The Wood Mechanic

Bed Progress

2009-02-02T07:58:00.001-08:00

Fun Bunk Bed!

2009-01-31T16:28:00.000-08:00

There's seems to be a run on beds these days. In addition to the contemporary headboard I posted about recently, I'm working on the bunk bed pictured below and another bed with an upholstered headboard. More on that one at a later date.

This bunk bed has a built-in bookcase on one side, drawers in the staircase leading to the upper bed, a few secret compartments, and all kinds of other neat features. It's a huge amount of fun to try to put myself in the mindset of a nine-year-old as I imagine what I can do to make this piece really special.

Since most folks eventually grow out of bunk beds, the lower bed and its nightstand (not pictured) will be nice enough for the young lady for whom I'm making this piece to take with her when she leaves the nest.

Is Lie-Nielsen Worth the Price?

2009-01-31T16:12:00.001-08:00

Short answer: Yes.

Longer answer: Yes if it's a tool one uses constantly.

I recently purchased this Lie-Nielsen #4 smoothing plane, and it is a pure pleasure to use. I chose the bronze version because it's a good bit heavier than the ductile iron version they offer. I like to think that a heavier plane contributes to smoother performance. Hopefully it will at least contribute to leaner biceps!

Contemporary Headboard In Progress

2009-01-28T14:33:00.000-08:00

I'm presently working on a very contemporary headboard for a distinguished gentleman in New York. For all of its elegant simplicity, it poses many interesting challenges, mostly those concerning the piece's weight and the correct veneering of its larger surfaces. Below is a drawing of the piece.

Here's the piece where it stands tonight. The large ends are veneered, and I'm in the midst of making a larger vinyl vacuum bag to accommodate the headboard's face. That's the large sheet of plastic you see in front of the piece.

I love the veneer we're using on this bed. It's rift-sawn, smoked white oak from Austria. "Smoking" is similar to the "fuming" popularized during the Arts & Crafts period, but is essentially a longer, more extreme version. Once oiled, this wood goes a very, very deep and rich dark brown.

I'll write more about this one as it progresses.

ALERT: CUTEST WOODWORKER EVER

2009-01-28T14:20:00.000-08:00

If Lucia isn't the cutest baby on the planet, then she's definitely the cutest baby who knows how to handle a back saw! I hope this photo doesn't get Jamie in hot water with the Mrs.

Sorry I've been away so long, folks. I've been super-busy in the shop, which is my favorite problem to have.

Oak Library Table

2008-12-16T16:29:00.000-08:00

I'm sorry I've been away from the blog for so long, kind readers. It's been a very busy time at the shop. I've recently completed a suite of museum cases for our state capitol (more about that in another post soon), several stain-grade architectural projects, and a variety of smaller odds-and-ends.

Presently I'm working on the library table below. It's in red oak which will be bleached and limed. The photo shows the piece where I left it tonight. Tomorrow I'll be refining some of the shapes a bit more and adding feet--almost more like big toes--to the ends of the bases.

For those of you who follow theses posts and wonder if I actually turned the big columns on my grandfather's old lathe, the answer is yes.

Here's a series of shots detailing the construction of the breadboard ends. This first photo gives you a sense of the overall design. A 3/8" stub tenon fits into a groove running the length of the breadboard. Longer tenons are spaced along the tabletop's width.

During the penultimate dry fit I bore 17/64" holes through the breadboards and the tenons on the end of the top. You'll see below how the outermost holes in the tenons are elongated to allow for the top's expansion and shrinkage. In fact, only the two center tenons are glued for this same reason.

Below you'll see the final joint with its pegs sheared flush with the top's surface.

Lastly, here's a shot of finish samples I'll FedEx to my client tomorrow morning!

Amazing Shop Improvement!

2008-11-04T07:53:00.000-08:00

Anyone who has worked through a Virginia summer without air conditioning will appreciate the photo below. I was reluctant to leave the doors open last summer as I'm constantly moving between shop and office. With steel gates like these, I can open the doors in the morning and leave them open until I leave at night!

The Gargantuan Jointer Next Door

2008-11-03T05:51:00.001-08:00

I thought I'd seen some large jointers in my time, but the one pictured below, which is sitting in a field next door to my shop, is simply gargantuan. It's an American Woodworking with a 20" cutterhead, but the the tables are a full 27" wide. It has a huge oil cup, presumably because it's still got its original babbitt bearings. My 12" jointer is the same brand and of a similar vintage (ca. 1910), but was retrofitted with ball bearings at some point in its past.

This monster has a 7.5 hp motor. I've heard that enormous jointers like this one were frequently used in the casket making industry, but I've never found any more detail about how, exactly, they were used. I certainly wouldn't be comfortable shoving a 19" wide piece of maple across this thing's tables--would you?

Check Out Our New Web Site!

2008-11-02T12:57:00.000-08:00

Bankston & Bailey LLC has a brand new web site!

Check it out HERE!

Site design by The Box Creative.

Programming by SkyBlueCanvas.

Interview with Yours Truly

2008-09-11T07:41:00.000-07:00

Here is an excerpt from an interview fellow blogger Karl Rookey recently conducted with me. Click the READ MORE link at the bottom of the excerpt if you'd like to have a look at the whole thing. Karl intends this to be the first in a series of conversations with pro woodworkers, so check back at his blog regularly for updates. I'd like to say an enthusiastic thank you to Karl for inviting me to participate!

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 9, 2008

Interview with Tim McCready

One of the pleasures of having a public blog site comes from relationships developed over the Web. Somehow, people find the blog, and sometimes they comment. Sometimes comments become conversations, and sometimes (read "this time") those conversations lead to something more.

Tim McCready—long-time cabinet maker, author of The Wood Mechanic blog, and president of Bankston & Bailey LLC, a fine woodworking shop in Virginia—commented on one of my entries, and during the resulting off-blog conversation I mentioned wanting to start a series of interviews and shop tours with dedicated woodworkers. Tim agreed to be the first interview. I think when you read the interview you'll be happy he did.

How did you start woodworking?

I started woodworking completely by chance...

READ MORE

Final Pedestal Table Photos

2008-08-01T05:10:00.001-07:00

Here are the final photos of the dining room table I recently completed. Thanks to Jay Paul for these terrific shots!

Up Next: Giant Built-In Cases

2008-07-31T13:36:00.001-07:00

Up next is a set of cases roughly 12' wide and 9' tall with six equally-sized raised panel doors on the lower case. More on this project soon.

Oops!

2008-07-31T13:21:00.000-07:00

This week I installed the set of three built-in bookcases I've been posting about recently. Things were going well until I went to install the last piece of baseboard on the final case. I coped the ends outside in the blistering heat only to find that somehow my piece was 3/8" too short. Maybe I made a mistake...or maybe the heat outside shrunk the board! Naturally I didn't have any more baseboard with me, and so I had to drive back to the shop.

Other than that, the installation went well. I'm looking forward to seeing these cases once Reid and family have painted them and filled them with books.

Sawtooth Supports Pt. 2

2008-07-24T14:00:00.001-07:00

This afternoon I finished work on the shelves for the built-ins I've been working on. Under most circumstances I prefer to make shelves out of 1" thick poplar. I can't stand the thought of sagging plywood shelves in my customers' homes!

I thought I'd post a couple of pictures detailing how the shelves work with the sawtooth supports. See the shots below for details. All that's left on this project is some finish prep and then installation.

Sawtooth Shelf Supports

2008-07-23T14:16:00.000-07:00

I've been hired by my friend Reid and his wife to make and install built-in bookcases in the alcoves created by the dormer windows in their house. Reid isn't just any client--he's one of the most talented cabinetmakers I know. He and I worked together in Harrison Higgins' shop in the 90's, and Reid's still there. He can produce a truly fine set of chairs with his eyes closed, and as you know, quality chairs are the mark of a craftsman's skill.

Because these cases are for Reid, I thought I'd make sawtooth shelf supports for them. These supports were a common method of providing shelf adjustability in the days before shelf pins and standards. A strip with bird's mouth cutouts is attached to each inside corner of the case. Cleats are made to fit the span between the cutouts, as you see in the photo below.

Once the cleats are in the desired position along the height of the case, shelves (which are notched to fit around the support stripts), lay directly on the cleats.

Making sawtooth shelf supports takes a lot more time than using pins or standards, but they add a nice handmade touch, I think.

Blade Hooks

2008-07-09T14:29:00.000-07:00

The mantel is on hold for a little while because my clients (and dear friends) just brought home their incredibly cute first daughter! I cannot think of a better reason to delay a project.

As a result, I've had a little downtime in the shop this week. I've been meaning to install some hooks for bandsaw blades, and when inspiration struck yesterday, I started making a few out of old scraps of this-and-that. Here they are.

NEXT UP: A SIMPLE MANTEL

2008-07-02T14:06:00.001-07:00

Next up is a simple mantel for the non-functioning coal fireplace below. It's in a renovated house in Richmond's Jackson Ward. Read all about it here.

Pedestal Table: The Spider

2008-07-01T13:53:00.000-07:00

Traditionally, pedestal tables have a steel brace called a spider attached to their undersides which serves to protect the joint between the legs and column from the stresses of being moved around on the floor. When made properly, and with modern glues, the long sliding-dovetail joint that attaches the legs is quite robust. Even so, over the years that joint is bound to suffer a lot of stress from the weight of everything above it including the tabletop itself. The photo below shows the underside of the pedestal without a spider. In it you can see the ends of the dovetail-shaped tenons that slide into corresponding mortises on the column.

The first step in making a spider is to come up with a template. I like to make the central disk separate from the tines that attach to the legs. That way, the tines can be individually tweaked until they're perfectly centered on their respective legs. Once I have each tine where I want it, I attach it to the disk with a little spot of glue.

At the shop where I apprenticed, we always made our own spiders from 1/16" thick sheet steel, cutting the pattern with a metal-cutting jigsaw blade. When I called my old boss Harrison for a couple of reminders about the finer points of spiders, he mentioned that he'd found a local metalworker who would make custom spiders for a very reasonable price. Below you see the pattern I provided to Larry the Spider Maker and the spider I picked up at his shop this morning. I was interested to see that the tines were welded on.

A spider should be attached to the pedestal in the four spots between the leg joints and in two spots along the underside of each leg. I marked the hole locations with a center punch (actually all I had handy was a ground-down nail set) then bored the holes with my drill press set at a very low speed. I was sure to use plenty of oil as I did so, and I used a scrap of plywood to protect my drill press table from becoming an oily mess.

After countersinking all of the holes, I used a bevel gauge set to the initial angle between the bottom of the column and the legs. With the spider clamped to my bench I then bent each tine to match that angle.

Once all of the tines were bent, I was ready to install the spider.

Here's a shot of the spider screwed into place with #10 wood screws.

Tomorrow morning I'll do a little bit more rubbing out and waxing of the finish, and then it will be time to move on to the next project!

Pedestal Table: Photo Tour

2008-06-28T11:52:00.000-07:00

Anything I may have posted this past week would have amounted to watching finish dry, I'm afraid. In fact, the table is not completely done just yet, but I thought I'd offer an update all the same.

Here's the top with its low-luster finish. I wash-coated the raw maple with 1 lb-shellac then water stained the top. Several additional wash coats of shellac followed. I rubbed out the shellac with 0000 steel wool, removed any steel residue with Naptha, and applied a coat of Minwax Antique oil. A day later I applied a second coat of oil. Two days after that I rubbed out the oil with steel wool, buffed with burlap and achieved the final desired sheen by buffing with a soft cotton cloth.

