Finishing / Sidecar Cot / Woodworking — Leave a comment
19
Feb 17

Not done yet…

…but it’s getting closer.

I’m kindof cheating a little there – that’s a dry-fit before gluing in all the slats. But it all fits and the mattress top is at the right height so that’s a good start.

Got the day rolling by checking on the last coat of shellac for the rear support and especially the endgrain carving, which turned out well.

Then I put a tarp down on the assembly table, laid out the parts and rails, and dry-fit everything together. Then I stood the crib on the back panel, got out the hide glue and glued up the tenons going into the front panel, and then glued up the wedges and started driving them home to secure everything.

It went pretty well, even if one wedge did fail after I’d driven it home (it’s the one listing off to the left in the top photo). But enough went in to do the job, so it’s fine.

Then I took the flushcut saw and trimmed down the wedges, leaving a few mm proud only, flipped over the crib onto the front panel and inserted the end panel and dry-fit with the top panel and found – horror – a gap of nearly 2cm. The frame wouldn’t close. How I missed that I don’t know, but I spent the next hour fettling the top panel with jack and smoother and shoulder planes to get it to fit properly.

(Got to sign the work)

Then once I had it fitting properly…

I painted the tenons going into the back panel with hide glue, seated them, painted the wedges with glue and drove them home as well.

Then I got some (now in bloody awful shape, I need to fix these again) of the heavy-duty clamps I used for the bench and clamped front to back panel to get good pressure on the joints.

And then there was some tea. Then I dry-fitted the back support and top crossrail and the slats.

There had to be some more fettling of the back of the mattress support platform (and will have to be some more still, I’ll do that tomorrow), but it all seemed to fit fairly well, so I stuck on the mattress to make sure that it was 510mm from ground to mattress top.

Yup, all good. And the grain pattern on the rails matched better than I’d hoped it would. I did have to remake one slat from a spare I had, but by the time the light was fading, I had the curved uprights glued and drawbored into the top crossrail and that glued into the main body and all the slats glued in place and clamped.

The question now is whether the hide glue can hold the slats on the left into the frame, as that curved upright wants to spring up and away from them. If it doesn’t hold, I’ll swap out the hide glue for titebond; but it should be okay.

And that was all there was for the main frame. I still have to fettle the mattress platform a little, that’s a five to ten minute job, but we’re just about done and onto finishing with the frame.

And all that leaves….

…is the drawer.

 

To-Do List (stuff in progress in blue:

  • Make a drawer
    • Thickness the boards for the drawer.
    • Cut the drawer front to size.
    • Cut the drawer back and sides to size.
    • Cut dovetails for drawer.
    • Groove drawer with #43 for plywood base.
    • Maybe add runners underneath the drawer?
    • Finish plane drawer front
    • Finish drawer front with shellac.
    • Paint drawer sides with milk paint.
    • Assemble drawer.
  • Assemble and glue-up and drawboring of everything.
  • Last minute fettling and foostering.
  • Finish entire assembly with several coats of Osmo wood wax.
  • Close door of shed, lock it, walk away and never do another project with a deadline ever again.
Finishing / Shed / Sidecar Cot / Woodworking — Leave a comment
16
Feb 17

Complaning

Y’see this happy chap? It’s from startwoodworking.com btw, it’s surprisingly hard to find a good side-on photo of how you use a hand plane. You’ll notice that he’s pushing the hand plane along the wood using his leg muscles more than his arm muscles, by leaning into the plane as he pushes it. This is normal, natural movement that you do any time you push an object that isn’t sliding round like a greased pig in a swimming pool.

Do you see what else he’s go there?

FECKING ROOM TO MOVE.

This is the shed at the moment.

Lean into the plane? I’m doing well if I can reach the shagging thing at the moment.

*sigh*. And I have to thickness drawer sides, which means taking off wood, half a millimetre at a time in a 2cm-wide strip. Over a whole board. Evenly. By about eight millimetres. Gah. See this thing?

This is a dewalt 735 planer thicknesser. It costs nearly €700 if you’re silly enough to buy it in a shop in Dublin where the prices are usually 50% too high. And if I had the room to store it, I would have bought two of them by now. I mean, finish planing, that’s one thing. It’s awkward, but even on the largest panel in the crib it was doable.

Granted, you need the card scraper in places and it’s a pain having nowhere to stand at times.

But thicknessing, that’s a whole other story. There’s no finesse in that, it’s just lots of pushing through wood and hoping it ends soon. Christopher Schwartz was right, the first power tool you should get is a planer thicknesser. It’s just that they’re also bloody loud. This is not a machine that endears you to the neighbours if you use it at 2200h on a worknight. It’s about as loud as your wife finding you feeding the neighbourhood cat. To the blender.

