Woodworking

Baby blanket chest / Woodcarving / Woodworking — No Comments
23
Jan 18

My left or your left?

Getting close now. Started today by cleaning up the inlaid peg in the front rail.

I’ll just trim down the front side while I think about what to do with it, since it’s a central decorative feature.

And now on to the main job, the panels. The panels were mostly flat and close to size already so it was mostly detail work and fettling and finishing.

Doesn’t look terrible. For each of the frames, I assembled two of the rails into a stile and got the measurements for the panel from that.

Mark it off with the panel gauge and rip to width with the ryoba and plane to a smooth edge (I’d already planed the reference edge and shot both ends on the shooting board with the T5). Then plane a bevel on the back side of the panel with the #05 on both sides and one end. Test fit in the frame and then mark off the length; cross-cut with the other side of the ryoba and plane a bevel on the remaining end (carefully to avoid spelching the finished edges). Then test fit in the assembled panel and make sure it’s a snug fit but with just a little wiggle in both directions – and by just a little I mean if I shove it, it shift less than half a millimeter in any direction, but it does shift so it’s free-floating.

The panel is oak like the rest of the chest, so according to the hardwood databook, I can expect 2.5% shrinkage going from the shed’s humidity to indoors; that translates to about a tenth of an inch of shrinkage across the width of the panel and the grooves are a quarter inch deep so they should hold. But I don’t want it so tight that any increase in humidity causes the panel to destroy itself. In the end I got the fit I wanted on all the panels though it was a bit of a faff with one of the side panels to get the angle of the bevel right.

And a dry fit of all the frames:

I didn’t think it looked too bad and then I looked at the side.

What the… the pattern isn’t flowing the way it’s meant to.

Some head-scratching ensued and I finally figured that at some point while doing the drawboring I managed to do the stage-left/audience-left confusion thing, only with chest-left/my-left. I’d swapped the sides. Worse, I’d drilled the drawbores that way. I must have been tired, given that I also managed to drill the drawbore pin holes on different sides of the centerline for half the rails. Oh well, they’ll still work. However I now had to redrill the drawbore holes on half the rails. Yeesh. Still, there won’t be too much stress on this piece and the glue and floorboards will add to the strength. It should be fine.

Besides, I couldn’t leave the pattern broken, it’d give me a headache. So I swapped the sides and redrilled drawbore holes.

Worth the effort, now the pattern flows around the chest as intended. Two jobs left now before assembly of the carcass. First off, what to do about that central element in the top front rail. I tried to carve it over but endgrain in sapele is uncooperative so I just cut it flush, chamfered the edge slightly and punched a flower into it.

Should do. Last job: plane down the inside of the stiles. For this, I need some V-blocks so I made some in a hurry.

Not stable enough to plane on though, so I drilled through the bottom of the V, countersunk heavily to get the screw away from the piece and then screwed both to a backing board (one of the less twisted rejected rails):

I must remake that later, it’s too useful a jig to not have a decent version of. But for now, deadlines, so I made do and planed down the inside to pencil marks made while the box was assembled.

If those drawbore holes look asymmetrical to you, it’s because they are –  this is why having a drill press would be nice. But they’ll still work, it’s all good. It’s “character” 😀

With that job done, time to assemble the carcass, so out with some clamps and hide glue and all the other bits I’d need.

Started with the front frame.

Glue tenons, insert tenons for both rails into one stile, dip peg in glue, hammer home while listening for any cracking breaking noises (there were none, so yay!). Then slide panel into place, glue the other pair of tenons (carefully so as to avoid accidentally gluing the panel), and tap the stile home with the soft-faced deadblow hammer, then drive in the other drawbore pegs. Repeat for the back frame:

Incidentally, those brass plant misters are a handy way to have water on hand to dampen paper towels for things like glue squeezeout cleanup.

I trimmed off some of the pegs from the back side (not all, for strength, but just enough to not get in the way of the rest of the process – I’ll clean up fully later).

Now things get a little awkward; fit the four side rails into the front frame, with glue and drawbores and fit the panels.