Detail shot of the apron with its vertically-oriented

quarter sawn maple veneer and small cockbead.

The pedestal.

A view from above with the table in its extended position.

The underside with the table in its extended position.

The underside with the top closed.

Traditional table yokes hold the two halves together. The leaf also has keepers so that the same yokes hold it in position as well. Note how the keepers are at a very slight angle off parallel with the seam. This pulls the halves together as the yoke is inserted.

Pedestal Table: Beginning the Finish

2008-06-23T06:07:00.001-07:00

Over the weekend I got started on the finish for the pedestal table I've been working on. The clients and I decided on a light honey color for the piece. At the point pictured, the table has been wash coated with a 1-lb cut of shellac, stained (with a water-based aniline dye), and topcoated with a few additional wash coats of shellac. I expect to build up enough shellac on the base today so that I can rub and wax it tomorrow. The top will be receiving a few coats of Minwax's Antique Oil, which I think creates a wonderful, tough, low-luster finish.

Veneering Curved Aprons

2008-06-21T06:45:00.001-07:00

A few days ago I veneered the curved aprons for the table I've been working on. Veneering curves along a large radius can be tricky, especially when there is no practical way to accomplish the task using a vacuum press. I decided to break the veneering of each apron into several separate glue-ups. This way I only worked about 1/4 of each apron at a time. More on this in a moment.

In the meantime, the photo below shows the set of tools I used for this process. In the picture you can see regular PVA glue, perforated veneer tape, a glue roller (or brayer), an Exacto knife, packing tape, a glue pallet, and a piece of sandpaper. It's important to have all of the required tools close at hand before any glue is spread.

One of the most important tools in any veneering operation--but especially when veneering curves--is the caul one selects. The caul helps spread clamping force equally across the entire surface of the veneer, ensuring good adherence to the substrate. The trouble with cauls is that they almost always accomplish this task imperfectly. Some people use thin packing foam, others use plain poster board, and many people use a layer of cork. I've tried all of these with mixed results. I was all set to buy a length of cork at the hardware store last week, when I saw a roll of the material pictured below. It's sold as "floor liner" and appears to be the stuff you wipe your feet on before entering a building on a rainy day. I immediately thought it would make a terrific caul. The rubber material has just the right ratio of rigidity to give, and the "kerfs" along the backside allow it to follow a curve well. Besides all of that, it's marvelously inexpensive and it resists glue.

I attached a piece of the rubber caul material to a length of 1/4" plywood with one centered piece of packing tape. I had made sure earlier that 1/4" ply would bend around the radius of the apron without cracking.

Long before I spread any glue on the apron, I cut and taped my 3" lengths of veneer. I had purchased quarter sawn maple veneer which came in three 8' lengths. I used two of these lengths, cutting 3" pieces from each one, numbering as I progressed. Thus I had two #1's, two #2's, and so on. I then taped together four pieces, bookmatching the edges.

Perforated veneer tape is still my choice for building-up any kind of veneer panel. Getting the moisture level just right for the tape can be difficult, but I find that a sponge with as much water wrung out of it as can be done by hand provides just about the right level.

My next step was to figure out how to hold the apron substrate in position so that I could apply as many clamps as possible to it without causing it to twist and break. I decided to clamp it on blocks to my work table in three places. This felt pretty solid.

This next shot shows all the clamps in place squeezing the 1/4" ply, the rubber caul, and the veneer against the substrate. Before I got to this point, I had masked the area of the substrate adjacent to the beginning of the veneer panel using packing tape. That way, when I removed the clamps I could simply peel the packing tape, leaving glue-free substrate for the next panel. I worked my way around the perimeter of both aprons this way until they were completely veneered.

Next, I scored along the back side of the veneer along the edge of the apron with my Exacto knive. I then bent the veneer towards me, breaking its fibers. A quick snap away from me, and the excess veneer broke off. After a light sanding with 120 grit sandpaper along the edges, my veneering was complete.

If any of this is unclear and you'd like more detail, just leave a comment, and I'll be sure to respond!

Pedestal Table: Almost There!

2008-06-17T15:50:00.000-07:00

I expect to finish the woodworking on this pedestal table tomorrow. It will be a full day of planing, scraping, sanding, and sweating. Today I finished applying the quarter-sawn veneer to the curved aprons (more on that topic tomorrow), finished installing the table slides, and attached the cockbead.

Here's a detail shot showing how the vertically-oriented grain of the aprons relates to the rest of the piece.

Soon it will be time to shift from the woodworking to the finishing phase of this project.

Pedestal Table: Final Sizing of the Top

2008-06-15T09:07:00.000-07:00

This morning I cut the three top pieces for the pedestal table to their final sizes and shapes. Whenever I am making a top with multiple pieces, even if the pieces are rectangular, I like to complete whatever method of attachment I've chosen while the pieces are still only rough-cut to size. For example, when making a drop leaf table of any kind, I complete the rule joints and install the hinges before the top pieces are cut to final size and shape. The reason for doing it this way is that no matter how well one measures for hinge mortises or leaf pins, tiny amounts of slop in the marking, mortising, or boring can lead to misaligned tops. So in the case of this table, I got the leaf pins and sleeves set before cutting the top to size. The first shot below shows the pins I used for this project.

After I was satisfied with the alignment of the leaves, it was time to cut the three pieces to final size and shape. I used a router compass to cut the radius along the perimeter of the two outer pieces. The specific rig I used allowed the compass to index from the same lines I made for boring the center pin and sleeve. That way I knew that the two pieces would create a perfect circle when slid together. If I failed to use the exact same center points, I could have ended up with two outer leaves which aligned perfectly along the center (thanks to the pins and sleeves) but which were off at the ends.

After ensuring that the two half-round leaves were aligned the way I wanted, the next step was to cut the center leaf to its final length. To do this, I simply placed it between the two outer leaves, slid everything together so all the pins and sleeves were aligned, and used my Festool circular saw to cut a straight line across the center leaf between the ends of the outer leaves. In the past, I've used a variety of methods to make this crosscut, but this was by far the easiest and most foolproof method I'd employed so far.

Here is the table where I'm leaving it today. Tomorrow I'll veneer the curved aprons, finalize the attachment of the slides to the undersides of the outer top leaves, and begin the process of flattening the top. Hopefully by the day after tomorrow I'll have all the woodworking completed and can begin on the finish process.

Pedestal Table: The Guts

2008-06-11T13:00:00.000-07:00

Today I made the center leaf for the table and began working out the details for the extension slides. I've decided to make slides with heavy-duty drawer slides and maple milled with a channel to accept them. The series of photos below show 1) the table in its closed position, 2) the closed position slide setup, 3) the extended position, and 4) the extended position slide setup. Note that none of the top pieces are cut to exact size and that none of the parts shown are glued, so if things look a little cattywompass now, don't worry--they won't when it's all said and done.

Pedestal Table: Curved Aprons

2008-06-10T12:14:00.000-07:00

I've decided to make the curved aprons for this pedestal table the old-fashioned way. These days, aprons like these are often made from several laminations of bending plywood--a perfectly viable method--but I felt that the traditional approach would be more appropriate for this project.

The first step in making traditional curved aprons is to make a pattern for the outer and inner radiuses. I like to make the initial pattern a little oversize and then trace it onto stock that has been surfaced on two sides, as you see in the photo below.

It's important to know the circumference of the apron so that you can estimate the amount of stock you'll need. Once I've traced as many pieces as I'll need, I cut the boards into manageable sizes and begin sawing out the blanks.

As I cut out the blanks, I begin stacking them in their approximate final position on the roughed-out top. Notice how the seams in the aprons do not line up. That's the whole point of building aprons in this manner rather than just sawing some curves out of thick stock. By staggering the joints this way, you're overlapping the relatively long grain towards the centers of the curves with the shorter grain of the extremities. Short grain is very prone to breaking; by overlapping short and long grain, this tendency towards breaking easily is overcome.

The next steps will be to flush-trim each blank to an exact template, then assemble the aprons. After that, I'll veneer them with vertically-oriented quartersawn maple.

Pedestal Table: Days 3 & 4

2008-06-06T07:27:00.000-07:00

Here's where things stand on the pedestal table. More details coming soon.

Pedestal Table: Days 1 & 2

2008-05-31T13:22:00.000-07:00

I'm two days into the building of a single-pedestal dining room table, and it's going well so far. I spent half the day yesterday driving out to lovely Zion's Crossroads, Virginia to buy lumber. Check out this giant heap of logs I saw along the way.

Once back in the shop, I glued together the blank for the column and dressed lumber for the legs. I sawed the outline of the legs which now need to be tapered along their length. Once the glue had set up on the column blank, I got it on the lathe and started roughing-in its shape. It was the first project I've ever turned on this particular lathe, a Craftsman from somewhere between 1939 and 1941 which originally belonged to my grandfather. The lathe wasn't in working shape when I got it, and it's been alternately trying and fun finding parts for it and getting it all together. I'm pleased to report that it handled a 6" diameter column quite handily.

Below are a few shots of where things stand at 4:30 in the afternoon on day two. Next week I'll create the sliding dovetails that attach the legs to the column, taper the legs, and get started on the top and veneered aprons.

Final Table Drawings

2008-05-29T12:23:00.000-07:00

Here is the final set of drawings for the single-pedestal extension table I'll begin building tomorrow.

The trickiest part about designing single-pedestal tables is ensuring that the diameter described by the feet's end-points is sufficient to balance the weight of the top. What a nightmare it would be if the first time one's clients placed a roast turkey towards the edge of the table the whole thing crashed to the floor.

I consulted Harrison, my woodworking mentor (he's a life mentor too), and he reported that he usually aims for the base to be sized between 2/3 and 3/4 of the top's diameter. He did point out, though, that back in the day most cabinetmakers chose from one or two pedestal patterns and just stuck whatever size top was required on top of it. I guess they just kept their fingers crossed that disaster would be averted. I need more assurance of success than that, which is why I spent part of the day making a scale model. Unfortunately I don't have a set of scale people and scale place settings to give the thing a truly scientific test, but one can only go so far!

Here's a drawing of the table in its closed position, which will seat four diners quite comfortably.

This one shows the table with its leaf installed which allows for the addition of two more diners.

This third drawing is a detail view of the pedestal's column. Like the Biedermeier designers, I favor the simpler orders of classical columns, Doric and Tuscan, over the more elaborate Ionic and Corinthian forms. This example is basically a truncated Doric column.

Next is a detail of the leg.

Here's a detail view of the apron showing its vertically-oriented quarter-sawn maple veneer and simple quirk-and-bead.

Finally, here is a sketch of the table's "works." I'll write more in another post about the system I'm using to ensure that the ends move smoothly without changing the pedestal's position.

Tomorrow morning I'm off to the Charlottesville area to pick up the lumber for this project.

UP NEXT: SINGLE-PEDESTAL DINING ROOM TABLE

2008-05-25T11:38:00.001-07:00

Here are two initial sketches of a single-pedestal dining room table I'm working on for clients in Philadelphia. They're looking for something simple, unadorned, and light. I'm thinking that the pedestal will be modeled on a doric column, though I'm not sure it will include entasis on so short a length. If anyone has a point of view on that, please weigh in. In any case, I'm looking forward to turning the column on my grandfather's old (ca. 1939) lathe, which I hope to have operational next week.

