Still hobbling round the place today with the sartorious, so working from home (the joys of IT – you can work anywhere, meaning you can work when sick). Over lunch, I tottered to the shed and flattened the board I was going to pull the rails from, and shot a reference edge with the #08.
The stain’s from accidental contact with the ebonising potion from the table build, but it’s surface only so it’ll plane out. Out with the panel gauge and mark off 2-and-a-quarter inch laths (we want two-inch-ish wide rails when it’s all done and squared so I’m leaving room for cack-handedness).
Back to work at this point until around about fourish, at which point I get stuck waiting on system tests, or in XKCD terms,
So to the bandsaw (rather than the ryoba because time). Ripped all four parts, then out with a medium-set #05 and a fine-set #08 and a straight edge and a square and a marking gauge and we get reference faces and edges on all four of these and mark off the reference faces for thickness.
This doesn’t take long and I leave the four parts marked up for resawing on the bandsaw and head inside for dinner. The light was fading and it was gray overcast when I went into the shed, then I open the door and…
Sneachta! And someone’s not seen this before…
Later, after dinner, back out to the shed and onto the bandsaw, resaw the pieces down to thickness (we want about three-quarters of an inch so the gauge was set to seven eighths (the pieces are about nine eighths thick)) and then it was back to the #05 and #08 to get the bandsaw marks off and the faces clean, and then taking them to S4S which didn’t take very long.
Ready for joinery. That was all I wanted done in the shed today (pick small goals, you’ll feel better), so I opened the door to go back inside and again, more sneachta!
Doubt it’ll last though. Oh well. We have driving wind and freezing rain on the way to replace it apparently…
I figure, with six projects sitting in component form in the staging area of the shed, best get to work making even more components for a seventh project. Because Reasons.
Anyway, the first video I ever saw by Richard Maguire was about building a small wall cupboard (in a sort-of, kind-of, if-you-squint shaker style probably best described as “`English colloquial” 😀 ):
I’ve wanted to build this for a while. But I don’t have the ten feet of pre-planed three-quarter inch thick pine his plans call for. What I do have is a pair of boards of inch-and-a-quarter rough-sawn poplar, mostly free from green stains…
That should work. And sod feeling bad about doing the rough-cuts with a power circular saw. Do you see room in there for me to swing a full-size handsaw? Or have a sawbench? Besides, do you know how they did this back in the 17th century? Apprentices!!! (And there isn’t room for one in there either, even if you can find smaller rooms being rented for the price of a car a month on daft.ie). So.
Woodwork al fresco. Yes, the deck’s a mess. I’ll tidy after the solstice when there’s time.
Right, that’s the rough-cut chunks for the cupboard on the left, a chunk intended for another project (yes, that’s eight, I know, hush), and offcuts that will probably become bandsaw boxes or the like.
Now, time to figure out layout a bit better.
Design, meet wood. Wood, meet design. This is the humming and hawing stage when I try to think through the size in the design and how to break down the parts best, and whether stuff is getting thicknessed by scrub plane or resawn or whatever.
Resawing is a pain to do, thicknessing is only slightly better, but a lot of parts in this can be under three inches wide and those I can resaw with the bandsaw reasonably easily. I do have a frame saw on the way for wider stuff to see if it helps (lots of people say it does), but the thing’s in Cologne with no sign of moving for the last week. Sodding DHL.
Round one with the bandsaw. I’ve planed a reference edge with the #05 and #08 and marked off the far edge with the panel gauge after sharpening the pin a little with the diamond paddles. I’ll rip those on the bandsaw and get widths (there’s some damage on the edges – the boards must have been near the edge of the pack in the timber yard I guess).
And I’m trimming up the bandsaw blanks while I’m at it.
Right, that’s the edges sorted. Plus I get a few pieces to test finish on.
Then I start marking off various parts. By the time I’m done, I’ve used almost all my gauges (you don’t unset the gauge until you’re sure you’re done with that measurement; that ensures you’ll only have to reset the gauge for the one cut you’ve forgotten instead of five or six times).
And time for round two with the bandsaw (after lunch):
Right. Now I plane a reference edge and face on each part and mark the relevant parts for resawing or thicknessing. And then change my mind about thicknesses – I’ll leave the front of the cupboard three-quarters of an inch thick (which is a standardish sort of thickness for these things) rather than a half-inch. The back panel will still be a half-inch, and I’ll make the sides three-quarters and the top and bottom of the carcass and the shelf will be half-inch and so will the top and bottom cap pieces (so top and bottom overall will be an inch thick and the sides a quarter-inch less).
