Woodworking

Bandsaw Boxes / Desk Shelf / Floor shelf / Wall Cupboard / Woodworking — No Comments
19
Dec 17

Kneedeep in shavings and carrying on

So, I’ll start with the end of something. Made as a gift for a friend of Claire’s:

Walnut offcut from the cot, some brass and pewter hardware and felt and viola, a small necklace box. Or key box I suppose. Didn’t come out too badly.

Then it was time to start pushing.

The problem with making a lot of rough-cut component parts is that then you have to turn them into planed non-rough component parts. At least it’s just poplar. And I did stop for forty minutes or so at the start to take the irons from my #04, #04½, #05 and #05½ planes to the diamond plates. It would have been less time, but I discovered the #05’s iron was skewed quite badly (one side was almost 2mm longer than the other). No wonder my lateral adjuster was always canted right over. Cue a lot of time on the 300grit plate because for some reason I thought that’d be faster than turning through 180 degrees and taking the bench grinder down off the wall. I don’t know, ask your mom.

I’m finding that this is pretty nice poplar by the way, I’d be tempted to oil this stuff. I know it gets a bad rap with woodworkers who think timber is NFG if it wasn’t all riven by hand from a single tree that grew in a tropical rainforest on the southern slope of a hill in Fiji before being cut down by hand using dental floss, but this has some nice grain and surface appearance. I might do this project over again in beech later, but I’m not regretting using the poplar here.

That chunk of plywood and the dowel on the left will become a new Japanese saw benchhook:

I was going to use that small piece of sapele the dowel is resting on as the stop but it’s a bit short and a short stop is a bit of a pain so I planed, halved and glued up a scrap piece of walnut there on the right. Yes, scrap walnut exists. Hush.

I don’t know why I’m keeping those little pine arrow shapes and the walnut scrap they’re on. Every time I go to chuck them I just find myself stopping for some reason. Presumably my subconscious has an idea it’s not ready to tell me about yet. We’ll see.

Four boards to thickness down by a quarter inch and an eight-inch wide board to resaw. Well, that’ll get you procrastinating in a hurry. I’m annoyed as well, I bought a frame saw just for this job and it’s still in Germany. What’s the holdup…

Huzzah! It might be here by tomorrow so. Right, ditch the resawing/thicknessing work and let’s park that project until the saw gets here on the bet that a frame saw makes resawing as easy as everyone says it does.

On to other things. I have a few bandsaw blanks; time to stare at them for a while and think of what to do with them…

We’ll see if they turn out the way I hope. I don’t like using machinery at the best of times but that late in the evening it felt like it’d be unsocial so nix that and I’ll do it tomorrow.

Sapele. Lovely to look at but a complete PITA to work with by hand. The toothing plane was needed to flatten that board (hence the grooved dull appearance of the board on the right) and to then smooth the surface I resorted to my #04½ because I ground that thing with a higher angle a while back and put a back bevel on the iron. And even with it set to a whisper thin cut and skewing the iron and having the chipbreaker set within a glint of the cutting edge, it’s not quite perfect. Scrapers will be needed… but I’ll leave that till after joinery is done.

Meanwhile, I need to do some cleaning up. If only I knew someone who had a wood stove in the middle of the kilkenny countryside I could get to burn this lot…

And it’ll probably get done sometime next week, but I have another commission. That’s the word for when your wife orders you to make something for junior, right? 😀 He needs a shelf for his bedtime story book, but it should go on the floor because that’s the easiest place to keep them if you’re sitting by the bed reading to him. So…

Wall Cupboard / Woodworking — No Comments
18
Dec 17

Starting again…

I figure, with six projects sitting in component form in the staging area of the shed, best get to work making even more components for a seventh project. Because Reasons.

Anyway, the first video I ever saw by Richard Maguire was about building a small wall cupboard (in a sort-of, kind-of, if-you-squint shaker style probably best described as “`English colloquial” 😀 ):


I’ve wanted to build this for a while. But I don’t have the ten feet of pre-planed three-quarter inch thick pine his plans call for. What I do have is a pair of boards of inch-and-a-quarter rough-sawn poplar, mostly free from green stains…

That should work. And sod feeling bad about doing the rough-cuts with a power circular saw. Do you see room in there for me to swing a full-size handsaw? Or have a sawbench? Besides, do you know how they did this back in the 17th century? Apprentices!!! (And there isn’t room for one in there either, even if you can find smaller rooms being rented for the price of a car a month on daft.ie). So.

Woodwork al fresco. Yes, the deck’s a mess. I’ll tidy after the solstice when there’s time.

Right, that’s the rough-cut chunks for the cupboard on the left, a chunk intended for another project (yes, that’s eight, I know, hush), and offcuts that will probably become bandsaw boxes or the like.

Now, time to figure out layout a bit better.

Design, meet wood. Wood, meet design. This is the humming and hawing stage when I try to think through the size in the design and how to break down the parts best, and whether stuff is getting thicknessed by scrub plane or resawn or whatever.

Resawing is a pain to do, thicknessing is only slightly better, but a lot of parts in this can be under three inches wide and those I can resaw with the bandsaw reasonably easily. I do have a frame saw on the way for wider stuff to see if it helps (lots of people say it does), but the thing’s in Cologne with no sign of moving for the last week. Sodding DHL.

Round one with the bandsaw. I’ve planed a reference edge with the #05 and #08 and marked off the far edge with the panel gauge after sharpening the pin a little with the diamond paddles. I’ll rip those on the bandsaw and get widths (there’s some damage on the edges – the boards must have been near the edge of the pack in the timber yard I guess).

And I’m trimming up the bandsaw blanks while I’m at it.

Right, that’s the edges sorted. Plus I get a few pieces to test finish on.