The table will be made mostly from maple. I'm planning on using quarter-sawn maple veneer with the grain running vertically on the apron. I'll include a small quirk bead along the underside of the aprons. Because the bead will have to be in sections along a 170" circumference (diameter of the table without its leaf is 54"), I was thinking I'd include some ebony accents at the breaks rather than using a scarf joint and hoping nobody notices.

I'm getting to where I'm pleased with the basic massing of the piece, but am not yet settled on a final leg design. This is where I turn to the books. I'm pretty certain that the inspiration I'm looking for can be found between the covers of Angus Wilke's definitive text on Biedermeier, recently reprinted with amazing improvements to the color photographs.

More on this project coming soon.

Locke Lane Final Photos!

2008-05-19T12:07:00.001-07:00

Here are final photos of the project at the Lock Lane condos. These shots were taken by photographer Liza Kate.

Merriwether Lewis Walks His Dog

2008-05-19T12:02:00.001-07:00

Here's a museum case I designed and built for the Virginia Historical Society last fall. The sculpture depicts Merriwether Lewis walking his dog. Note that Mr. Lewis is not carrying a baggie.

Photos by Liza Kate.

New Shop! New Sign! New Rate!

2008-04-27T12:09:00.000-07:00

Tim McCready Fine Furniture & Architectural Woodworking has officially been subsumed by Bankston & Bailey LLC. All future business will be conducted under the latter name. We're moving into a new space in Richmond's Scott's Addition on May 1 (more details forthcoming), and our new shop rate is $50/hr. Check out Hunter Duke's drawing of our new sign:

Drawn But Not Yet Built

2008-04-27T11:53:00.000-07:00

Here are a couple of sketches I made recently for a prospective job. My plan on this piece would be to use a milkpaint and linseed oil finish. The diamond grid in the doors would be a custom-fabricated brass grille with pleated linen hanging behind that. As drawn, the piece is a full six feet wide. I would probably use casement stays on the doors so they would be well supported in the open position.

Lock Lane Cases Complete!

2008-04-17T16:26:00.000-07:00

I put the finishing touches on the built-ins on Lock Lane this afternoon, installing knobs and touching up a few paint spots. This was a very enjoyable project from the design phase straight through to hanging doors. Having a great client who really appreciates one's work is always a pleasure!

I hope to have a more professional photo of the complete project to post sometime in the next month or so.

In the meantime, if you happen to own one of the Lock Lane condos with this particular floor plan, I saved all my drawings and templates...

Installation Finis! Painting Starts Tomorrow.

2008-04-10T12:29:00.001-07:00

Here is a roughly patched-together shot of the completed woodworking over on Lock Lane. Tomorrow I'll do last-minute finish prep, then prime everything. I'll mortise the door hinges and start making the shelves tomorrow as well. I expect I'll wrap up by Tuesday or Wednesday.

Installation Day 2

2008-04-08T17:32:00.000-07:00

Today was my second full day installing the pair of bookcases I've been working on for one of the new Lock Lane condos. The great electrician Don Brewster met me first thing this morning to take care of rewiring the electrical and cable outlets in the cases. In the early evening I got started on the trim for the larger of the two pieces--I'll finish up installing moldings and hanging doors tomorrow and the next day.

Arches, Neck Moulding, and Keystones

2008-04-02T17:05:00.000-07:00

Today I missed the U.S. Concepts arch moulder we had at the place I worked before going out on my own. With that machine I could have churned out the radius casings for the arches on this project in a matter of minutes. As it was, I built them up from three separate elements which are being glued together in the shot below. You can get a sense of the nice morning light in the shop from this photo.

I was curious to see how the mouldings would work together in the real world--I'd seen them in my drawings--so I used some double-sided tape to hold things in place in order to have a look. To my eye, the way the radius moulding wraps around and forms the neck moulding on the pilaster seems ever-so-slightly odd, but the research I've done confirms that this is the way to go. I don't remember it looking strange in person, and I kind of think I'm seeing it that way now because there is such low contrast in this photo between the pilaster's capital and the wood behind it.

I also made the keystones this afternoon. The photo below shows one taped together--sometimes I like to do that before committing myself with glue and clamps. I'd been through several designs of the keystone, and finally found some very helpful guidance in Asher Benjamin's 1830 volume The Architect, Or Practical House Carpenter. Benjamin suggests that blocks of this design be divided into 9 parts, with the center section representing 5 units to 2 units for each of the outer sections.

Dover Publications prints a nice paperback edition of Benjamin's book (ISBN:0486258025) which is available for around $10 at just about any online book seller.

Progress!

2008-03-31T16:23:00.000-07:00

The pair of colonial built-in bookcases is coming along nicely. I made the raised panel doors today, and tomorrow I'll get started on the moldings for the arches. I'm hoping to begin installing the cases on Friday.

Below you'll see a drawing of the right-hand case and then the case in its current state.

Next Up: Locke Lane Cases

2008-03-18T11:43:00.000-07:00

I'm starting full-steam ahead on a pair of painted colonial built-in cabinets with arches, keystones, fluted pilasters, and raised panel doors. I owe a lot to Wendell Garrett's fantastic book American Colonial (ISBN: 1885254997) for design inspiration. Cases of this kind typically had scalloped shelves and were used for the display of porcelain and other valuables. I've adapted that form for the storage and display of books. I particularly like the keystones in this design, which are modeled on one at the Morris-Jumel mansion in Manhattan. To my eye, it almost hints at art deco.

Ginter Park Bookcases Pt. 4

2008-03-10T18:44:00.000-07:00

The upper cases and face frames went in today. Tomorrow I'll install the bed molding, which in this room functions as a small crown. Then I'll start painting.

Check out how cattywompass the ceiling is to the left of the chimney. It dips about 1/2" over a 10" span. The good news is that the bed molding is positioned below the ceiling just enough to make the dip disappear. That's a piece of good luck.

Breakfront Base Complete!

2008-03-08T14:15:00.000-08:00

Yesterday afternoon I finished the chinese chippendale breakfront base I've been working on. If you've not been following these posts, please note that I'm not responsible for the upper section of this piece; I only made the base to match.

Finishing took the better part of last week. After prep was complete, I used a water-based aniline dye to match the background color of the existing piece. A thin wash coat of shellac followed, and then grain filler tinted with japan color. After the next coat of shellac, I applied walnut crystals and a different aniline dye to approximate the color variations in the upper piece. Once this was done to my satisfaction, a few more coats of shellac were brushed on. Finally, I rubbed-out with steel wool, then waxed and buffed.

Thanks to Alan and Harold for their extensive help with this finish!

The client hasn't chosen hardware yet, if you're wondering how one opens the doors and drawers.

Fret Moldings Installed

2008-02-28T15:37:00.000-08:00

I spent the day installing the fret moldings on the breakfront base I've been working on. This was incredibly tedious work, but I'm not complaining; as any of my friends will tell you, tedium is my middle name! These were some tricky miters because no 45 degree angles were involved. The larger doors required 52/38 degree cuts, while the smaller doors were some other combination summing to 90. I used a brad pusher and tiny brads to hold each piece in place until the glue set. Altogether, making and installing these little moldings took about 12 hours. Sheesh.

Tomorrow I'll fit the drawers, hang the doors, and do finish prep.

Breakfront Progress!

2008-02-26T16:09:00.001-08:00

Today I made the doors and drawer faces for the breakfront base I've been working on. Tomorrow I'll make and install the fretwork moldings you see in the drawing below.

Locke Lane Condominiums

2008-02-23T14:28:00.000-08:00

I'm in the early design phase of a project at the old Locke Lane apartments on Grove Avenue. The apartments have been renovated into beautiful, high-end condos, and one of the new owners commissioned a pair of built-in bookcases for his living room. I'm getting to the point where I'm happy with the basic proportions of the case work, but am fussing a lot about details, like whether or not the heads should be arched. Here's where the sketch stands at present.

Chinese Chippendale Breakfront

2008-02-23T14:17:00.000-08:00

I've recently been working on the base for a Chinese Chippendale breakfront. The client has the upper case and needs a base to match. Below are some photos of the work in progress as well as examples of the kinds of measured drawings I use in the shop.

KENTWOOD MOLDER: BEWARE

2008-02-22T12:13:00.001-08:00

The following is a post I made to the Woodweb.com site on February 13, 2008. The forum's moderator contacted me a few hours after I posted to inform me that she had pulled the post for failure to adhere to Woodweb's posting guidelines. Because they cannot independently verify complaints of this kind, they do not allow them on the site. Nonetheless, I feel it is imperative that information of this kind be available to prospective buyers of any machine that poses such serious health threats in the event of a malfunction. I am confident that if my former employers had access to information of this kind, they would have purchased a different molder.

Despite my criticisms, I want to emphasize that I perceive Stiles Machinery, which markets the Kentwood Molder, to be an excellent company in general. I have written very favorably about them in previous posts, and as a woodworker, I have enjoyed the use of many of the machines they sell and service. While negative perceptions like those I share in the post below may decrease the likelihood that those in the market for a molder choose a Kentwood, nothing I say could affect Stiles as adversely as a serious injury resulting from a machine of unacceptably low quality.

Lastly, if anyone reading this would like to respond to any aspect of this post, I will gladly publish any reasonable comments.

Here is the original post from Woodweb:

I had previously posted anonymously about Kentwood Molders, advising prospective buyers to contact me first. At the time, I was concerned about adversely affecting my employer's relationship with Stiles. At this point, my misgivings about the machine far outweigh that consideration.

The molder has been nothing but trouble. Spindles have spun out of their housings. Heads have locked onto spindles. Belts have disintegrated while scarcely under load. Latches and other small parts have failed, at times leaving the machine inoperable. Yesterday, the guard on #3 vibrated loose, made contact with the spinning head, shattered, and sent shrapnel flying throughout the machine. One piece of shrapnel actually pierced the acrylic hood.

I cannot overstate my misgivings about this machine. In my view, it should be taken off the market. Please feel free to contact me with any questions.

Be safe.

Flat Files Finished!

2008-02-22T07:57:00.001-08:00

On my last two days working for one of Richmond's oldest suppliers of building materials, I installed a set of flat file drawers in the drafting room. Eventually, the top will be painted a deep, semi-gloss red while the sides and plinth will be some neutral color to match the room's trim. The six drawers are roughly 5" tall x 46" wide x 40" deep, i.e., truly huge. Each pair of full--extension drawer slides weighs about 20 pounds and cost somewhere in the $100 range. The exquisite mahogany I used for this project was in a shed behind the mill where I worked.

The shot below shows the cockbead I applied to the drawers' perimeters. I should mention that I used clear white pine as a secondary wood and that the finish is boiled linseed oil, shellac, and wax.

This last photo details the brass and mahogany knobs I used on the case. Lee Valley sells beautifully turned brass knobs which are recessed to accept any 3/4" diameter material. I chose to use mahogany to match the drawer faces. I thought the piece ended up with a bit of a nautical flair, thanks to this combination of brass and mahogany.

This was a fun project. If you're reading this and in the market for a chest of flat file drawers, contact please email me at timmccready@mac.com for an estimate.

Ginter Park Bookcases Pt. 3

2008-01-31T13:49:00.000-08:00

The next step on this project was to establish a level base on the left-hand side of the fireplace onto which the case could be fastened. My main concern was that the line describing the top of the lowest shelf read as level from the old to the new case. This line is highlighted in red on the right-hand case below; it is 4.25" from the floor.