I’ll come back and tidy up the pegs when the glue’s cured. And now for the really finicky bit – glue up all four tenons and lower the last frame into place on top of all of them at once. This is why dryfits were so important. Also, because the bottom frame is resting on the drawbore pegs right now, you can’t tap the frame home with the deadblow, you have to use the clamps to squeeze them home and then secure it with the drawbore pegs.

There’s always one…

The drawbore hole was just fouling the panel on the far side enough to stop the peg and the next hammer blow was just off-center enough to snap the peg. *sigh*

I guess cleanup’s going to be more fun that I expected. Oh well.

Final assembly of the carcass is now done, and it looks nice.

Still things to do, but I think I can get the first coat of finish on the box tomorrow night even if the lid isn’t ready or attached (I’ll want to cut the recesses for the hinges first though I think). Maybe. I’ll just be using Osmo on the box, keep it nice and simple.

TDL:

  • Rip out lid frame parts
  • Groove lid frame parts
  • Cut lid frame M&T joints and drill for drawboring
  • Measure out lid panel size
  • Groove lid panel
  • Shape lid panel
  • Cut box tenons and drill M&T joints for drawboring
  • Groove bottom box rails for floorboards
  • Crosscut floorboards to width
  • Plane panels
  • Cut panels to final size
  • Bevel or rebate panel edges to fit grooves in rails
  • Plane away inside corner on stiles
  • Cut edge floorboards to fit around stiles
  • Clean up drawbore pegs and any missed glue squeezeout
  • Saw off top horns
  • Plane top of chest so all four sides are exactly level
  • When floorboards are fitted, stand chest on legs on a flat surface and mark off base of legs to eliminate any wobble
  • Cut legs to size
  • Shape legs
  • Assembly
  • Hinges
  • Finishing with Osmo (three coats at least)
Baby blanket chest / Woodcarving / Woodworking — 1 Comment
22
Jan 18

Blood, gouges and drawbores

Started off the day with the noisier tasks to get them out of the way…

There’s not a lot of art here. Rive the stick to about the diameter you want, pound it through the hole with the big hammer several times, move on to smaller hole until desired size reached, sharpen slightly, continue on. And it’s noisy, so ear defenders. But, keep going and you finally have all you need minus one (because the universe hates you, there will always be a need for one more than you have).

Then on to finishing off the carving.

It’s a fairly simple design on the bottom. Mark off every inch on the two reeds I cut yesterday.

Then chop down vertically with the gouge (whose profile matches the reed pretty closely) on each spot on one reed.

Then flip the piece and chop down at each spot on the other reed, only offset a little (judge this by eye) so it looks like a kindof backwards ‘S’

Now use the gouge to cut down from just behind one gouge chop into the stop-cut created by the next gouge chop over. You’ll be gouging in different directions on the two reeds so it finally looks like this:

The top rail is something similar but with only one row of those motifs, surrounded by the two scratch stock reeds from yesterday. And I threw in a punch into the motif just to be different.

 

The thing about that design on the top going only one way is that you can keep track of which rail is which and have the motifs flow from a single point on the front to a single point on the back. So on the back I just cut away the foreground and stipple the background with a punch:

And on the front I had planned to have a small decorative element:

But it proved too small and fiddly and it lost all its crispness almost immediately so I scratched that idea, and drilled out the spot the central element was in:

And then made another peg from a short piece of sapele:

And glued that in place:

I’ll trim the peg down tomorrow, and I’ll have a blue-collar inlay of sorts on the front:

With that done, I went to cut a rebate on the front and back bottom rails to hide the floorboards from being immediately obvious. Only a quarter inch deep, so they won’t be totally hidden, but I can plane down the edges so they don’t stick out like a sore thumb. And then as I was tightening the thumbscrew on the #778’s fence…

Well. Shite.

A moment of panic and wondering if I could use it without the fence and then I remembered that when I bought the #778, I accidentally bought a second fence and I’d never gotten rid of it…

Sometimes hoarding pays off. A quick swap and I got back to the rebate.

