It’s been a long time coming, but I think I’m ready.  I’ve progressed sufficiently in my woodworking that it’s finally time to revisit my red oak desk.  I still love the design (mitered half lap joints continue to be a personal favorite) and I’m quite satisfied with the overall size and shape (which is why the revisit hasn’t been a high priority), even the joints were cut almost entirely with a plunge router.  I don’t even think I owned a tenon saw at that point.

I’m very proud of the piece, despite being made entirely with power tools.

There is no real need to revisit the piece.  I just think I can do it so much better now, almost two years later.  And I’d love another crack at some of the design elements.

The biggest design change I think will be to thin out the frame pieces a bit, which are currently full-width red oak 2x4s.  3/4″ or so off the width will create a slightly more delicate feel (without any real compromise to strength).  I’d also like to tweak the shape and increase the size of the exposed ends of the cross-rails.  I’ve had to reinforce them once already and, although they are holding well, I worry that one day they’ll snap off again.  There are some execution-related flaws as well, but they are pretty well hidden from day to day view.

I apparently used to not know a ton about grain matching.

The tabletop (which is quartersawn and well-jointed) is not permanently affixed and is in fine shape, so I’ll just reuse it as is.  Also, I have quite a bit of air-dried, rough-sawn red oak stock available, so I won’t need to salvage anything from the existing desk (meaning I can build the new frame at my leisure).  Plus, it will give me a chance to use the new planing slab.

There is also a matching printer stand that fits two metal baskets on the bottom shelf (because I didn’t know how to make drawers back then).

There will be significant stock preparation involved, and I have other projects in the works already, so the desk revisit will likely take a while.  I’ve already sketched a few possible design tweaks, which I will share when I discuss the build.

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If you’ve been following the saga, you know I now had a relatively S4S planing slab.  All that remained was some final flattening/smoothing, installation of the Veritas inset vise and dog holes, and sealing with a coat or two of Danish Oil.

The final dimensions are a smidge under 72″ wide, 13″ deep and 2 3/4″ thick.

Truth be told, not a ton of final flattening was required after skip planing.  The back seven boards of the slab are perfectly flat along their length, and although there ended up being about 1/32″ of hollow along the entire length of the front two boards, there is no twist across the entire slab.  I made the executive decision (starring Kurt Russell) that the miniscule hollow wasn’t worth agonizing over.  Therefore, it was time to install the Veritas inset vise.  After much thought, I determined it would be best to install the vise centered over the width with a single strip of in line dog holes.  More dog holes could be bored as needed.

The inset vise requires a two-stepped recess, with the bulk of the vise sitting inside a 29/32″ deep recess and the wings (where the screws attach) sitting inside shallower, 1/8″ deep wing recesses.  I seriously considered using a power router at this point.  I could have (should have?) marked out the entire recess, hogged out most of the waste with a 1/2″ upcut spiral bit on a full size router and cleaned it up by hand with a chisel.  Instead, I did it all by hand.  After marking and carcass-sawing down the sides of the main recess, I hacked out the waste with my new Narex 1 1/4″ bench chisel and cleaned up the bottom with a large router plane.

This took way longer than it needed to, but it was good practice (I think?).

The good news was, once the main recess was cut, I could mark the wing recesses directly off the vise itself.  The bad news was, at 1/8″ deep and running with the grain, there was no completely clean way to remove the waste and leave crisp corners on the wing recesses (I opted for the large router plane, which did an adequate job, albeit slightly rough).  After a while, the vise was fully installed and, remarkably, the jaws are perfectly square to the back reference edge.

But the lack of perfectly crisp corners will haunt me forever (at least until I reflatten the slab and recut the recess).

The 3/4″ dog holes were interesting to bore.  I have been using the Rockler forstner bit guide with my handheld drill for a while now, but the slab was too thick to make it all the way through.  After starting the hole straight with the guided forstner bit, I had to switch to my beefy brad point bit after the drill chuck bottomed out on the guide.  I went slow, but I still had a little bit of blowout on the underside, easily solved with water-based putty.  I filled some other holes as well and left them to dry overnight.

This is actually the inset vise exhaust port, but still.

Nearing the end, I hit everything with a quick 220 grit orbital sanding, slapped on two thick coats of natural tint Danish Oil and leaned it up against the wall.

A place for everything and everything in its place.

So there it is: the finished planing slab.  From home center douglas fir construction lumber to a sufficient worksurface for planing longer, thinner boards, all in about 30 shop hours (not including drying time).  I think it was excellent practice for eventually making a proper woodworking bench (maybe something in white ash and walnut) and I am glad now to have it.

Now all I need is to pick a furniture project that requires planing longer, thinner boards so I can actually use the thing.  I will report back.

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Welcome back to the third installment of the Planing Slab series (Parts 1 and 2 linked here and here)!

When laminating the slab, I did my best to keep what would be the bottom of the planing slab as flat as possible. I did this by only using boards ripped from the outside edges of the 2x10s and by doing some basic straightening before glue-ups. Also, by laminating one board at a time, I was better able to control float during the glue-up.

Overall, not too bad for a starting point.

As is often the case, the best intentions only get you so far. I still had a decent amount of flattening to accomplish for the fully-laminated slab. I have a box store Stanley bench plane that I set up as a scrub plane, but it’s unfortunately not at my apartment, so I did the next best thing: I sharpened an exaggerated camber into my No. 5 1/2 (not overly much, so I wouldn’t need to grind to reset the iron) and went to work.  A few hours later, my floor was blanketed in shavings and I had something flat enough to skip plane through my thicknesser.