To transfer a line from the right-hand side of the room, around the fireplace, and over to the left-hand side, I used a laser level. I set it up in the room on a base which I leveled front-to-back and side-to-side with shims. I directed the laser to the top of the lowest shelf on the existing case, making sure that the laser sat perfectly level as I did so. The point at which I was aiming was the same one highlighted in red in the photo above.

Next, I pivoted the laser until it was directed to my target point on the left-hand side of the fireplace. I had made a base about 1/2" shorter than I would need and used shims at its four corners to raise it to its final height. That height is represented by the line onto which the laser beam is shining in the above photo. Once this height was correct all the way across the front of the base, I leveled the front-to-back dimension with shims and a regular spirit level.

The photo above shows the almost-complete base. At this point, two steps remained. The first was attaching permanent feet which would hold the base in its final, level position.

The last step was establishing a plumb line from the new mantel shelf above to the floor below. Once I had the base positioned relative to this plumb line right where I wanted it, I attached it to the floor with screws. At this point I could be sure that when I plopped the case onto its base, it would sit in the proper relation to the existing case on the right-hand side, with all the shelves reading as level with one another all the way across.

Here's the installed case. With minimal fuss it slid onto its permanent base just as I'd hoped it would. Next week, I'll trim the case to match the existing one, and I'll get started on the upper cases with their adjustable shelves.

Ginter Park Bookcases Pt. 2

2008-01-21T15:14:00.001-08:00

Here's a picture of the right-hand side of the wall where I'm installing the built-in bookcases. I will be matching the existing cases you see in this photo over on the left-hand side of the fireplace. Once that's done, I'll build cases that go from the existing mantle-shelf level up to the ceiling on both sides.

In my last post about this project, I described the method I use to create a 3D "map" of the spaces I'm working with. Below, you can see how I use the computer model to derive templates for workpieces that have to fit into odd areas. I'll be extending the mantel shelf you see in the photo above over to the left-hand wall. Since the left-hand corner is about 5 degrees from square and slightly curved, it took some careful templating to make a piece that would fit just right.

This last photo shows the piece which will form the top of the new mantle shelf. If you viewed this piece from the top, you'd see that its ends are far from square and parallel. When something like this is fit properly, though, one doesn't see how wonky it really is.

Ginter Park Bookcases Pt. 1

2008-01-16T12:20:00.000-08:00

I recently began work on a set of built-in bookcases for a home on Ginter Park's lovely Wilmington Avenue. I plan to track the project's progress here on the blog as I make my way through it. Though specific details vary from job to job, most projects go through a series of similar phases. With built-ins like these, my first step is always to make a very detailed three-dimensional map of the room.

The map of the room which will house the bookcases is pictured below. I generated it using 3D drafting software and my extensive field notes. Initial measuring of the space took about an hour, and making the drawing was another few hours-worth of work. It's very important to me that I get this map just right. Because of settling, old houses like this one rarely have plumb or square walls. The various kooky angles that result directly affect the dimensions of the cases as I'll detail in a later post. My concern at this point is that all those angles and dimensions are accurately represented in the model.

As you can see in the model, the house already has a case on the lower right-hand side of the fireplace. It's a mystery to me why the left-hand side did not also have shelves. When I'm finished, cases will go from floor to ceiling on both sides.

Walnut Tea Caddy

2008-01-13T16:18:00.000-08:00

Here are a few shots of the walnut tea caddy I just finished. I made the bookmatched veneers on the top with my new bandsaw. This one is a gift for a dear friend.

Goodbye Beckstoffer's

2008-01-04T14:39:00.001-08:00

After 110 years of continuous operation, H. Beckstoffer's and Sons of Richmond's Church Hill have shut their doors. Over their century-plus of hard work they supplied Richmond's builders with countless lineal feet of fine millwork, the highest quality doors, and decorative architectural woodworking of every conceivable kind. Employees were notified of the firm's closure upon their return from the New Year's holiday. It almost makes me feel guilty for complaining about the turkey I received as a Christmas bonus.

My friend Clay and I went over to see the old mill this afternoon. He took a bunch of pictures while we were there, a few of which are included below. More can be seen here.

Happiness Is a New Saw

2007-12-14T14:36:00.000-08:00

The best case scenario one can hope for when buying a new tool is that it does what its manufacturers claim it does. So often, sadly, this isn't the case. What woodworker hasn't been frustrated by a tool purchase when the tool doesn't perform as advertised?

The flip side of this equation is the feeling of satisfaction and possibility that arises in response to a new tool that does exactly what it's supposed to do without any tweaking or fuss. Happily, this was my experience today as I set up my new Laguna bandsaw, pictured below.

The first thing I noticed about the saw was how small it is. Despite its petite profile, it has a full 12" below the guide for resawing wide stock. That's one of the reasons I chose it. In the picture above you can see how the saw's mobility kit works. Wheels are affixed to an axle on the saw's left-hand side, and a removable wheeled lever fits into a tab on the opposite side. You can see the lever leaning against the wall. This is such smart design.

Everything inside the saw is so tidy and well-machined. This particular model is manufactured in Bulgaria. It comes with a signed certification from the head of the factory, which seems kind of touching and old-world to me. Let's just say it's something I've never encountered when un-crating a machine made in Taiwan. In the upper left-hand corner you can see the tension guide; Laguna doesn't even bother with the standard markings for this-or-that blade width. Everyone knows that as a spring wears, those markings become meaningless, and I like it that the folks who designed this machine responded to that fact by ditching the convention.

The photo above depicts the heart-and-soul of what separates a Laguna from the rest of the pack. Instead of using ball-bearing guides, they've gone with small pieces of ceramic--those would be the white parts next to (and behind) the blade. The rear guide actually touches the back of the blade when not under tension, and the side guides are set but a hair's breadth apart from the blade. This results in amazing control when pushing a workpiece through the blade.

Here's another smart feature of the saw. It's a plywood baffle into which one cuts a kerf during initial setup. It directs almost all of the sawdust down the dust chute on the right. Laguna went so far as to attach a bushing strip to the outside of the baffle so that it would connect with the lower door. The net effect is a relatively dust-free wheel housing. Anyone who has recently purchased a Powermatic bandsaw would likely give their eyeteeth for this.

This last shot is of two pieces of bookmatched oak veneer I sawed before leaving the shop this afternoon. You're actually looking at the sawn surfaces! They're about 3" wide by 7" long. Without even trying too hard, I sawed them to 1/32" in thickness. That was using a 1/4" 6 tpi blade! I can't wait to get my specialty resaw blade ("The Wood Slicer") on the machine tomorrow and have a go at resawing my last big hunk of wenge into veneers.

Brobdingnagian Brackets Complete

2007-12-13T11:45:00.000-08:00

I finished the massive fir brackets this morning. See the photos below for the play-by-play.

Once I had my 6" x 15 1/2" x 70" slab glued together, I needed to cut out more manageable blanks. I used one of our big 36" Powermatic bandsaws to cut the slab into three pieces.

Here are the three blanks. The next step was to trace the pattern I'd made (see previous posts) onto the blanks and saw out the shapes. As you can imagine, it took some time to shape the profile with the saw, a block plane, and a couple of different sanders.

This photo shows the three almost-complete brackets after sawing and sanding.

Below you see a finished bracket, complete with its backing board. Each bracket must have weighed 20 pounds or so. I can't imagine how huge the house they're for must be.

VOTE FOR PEDRO...OR ME!

2007-12-12T14:13:00.000-08:00

So, your good friend The Wood Mechanic has been nominated for some awards by the good people at RVAnews. The nominations are in the categories "Best Topical Blog" and "Best Kept Secret." Since you and I are such good friends, I know I can count on you to cast a vote for The Wood Mechanic by clicking HERE!

The Mother of all Magazine Racks?!

2007-12-11T16:21:00.000-08:00

Here are some shots of a magazine rack I recently completed for an addition to a beautiful Craftsman bungalow in Westover Hills. A special thanks to Clay for getting me this very enjoyable piece of work!

The rack is made from quarter-sawn white oak. The finish is antique oil (which goes on easily and is hard as nails) and wax. The lower two rails are slightly bevelled top-and-bottom to form a sliding dovetail where they meet the stiles.

Draftsman's Flat Files In Progress

2007-12-11T16:08:00.000-08:00

During the recent slow period at work I've been working on a set of flat file drawers for our drafting department. We have old drawings going back 40 or 50 years that need a home. It's surprisingly tough to find drawer slides that extend a full 36". We finally did locate some (Knape Vogt makes them), but they cost an astounding $85 per pair and weigh a solid 10 pounds apiece. I'm glad I didn't have to pay for six pairs of them! I used mahogany leftover from some long-ago job for the drawer faces and face frame. The drawer components are of white pine with birch ply bottoms.

The sides of the piece get painted to match the room they're going in. I think I'll finish the mahogany parts with shellac and wax.

If my boss goes for it, I'm going to use the insert knobs pictured below for the pulls. These brass knobs are recessed to accept a wooden plug which can then be shaped into a slight dome. The amazing Lee Valley sells these things--see the link to their site in the list to the right.

Enormous Fir Brackets

2007-12-08T13:08:00.001-08:00

As I mentioned in yesterday's post, I'm working on a set of three enormous fir brackets. These will fit under the soffit of some huge home. They will be 20" tall and 6" thick, projecting off the exterior wall about 21" total. The pattern I'm using is shown below. I took the full size drawing from our drafting department and glued it to a piece of 1/4" ply to make my pattern.

After I'd used the fantastic Fay & Eagan 429 (see previous post), I glued-up five 1 13/64" x 15 1/2" x 70" slabs. Below, you can see one of the slabs in clamps. I frequently use the printmaking brayer you see on top of the slab to spread large amounts of glue quickly. Stacking all five slabs yields the required 6".

Once all five slabs were glued together, I stacked them one on top of the other and used a caret to mark one edge. Harrison taught me to use carets in markups because they convey a great deal of information. In the photo below, the caret indicates 1) the placement of each slab relative to every other; 2) which surfaces receive glue and which do not; and 3) which side I'm working from on each slab. Someday I'll do a whole post about carets and their multiple uses.

At this point I was almost ready to start gluing, but I knew I needed a way to register the slabs since I'd soon have roughly 30 square feet of wet glue causing them to slip and slide every which way while under pressure. My solution was to drill two 9/16" holes in opposite corners of the slabs in the waste material. I could then drop 1/2" dowels into the holes to keep the glued slabs from going cattywompas. In this photo you can also see the considerations I thought about with regard to grain orientation at the ends of the boards.

A coworker helped me spread the glue across the slabs' interior surfaces, I dropped the dowels into their registration holes, and then the whole assembly went into this massive press. I'm not sure what it was originally designed for or why we have it, but it's handy for face gluing large, heavy pieces like this one. The red gun at the top is a pneumatic driver that screws the clamps down. There are four or five clamps per beam, all of which can be located side-to-side.

This last picture shows the assembly under pressure in the press. The 4-by material is simply blocking we use to keep from having to drive the clamps all the way down. The air driver makes a hellish racket. When I go in on Monday, I'll take my huge timber out of clamps and start bandsawing the brackets.