I mean, ideally, I’d resaw the boards to thickness, but honestly, I’ve had enough of that. The ryoba is just not up to the job if the plank is more than two or three inches wide, and I’m still waiting for saw files to sharpen the western saws I have but so far they’ve just not made the task any easier. A bandsaw might, but (a) where the hell would I put it, and (b) bandsaws that can resaw an eight-inch-wide board are not like bandsaws that are just used for cutting curves; they are not small things. You have to use wider blades for reasons that involve clearing a kerf, physics and metallurgy, and those wider blades need larger wheels in the bandsaw to cope with bending radii, and that leads to a big freestanding monster of a machine.

So basically, I’m stuck inside the limits of the 8’x6′ shed. At least for now. But every so often, it’s helpful to complane (see what I did there?) about it.

At least the top panel is finish planed and one of the drawer sides is now thicknessed.

And the final coat of shellac is on the mattress platform and on the rear upright.

 

So not a totally wasted hour or two in the shed.

To-Do List (stuff in progress in blue:

  • Finish plane top panel
  • Make a drawer
    • Thickness the boards for the drawer.
    • Cut the drawer front to size.
    • Cut the drawer back and sides to size.
    • Cut dovetails for drawer.
    • Groove drawer with #43 for plywood base.
    • Maybe add runners underneath the drawer?
    • Finish plane drawer front
    • Finish drawer front with shellac.
    • Paint drawer sides with milk paint.
    • Assemble drawer.
  • Assemble and glue-up and drawboring of everything.
  • Finish entire assembly with several coats of Osmo wood wax.
  • Close door of shed, lock it, walk away and never do another project with a deadline ever again.
Finishing / Sidecar Cot / Woodworking — Leave a comment
15
Feb 17

Getting wedged

So after the ten-hour out-of-hours callout over the weekend, I had a day’s time in lieu on tuesday, and I had great plans to get almost everything done.

These plans did not allow for the day being composed of 70% being inside a cloud and 20% horizontal freezing rain.

However, I did manage to get an all-up dry fit assembly, so I was able to get the holes and slots cut for the mattress platform’s rear support, so that’s done at least. I did discover that the mattress support platform didn’t want to fit; I knew there was some interference with the rear upright, but I thought it was 1-2mm and a few swipes of a plane would fix it.

Nope.

Well, that’s disappointing. But at least it’ll be at the back and under a mattress and there’s still enough strength there to hold (there’s a wide support right under that when this is in use). Still not getting much love for round-bottomed spokeshaves btw, that tight radius was what I thought would be perfect for them, but nope, still no joy. Used a rasp and chisels and sandpaper instead, then reapplied shellac (that’s coat #2).

I also noticed that all my working clamps are about a centimeter too short to use for the crossrail glue-up, so I decided to go with wedged tenons there. So today was prepping for that.

First off, a quick jig – take one piece of walnut with a square end that’s 50mm long, and plane down to a line going from the square corner to a point 2.5mm in from the adjacent corner. That gives you a 87 degree angle. Now slide the chisel down that angled face, and that’s how far to pare the mortice walls to flare them out on the face side.

(For those who don’t know, a wedged tenon has to have room to expand as you drive in the wedges, otherwise you’d just pop the top of the mortice clean out of the wood by shearing along the grain lines).

Next, make wedges. Rive out more of that lovely white sycamore stock, cut about 2-3mm thick and the width of the tenon wide, then put the end of the rived piece into the bench hook’s block and pare it to a point with a wide chisel.

Do that about twenty times or so and you’ve enough wedges even allowing for breakage. Grand.

Next, take a 3mm drill bit, and drill two strain relieve holes in each tenon, about 6mm in from the edge and up from the shoulder. Now cut down a line from the end of the tenon to meet the inside tangent of each circle and you have a tenon with two end pieces that can flex outwards slightly.

And now when you go to glue up for final assembly, put the joint together, (glued up and everything) then take two wedges, paint with a light coating of glue, and tap them just home into each cut.

And now take your hammer and drive them home. They may not go down all the way, they might bottom out before that; but either way you now have a wedged tenon M&T joint that doesn’t need clamps to hold for glue-up and which has a mechanical aspect to lock the joint as well as the glue. And with the contrasting woods, they’ll be decorative as well, hopefully.

With that all done, I sanded down the back support and the mattress platform and its rear support and gave them coat #3 of shellac…

Tomorrow it’s time to sharpen the scrub plane and get that drawer side thicknessing finished so I can get on with making the drawer. I’ll get the last coat of shellac on things as well, and that’ll let me do the final assembly of the frame as soon as I complete finish planing the top panel.

To-Do List (stuff in progress in blue:

  • Finish plane top panel
  • Make a drawer
    • Thickness the boards for the drawer.
    • Cut the drawer front to size.
    • Cut the drawer back and sides to size.
    • Cut dovetails for drawer.
    • Groove drawer with #43 for plywood base.
    • Maybe add runners underneath the drawer?
    • Finish plane drawer front
    • Finish drawer front with shellac.
    • Paint drawer sides with milk paint.
    • Assemble drawer.
  • Assemble and glue-up and drawboring of everything.
  • Finish entire assembly with several coats of Osmo wood wax.
  • Close door of shed, lock it, walk away and never do another project with a deadline ever again.
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