Projects

Medium-Sized Wooden Tool Chest

I just purchased the August 2015 issue of Popular Woodworking (the issue with Christopher Schwarz’ Traveling Tool Chest on the cover) and can’t wait to start work on the tool chest.  First, I need to fetch some 3/4″ pine from the lumber yard for the carcass and the trays.  From there, I’ll figure out additional materials for the rest of the pieces on a rolling basis.

I like my Craftsman Top Chest set up and plan to continue using it as long as I’m in my current apartment.  But I haven’t ever built a wooden tool chest before and would like to give it a try.  The wooden tool chest will probably find a permanent home in my next shop.

I think I should build that benchtop bench first, so I have a moxon-style vise for gang-cutting the dovetails.  I’m sure the Milkman’s Workbench is up to the task, but that might require double-sided taping the boards together because the screws on the Milkman’s can shift the work during tightening.

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Christmas in June?

The Woodworking Masterclasses video course on the housing joint carrying tote is one of my favorites.  Not sure if it’s Paul Sellers in a santa cap or the beautiful simplicity of the project, but I’m a big fan of this particular set of videos.  I watched it the other day, so one of the techniques Paul Sellers teaches in those videos was fresh in my mind and of use today.

The tabletop for the angled leg side table will consist of two 24″ x 12″ boards cut from the same piece of 1″ pine.  As a result, I can use the double knifewall method shown in the housing joint carrying tote video.  By sawing between the scribed lines, each end has its own knifewall to plane down to, guaranteeing square ends and eliminating chipping from the saw cut.

I haven't used this knife in a while.

I haven’t used this marking knife in a while, either.

I don’t crosscut boards this wide very often, so it was nice to use my 22″ crosscut panel saw and some saw benches for a change (instead of my usual carcass saw and bench hook for smaller crosscuts).  Using my least twisted, flattest piece of premium pine for will hopefully mean there won’t be a ton of mill work to be done once the boards are cut to length.

Mid-cut, for illustrative purposes.

Mid-cut, for illustrative purposes.

On a side note, the table will end up overall 1/4″ shorter than it is wide/deep, which will allow me to use those felt furniture pads to get it back to cubed overall.

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Another Benchtop Appliance

The wood is acclimated and the veneer press screws were delivered a while ago, so I think it may be time to finally make that bench top joinery bench. I’ve always liked the plans and I think there is some room left in a corner of the shop where it can live when not on the bench.

Maybe

Maybe

I wonder, though: is it worth including any storage underneath?  I think I’d add a drawer (or maybe just a sliding tray) to hold my dovetail saws and coping saw (and spare blades).  Not sure it’s practical to store anything else in a mobile joinery bench.

Either way, my “clamp-on worksurface” collection might be getting out of hand.

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In the Here and Now

Having finally cleared a couple projects from the queue, I can now get around to that plant stand I designed a few months back. Its lower priority was due to the presence of a suitable placeholder, certainly, but also because of a personal flaw I often struggle with. I find it difficult to focus on a single project from start to finish. I get distracted regularly, sometimes to the detriment of timeliness.

The rough stock for the plant stand was ripped quite a while ago. The design, with some minor tweaks from the original, has been locked off for almost as much time. But things kept coming up (work, life, other projects) and the build was always delayed. But now I’m back on task – for now, anyway. A couple more hours of planing and I’ll be ready to hit the thicknesser and move onto joinery.  As a bonus, I used the planing slab for the first time in a while.  The planing slab is still flat, which is nice. And that Veritas Inset Vise is such a joy to use.

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I think I need to tweak the orientation of the planing slab to the work table.

Also, I’ve said it before, but hard maple is hard.  Especially the stuff for this project: air-dried, riftsawn, tight-ringed Vermont sugar maple. After only S2S’ing these boards, I sure am grateful for my thickness planer.

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A jar of Vermont Maple Syrup died so that this plant stand may live.

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Blasphemy (Not Really)

With an inspired idea in-hand, I have finished my design for a bedside table that I am hoping will be the first piece of a full bedroom set (or maybe a living room set, depending on my mood). It will heavily employ my favorite joint (the mitered half-lap) and be two-toned, probably in cherry with a lighter wood tabletop and shelf (both of which will float). I might add a drawer at some point, but that is not critical to the design.

The most beautiful joint of all.

The most beautiful joint of all.

While creating a cut list, it occurred to me the table will essentially have a face frame (two, in fact: front and back). Being a hardwood-only woodworker (except for drawer bottoms and the odd storage container), I don’t do much casework. To me, “face frame” might as well be a euphemism for “way to hide the end grain of sheet good carcasses”. Veritably one step up (barely) from stick-on edge banding.  In this piece, though, the face frames are meant to hide the end grain of the hardwood tabletop and shelf.

I usually don’t mind exposed end-grain (there will be, after all, visible end grain in each of the mitered half-lap joints). I certainly remember reading somewhere that masking end-grain was a much more dire endeavor in eons past. But for some reason, it feels correct to hide the end-grain in this project.

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Lots of exposed end-grain here.  And here.  And here.  Everywhere, really.

I’m hoping to get some stock preparation done this weekend if I can make it to the lumberyard on Saturday. Maybe I will first mock up a face frame in pine to confirm dimensions. I don’t do prototypes often, but it makes sense in this instance.