Elegy to an Old Machine

2007-12-07T18:27:00.000-08:00

I started a set of three massive exterior fir brackets this past week. They are 20" tall, 20" long, and 6" wide. Because fir timbers of that size aren't available to me, I assembled a bunch of dressed fir 2-by material and glued it together to make my stock. More about that process in a later post. For now, here's the basic shape of the brackets:

To create perfect glue joints, I used one of my absolute favorite old machines, a Fay and Eagan No. 429 Automatic Glue Jointer and Edge Molder, which we all just call "the tongue and groove machine." Check out the video below to see it in action.

Lastly, here are a couple of old pictures of this amazing machine. You know, this one is so ancient that it doesn't even have ball bearings--just very, very old (but still entirely functional) Babbit bearings.

She Finally Came!

2007-12-01T15:14:00.000-08:00

My new (but also very old) jointer arrived today. It's an American Woodworking Machinery 12" from somewhere between 1904 and 1910. It was meticulously maintained by an old frenchman who ran the woodworking shop at a large textile mill in New Hampshire. I bought it from Jeff Behan, wood carver extraordinaire and savior of too many tons of cast iron to count. I got an amazing deal on this machine and expect I'll get many decades of use from it. Watch the video below to see how we moved this 1,200 pound monster into the shop.

Now all I need is a free machinist or a rotary phase converter! By the way, yes, the title of this post was a tawdry attempt at boosting traffic to my blog! (Did it work?)

More Shop Photos

2007-11-30T04:05:00.001-08:00

Thanks to Clay for the great shop photos. You should visit his Worm Drive blog.

Cherry Tea Caddy

2007-11-29T18:18:00.000-08:00

Here's a cherry tea caddy I made for my sister-in-law. I'm increasingly convinced that sanding is a horribly crude thing to do to a beautiful piece of wood, so wherever possible I'm trying to let my scraper be the last thing to hit a workpiece before the finish. In the case of this tea caddy's curved sides, I'm afraid, I resorted to sanding nonetheless. The top, though, was only scraped before being finished with boiled linseed oil and wax, and the difference was fairly stark to my eye.

More shop photos coming soon!

New Shop Part Two

2007-11-29T18:07:00.000-08:00

Aren't you glad I didn't call this post "New Shop 2.0" or something along those lines? I'm glad, too. I thought about it. Then I thought better.

Here are three photos of the new, new shop on Hull St. It's 4000 square feet of near heaven, and that's just the ground floor. I have somewhere just under half of the first floor, which is not only bigger than my deck (see previous post) but also INSIDE!

Anyway, I'm totally for hire now, so if you've been sitting back thinking to yourself, "I sure would like to get that Wood Mechanic guy to build me some furniture, but until he has a bona fide shop, I'm not going to bother," your time has come.

My New Shop Space

2007-11-02T17:30:00.000-07:00

Why wait? I'd love to have a few thousand square feet, three-phase power, and a host of machines from 1950 or so, but that's not happening anytime soon, so I'm going to have to make do with this:

I've got a Festool TS 75 and a Kreg Jig, and I'm ready to go.

Curly Maple Bass Back

2007-10-28T04:17:00.000-07:00

The most unusual task I do at work is preparing stock for an acoustic bass maker. He brings in amazing pieces of old lumber which I resaw, joint, glue, and sand. Most shops don't have a band saw as large as ours to accommodate such wide boards for resawing. Likewise, there aren't many places in town with digitally calibrated belt sanders. When this bass maker says he wants his lumber to be 2.5 mm thick, he really means it. So he brings his lumber to us, and I get to enjoy working with it. Here are some photos detailing the procedure I recently used for gluing up a beautiful curly maple bass back.

I began by attaching straight boards to my work table spaced apart one inch wider than the two pieces to be glued. The pieces were irregularly shaped at the top which accounts for the blocks at the far side of the table. I place pairs of wedges along the perimeter of the blocking. The combined thickness of the wedges is greater than the gap between the blocking and the workpiece.

Next I place a piece of Tyvek tape down the center line of the board. This will prevent the glue from adhering the bass back to my work table. Packing tape would work equally well.

After the two boards to be joined have been jointed, the first piece is laid into the clamping form. The two boards were resawn from one piece, resulting in a bookmatched set.

Glue is applied to the second piece, and it goes into the clamping form. I put a weight in the center to prevent the blank from buckling when I drive the wedges home around the perimeter.

Here you see the wedges holding the two sides together. Once I'm satisfied that no buckling is occurring, I remove the weight from the center.

This photo shows a detail of the bass back. This was some of the most beautiful curly maple I'd ever seen.

Hooker Furniture

2007-10-26T17:27:00.000-07:00

I drove to Martinsville, VA yesterday to pick up the odds and ends I'd won at an auction of the old Hooker Furniture factory's equipment. Folks have been picking up their goodies for about a month now, so the place was mostly empty. 760,000 square feet of indoor space is a lot of emptiness. I saw many marvels of 20th century manufacturing there including wooden carts with four swiveling feet and a post in the center that ran in a track in the floor like a streetcar. Although I was excited about my loot, it was sobering to think of all the long careers that ended there last March.

The stuff I bought includes a 20 gallon flammable liquids cabinet, a 5,000 lb pallet jack (for moving machines around), an old factory cart with giant iron wheels, an assortment of levels and framing squares, and this beauty:

It's a 72" stainless steel precision straight edge manufactured by Phillipp Zimlich of Aschaffenburg, Germany. There's a shipping label on the outside of the box indicating that it was supplied to Hooker by Weinig, the leading manufacturers of moulders and other industrial woodworking equipment. I called Weinig today to get a sense of the replacement cost for this hunk of metal, and...well...I was shocked. I had kind of an "Antiques Road Show" moment.

Precision straight edges are useful for machine setup in a woodworking shop. I've found them especially helpful when adjusting jointer outfeed tables. They can also be used when making full-size shop drawings, but a relatively straight piece of plywood will suffice for that. For the most part, my interest in this kind of precision measuring and calibration instrument hovers somewhere between the realms of respect for their usefulness and just plain-old fetishism.

Lastly, if anyone reading this ever worked at the Hooker facility in Martinsville, please drop me a note. I would love to hear your stories.

Stanley #5 Restored!

2007-10-20T10:14:00.001-07:00

I recently finished restoring this old Stanley #5 jack plane for my friend Jamie. His parents had bought it for him at a yard sale, and it was in a sorry state. In addition to never having been tuned when new, it had picked up a lot of rust and other crud over the years.

I disassembled the plane, being careful to note where each part went. Next, I lapped the bottom and sides on an edge sander. It took a long time since it had never been trued when new. Planes don't come ready to use from the factory. The soles have to be flattened (or "lapped"), the chipbreaker requires modification, and the iron needs grinding and honing. I did all of these things then shined all the loose metal pieces.

I also refinished the knob and handle. Instead of the thick lacquer that had been on the wooden parts, I used boiled linseed oil and wax. That finish has a nice feel in the hand.

Incidentally, old Stanley #5's don't hold a lot of monetary value, so there's nothing much to be lost by doing whatever you want to them. They can often be found on eBay for $30 or so. After a couple of hours of work they can usually be restored to a better-than-new state. If you take on a project like this and want to go whole hog, invest in a replacement iron from Lie-Nielsen. They produce irons of thicker steel which are harder and hold a better edge for a longer time.

Tannewitz XJW Table Saw Manual

2007-10-13T08:27:00.000-07:00

This morning I created an electronic copy of the manual for the Tannewitz XJW table saw we have at work. Mid-20th century machines like this one were so well made. Their cast iron bodies weighed a ton or more and dampened vibration to an extent rarely seen in contemporary machines. Saws like this one can be had at auction for around $1,200; a comparable new 16" table saw runs in the $6,000 range.

The manual itself is a small work of art. The last ten pages or so are mimeographed copies of hand-drafted schematics. I've included some of my favorites below.

If you would like a full copy of the manual (it's for machines from the mid/late 1960's), send me an email, and I'll happily send you the file. Hopefully it will also soon be available from the Old Woodworking Machines Publication Reprint site.

This is a schematic of the blade raising assembly. Nowadays it's almost impossible to imagine someone doing drafting of this quality by hand.

Here is my favorite of the schematics in the manual; it details the blade guard. I wonder how long it took to make this drawing!

WELCOME GOOGLERS

2007-10-11T17:07:00.001-07:00

Every day, this site welcomes somewhere between 20 and 50 people who have been directed to it by a Google search. Often, they've entered a search term like "how to fit boxwood stringing" or "Tannewitz bandsaws" or "cupola roof framing." If you're one of these people, and you're pondering some kind of woodworking question, it sure would be nice if you sent me an email. I may not be able to answer your query, but at least we could puzzle over it together.

As for the Dante scholars who end up here...sorry, I can't help you.

Before I go, here are pictures of the fir louvers I just finished. The second picture shows the weird cutout that was in back of the original. I have no idea if it needed to be reproduced exactly, but I went ahead and did it for fun. The difficulty was that including the cutout necessitated four different sizes of slat in each louver. Does anybody know why these louvers had the cutout? Another good reason to send me an email!

All in a Week's Work

2007-10-06T14:24:00.000-07:00

Last week I worked on four projects. The first was fine-tuning the calibration of our new moulder, about which I've written in earlier posts and about which I'll surely write more in the future. The others were actual woodworking projects, which was nice since I feel like tweaking the moulder has been taking me away from actually making stuff.

This decrepit old column base came in at the tail end of the week before last. The customer wanted two new ones just like it. For some mysterious reason, the customer wanted these out of poplar, which will rot very quickly out in the elements. Maybe they enjoy paying a ton of money to have parts of their house replaced and plan to have more column bases made in 2009.

Here's one of the reproduction bases I made. Each one is comprised of two layers, one for the bullnose and a second for the cove. First I built splined hexagons of the proper thickness. I decided to make complete circles because they'd be stronger (and thus safer) when it came time to cut profiles on the shaper. I then established the circumference of each circle with a router compass, and sawed off the waste on the band saw. After flush-trimming to the initial routed circumference, I passed off the blanks to our brilliant shaper man who cut the profiles. Then all that was left was to glue the bullnose circle to the cove circle and cut the flat across the back which will presumably sit against an exterior wall.

This week I also made the box columns below out of 5/4" fir. Making box columns is a giant snore, and they usually don't land on my bench, but this order included one that was L-shaped in cross-section, which you can see sitting on top of the pile.

On Thursday and Friday I worked on reproducing this rotten foundation louver. Usually we make new custom louvers out of PVC, but this particular customer thankfully wanted them out of fir. I didn't take a picture of the backside, but it's a little odd. I'll take appropriate photos of the reproductions and explain in a future post.

Before I sign off for the day, I'd like to draw your attention to the new link I've posted on the right-hand side of this page. It's an incredible resource about Stanley and Bedrock planes. Check it out if you ever need any info about the hand planes in your collection.

Woodworking Sites I like

2007-10-01T16:50:00.000-07:00

In lieu of anything interesting to photograph at work, I thought I'd post links to some of the woodworking sites I frequent. If you know of cool sites I'm missing in this not-at-all-exhaustive list, please leave a comment.

When I want to drool over amazing mid-20th century machines (like the Tannewitz band saw I very nearly won at auction last week), I head to the Old Woodworking Machines site. There you can find all kinds of useful information, including years of manufacture, parts lists, photographs, and so on. I've found it very helpful recently while restoring the old Craftsman lathe I inherited from my grandfather. By the way, it's a good thing I lost that auction for the Tannewitz--after I'd placed my high bid, further research uncovered the fact that the thing weighs 3000 lbs. I think that's more than my car.