I generally keep the workshop cleaner than this, ladies.

Skip planing is relatively new to me. I don’t often work in boards large enough (read: thick enough) to resist the flex of the roller bars on my thicknesser. It was pleasant to focus solely on getting the the outside edges parallel and on axis and scooping just enough out of the center to ensure the outside edges ran slightly proud. After all, the slab was rigid enough that it would ride only on the edges while going through the thicknesser (which is how skip planing works).  I removed the angle irons (used to clamp it to the table) and loaded the slab into the car.

It took about 10 light passes through the thicknesser to flatten the top and about 3 more to flatten the bottom (after a flip). Overall thickness ended up just over 2.75″, which is not bad, considering I ripped the component boards to slightly over 3″. All that was left was some basic squaring of the ends, accomplished via chop saw, and the rough dimensioning phase was done.  Back at the apartment workshop, I straightened and squared the back edge, rounded all the corners with a 1/8 round-over router bit and reinstalled the angle irons.

My shop-made sharpening depth stop block makes a great backer-board for installing angle irons.

Special thanks to my mother for helping me out with the skip planing. It would have been a much tougher job without the extra set of hands. I would have managed it, but a little help goes a long way.

Straight-ish, square-ish and ready for final flattening and installation of the inset vise and dog holes.

In the next (and final installment), I’ll cover installation of the Veritas Inset Vise and final flattening, smoothing and finishing.

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Welcome to the next installment of the Planing Slab project!  Part one is here.

To make the planing slab, I opted to follow Christopher Schwarz’ advice and dig through the stacks at my local home center for the clearest, driest, straightest Douglas Fire 2″ x 10″s I could find in order to laminate a benchtop.  I should mention I showed up at exactly 7am and spent over an hour garnering confused and/or disapproving looks from the contractors who were probably wondering why a stocky thirty-something with a beard and a trendy haircut was checking construction grade lumber for knots and twist in fashionable jeans, a scarf and work gloves.

Once back at home, I left the approximately 36 feet of the aforementioned 2″x 10″ Douglas Fir (crosscut into six 6 foot boards) against the wall to dry out for 2-3 weeks, because “driest and straightest” equals not “dry and straight”.

Apologies for the grainy picture.  On a side note, is it just me or is my chisel mallet incredibly phallic?

I don’t own a moisture meter, but wetter pretty much means heavier, so I used a scale to compare the relative weights of each board over a couple weeks.  When there was no change in the weight of a board over a 7 day stretch, I knew it was dry enough to be ripped down. I will spare everyone the play-by-play on hand-ripping nine 3″ wide lengths of Douglas Fir, but suffice to say, I had to resharpen my 8 TPI panel saw after rip seven of nine.  It also became much easier once I built that second saw bench.

Not sure if I ever posted a picture of my Lie-Nielsen-style saw vise.

From there, it was all ripping, surface planing and glue-ups when I could find the time (usually one board every three or four days).  After a couple weeks in total, I had at long last a little more than 72″ x 13″ x 3″ of lamination.

I had to grab all of my parallel jaw clamps from my parents’ house.

That’s all for this installment.  In part three, I’ll cover flattening and final dimensioning, while part four will take us through installation of the Veritas inset vise and dog holes and final surfacing of the completed slab.

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It seems these days the only part of a workbench that anyone cares about is the benchtop.  Everyone is blue in the face with strong opinions on length, depth, thickness, material, vise configuration, dog hole locations, what have you.  The average workbench is lucky to get much more than four legs, four stretchers and maybe a shelf.  But I am telling you, there is much more to a workbench than a flat, heavy slab (or lamination).

Until they make levitating workbenches, I guess.

If you’ve been following the blog, you know that in lieu of a traditional woodworking workbench I built a solid ash table to which I clamp various work surfaces: a Milkman’s workbench for joinery or a miterbox for repeatable cuts, to name a couple.  The tabletop is only about 5/4 thick and I’m certainly not drilling dog holes or chopping mortises on it (I really do hope to use it as a dining table someday), but as a clamping surface, it truly excels.   In theory at least, as long as it can clamp to a table, my workbench can have any work surface I want (or am able to create).  The system has served me well these last few months, but it has its obvious shortcomings.

It’s worked well enough, so far, as long as the boards that fit between the dogs or the screws.

Don’t get me wrong.  I would love to have a real woodworking workbench and I’m very close to convincing myself a furniture-quality roubo (maybe something 72″ long x 20″ deep x 32″ high, with a double screw front vise and a slatted shelf underneath) would be a perfectly acceptable apartment furnishing.  Given my time and space constraints, though (for all my prop replica sonics, I’m still not The Doctor), I did the next best thing to making a real woodworking workbench.  I built the part of the workbench I was missing: the benchtop.

Behold, approximately 35% of a proper woodworking benchtop!

What you see above is 72″ x 13″ x 2.75″ of pure home center Douglas Fir, with 3/4″ dog holes and a Veritas inset vise, and sealed in two coats of Danish Oil.  Nine boards, each one hand-ripped from six-foot lengths of the clearest, straightest, driest 2×10’s I could find in the pile, hand planed to decent gluing surfaces and skip-planed through a thickness planer after basic flattening (followed by final flattening and smoothing by hand). Weighing in at around 75 lbs, the planing slab clamps to the table with angle irons and f-clamps and stands against the wall when not in use.

Over the next week or so, I plan to take you through the planning and construction of what I have dubbed my “planing slab”a, more or less because the genesis was a need for extra work surface for planing longer boards.  It was a beautiful chore to construct and I am thrilled with the result.  I can’t wait to tell you all about it.

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