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A Toy Workbench

I’ve alluded to it several times, but I finally finished over the weekend the toy workbench for my niece and nephew.  Although it took much longer than expected (due to my sloth, mostly), I am unequivocally pleased with the result.  At 23.5″ long, by 12.5″ deep and 23.5″ high, the piece is not exactly in proportion to a full size workbench (which was the original goal), but nonetheless will serve its purpose.  If anything, it’s a bit tall for my nephew currently, who should grow into it within the next year.

In all its, ahem, unfinished glory.

In all its, ahem, unfinished glory.  I expect my brother and sister-in-law will paint it.

Right away, I knew this project was something special when the laminated benchtop came together so easily. I took great care to S3S each piece for the lamination, so it was a snap to glue up all nine pieces at once and then flatten the slab once the glue dried.

I learned my lesson from the planing slab project.

I learned that lesson the hard way during the planing slab project.

Constructed mostly of leftover home center Douglas Fir, much of the stock that went into the bench is quartersawn or riftsawn (three legs and both stretchers being the exceptions), so it should be a pretty stable piece for a long time.  The joinery throughout is solid and relatively simple:

  • The legs are stub-tenoned and glued into the underside of the benchtop (drawbores felt a little extreme for a toy workbench).
  • The side rails are flush (but not glued) to the underside of the benchtop and stub-tenoned and glued into the legs.
  • The front and back stretchers are half-lapped to the legs and affixed with with glue and a single No. 10 wood screw.

The shelf, which after much agonizing I glued and nailed to the underside of the stretchers (shortcuts do make sense, sometimes), is off-cut pine siding (rather than Douglas Fir), planed S3S.

All in all, the toy workbench weighs about 40 lbs. It would have been heavier, but I lost some thickness on the benchtop slab on account of chopping mortises on the wrong side.

I would be greatly surprised if it’s not still around for my grand-nieces and grand-nephews.  And now I have some practice for when I make the real thing.

Ebbs and Flows

I’ve been stuck in a creative rut. Sure, I’ve completed plenty of woodworking projects over the last few months, but I haven’t designed anything I find intellectually stimulating in a long while.  But today, I broke my drought. And surprisingly, this piece will be for my use.

The design is not quite finalized yet (I freehand sketched the plans on the train and I need to confirm I have the correct lumber available), but I already have enough to build off. I think this one may go in the portfolio. I’m excited. For the first time in far too long.

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Necessary Supplies

This weekend, I finally made it up to Vermont to grab the remainder of my lumber and I am so glad I did.

In addition to the reclaimed pine (which I left up there for use in a kitchen table for my mother), I apparently had a sizable amount of hard maple and red oak, some dimensional cherry I had forgotten about and (most amazingly)  a couple board feet of 12/4 ash that must have been off-cuts from my dining table project.  Not to mention another 40 board feet or so of pine siding off-cuts (more dovetailing practice!).  I’m fairly confident that I won’t need to buy any new lumber for a while.

One of the more interesting finds was a set of four, shaped pine legs that were set aside from the bulk lumber.

Super random!

Super random!

At approximately 23″ tall, I think they were part of an abandoned side table project (which in all likelihood began as shaping practice).  I’m happy to re-purpose them (and some of the pine siding off-cuts for rails and tabletop) into a little table.  It will be a nice little project for my week off.

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No One is Perfect

I’m not immune to mistakes.  No one is.  Someone once said (I’m drastically paraphrasing) that the sign of an accomplished woodworker is the ability to hide the inevitable mistakes.

Sometimes, mistakes are minor and can be easily corrected.  Sometimes, you start chopping mortises on the wrong side of the benchtop for the mini workbench you’re making for your niece and nephew.

Like this time.

Like this time.

I’m fortunate to have left the lamination for the mini workbench a bit thick, so I have some leeway to skim 1/8″ off the other side to clean it up.

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I left it a bit rough because it was supposed to be the underside.

So all in all, no harm no foul.  And, for the record, no one would ever know, had I not mentioned it.

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Weekend Dovetailing

Practicing what I preach, I took a few hours off this weekend and hand-prepared some leftover pine paneling for joinery.

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Pine paneling off-cuts from my cousin Gary are my main source of casual dovetailing stock.

I forget sometimes what a joy to work generic pine can be.  Fluffy, flat-sawn white pine planes nicely, saws easily, shoots smoothly and produces the tightest dovetails I’m capable of cutting (mostly through fiber compression).  And any slight cup in the boards definitely presses right out when the dovetails close.

Although apparently my pencil marks look like terrible gaps.

Apparently the lighting makes the pencil marks look like terrible gaps.

The above box is about 18″ x 12″ and will probably serve no real purpose.  It’s not the right shape for a bench top chisel case and much too small for any meaningful toolbox, so I will probably just glue and nail it to a base and give it to someone for use as a junk tray (for recent mail and receipts and such).

Like everything else I do, joinery overkill for the purpose.

Even I’m allowed a “look at this thing I made” post once in a while.

I haven’t yet prepared the base, but I’ve got about 24 board feet of select pine for an eventual tool-chest project from which I can borrow when I get some time next weekend. I also need to smoothing plane off the pencil marks and flush the joints, but I’ll get to that next weekend as well.

Come to think of it, I’m going to the Mets game on April 19 (a Matt Harvey start, weather permitting), so maybe it will be the weekend after next.

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