Many people think that Garrett Wade is the best catalog for tools, and while it is very nice, I prefer Lee Valley. They produce three catalogs, one each for woodworking, woodworking hardware, and gardening. Each one is good for many hours of couch-based perusal. I recently bought a set of their hardened steel scrapers and have been wowed by their performance. Ditto for the rare earth magnets they sell.

If you're curious about state-of-the-art "wood technology" equipment, head over to the Stiles Machinery site. If you work in a shop like the ones I've worked in, then the products on offer at Stiles may look like science fiction. But they're real! I swear! I've seen them.

WoodWeb is a useful site for all kinds of things, but I mostly look at it to find old machines for sale and for woodworking jobs. It's not that I'm looking for a job, mind you--I just like to know what's out there. You know how it is. If you go to WoodWeb looking for machines, be sure to try the Woodworking Machinery Finder a ways down the left-most column on the home page; it's different than the online classifieds.

Industrial Recovery Services seems like kind of a sad business to me, but I'm sure glad they're out there. They liquidate old mills and shops that go under, and there are incredible deals to be had at their auctions. I just got a 72" machinist's straight edge for well-under what a new 36" one would cost. I love precision measuring instruments. A lot. This is where my wife would fake pushing a pair of glasses up the bridge of her nose while cough-speaking: "NERD." Takes one to know one!

Lastly, I mention Fine Woodworking because the online subscription, which is about $5.00 per month is an incredible resource. I use it over and over again and I can't overstate its utility. I wish I could say the good people at Taunton Press were paying me to say this, but they're not. If you want to avoid reinventing the wheel before attempting some new process in the shop, do two quick keyword searches at the Fine Woodworking site--one that searches the magazine's archives and a second in the "Knots" forum, where other subscribers share their techniques and insights.

Portfolio Photos at Flickr

2007-09-30T07:03:00.000-07:00

I've been slow to organize photos of my work at Flickr, but I finally have. Click the Flickr badge at the right of this page to look at my portfolio. Be sure to peruse both sets ("Architectural Woodwork" and "Furniture and Decorative Arts"), and leave comments if you're so inclined.

Homemade Knives!

2007-09-23T14:48:00.000-07:00

In brief, here's what I learned down in North Carolina:

1) How to make a knife template from a customer's sample moulding. The template is depicted below. This one was made by hand, but where I work, a computer controlled router churns these out. Incidentally, it's signed not because of its incredible beauty, but simply to differentiate it from my classmates' templates.

2) How to use that sample to grind knives to be used in the moulder. The knives are depicted below. These are ground from stock M2 steel, an alloy containing Molybdenum. As I mentioned in an earlier post, the knife grinding machine (which costs more than $30k) is really just a fancy version of a key grinder. A stylus guides the spinning grinding wheel across the template's pattern, and transfers that pattern to the the knive's edges. Grinding the knives takes about 20-30 minutes.

3) How to set up and run the moulder. Below you'll see the moulding that was run from the knives I ground. Once the machine is set up, it can change the dimensions or add profiles to all four faces of a piece of stock, and it can do this very quickly.

As I have mentioned, the company which offered this class, Stiles Machinery, is a leader in "Panel Processing" (working with plywood and MDF) and "Solid Wood Technologies" (working with wood). Having worked primarily in small shops, I've not seen the kinds of machines for sale in Stiles' showroom, and I'd wager that very few of my woodworking brethren have either.

Allow me to offer some examples:

Stiles sells machines which can apply a cured, high-gloss finish to a plywood cabinet component in about four minutes.

I saw people running assembled 5-piece maple doors through a multi-head sander, and when the doors came out of the machine, most recently having been sanded with 400-grit flaps, they were in amazing condition to take a finish. The doors looked like they'd been hand-detailed, not like they'd been sandblasted.

The showroom included gang rip-saws through which rip wide pieces of stock are transformed into multiple moulder blanks in a matter of seconds. Ditto for the incredible cut-off saw and robotic hopper.

You know, I really try to make this blog a technical, informative one, and not one where I wax philosophical about stuff. I try to steer clear of opining and editorializing. BUT, the stuff I saw last week has really got me thinking about what we mean when we talk about craft, and about the future of craft in the face of these kinds of capabilities.

Let's imagine that there's a continuous scale which has on one end a single person producing a piece of furniture entirely by hand, and on the other, several acres of servo-driven, robotically fed, software optimized big-box machines spitting out cabinets. Let's say that the fit and finish produced by these two efforts ultimately reaches the point of total equality. Is that awesome or sad? Is it both?

There have been craft traditions (The Arts and Craft Movement, The Roycrofters) which have rejected the machine in favor of "the best I can do" by hand work alone. Most fine woodworkers these days blanch at the thought of production machinery or factory furniture. But, at the same time, most fine woodworkers daily take advantage of technological advances their predecessors didn't have access to, like electricity, improvements in tool steel, and the like. So where does the continuous scale from all-hand-work to total-machine-work move from useful and cool to simply dehumanized and dreary?

I don't know. If you know, please post a comment.

The Wood Mechanic Hits the Road

2007-09-17T16:10:00.001-07:00

I'm in Greensboro, N.C. for training on the two machines pictured below. The first one is a fancy knife grinder, which grinds the profiles into the tool steel used in shapers and moulders to create mouldings. One makes a template which the machine follows to guide a grinding wheel across the surface of blank tool steel. Basically, it works like a big, expensive key grinder. It used to be that the templates were cut out of 1/16" mild steel and filed by hand, a process that could take hours. Nowadays, one simply outputs a CAD drawing to a little desktop CNC router that cuts the template from a sheet of acrylic. It even etches in a job name if you want. If I ran "CuteOverload.com," that little router is the kind of thing I'd put on it.

The second machine is a state-of-the-art six-head moulder marketed under the brand name Kentwood and sold by Stiles Machinery. Competing brands include Diehl, Wadkin, and Weinig. Moulders have been around since the mid nineteenth century when someone got the bright idea of combining jointing, planing, and moulding operations into one machine. The early ones were belt-driven monstrosities that ran from a central shaft that powered all the motors in the shop. I imagine they had a "parts" bucket next to these things, not for machine parts, but for people parts. In any case, a moulder is capable of quickly and accurately producing large quantities of any straight moulding used in a building. In fact, 2 x 4's and other dimensional lumber is milled in a moulder,which reduces the rough stock to the final dimension and rounds the corners. We use ours for anything from white pine shoe moulding to 9" crown moulding. Until we got this new machine, we were using one from the late 30's and another from the mid 80's.

I hope to post more updates as this training week continues.

Lastly--please send me some emails; I'm lonely down here!

Seven Oak Newel Posts

2007-09-16T05:34:00.000-07:00

Last week I worked on this set of seven large fluted oak newel posts. The photos below show the newels at various stages of completion. I used lock miters on the upper column and splined miters on the lower, larger column. The mouldings were made to match those in a photo provided by the customer.

Bartering with the Dentist

2007-09-01T05:24:00.001-07:00

Here's a curly maple through-dovetailed chest I made for my dentist several years ago in exchange for some fillings. I've been thinking about this piece recently because of my newfound obsession with tool sharpness. A good set of hand-chopped dovetails really depends on sharp chisels, and I think this piece could have been better with sharper tools. The photo is very flattering, hiding the flaws which I can see so clearly in my mind's eye.

I've Been So, So Dull

2007-08-31T12:47:00.001-07:00

I started my woodworking career in 1992, fifteen years ago now, and until the past month I've been working with dull tools. Of course, I didn't know it or I wouldn't have been doing it, but the fact remains--I've never handled a truly sharp chisel or plane until very recently. It's often said that a sharp plane iron can shave the hair from your arm or peel a small, continuous thinner-than-paper strip from your thumbnail's surface, but one can force even a slightly-sharp tool meet these criteria.

In the past I've worked my chisels and plane irons on all kinds of stones, always completely freehand. While some master craftsman can produce a reasonably sharp edge this way, most mortals only end up producing a mildly rounded bevel instead of a true razor's edge. Don't get me wrong--people will boast that their tools are sharp after honing this way, but they're just not.

I recently decided to work on my sharpening skills, and it's been an incredibly productive month. The first thing I did was invest in the best honing guide I could find. It's the Veritas MK-II system pictured below. If you want sharp tools, buy one HERE.

Without getting into the details of how the guide works (you can find that info at the link above), suffice it to say that the honing guide provides a way to maintain an absolutely consistent angle between the stone and the tool's cutting edge. This eliminates the possibility of a rounded bevel. After honing on successively higher-grit stones, one can easily achieve a mirror-finish on the cutting edge and on the tool's flat back. Many people overlook this last point: Unless the backside of your iron, chisel, or machine knife is dead flat, the sharpness of the cutting bevel is basically irrelevant.

I've also been reading about and experimenting with different stones. I've tried a variety of oilstones (both manmade and natural), waterstones, and the relatively new 15- and 5-micron grit mylar-backed abrasive sheets. People can get very passionate about the benefits of this-or-that stone, but I'm convinced it doesn't matter a whole lot what one chooses as long as one starts with a fairly rough abrasive and ends with an incredibly fine one. Also, there's no reason, despite prevailing norms, not to go ahead and mix up different kinds of stones in the honing sequence. To wit, I'm now beginning with coarse and then fine India (both oilstones), progressing to black Arkansas (also an oilstone) and finishing with an 8000 grit japanese waterstone. This produces a chisel edge that can not only shave the hair from my arm, but even the stubble from my chin. Yes, I tried it!

If I'd been able to sharpen tools this effectively 15 years ago, it's hard to calculate how much fretting and gnashed teeth I might have saved myself.

Mother of All Gazebos?

2007-08-22T11:44:00.000-07:00

We've been talking about building a gazebo out back. At first we were thinking of your average deck-quality screened porch, but as we've talked about what we really want from the structure, our plans have changed. At present we're thinking of a 150 square-foot octagon with a stone fireplace, cedar shingles, and a paneled interior, all of which is a lot more ambitious than the original idea. In all likelihood, we'll end up somewhere between your average gazebo and some kind of backyard Taj Mahal. Budget will almost certainly be the deciding factor!

Here's the scale model I started last weekend. Small model = big fun.

Here's a detail view of the arched rafters, beaded ceiling, pine paneling, and the mantel.

Magical Transformation?

2007-08-22T11:36:00.001-07:00

We're turning our laundry room into a textiles and printmaking studio. During this project I've built my first-ever walls, hung a heavy solid core door (also a first), and used a rented floor scraper to remove hideous vinyl tile. The floor scraper did in 15 minutes what would have taken me days to complete with hand tools. I can't recommend it enough--best $40 I've ever spent.

The photo below shows the door that separates the studio from the litter box room. I thought the cats' arch should be inscribed with Dante's warning at the gates of hell: Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here, but I was out-voted. The door is solid-core birch. I made and installed the 12-light window and the arch. The window is going to have textured glass in it so we keep the incoming light without having to look at a room full of cat boxes.

Chaweeka Plane

2007-08-22T11:32:00.000-07:00

"Chaweeka" is a catch-all noun invented (so far as I know) by my friend Nick's late mother Jane. It can be used to describe any small item, from say a lamp finial to a tiny plane like the one pictured below. This plane came with a set of WWII-vintage chisels I recently bought through ebay. I can think of many times in the past when it would have been very helpful.

