grooves, and you’ve got about 5.75″. Because the redcedar I resawed was from a 1×6, that’s perfect, right?

Well, no.

I always forget how crazy they go when they surface these softwoods. What I had was a total width of about 5.5″–a quarter-inch short. Oh, so annoying. (Note to lumberyards: I really, really want my softwood unsurfaced, like my hardwood.)

So I jointed an edge from the offcut from the previous panel, jointed an edge on the slightly-too-small 5.5″ piece, glued it up (sprung-joint style), and rather than getting fancy with clamping as in my previous episode, I just slammed it into the front vise on my bench:

That vise sometimes makes some good arguments for why it should stick around.

Then after the glue dried, the most annoying part came: I sawed off all but about 3/8″ of the smaller piece that I had just glued on so that the panel was the right size. It’s a really good-looking, almost seamless joint when planed down, but no one will ever see it because it’s on the back of the piece. That means that, in the future, I get to spin the piece around, point at a practically invisible line, and say, “this here was really annoying.” I’ll also be suspected of having gone off the deep end at some point.

So right now, I have these rear panels finished on one of the cabinets. To help align the cross-members of the piece, I made myself a little guide out of scraps:

And here it is in use on the rear frame of the cabinet:

The main goal of making this guide was for glue-up, because you have a lot less time to go measuring stuff during that process. And hopefully by the next time I post, I should have the cabinets glued up.

Nightstands v2: Panels, Decorations

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Work on the new nightstand projects has been excruciatingly slow this month, but has not stopped. In part, I’ve needed to do a lot of stock preparation and a lot of resawing (that’s the bandsaw calling me with its siren song again). The other problem is a lack of time–external stress causing most of it. But who cares about that? Let’s get into the woodworking.

I’ve been primarily working on the panels for the sides and backs of the cabinets. The sides are similar to the ones I’ve used before–1/4″ thick wood from the same stock (or similar) as the frame. There’s a slight difference, though: I decided that because I didn’t have any single piece of cherry wide enough to cover an entire side, I’d make a decorative touch with another species (birch) when gluing them up to make the piece.

The birch I picked was particularly annoying to work with, mainly because in many places, the grain reverses halfway through the width. Oh yeah, and it adores tearout.

This time, I used the double-wedge method to secure the panel stock against dogs (my low-profile versions) as I was planing it:

The panel jointing/glue-ups gave me a chance to use my new Veritas bevel-up jointer with the fence. I’d already used it in this piece back with the shelves, but this operation was tricker because the stock is so thin (it tends to bend when you press it).

I cut pieces out of the stock as I needed them, first jointing one edge with a slight hollow, then sawing off the desired stock, then jointing again. This was not as simple as it sounds, because when you saw off a small strip, the strip often slightly changes in geometry, because it’s under tension. So the hollow that you had before on that one edge may now be a bit convex, and you have to redo that edge.

But the most annoying thing, by far and away, was that I couldn’t use the jointer fence on the now-thin strip as I did before, because the fence is too deep and I don’t have a workbench trick for that yet (though I might in the future). So I had to use the old “clamp the plane upside-down in the vise and pull the strip through” trick.

It works, but I’m not terribly fond of it. I’m always afraid of planing a knuckle, and you tend to get sweat on the plane sole, leading to rust if you’re not careful. Still, it was the only option I had at the time.

With that done, it was time for laying out the panel components and choosing which pieces would go on which panel. Some people use stroke marks or triangles to mark which pieces go where, but because I had 20 pieces, I decided to go with a more detailed system that told me which part went where, and which panel each piece ultimately belonged to.

Now the fun part began: glue-up. There’s been a bit written about gluing up panels lately, and wouldn’t you know that The SchwarzThe Chris would post something just as I was doing mine. However, that method is for thicker stock. Plus, I was itching to try a variation on something I saw on page 20 of Toshio Odate’s shoji book.

Essentially, that method calls for you to sandwich the panel that you’re gluing between two boards, wrap a rope around the panel/boards, and put some blocks of wood underneath the rope to tension it and smash the panels between the boards to keep everything flat.

I modified it a little, making it sort of a hybrid with go-bars:

  • I used my workbench top instead of the board.
  • I didn’t use a board on top, but rather, just put the blocks directly onto the panel.
  • I used two sets of rope instead of one (one for each side of the panel)
  • Instead of using the rope to tension both on the top and the sides, I used it on the top only. For the sides, I used wedges, dog holes, and a stop on my workbench.
  • I put wax paper between the panel and the workbench to keep the panel from getting stuck to the benchtop.

