big projects

Shattered Dreams

I should know better than to get my hopes up.   Reading Ingenious Mechanicks psyched me up to make a minimalist workbench.  Something with a slab top, through tenoned front legs and splayed back legs.  Then I found this lovely chunk of pattern grade 16/4 Honduran Mahogany at my local Downes and Reader lumberyard.

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Pattern grade, indeed.

The slab I found was overall 124″ long, at least 14.5″ wide at every point and a full 4.5″ thick.  It had almost no cupping or bowing along its length, and no through checking.  The ends were even nearly square.  It seemed like the perfect piece of wood for the task, as I could get both the slab top and the legs from the same piece.

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Every bit of this board is usable.

But then I unloaded it from the trailer.  And could lift it by myself.  It turns out that there is more to wood than just its Janka hardness.  Honduran Mahogany exceeds Douglas Fir in hardness (which I confirmed while at the lumber yard), but apparently isn’t that great in the density department.  The bench would have been far too light for any serious planing activities.

At least I got a full refund.  Which I will put toward a Brooklyn Re-Co red oak roubo kit (sans stretchers, though).

My near mistake has made me more cautious.  Before I invest in a slab of soggy, urban red oak, I will laminate a 20″ wide top (as close to 96″ long as I can) from my glut of home center Douglas Fir 4×4’s and figure out the correct angle for the back legs.

And after that is built, I will probably sell my current workbench.

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Moving On

There comes a time in everyone’s life when they must let go.  Circumstances change and priorities shift.  And so, it is with great regret, that I am relinquishing my old workbench to my parents.  It will live a new life as a kitchen island.

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All cleaned up, as much as it can be.

The bench is, after all, home center douglas fir.  A toothed planing stop and holdfast holes are no good for a kitchen surface, so I plugged them up with what I had on hand.  Red Oak dutchmen and dowel rods.  I did my best to select clear wood when laminating the top, but douglas fir isn’t the most uniform of woods. So all in all, for the sake of cleanliness, it should get a coat of paint on the top.  

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Knots, dutchmen, dowels, CA glue and wood putty.  Not really that food safe at the moment.

I did leave the two post holes for an aluminum planing stop, though.  If I ever need to do woodworking at my parents’ house, it would be great to have a functioning workbench.  And a planing stop goes a long way toward a functioning workbench.  I still think this would have been a fantastic work bench to have in my old apartment.

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The paint will cover up some minor defects in the wood as well.  

This workbench has been largely redunant for a long time.  So I’m glad it will find a good home and free up some room outside my workshop.

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A Tour of the New Tool Chest

My English floor chest is, for all practical purposes, complete.  I must still attach the lifts, paint the lid and add some ring pulls to the sliding trays, but it is now at max tool holding capacity.  I’ve organized the trays and am calling this one good enough.

The bottom tray is sharpening and boring tools, plus a tool roll of gouges and specialty chisels.  In the middle are my every day hammers and tools that do not see every day use (e.g., rasps and planemaker’s floats), as well as my largest chisels.  Up top are every day marking tools, plus a block plane and extra bench dogs.

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I never thought I’d see the day.

Down below, the well is separated into three main areas.  At the front of the chest, a saw till at the front that holds both back saws and hand saws, and a tool rack that holds chisels and other important pointy tools that lend themselves to 1/2″ holes bored on 1 1/2″ center.

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I now have room for the router plane container that Jim gave me.  

In the center, general storage for my bench planes (Nos. 3, 4, 5 1/2 and 7), plus my spokeshave and scrub, chisel, small router and shoulder planes, as well as a panel gauge.  The No. 3 is very much a specialty plane in my tool chest, used solely for delicate smoothing tasks.

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I still think the saw till eats up too room and should be broken up into two different tills.

In the back, a typical moulding plane till for my modest set of hollows and rounds (2-8), two tongue and groove plans, my shop-made fillister plane and some other bits and bobs.  I plan to expand my moulding plane collection through a combination of rehabbing existing planes and making new hollows and rounds (hence the new set of planemaker’s floats).

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I’m probably going to move the calipers up to the trays.

In addition to new moulding planes, one thing my tool chest is definitely missing is a drawknife.  I have vintage versions of both a small and a large drawknife, but I don’t dream of using them until I get a way to sharpen them safely.  In my case, a Benchcrafted Drawsharp.