I'm Back!

2007-08-22T11:30:00.000-07:00

Sorry it's been eight months since my last post! What can I say? With the collapse of the mortgage market, work has been incredibly slow, and there just haven't been many projects worth posting. Just to get back in the habit, though, I'm going to post later today about a couple odds and ends.

More Projects Installed

2006-12-08T12:48:00.000-08:00

I spent most the week assembling custom windows which just involves opening boxes and following arcane instructions describing how to screw the things together. It is not very interesting or rewarding from a craft point of view. Oh well. You can't make cupolas and arched jambs every week, I suppose.

This afternoon after lunch, I did drive out to the west end to find a house where a couple of my past projects have been installed. You may recall the big PVC entrance head and pilasters from a couple of months ago. Below, you can see it installed. It's weird how the scale of this kind of thing changes based on its setting. In the shop, this assembly seemed massive. In place, one would hardly notice it.

The curved staircase I made back in the early summer is installed in the same house. I was shocked to find it in such abominable condition on the job site. The picture below was taken the day the staircase left the shop.

...and this one was snapped at the site about two hours ago. As I look at this, I shudder to think of the time I spent carefully filling brad holes and sanding, and sanding, and sanding. Maybe it'd be better if I didn't go visit these things after they're installed!

Arched Jamb Heads Complete

2006-12-04T14:51:00.000-08:00

This afternoon I finished a set of five poplar arched jamb heads with wide trim and key blocks. Below is the largest of the heads.

One of my coworkers built box columns which will wrap rough openings on the job site. The heads I made will then sit on top of the columns. You'll get a sense of what I mean in the picture below.

Three of the heads were the same size. There was one wider head and one narrower one as you can see. I wonder why people always want this kind of thing at a paint-grade level of finish? I think it would be fun to make some of these from walnut or cherry.

I had never really built anything like these before. The project involved a great deal of radius work on the shaper; the trim that you see on the face of each arch above is comprised of six curved elements in addition to the straight runs and the key block. You can get a sense of what I mean in the picture below which shows the pieces before they were assembled.

I don't know yet what my next project will be, but you'll hear about it when I find out. In the meantime, if you're reading this and you'd like any more detail about this or any of the past projects, please email me and I'll very happily respond. Likewise, if you do similar work--or indeed any kind of craft--I'd love to hear about it and see some pictures, too.

Cupolas Installed!

2006-12-01T16:30:00.000-08:00

After work today I drove out to the east end to see if the cupolas had been installed. They had been, and the general contractor was kind enough to climb three or four ladders with me so we could go have a look. Here are a few pictures of the cupolas where I hope they'll be for a long time to come.

Tomorrow I plan to post extensively about the arched door jambs I'm wrapping up at the beginning of next week.

Arched Jambs and Raised Panel Doors

2006-11-26T16:54:00.000-08:00

Since finishing that set of cupolas, I haven't had anything really major to sink my teeth into. I did make three frame and panel doors last week; they were a rush job, and pretty big, but I got them done in two days. They're pictured below. Other than that I've been working on a set of five arched door jambs with lots of trim, key blocks and whatnot. I'll post more about those soon.

Here is one of the three completed white pine frame and panel doors. These were all about five feet tall and ranged in size from 24" to 36" wide. In the absence of our shaper man, we're trying to switch everything we can to the router table. I think it's the right move. Using a shaper for little beads and whatnot is like using a sledgehammer to squash a mosquito. We got a router bit to raise the panels for these doors, and it worked like a champ. I made two passes, and even the cross-grain cuts were nice and clean.

I mentioned that I'm working on several arched jambs. The picture above shows a set I did about six months ago. When I arrived at the shop, arches like this were done by stacking and butt-jointing strips of white pine, assembling them, then bandsawing and sanding the curve. That's more or less the way that curved drawer fronts have traditionally been made. I find this system inefficient and think it produces an unreasonable amount of waste. Clear white pine is not cheap these days. So, when I get a work order for curved jambs, I'm doing them differently.

Specifically, I'm using bending ply and forms. In this picture you see the beginning of the concave half of a set of bending forms for one of the arches I'm making. I use a router with an arc-cutting jig to cut the radius into a blank of cheap ply material. I then attach that arched blank to a second rectangular blank, bandsaw about 1/16" away from the line of the arc, then flush-trim the second arc so it's a perfect reproduction of the first. I install the blocks between them, cover the whole thing with 3/8" bending luan, then get started on the convex half (not pictured).

More to come in future posts.

Cupolas (Finally) Fly the Coop

2006-11-05T06:13:00.000-08:00

Well, the cupolas are done. I didn't post for a while because things got kind of crazy at the shop a few weeks ago. One of my coworkers sustained a completely hideous injury, and it was all I could do to show up and get my work done for a while thereafter. I'm going to try to recreate some of the more interesting steps in the cupolas' construction between my last post and the present.

Click here to see a video of the cupolas leaving the shop.

Here's a mockup of the basic structure I designed for the roof framing. The central, short octagonal column provided a convenient way to join the rafters together. The cleat you see on the left-hand side of the rafter was glued to the column, and the rafter was glued to the cleat. That way, if the steel fasteners ever rust away, there should still be a good glue connection between the parts.

This photo shows the final central columns with cleats attached. I thought they ended up looking like gears.

I needed a 59 1/2 degree cut on one end of the rafters, but since my cutoff saw only goes to 55 degrees, I had to make the jig you see above. It basically added the additional 4 1/2 degrees and provided a length stop as well.

I figured out how much overhang the roof bases were meant to have over the face of the posts and marked that distance at each corner of the bases. I used a sharpie for one of these marks so you could see what I was talking about.

I registered my mark on the underside of the bases with their proper location with regard to the post faces. I didn't spend much time photographing this step because it didn't seem all that interesting. Suffice it to say that the roof bases were secured to the posts with long lag bolts.

With the roof bases secured to the posts, I was ready to begin installing the rafters as you can see above.

Here are the completed cupola frames.

Once framing was complete, the next step was to make and install the louvers. I'm not going to go into the louver-making process right now because it was so mind-crushingly dull that it pains me to think about it. Here are a few relevant details, though. There were 17 louver slats per side, 8 sides per cupola, and 5 cupolas. That makes 680 slats. Each slat was connected to its frame with four stainless steel screws. That's 2720 screws that I had to install. B-O-R-I-N-G! Somebody, please get me an apprentice, and soon!

The final steps were sheathing the roofs and applying the facing trim. Making the roofing panels was probably interesting enough to merit documentation, but by then I'd reached the point of just wanting to get these things done, so I didn't drag the camera out every few minutes.

Cupola Roofs

2006-10-09T16:18:00.000-07:00

The next step on the cupolas was to make the octagonal bases for the roofs, indicated by red arrows in the drawing below. Unlike the pressure-treated plywood bottoms in the bases, I wanted these to have some real heft, so I made them from 2 x 8's.

The first step was to once again calculate the octagon dimension I needed. It would be entirely too boring to detail the computations I underwent to determine this fact, but I will say that the online octagon calculator my boss found has indispensable throughout this project. If you're interested, you can see it here. Suffice it to say that I determined the length I needed from each face of the octagon and crosscut my stock to that dimension (with 22 1/2 degree angles at each end so that they'd form the shape I needed when put together).

Once I had a pile of 40 base pieces, I needed to figure out a quick and dirty way to join them together. I decided I'd use biscuits, and I made the marking jig above to save myself from having to make 160 measurements (4 biscuits per piece x 40 pieces = 160 biscuits). The workpiece slid into the jig...

Then the poplar arms were swung until they were parallel to the end of the piece. I marked a line at the end of the swinging chaweeka.

Then I cut the biscuit slots. By the way, when I say biscuits, I mean little ellipses of compressed wood that are inserted in matching slots to join together two pieces of wood. I do not mean the sorts of biscuits one eats. For the best edible biscuits in town, go to Perly's.

After biscuiting the left-hand ends of each piece, I followed the same procedures for the right-hand ends as you can see above.

A coworker helped me glue the biscuits and put them in their slots. One has to work fast when dealing with this many wet biscuits; they swell up fairly quickly, reducing the open glue time one has before everything is set. I included the above picture because it depicts a solution to a problem that has long troubled me. As I've said before, I love band clamps. I particularly love them for clamping large mitered workpieces like these roof bases. One downside to band clamps, though, is that no matter how careful one is, they always seem to get twisted. I've been cussing about this for almost 15 years now, and it finally ocurred to me last week that if I thought about the problem for all of five minutes, I might be able so solve it. It's so obvious, really: Just clamp the ratchet mechanism to a table. Sheesh, I wish I'd started doing this a long time ago!

Here's the assembled roof base.

And here's a simple marking jig I put together to mark where I needed to drill holes.

Finally, a completed roof base. I put the plywood scabs on to add tensile strength as well as to give the lag bolts that will eventually connect the roof to the cupola base something to bite down on.

Tomorrow I'll be posting about gnomes.

I'm Tired of Cupolas!

2006-10-08T14:11:00.000-07:00

I'm tired of thinking in multiples of eight. Enough octagons for a while. Here's a work table I made five or six years ago for the kitchen in my apartment. I wanted a "real" butcher block top, by which I mean one with the grain running top to bottom. All the old butcher blocks I've seen were made that way, I suppose because the harder end grain is more resistant to knife strikes. Apparently, the butcher would use his table all day, then at work's end, he'd pour scalding water on it and scrub it with a stiff wire brush. That's why all the old tables one sees in antique stores are so wallowed out in the center.

I don't know how I could have made this thing without Harrison's Time Saver sander. I started by making a bunch of 1.75" x 1.75" x 40" strips of hard maple, making sure they were dead square by running them through the sander on each face several times. I then glued four of these lengths together at a time resulting in a pile of 3.5" x 3.5" x 40" pieces. I cut these into 3.25" lengths, then glued six of them together to form a single row. Then I started gluing the rows together. Finally, I ran the whole thing through the Time Saver for what seemed like forever to get it nice and flat.

Big lesson learned while making this table: Use MINERAL oil to coat your butcher block if you ever decide to make one, not vegetable oil like I foolishly used. Oh, why didn't I spend half an hour doing research? Why? Why? Why did I spend that half an hour dousing $250 worth of maple endgrain with vegetable oil which quickly went ransid, creating a yucky film on the surface of this top? The poor thing isn't even close to suitable for kitchen use. It's holding my stereo and printer these days. So sad, yet so instructive.

Cupola Base Framing Complete

2006-10-05T17:06:00.000-07:00

I finished framing the cupola bases today. I had thought this task would be pretty easy, but it turned out to be a tad trickier than I'd anticipated. The first photo below shows one of the completed frames. You'll see that I'm building these things on pallets at this point as they're only going to get heavier over the next week or so until I'm finished. I imagine we'll have to move them out of the shop with forklifts once all is said and done.

My hope had been that by putting the correct length of spacer between each post and drawing the whole assembly together with a band clamp, everything would come out perfectly dimensioned. I still don't know exactly why it didn't work the way I'd planned, although I suspect there were minute (but additive) irregularities in the posts I had made. As you can see in the photo above, I did use the band-clamp strategy, and it did work--just not as smoothly as I'd hoped. Framing the first cupola base took four hours. The subsequent five only took an hour and a half apiece.

Once I'd gotten everyhing in its place, I attached the spacers to the posts with pocket hole screws. The spacers at the bottom were temporary, just placed there to assist in locating the posts. They did, however, serve another function; more on that later.

