Cherry Tea Caddy

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

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

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

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

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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!

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

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

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

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

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?

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?

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

"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!

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.