Well, feck. It’s that time again, where am I leaking from now?

Ah, there we go. I blame the 778 and all its sharp bits:

I mean, you start reaching in there to pull out the shavings that are clogging the mouth and….

Feck. This is getting silly now. But I got the rebates cut, so on to the drawboring. I’m doing this with the new hand drill, mainly to see how it behaves (answer: like a power drill. Only much more solidly built than my last one).

Everything got done in batches; drill the holes in the mortices, then go through every tenon, seat it, tap the drill bit in to mark the tenon, then bradawl a point a sixteenth (or a millimeter – the distance seems to be the smallest whole unit the person talking about drawboring grew up knowing about) closer to the shoulder, then drill that hole out in the tenon; and repeat.

Last job of the evening was to roughly crosscut the panels oversize, and plane them smooth on both sides. I’ll finish plane them when I have the final dimensions. I won’t be carving them because of time.

Tomorrow I’ll start assembly; when the carcass is together I can cut and install the floorboards and start working on the lid…

TDL:

  • Rip out lid frame parts
  • Groove lid frame parts
  • Cut lid frame M&T joints and drill for drawboring
  • Measure out lid panel size
  • Groove lid panel
  • Shape lid panel
  • Cut box tenons and drill M&T joints for drawboring
  • Groove bottom box rails for floorboards
  • Crosscut floorboards to width
  • Plane panels
  • Cut panels to final size
  • Bevel or rebate panel edges to fit grooves in rails
  • Plane away inside corner on stiles
  • Cut edge floorboards to fit around stiles
  • Possibly build face frame for the top of the chest
  • Assembly
  • Hinges
  • Finishing
Baby blanket chest / Tools / Woodcarving / Woodworking — 3 Comments
21
Jan 18

Too many inches

Quite a bit of time in the shed today, so made some progress (there being a nearby deadline, this is a good thing). Started by cutting a side rail’s tenons, then marking off the other side rails from it (same as for the long rails).

I wanted to keep using the offset shoulder idea, but rather than gauging it by eye, which I can’t do yet, or sawing on one or the other side of the line, which I also have trouble doing, I decided to just mark out the shoulders and cut to the line. So I marked off the show face shoulder, ran the line round with the square to the back side, and then marked out 5mm or so of the line on the back side, then put a ruler on the line and butted the square up against that.

Problem is my ruler’s too thin. And it’s fiddly. And then I had an idea – I’m already holding a thin bit of metal, why not use it?

Put the knife upside down, butt the edge up to the line at that point on the back where the back of the knife starts sloping down to the point so I had a consistent thickness (the whole blade narrows down to the bevel slightly like a saw plate), butt the square up against the other side of the knife, then flip the knife over and cut the back shoulder line.

Works quite well. And that’s about as much of an offset as you need really, at least for something of this scale.

By the way, one of these makes it a lot easier to see the lines. It’s a little rechargeable camping light off ebay. Big Clive did a video on them and the internals were quite solid so I bought one.

It cranks up to quite a high brightness and if you just put it on the bench near the work you get a nice horizontal light thrown across the piece so cut lines stand out clearly. Plus, has a nice magnet in the base so I can just put it on a plane on the wall and it acts as a quick light on those short runs to the shed to grab something when I don’t want to plug in the whole shed but need light. Or it can grab onto the bandsaw frame and act as a work light when I’m using that.

Not bad for €6.40 delivered. Big Clive had a link to a generic ebay search if you want to grab one.

Anyway, got the side rails done.

That offset shoulder method is even faster when you don’t have to faff about cutting to one side of a line when you don’t have the skill for that 😀 And all the joints bar one fitted off the saw, which I was happy with.

What I was not happy with was the overall look of the piece when I put all the rails into the stiles to get a look at the final size.

That’s… it’s just not right. It’s square. I don’t understand that. First off, it looks clunky. Secondly, the design was not square, it was rectangular because it’s designed to hold something specific which is very rectangular.

Measuring tape time.

Width is fine, a quarter inch under but no biggie.