It’s much easier to show this in a photo:

It took me a while to finalize the setup. I actually used a single piece of rope (twine, really) that I clamped to the bench in strategic places, and didn’t even cut it from its spool. I didn’t have scrap blocks handy, so I had to search all around the place for one of my boxes of scrap. And since I’d never done it before, I didn’t have a feeling for what the tension should be like and how everything fit together.

The good news is that once I figured it out, the actual glue-up process was a snap and took only a couple of minutes to execute. That’s important, because I had to do eight repetitions. (There are four panels, and each panel has five pieces, and hence four joints. I glued only two joints at a time to reduce complexity.)

Additional good news: it worked like a charm. Those panels came out really flat and seamless on the faces, and the wax paper did a perfect job at preventing the panel from sticking to the bench (and the paper). You have to replace the wax paper now and then because the wax coating comes off because it’s stuck to the glue.

I’m really happy with the results of the method and I’ll be trying it again. I’d struggled doing this sort of glue-up earlier because the panels are so thin. Being able to put the interim work into a spot where it won’t shift around is nice. I just hope that my experience with this time reduces the time it takes to set up next time (although part of that time was spent looking through boxes to find the rope).

I also acquired and resawed the stock for the backs of the nightstands. I picked up a bunch of “vertical grain” (quartersawn) western redcedar. It was so easy to resaw and plane–what a relief.

I guess there’s also this obligatory shot of this board’s grain (sorry to you folks on Google+, you’ve already seen these shots):

The other thing I’ve been doing on this project has been the decorations. I changed the design to be a little closer to the one I used on the first nightstand, to give it a little less transparency and eliminate the need for plinth on the bottoms of the sides:

With all of these components made, I’m nearly ready to glue up the main cabinets.

BAGathon 2011

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This year’s Bagathon (Bay Area Galoot meetup) was last Sunday, awesomely hosted by Greg Isola. Upon arrival, most of us wandered into his shop to check it out and there was a lot of drooling. (He’s got one seriously nice shop.)

I’ve gone to this event every year since I got into woodworking and started this blog, and it really is a treat. Seeing all of the tools that attendees bring along is one thing, but the demonstrations and interaction that you get with fellow woodworkers is priceless. It’s strange to wrap your head around this, but five days out of five years have really accelerated my work.

There was no shortage of good demos this year.

Mike Suwczinsky did a demo on scrapers, starting with cutting up beat-up handsaws. Here he is on the right demonstrating the use of a #80 cabinet scraper (if it’s not a #80, let’s pretend that it is):

That’s Bill Kasper on the left, sort of steadying that nasty piece of cocobolo.

Note the attire: Bill’s got a BAG shirt, and Mike’s outfitted in the more traditional Woodwright’s Shop garb. Not feeling content to leave it at the shirt, Mike also gave himself an Underhill-style cut on his arm (see foreground). Unfortunately, we weren’t filming, so we have no idea how he managed to do it.

Tom Conroy gave a demonstration on leather-bound bookbinding, gluing a piece of leather to a cardboard book cover. The technique is a little similar to how you might glue leather to a desktop. It was fascinating to see how one massages the material into place, and also how you can form it to shape with glue (and water).

Kirk Eppler demonstrated how to make leather sheaths for axes, adzes, and tools of a similar nature. This was fascinatingly easy-looking–installing the rivets and snaps appears to be a quick process once you’re used to it. Mike made one for an axe.

A perennial feature of Bagathons is the wine box feeding frenzy. Greg Hahn shows up with a whole bunch of empty wooden wine boxes, and we take them. This year, our host had the idea to surprise him, so several people brought projects they’d made with the boxes. A great many of these are tool holders, as you can see:

Greg H showed us his appreciation in advance by bringing another truckload of wine boxes. Thanks, Greg! Also, thanks again to Greg I for hosting, and to everyone who went.

Nightstands v2: Frames Complete, Shelves Joined

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It’s been a little while since I posted anything on the twin-nightstand project, so it’s time for a quick checkpoint (one of the reasons I write this blog is so that I can record when I’ve finished various phases of a project).

Both frames, exterior and interior, are complete. The interior frames are to support the shelf and drawers in each piece. In the first nightstand project, I shaped some of the exterior pieces to provide drawer supports in strange ways, and I said to myself that this method was too complicated to be worth the effort next time. So in the new one, I’ve been making the supports as separate pieces, in a secondary wood (yellow-poplar salvaged from an old bed frame).

