Woodcarving

Baby blanket chest / Finishing / Woodcarving / Woodworking — 8 Comments
25
Jan 18

Done

Last stretch now. Start off by cleaning up from the glue-up last night. Trim the pegs with a flush-cut saw and run a chisel over the surface until it passes the fingerprint test. Use the plastic razor blades to get any glue squeeze-out I missed last night.

Those things are remarkably useful for this by the way, particularly in hard-to-get-at spots.

Gets right in there, doesn’t mar the surface at all.

Then saw off the horns so I can see what I’m working with.

Right. Test fit that on top of the chest and centralise it, make sure I have enough room for dust seals on either side plus the width of the dust seal again, and then mark off that point as being the final width of the lid. And then, very careful sawing. I got lucky and didn’t hit any of the mortices or crack anything from the stress of sawing (clamping cauls helped enormously here). Then I paused before putting away the chest again to decide on the hinges.

I went with the black in the end. I’m not sure why, but it just seemed to match the wood more.

Then on to the lid again, and shaping the front (where it’ll be grabbed most often) to be comfortable to hold.

First time that gooseneck has come in useful for me, but it more than earned its keep tonight. I broke all the other arisses as well, and then I sawed one of my pieces of material for the dust seals in half to give me some dust seal blanks, planed them to be matching – or close to it – and shaped a curve at the front.

When I was happy they looked okay and matched, I drilled for two screws, countersunk, painted the mating surface with hide glue and screwed them into place on the lid. Then I turned to the last job, fitting the hinges.

I don’t like this job much, I’m not terribly good at it. First I attached to the chest, and then using wedges and cauls to hold the lid in the right position, attached to the lid.

And then I spent the next twenty minutes refitting and fiddling with them to get the damn lid to sit flat.
Hinges.
They’re enough to make you tear your hair out.

I suppose it could be worse, these hinges are definitely not 17th century pieces (or even replicas of it). Period correct hinges would be these things:

Depending on who you talk to, these are snipe hinges, gimmel hinges or something even odder-sounding. But they’re not terribly pretty on the inside of a chest when fitted:

And even Peter Follansbee can’t make them look good on the outside:

Oh well. Count your blessings I guess.

 

And with that last job done, that was it. Build complete.

Well. The lid needed a coat of osmo, so I did that. But that was it then, nothing to do but wait for the osmo to cure (which it’ll do in the house tonight so the panels can start drying – if they’re going to do something weird on me I’d rather they did it now instead of after I deliver the piece).

You know, it didn’t come out too bad in the end.

 

Even the dust seals look good.

Oh, and for those who were wondering what it was for…

A friend at work and his wife are expecting their first in the next few days. In the 17th century, chests like this were four feet wide and three feet deep (or even larger) and they held a household’s linen or blankets. Today they’re called blanket chests. But this one is a baby blanket chest; the name is a bit of a pun in both construction and intended usage. It’s sized so that you can take four to six cellular blankets from mothercare, fold them the way you’d normally fold a blanket when you’re tired and in a hurry, and they’ll drop right in here. It’s also a baby version of the full-blown blanket chest, which would never fit in my shed 😀 (There are examples of miniature chests like this from back then, so they’re not unheard of – just uncommon).

Plus, I had wanted to make a chest for a while. They’re a fun build. Might do another one during the year.

Next up however is: tidying up the shed after building this. There are shavings everywhere…

Baby blanket chest / Finishing / Woodcarving / Woodworking — No Comments
24
Jan 18

Almost done…

So I had a 2330h callout last night after finishing in the shed and got to bed around 0100h; and then had another callout at 0430h that wrapped at 0530h and then went into work about 40 minutes later than usual because the last remaining scrap of the morning routine was blown out of the water when junior came down with a temperature (he’s caught the cold Claire and I have had for the last week). So I was a wee bit braindead for most of the day, came home early, and all three of us had an hour’s nap. After that, and another quick call for work (on-call is turning into much fun this week) and dinner, Claire and junior packed it in for the night and I headed to the shed to try to finish the chest.

Right, first order of business, those pegs need to be trimmed with flush saw and chisel.

A bit finicky in places, but mostly this was straightforward. There are still some dark lines in places where the pegs weren’t perfect, but the surfaces pass the fingertip test. With that done, the next job that had to be done in order was the floorboards.

But first, I wanted to take a minute to look at options for hinges for the lid to see if I could mortice in the hinges before finishing started.

I had gotten a few choices of hinge in the sales over xmas (and those are just the ones that would take the weight of a lid this size), but that oddly wasn’t making this much easier. I don’t like the shiny brass ones much, not on oak. They just look out of place, far too bright even against what the wood will look like when it’s finished. The bronze effect isn’t bad (and it’s definitely just an effect unless bronze sticks to magnets now), but that black effect one is I think the best match (especially as I think it’ll look blacker when I oil it). But I didn’t come to a final decision because the barrel of the hinge being where it is on those two means a cutaway at the back of the lid which is extra faffing about. Not the end of the world, but sod it, I don’t have to choose today so I’ll sleep on it. Unless work calls, of course.