In the meantime, though, a spokeshave will have to do for rounding parts.

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Start to Finish

There is nothing like a good deadline to get the creative juices flowing.  The adrenaline rush of getting it done, right at the wire, is divine.  And deadlines have a way of helping me see through the fluff and get to the heart of things.  In this case, I had to advance my floor chest enough to move everything out of my Dutch tool chest (so that I could gift it to a friend who was coming into town).

Tool chests are all about keeping dust off the tools, so it starts with a lid:

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3/4″ birch plywood, because I had some on hand.

And then a seal around the lid to lock out the dust:

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The nails at the corners are to reinforce the actual dovetail joints

Next stop is reinforcing the lid with another 1/2″ of plywood:

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Easiest raised panel, ever.

And finally, adding a second sliding tray so pretty much eveything fits comfortably in the chest.

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Still cluttered, but less so.

Even without the third sliding tray, this chest is in good working order.  A few tools (like my rasps) are still in a safe place outside the chest, because I don’t want them grinding against each other while it’s still more piling than organization.

I’ll build the last tray, paint the lid and attach the lifts this week.  Then I will have no excuses not to begin working on the upstairs bathroom vanity.

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Assembled like Dovetails

There is a very specific admonition in the December 2015 Popular Woodworking article on the Japanese Sliding-lid Box.  It says “Hand-cut finger joints have to be assembled like dovetail joints.”  I had never cut finger joints before, so this warning never registered with me.  Until last weekend, that is.

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Still in keeping with my “half tails” motif.

Above is a finger joint for the saw till in my ever-progressing tool chest.  There is no shoulder on the pin piece, so I figured it would assemble like a lap joint (by pressing the two pieces together when already overlapped).  But when I tried, the joint did not fit together.  Just before grabbing a chisel to fiddle with the pin recess, I remembered, randomly, the warning in the article from over 2 years ago.  So I tried assembling it like a dovetail joint.  And it fit.  Perfectly.  With no gaps all around.

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More reclaimed mahogany for my enjoyment.

This isn’t the first time I’ve had something register without actually registering.  I’m continually surprised by how efficient the human brain is at absorbing and cataloging for indeterminate future use.  But I’m glad it did, as any further fiddling would have ruined the fit of the joint.

As for the saw till itself, while the execution is sufficient, I am not super pleased with the design.  At 7.5″ wide, it’s designed to hold eight total saws (coarse rip panel, fine rip panel, cross cut panel, cross cut tenon, rip cut tenon, dovetail, large rip cut tenon and a soon to be purchased large cross cut tenon).  But the large rip cut tenon felt too crowded with the others (even without the large cross cut tenon) to pair with.

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When spaced out, it’s not quite so bad.

I think I need to divide the saw till in two: one for panel saws and large back saws, and then another for small back saws.  Regardless, the next iteration definitely needs some slightly-refined kerf spacing.

Like in my dutch tool chest, I’ll leave the saw till loose (with only some abrasive sand paper on the bottom to keep it from sliding around too much).  I worry that the long tool rack on the front wall will occlude my dovetail saw, so I want the ability to scoot is around the well as needed.

But for now, it works and I’ll move on to the aforementioned wall rack (for which I’ve refined the spacing of the 1/2″ holes a bit since the dutch tool chest).

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Passage of Time…

… as marked on the fence of a shooting board.

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Almost 2 years since the last time I squared it up.

It’s been a while since I last posted, and I missed my usual grumpy New Year’s post.  In penance, I’ve kept with the half tails motif on my recent dovetails.  This time for the large sliding tray in my English floor chest.

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Fear me, fancy lads!

Two more sliding trays to go, plus wall racks, a saw till and a lid.

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Incremental Improvements

It’s been a few weeks since I had enough time or energy for writing about woodworking, let alone doing any actual woodworking.  But those few weeks ago I managed to advance my tool chest project quite a bit, by adding the lower skirt.

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It doesn’t seem like much, but it’s a huge part of the project.

Fitting a skirt is never easy.  A goberge (seen below) was enough to close the gaps on the front and back skirts.  But I somehow managed to mess up one of the shoulders on the back lower skirt, resulting in a decent gap at the back left corner.  I don’t think there is a structural issue, but I plan to drive some slotted screws at each corner through the end skirts, just in case.