I was finished with the exterior frame several weeks ago, and I finished with the interior frame about two weeks ago. This week, I’ve been working on the shelves that go above the midsection of each piece. Each shelf is made from two roughly 1/2″ panels edge-glued; I did the glue-ups yesterday and today.

So now the pile of components looks like this:

You can clearly see the secondary yellow-poplar members here. The components that I have yet to make are:

  • panels for the sides and back
  • drawers
  • drawer bottoms
  • tops
  • decorations (these will line the base of the pieces)

In theory, none of this should take too long, but it’s still a fair amount of work to do. There will be a non-trivial amount of resawing for the panels. I can’t really put a time estimate on how long this is going to take, because I’ve encountered a lot of diversions when making this project (though I’m starting to feel like I really need to finish this and move on to the next thing).

There is a new tool in the preceding photo that I may feature sometime in the future, depending on how just I like it. You could guess which one it is, though the excitement factor may not be entirely present in doing so.

 

Recessed Mortise and Tenon

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Here’s a quick little note on how I cut the mortise-and-tenon joints for the frames of projects such as the nightstands and the stool (though to be honest, I didn’t really do it this way until the latest project).

Normally, you arrange a mortise-and-tenon joint so that the faces of the two members that you’re joining are flush. However, you can recess the tenon member so that you get more of a three-dimensional look. In part, I’ve done this to frames that hold panels. My panels aren’t typically raised, so getting a little extra depth is nice:

Start by milling your pieces and figure out roughly where the mortise ought to go. You don’t need to be too precise about it; just make sure that your tenon member covers the mortise fully, and try to even out the shoulders as much as makes sense, because tenon shoulders make your joint significantly tougher. You can mark the area with pencil if you like.

Then mark out a line with a marking gauge for one wall of the mortise. If you really want to, you can set a mortise gauge for the width of your chisel and mark both walls, but I don’t do that because I set my mortise gauge from the mortise itself after I’m done chopping one.

Chop your mortise. The following photo shows a completed mortise, and the tenon member roughly at the depth it will eventually go:

Set your mortise gauge if you haven’t already. Set it from the mortise piece, as if you were going to chop another mortise:

Now, figure out how much of a recess you want. Set another marking gauge to this depth. Mill a thin, flat piece of wood to this depth by marking the piece all around with the gauge, sawing, and planing to the line (normal practice for milling wood if you do it by hand; feel free to use an electrobeast if you like).

This piece of wood will be your spacer, and is really the whole trick to putting the tenon in the correct place.

Mark out your tenon the usual way with your mortise gauge, but put the spacer between the stock and the tenon member as you’re marking. Mark from the face side.

Now, saw your tenon (the following photo is gratuitous, but just in case anyone’s forgotten how to saw a tenon cheek):

And you’re done.

The point to making the spacer is that once you have it made, you can use it over and over. I had to make dozens of these joints for the new project but needed only set the mortise gauge once. I just used it with the spacer for all of the joints I needed. (Obviously, you don’t use the spacer when marking the mortise; only the tenon.)

The Embellished Story of a Simple Box

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There I was, working on the latest project, when SWMBO approached and asked for some sort of container to put in the cabinet for some spices. She drew something that suspiciously resembled a box, so I inquired, “would a box work for this?”

Affirmative was the reply, and in the words of Topato Potato and Sheriff Pony, it was time to “spring into action!” The valiant woodworker never misses an opportunity to trot off to Mount Carcase to face off with the Dovetail Dragon, no?

I selected a target and started milling. Then I realized that the chunk I had chosen didn’t have enough wood to make the piece, so I looked around for another piece, which turned out to be this:

It was a measly offcut from some much larger board that I’m saving for a rainy day. Making the second call to “spring into action,” I was successful at milling the necessary pieces.

At about this time, I realized that I had no idea what this wood was. I still do not. Here is a cross-section of this ring-porous angiosperm for the sole purpose of an excuse to use the macro lens again, and on the off-chance that one of you crack wood identifiers knows:

At this point, I just made the box. I think most of everyone who reads this knows about through dovetails, so I’ll digress on that. The sole excitement was getting to use the 1/8″ blade on the Stanley #45 for the groove on the bottom, and since that doesn’t reach high enough on the excite-o-meter, let’s just skip to the end.

Box.