Then I checked the levels of the sides against the front and back.

The top levels don’t match, they’re out by just over 2mm (all around). I suppose I could saw them down to match but there’s not a lot of point in that – the disparity will be hidden by the lid, which will have a dust seal around it. And it’d spoil the look of the carving.

The bottom levels don’t match either, they’re out by 4mm all around, but that’s useful – the front and back will hide the floorboards partially. It’s still a bit untidy though. Something to do better next time. And with that checking done, on to the floorboards. The width on them was mostly fine already, but the two outermost needed to have their excess tongue and groove removed, and had to be shaped to fit around the stiles.

Not a hard job, but time consuming because after the initial rough cut it’s a cycle of test fit and then adjust with chisels and test again until you’re sick of it 😀 And you can’t just hack it out or there’d be a great big gap inside the box letting you look down at the floor. Next time, I do the grooved side/front rails and narrower back rail with floorboards running front to back and nailed into the back rail, it’d be less work.  But eventually, they were fitting well enough to go with.

Next, prepping for nails – I’m going to use the Dictum cut nails for this, get that nice medieval-ish look in there even if it’s hidden away a bit. But the last thing I want at this point is splitting.

I was worried that the smallest drill bit I had in that index wasn’t small enough and the nails wouldn’t have any meat to grab onto, so I tried using my pin vice to hold a smaller drill bit and hammered some nails into a test piece.

Seemed to work well enough in cedar (but that collet was useless, I just put the 2mm bit in the chuck and the bosch held it just fine). But when I went to hammer in the first nail, there was so much resistance when the nail went from cedar to oak that I was worried the pilot hole wasn’t big enough to prevent splitting so I redrilled the oak hole with a larger bit and did that for all the other nails (2mm in cedar, then widen to 3mm in the oak, then nail the floorboard in place). The first board, the back one, also got glued to the back rail because why not. That edge is the only secured edge for that board and glue’s cheap (and it won’t be expanding across that joint, just away from it).

Might not be the best job in the world (that cedar really does look a bit too thick to me now, plus it’s western red cedar, and I thought it was cedar of lebanon when I bought it – doh 😀 ). But it’ll do.

And with the floorboards in place, the next thing is to cut the bottom horns off and to cut the legs to length and eliminate the small amount of rocking the chest has at the moment (it’s square to within 1mm corner-to-corner, but the legs are uneven by 3-4mm or so).

I keep a sheet of thickish MDF in the shed for this task (I don’t like to make stuff from it, but it’s handy when you need a really flat surface and aren’t going to load that surface). I put the chest on it, let it balance itself (two legs up in the air at this point by different amounts), and wedged them carefully, checking that the stiles were vertical when wedged (you don’t want to just shove the wedge in under one leg and wind up cutting the legs so the chest sits nice and stably at a cant). Then I picked out a piece of wood of suitable size and used it as a reference to mark off where to cut the legs to get them even; and then out with the ryoba and crosscut across the knife lines carefully. Hold your breath and put it back on its feet on the bench…

And phew. No rocking. Got it the first time, nice and solid. Well, next up is just removing the top horns. Already have pencilled in the lines, so away I cut with the ryoba…

Not bad. I went over it one last time with an eraser to remove any pencil marks and generally just tidy things up…

And out with the chisel and just chamfer the new sharp edges, make sure there’s no arises to hurt hands or anything, and did a fingertip check over the whole surface to see if there was any last little thing to take care of.

And that’s now ready for finishing.

I went over the edges and corners with some 240 grit sandpaper just to soften them a bit, and in some of the groove lines in the carving to clear out any last fuzzy bits, and the inside corners of the chest as well. Then I laid down some parchment paper (I’m not being prissy, but I have a lid yet to build so not dousing the bench in finish would be useful), decanted the last of my Osmo (Hmmm. Need more. Not sure where to get it fast enough. I may need to switch brands of hard wax oil which is never a good idea) and donned some nitrile gloves (because I have about fifty cuts in my fingers at the moment thanks to the #778).

First coat will be heavy and brushed on, left for 15 minutes and then the excess ragged off.

Nice. And now back inside for a cup of tea, and 15 minutes later I came back out and ragged off the excess, and it’ll cure overnight.

Gotta say, it doesn’t look too bad.

The project’s not done yet – I need to make a lid and install hinges yet. But still. Look! Pretty! 😀

And I do like how the carving draws the eye away from the imperfections in joinery and alignment 😀

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 — 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)
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