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Also, don’t make a goberge from soft wood.  It’s a nightmare to fit.

I’m trying to make this thing entirely with materials on hand, so the tray runners are a mishmash of hardwoods.  The bottom runner is ash, leftover from the sitting bench project.  The middle runner is home center hobby board red oak that was once upon a time going to be a floorboard for another till.  The top runner is some re-sawn 4/4 red oak from another lumber yard.  I forgot how gross and unstable kiln dried red oak is.

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This stuff curled right back up once re-sawn from 4/4.

The runners are glued flat against the inside wall, so the cupping after re-sawing turned out to be a good thing.  A de facto spring joint closed up nicely with some screw clamps.

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O! to own more screw clamps.  This had to dry completely before I could do the other side.

For the top tray, I will add a fourth runner: some drawer tape.  It’s just ultra-high molecular weight, low friction plastic with adhesive backing.  But it does work wonders to prevent wear on the soft pine walls.

Next up, if I ever find the time, is the top skirt, following which I will paint the carcase and attach the chest lifts.  I’m going ultra-lazy on this one and making a plywood raised panel lid.  Then it’s just tills, tool racks, and sliding trays.

Sounds easy, right?

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Parallelogram

It occurs to, that even if the case isn’t square, as long as it’s out of square all around, it’s still a parallelogram.  And that means that a tray will still run okay.

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It’s very pretty.

I need to add a skirt and some wheels, but this thing just might work.

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Thanksgiving 2017

I originally wanted to title this post “What’s so ‘Happy’ about it?”.  But my mood is substantially better than a few days ago.

It may be belated, but I am thankful for cows.  Or, more specifically, leftover cow parts that get boiled into hide glue.  Without hide glue, my latest glue-up would not have been possible.

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It’s square to within 1/8″ both top and bottom.  The floorboards can do the rest.

You may have noticed that almost 6 months to the day after finishing my Dutch Tool Chest, I commenced making another tool chest.  An English Floor Chest, this time, based largely on the ubiquitous (dare I say, cosmopolitan?) Anarchist Tool Chest design. Because of the wood available to me, the case is only 23.5″ high, but I made up for that space by making the ends a full 24′ wide.

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I went with a very English ratio of pin to tail.

I am not exaggerating when I say the glue-up would not have been possible without hide glue.  From the time I knocked the first corners together to the time I set the diagonal clamps to bring the case it into square, almost 60 minutes passed.  I’m fortunate the heat was off in the shop, which probably bought me a few more minutes past the typical 45 minute max set time.  PVA would have seized long before I finished.

Because the case is still slightly out of square, I have to nail the bottom boards on first, before I can apply the skirts.  I hope to get both the floor nailed on and the bottom skirt dovetailed and applied before the week is out.  But that feels ambitious.

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Traveling Show

About a month ago, I visited a particularly close friend for the first time in a long time. We had a two-fold agenda: (I) develop a metal prototype for a woodworking bench appliance and (II) hang a new door and create a cat door in it. We accomplished both and had a great time. More on the bench appliance later.

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Everything neatly fits in the actual trunk of my car.

I mention it now because finally got to use my casket tool chest for its intended purpose: traveling with a set of woodworking tools. Although the wall rack leaves something to be desired (because of clearance above the rack), the tool chest worked wonderfully. I daresay it held a basic tool kit worth of tools: enough to make real furniture anywhere.

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It’s a bit of a “pile on” approach, but it works.

I was able to fit a No. 5 1/2 jack plane, block plane, rip tenon saw, chisel roll, hand brace, auger bit roll, egg beater drill, mallets and hammers, plus 8″ and 12″ F-clamps, all in the well.  Gauges, dividers and other miscellany fit in the wall rack.  I am especially pleased with how the till worked out.  My diamond plates and other sharpening accoutrements fit beautifully, and there is even room to spare for other marking and measuring tools.

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Almost like I planned it.  The plumb bob was a present for my friend.

I never did a full inventory.  I think the entire operation would have been streamlined by a till for the tenon saw, though.  But that’s a small complaint.

Just goes to show: sometimes the best-laid plans do work out.

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