Depth is about what I estimated (well, a half-inch over). Still not seeing it. What are the internals?

Internal width is perfect…

And internal depth is… wait, what? 13 inches? That’s supposed to be 11, what the…

Ah. Shite.

If you change your initial sizes in your design, and you’re adding on a margin for the thickness of the material, you need to run the sums again and change the final size too. Feck. Well, at least this is an easy fix (too short would have been a bit more work). I want 11-and-a-quarter inches in internal depth, so if I move the shoulder on the side rails back by one-and-three-quarter inches, that should give me the size I want. So, out with the marking and measuring gear and the saw…

And I recut all of those tenons on the rails (and everything fitted off the saw this time, yay), and reassembled the chest.

I don’t know if the photo gets it across, but it looks a lot more right this time. Weird how your brain reacts to proportions.

That’ll do nicely.

At this point I took some time to practice carving…

Simple practice pattern, just some concentric circle segments to cut out with the v-tool.

It’s a physical skill, so you just need to practice. I’m getting slowly better.

Not sure if I’m at the stage where I’m comfortable carving the panels for this chest or not. I will be for the next one whenever that is, but this one… not sure. Might leave it.

Or not. Really not sure – if the design is simple enough, it might look acceptable…

But enough diversion. Quick side job now, splitting out blanks for drawbore pegs.

I can’t tell you how much better this job is thanks to that hacking knife. Compared to a chisel, it’s faster, more controllable, safer, and just all-round better. I tested one of the peg blanks by hammering it through the dowel plate down to the quarter-inch size, but just one (it’s a noisy job, better suited to earlier in the day even with the sound dampening in the shed so I’ll do it tomorrow).

Meantime, I rough-cut the floorboards to size.

They’re cedar, already tongue-and-grooved which is a nice timesaver. I haven’t decided yet whether I should just rebate them into the base or whether I should groove three rails and nail them to the fourth (which is cut narrower). Need to figure that out tomorrow.

At this point, I got out my #04 and stropped the blade and reset the cap iron and started cleaning up the rails and stiles.

And then I set up to do some of the decorative features I had in mind for the rails. First, some fences to hold the bottom rails in place.

This wasn’t great, the piece kept spinning out, so I added another fence clamped to the front as well:

This worked nicely. It’s effectively an ad-hoc sticking board, and I’m going to use my new 167-year-old reeding plane on the bottom rails. This was the point of buying it, after all. And I’ve learned I’m not that good at using the thing, though I’m starting to get the knack of it. I think I need to get some slipstones to sharpen it a bit more (the strop only sortof works) and I’m starting to think I need to go buy and read “Mouldings in Practice” because even when I finally get the iron set to take a fine cut so it doesn’t chatter, it still digs in in the last half-inch or so of the groove and I’m sure it’s something I’m doing wrong. But I got it working well enough to do the bottom four rails. Not before I discovered that I need to do some repairs though…

It is somewhat disconcerting to hit your moulding plane with your plane hammer where you’re supposed to hit it to retract the iron and have bits fall out. It’s even more fun when you go to advance the iron and don’t realise the wedge is loose. That iron can really get some distance on it when you give it a belt with a hammer when the wedge isn’t holding it in the plane. But I was able to get it back from behind the bench without any damage, so that’s allright.

Anyway, the top four rails get a different treatment, for which I needed my scratch stock.

Lee Valley. It’s a luxury I know, but it wasn’t that expensive (it was about $50 plus P&P for the stock and all of its scratch cutters) and it works very nicely once you get the hang of it and only try to do short strokes instead of long runs (you do a few of those but only at the very end when the moulding is well established, and you have to be careful even then that it doesn’t dig into the grain and dive off to one side or the other). I used it to cut a pair of beads separated by a gouge’s width on the top rails, and called it a night there. I have some work still to do on the decoration, but it requires belting a gouge with a mallet so it’ll be loud so again, I’ll wait till tomorrow for that.

Not too bad, though a little more ragged than I’d like in places even after burnishing with a handful of shavings. But it’s not done yet…

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