Then I start marking off various parts. By the time I’m done, I’ve used almost all my gauges (you don’t unset the gauge until you’re sure you’re done with that measurement; that ensures you’ll only have to reset the gauge for the one cut you’ve forgotten instead of five or six times).

And time for round two with the bandsaw (after lunch):

Right. Now I plane a reference edge and face on each part and mark the relevant parts for resawing or thicknessing. And then change my mind about thicknesses – I’ll leave the front of the cupboard three-quarters of an inch thick (which is a standardish sort of thickness for these things) rather than a half-inch. The back panel will still be a half-inch, and I’ll make the sides three-quarters and the top and bottom of the carcass and the shelf will be half-inch and so will the top and bottom cap pieces (so top and bottom overall will be an inch thick and the sides a quarter-inch less).

This is about the point where I discover that my favorite small proops brothers engineers square is… not. Square that is, it’s out by almost a full mm across its arm, I must have whacked it off something without noticing. I know I didn’t drop it. I don’t know if you can true one of these back up with the kit I have available. I may just need to buy a new one (for all of a tenner or so). In the meantime, I have another engineer’s square and the new Moore&Wright sliding square so that’s fine. Except that I had to reshoot a bunch of edges to get them back to square. And then marking them out for resawing.

And back to the bandsaw for round three…

Right. That’s the rails and stiles for the front door, the boards for the back, and the sides and top and bottom will have to be resawn by hand.

Just clamping and stickering them for now to let them dry overnight without too much warp.

Yeesh. Really do need to start joinery on something soon, if only to clear space. I only just finished tidying this up on Saturday…

Also finished up the bandsaw box. Two coats of garnet shellac on top of two coats of danish oil, and then some hardware, and then some felt for the base and the drawer gap. More photos tomorrow.

And then there was this idea from Paul Sellers:

And it looked simple enough that I could do it with Calum, so I prepped a piece of pine and this evening we drew lines on it, sawed it with a small ryoba rather than using the chisel Sellers used which would be a little dangerous for a five-year-old (or for me in close quarters with a small child holding a surgically sharp pointy lump of metal for that matter), and cleaned it up using “his” number #03 plane (because it has two places to hold that keep small fingers away from sharp edges). And then split it with a hammer and enough glee to convince me it’s a good thing we don’t have a cat.

Then break out the green spraypaint and masking tape and do the next bit outdoors 😀

Came back a bit later with spray-on snow and drilled a hanging hole…

Not bad for a five-year-old.

Baby blanket chest / Bandsaw Boxes / Finishing / Shed / Side Table / Woodworking — No Comments
16
Dec 17

Post partum prepping

So, table delivered (yes, the recipient liked it). BTW, if you were wondering, it was a build-along to Richard Maguire’s video series:
In case you were thinking of buying that series, it’s well worth the money.

Today though (and yesterday) was all about cleaning down from the build (and carting away two rubbish bags full of shavings – not being able to burn wood here is a pain) and doing the dozen little jobs that needed doing like sharpening the wooden skew rebate plane I have here; going to use that in a build soon. And every plane had to get a light sanding with fine paper on the tops of the cheeks of their sides for surface rust (the -3C nights came with water vapour condensing on the cast iron) and then a fresh coat of wax. And other small jobs like that which had been backing up. I still have one more of those – building a japanese saw bench hook. I’m using a normal bench hook at the moment but for pull work, it can be a tad awkward because you have to hold the work to the fence. You can use a normal european bench hook if you hook it to the far side of the bench; but I think it’s a bit nicer if you attach the fence to the baseboard and drill through both and glue a dowel through both and down a few inches below the baseboard. The dowels then go in the bench dog holes and that’s your bench hook. Parts are set for that (I’m not sure I have enough dowel stock though) and I’ll get to it probably tomorrow.

The rest of my time has been spent on stock prep. Bit of resawing and flattening and ripping yesterday and prepping some blanks for bandsaw boxes. So walking into the shed today it all looks fine…

…and then you turn to the right to look at the staging area…

Ah. Right. So that’s four more side tables (or at least the raw material rough-cut for them) and then on top of that all the finishing jars and glues and screws and my plastic box of off-cuts. Those are only the bits I could use for things by the way (I’m resisting the packrat urge to keep every scrap of wood I cut off a larger piece on the grounds that There. Is. No. Room. In. Here), so resawn pieces that could be used to make small boxes or chunks that could become bandsaw blanks (not many of those left, I picked through the box on Friday to make up some blanks), or the cores from bandsaw boxes (which can get used for things like feet or drawer pulls or whatever).

Tucked behind the plastic box are the panel gauge and the dovetail alignment board, and on top of the box is where I stash all the component parts of builds in progress (and a lot of sandpaper at the moment because I haven’t found a place for it). So there’s five glued-up blanks, and the component parts for six other projects in the pre-joinery stage.

Blanks drying outside along with a bandsaw box that’s almost ready.

Two coats of danish oil in; going to do a coat or two of shellac yet and attach the hardware (it stands vertically and you use it to hang necklaces) and some felt in various spots. First box made using the new sander. It’s not that it makes it better so much as it makes it easier to do some things because you’re not worried that trying them will immediately remove a finger. More photos later.

And this is a quick test of a Paul Sellers idea for a project to do with the kids:

He made his using a razor-sharp chisel; I won’t be doing that with Calum 😀 The project works just fine with saw and bench plane 😀 With a bit of luck, that’ll keep him occupied for the guts of an hour and he can make one for his teacher.

And then I have two more projects to prep for, one in beech and one in poplar. This phase always seems to make me long for a powered planer thicknesser, can’t think why…

Can you tell what it is yet?

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