Screwing the spacers to the posts gave me a way to clamp the posts securely in place, as you can see above.

At the beginning of the week I had pre-drilled holes through the bottom of the bases. I made a simple jig on the drill press table to locate the holes. First I used a 1 1/2" forstener bit to make a hole deep enough to accomodate a lag bolt's head. Then I drilled a 1/2" hole through the center of the first hole. My jig kept the workpiece properly positioned so that all the holes were just where I wanted them.

Once I was positive that I had the post perfectly positioned, I located my drill by using the holes I had pre-drilled earlier in the week into the bottoms of the bases. I bored a deep 13/32" hole up through the base and into each post.

Then I drove long lag bolts through the bottom. I can't stress enough how much I very, very much want these things to stay in one piece when they're being lifted 30 or 40 feet in the air by a crane. That's why I'm incorporating just about every over-building idea I can think of!

Here are the first few base frames sitting in the shop. At this point, I'm moving them around with a pallet jack.

Oh, one last thing: Remember the spacers I'd used to locate the posts? I used those same pieces as the headers between the tops of the posts. That way I could be certain that the interior widths of the frames between each post would share the same dimension top and bottom.

Woodworking Wisdom from Cormac McCarthy

2006-10-02T15:26:00.000-07:00

Have you ever noticed how bull-headed so many woodworkers are? Why is that? Why is it that once we've done something the same way once or twice we usually stop looking for ways to improve our technique? Maybe it's what psychologists call "functional fixedness." I don't know. A related thing I've noticed is that many of us are loath to let it show when we're seeing somebody else doing something we didn't know about.

To that end, check out the following quote from Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses. My wife is reading it right now, and she emailed this to me today.

"They listened with great attention as John Grady answered their questions and they nodded solemnly and they were careful of their demeanor that they not be thought to have opinions on what they heard for like most men skilled at their work they were scornful of any least suggestion of knowing anything not learned at first hand."

Tiny Cupola Roofs

2006-10-02T15:08:00.000-07:00

I started the day a tad perplexed about how to proceed with the construction of the cupolas' roofs, so I spent some time making quarter-scale models. I think I pretty much figured out how I want to do it.

The framing structure will basically consist of 8 pressure-treated 2 x 4s which will all meet a central octagonal shaft. There will be all manner of bracing, as well, but the photo above shows just the bare-bones of my plan. I rarely take the time to make models, but they help me when I'm really confused. I saved myself a lot of grief by making this one. If I hadn't, I'd have forgotten that the thickness of the PVC sheathing is greater than 3/4" when on a bias. That would have been a BIG BUMMER as it would have resulted in the roofs overhanging more than they're supposed to.

Here's the model for the roofs' sheathing. You can see where I made notes all over it to correct problems. One major benefit of making this model was that it helped me to figure out the jigs I'll need to get the correct bevels in the right places. I haven't done a cone-shaped thing in a quite a while, so this was a helpful exercise.

Cupola Framing Starts

2006-09-30T05:56:00.000-07:00

Here's a section view of the cupola's vertical framing members. Each one consists of two lengths of pressure-treated 2x4 beveled at 22 1/2 degrees then glued and stapled together.

In general, I like to take measurements from assembled workpieces. By doing so, I can always test what is rather than what ought to be. In this case, I dry-assembled the vertical framing members in place on the sill so I could find the exact distance between them. Next week I'll be making louvers that fit in the spaces between the vertical members. The outside dimensions of the louver frames will have to fit just about perfectly, so I took plenty of time getting this dry assembly just right.

One of my coworkers, Wayne, saw the framing members standing upright on the sill and wondered if I was using some kind of mental telepathy to make them stand up so straight. In fact, they're just squeezed together with a band clamp and spacer sticks. I love band clamps; when assembling frames, there's nothing better because they automatically distribute any minute error equally across all the joints. Plus, they're relatively inexpensive.

Set of Five Massive Cupolas Begun

2006-09-29T06:27:00.000-07:00

Here is a part of the final drawing for the cupolas. Our shop has a full-time draughftsman who produces these. We also have the ability to print full-size drawings of any element within the overall drawing. Sometimes I glue full-size drawings to a piece of 1/4" material for use as a tracing or routing template.

The cupolas are huge; roughly 7' tall by nearly 5' wide at the underside of the roof. They're going on an old school in Richmond's east end and are near-exact reproductions of the original cupolas which have rotted away to nearly nothing.

My first step was to make pressure-treated plywood bases upon which everything else would be built. To do this, I cut 1/8 of the octagon size I needed from a scrap of ply. Then I traced that piece four times onto the piece of scrap 1/2" MDO you see above. I trimmed the resulting template on the bandsaw, then perfected the lines with a straight edge and router.

Whenever I make templates, I like to make one half of the final size I require. See how the template is marked for right-sidedness? I traced five of the pressure-treated ply halves with that side facing up and five with the reverse side up. That way, any minute imperfections in the template are mirrored side-to-side.

Here are the five pressure-treated ply bases. I used the template to flush-trim the halves on the router table. The halves are joined together with #20 biscuits and the 1/2" ply scabs you see in the photo.

The sill that wraps around the ply bases has several parts. The lowest section is depicted above. It, like much of this project, is made from PVC. We can't get 1 1/2" thich PVC for some reason, so I had to laminate two 1 x 6's together to get the stock I needed. We used a shaper to create the rabbet and the router table to make the bevel. No big deal, but when you're making five octagons, you need 40 of each part you make (8 sides x 5 octagons = 40). By the way, yes, the bevel is a little crooked on the above piece, but happily, PVC dresses very neatly with a block plane.

Here the sill elements are attached to the ply bases. I used construction adhesive and long staples. I worry that any fasteners I use will eventually rust away to nothing, so I'm using some kind of adhesive whenever feasible.

Various Past Projects

2006-09-29T05:47:00.000-07:00

This yellow pine bookcase features saw tooth supports. You can catch a glimpse of them in the case's right-hand rear corner. This case is very tall, and just barely tips upright below an 8' ceiling.

I made this wenge butler's tray as a wedding present for my friends Jamie and Michaelann. I like the idea of using an exotic wood for such a stodgy, traditional form. The corner joints are dovetails with a mitered top.

This is the first piece I ever designed and built for myself. I'm sitting at this writing table right now, as a matter of fact.

Okay, you either love it or hate it. I made this toy chest for my niece's first birthday. It was a faux-finishing learning exercise, really. My good friend Stuart Bailey taught me the technique--it's meant to look like it's tiled with pieces of malachite.

Broken Pediment Entrance Head

2006-09-29T05:42:00.000-07:00

I finished this broken-pediment PVC entrance head a few weeks ago. Getting it just right was kind of involved because of the many compound angles in the various mouldings.

This detail shows the various runs of moulding. We recently started using a new kind of modillion block--they're actually made of a hard, blown styrofoam which is a tad depressing, I think. Oh well. For the dentil mouldings along the rake, I made individual teeth and spaced them with a spacer block rather than routing them or finding some way to use a dado cutter.

Pembroke Table

2006-09-29T05:39:00.000-07:00

I began work on this federal Pembroke table in the early spring of 1999. It is a close reproduction of a table from the Kaufman collection, a private collection of American furniture exhibited at the National Gallery of Art in 1986 and catalogued in American Furniture From the Kaufman Collection by J. Michael Flanigan.

The table's serpentine top is characteristic of New York pembroke tables.

The drawer is pulled from the underside so that it appears to just be an apron. I love hidden things like that. The drawer face is veneered with crotch mahogany. Other inlaid elements include boxwood and ebony stringing as well as satinwood panels. The original table had urn and swag details where I put the satinwood. Urns and swags are a bit fussy for my tastes.

This photo details what I was talking about with the drawer. It also shows the many bandings that follow the perimeter of the serpentine top. To get the boxwood and ebony to bend along the tight corner radius, I soaked them, then gently bent them around a guitar side-bending iron.

Ram's Head Mantel & Paneling Finished

2006-09-29T05:28:00.000-07:00

Here are a couple of photos of the large mantel I finished in July. I built it in three sections; 1) the mantel shelf and legs, 2) the frame and panel element, and 3) the moulded ram's head.

By far the trickiest part of this project was getting all the miters right on the ram's head. I like to use templates for that kind of thing. That way I can get my thinking straight and mistakes corrected on scrap pieces rather than on an actual workpiece with a couple of hours of work in it.

The photo below shows the entire structure. To give you a sense of how tall the finished piece was, I had to get up on a 16' ladder to get the whole thing in my camera's frame.

Chop Saw Setup Complete!

2006-09-29T05:05:00.000-07:00

I finished my chop saw setup a few weeks ago, and am finally getting around to posting about it. This Hitachi saw was a freebie from one of our shop's suppliers. It sat next to the break table for about six weeks before I finally claimed it for my work area.

Here's the finished set up in all its glory. There are several problems with normal chop saw arrangements that I wanted to correct. The first was drooping table extensions. I hate it when you have to apply significant downward pressure on your workpiece to keep it square. The second problem was always having to use a measuring tape and pencil every time you want to make an accurate cut. The third problem was coming up with a stop system that was versatile and did not require any clamps. More below.

Here's the stop I came up with. It slides along the fences and clamps with a threaded knob along the back. I was naive in thinking that the threaded bolt would hold the thing square; all it did was spread the bottom of the front side of the stop away from the fence. That's why you see a nailed-on pine strip underneath the knob. It keeps the bolt's pressure correctly oriented.

Each side of the fence has its own stop, and each stop has two square sides. One side of each is relieved to allow dust, while the other is left straight all the way to the table. This way, if I'm ever crosscutting veneer or other really thin stock, I can use the straight side.

I attached tapes to 1/4" thick strips of poplar and fit them into dadoes I routed into the fences. This way, I can set the edge of the stops at any dimension along the fence and cut accurately. No need to measure! I found left-reading and right-reading metal, adhesive-backed tapes at Woodcraft.

Another thing you can see in this picture is part of the system I used for leveling the tables. Both tables are attached to two cherry strips like you see below. The strips have threaded inserts about halfway down their lengths that accept a bolt through the middle of the tabletop. A few inches on either side of that bolt, the top has threaded inserts with set screws in them. Leaving the middle bolt loose, I adjusted the set screws using a laser level on the tables until they were perfectly level from far left, across the saw, out to far right. That took a lot of work. Once it was done, I socked down the bolts in the center. If the table sags in the future (which it probably will), I'll just adjust again.

I figured that I'd never get the tapes perfect if I stuck them directly onto the fences. That's why I went with the inlaid strips. To allow me to perfectly index the tapes, I used the system of elongated holes above. It took a bit of fiddling, but the tapes and stops now work together well enough that I can cut any length accurately to within 1/64th.

Because of the saw's built-in fences, the stops can't reach past 10" from the cut. So I came up with the spacer block you see above. If I have to cut something that's 2 1/4", I set the stop at 12 1/4", and add the spacer. I've found other uses for it, too. For instance, let's say I want to accurately cut 1/16" from the ends of a bunch of boards that aren't starting out at the same length. What I do is set up the stop and the spacer to the left of the cut so that the spacer is 1/16" shy of the right side of the kerf. I then butt my workpiece against the spacer, remove the spacer, and cut.

Here's a head-first shot. You can see where I wasted away the fences to allow for all possible compound bevels.