This is about the point where I discover that my favorite small proops brothers engineers square is… not. Square that is, it’s out by almost a full mm across its arm, I must have whacked it off something without noticing. I know I didn’t drop it. I don’t know if you can true one of these back up with the kit I have available. I may just need to buy a new one (for all of a tenner or so). In the meantime, I have another engineer’s square and the new Moore&Wright sliding square so that’s fine. Except that I had to reshoot a bunch of edges to get them back to square. And then marking them out for resawing.
And back to the bandsaw for round three…
Right. That’s the rails and stiles for the front door, the boards for the back, and the sides and top and bottom will have to be resawn by hand.
Just clamping and stickering them for now to let them dry overnight without too much warp.
Yeesh. Really do need to start joinery on something soon, if only to clear space. I only just finished tidying this up on Saturday…
Also finished up the bandsaw box. Two coats of garnet shellac on top of two coats of danish oil, and then some hardware, and then some felt for the base and the drawer gap. More photos tomorrow.
And it looked simple enough that I could do it with Calum, so I prepped a piece of pine and this evening we drew lines on it, sawed it with a small ryoba rather than using the chisel Sellers used which would be a little dangerous for a five-year-old (or for me in close quarters with a small child holding a surgically sharp pointy lump of metal for that matter), and cleaned it up using “his” number #03 plane (because it has two places to hold that keep small fingers away from sharp edges). And then split it with a hammer and enough glee to convince me it’s a good thing we don’t have a cat.
Then break out the green spraypaint and masking tape and do the next bit outdoors 😀
Came back a bit later with spray-on snow and drilled a hanging hole…
So, table delivered (yes, the recipient liked it). BTW, if you were wondering, it was a build-along to Richard Maguire’s video series: In case you were thinking of buying that series, it’s well worth the money.
Today though (and yesterday) was all about cleaning down from the build (and carting away two rubbish bags full of shavings – not being able to burn wood here is a pain) and doing the dozen little jobs that needed doing like sharpening the wooden skew rebate plane I have here; going to use that in a build soon. And every plane had to get a light sanding with fine paper on the tops of the cheeks of their sides for surface rust (the -3C nights came with water vapour condensing on the cast iron) and then a fresh coat of wax. And other small jobs like that which had been backing up. I still have one more of those – building a japanese saw bench hook. I’m using a normal bench hook at the moment but for pull work, it can be a tad awkward because you have to hold the work to the fence. You can use a normal european bench hook if you hook it to the far side of the bench; but I think it’s a bit nicer if you attach the fence to the baseboard and drill through both and glue a dowel through both and down a few inches below the baseboard. The dowels then go in the bench dog holes and that’s your bench hook. Parts are set for that (I’m not sure I have enough dowel stock though) and I’ll get to it probably tomorrow.
The rest of my time has been spent on stock prep. Bit of resawing and flattening and ripping yesterday and prepping some blanks for bandsaw boxes. So walking into the shed today it all looks fine…
…and then you turn to the right to look at the staging area…
Ah. Right. So that’s four more side tables (or at least the raw material rough-cut for them) and then on top of that all the finishing jars and glues and screws and my plastic box of off-cuts. Those are only the bits I could use for things by the way (I’m resisting the packrat urge to keep every scrap of wood I cut off a larger piece on the grounds that There. Is. No. Room. In. Here), so resawn pieces that could be used to make small boxes or chunks that could become bandsaw blanks (not many of those left, I picked through the box on Friday to make up some blanks), or the cores from bandsaw boxes (which can get used for things like feet or drawer pulls or whatever).
Tucked behind the plastic box are the panel gauge and the dovetail alignment board, and on top of the box is where I stash all the component parts of builds in progress (and a lot of sandpaper at the moment because I haven’t found a place for it). So there’s five glued-up blanks, and the component parts for six other projects in the pre-joinery stage.
Blanks drying outside along with a bandsaw box that’s almost ready.
Two coats of danish oil in; going to do a coat or two of shellac yet and attach the hardware (it stands vertically and you use it to hang necklaces) and some felt in various spots. First box made using the new sander. It’s not that it makes it better so much as it makes it easier to do some things because you’re not worried that trying them will immediately remove a finger. More photos later.
And this is a quick test of a Paul Sellers idea for a project to do with the kids:
He made his using a razor-sharp chisel; I won’t be doing that with Calum 😀 The project works just fine with saw and bench plane 😀 With a bit of luck, that’ll keep him occupied for the guts of an hour and he can make one for his teacher.
And then I have two more projects to prep for, one in beech and one in poplar. This phase always seems to make me long for a powered planer thicknesser, can’t think why…
Because what the world needed most was a rerun of The Quiet American. #uspol [...]
Ah, *that* fresh hell is this. Thanks world, I really needed an answer to that question. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/05/cia-reported-buyouts-workforce-donald-trump-administration#uspol [...]
Well, duh, as the kids say - it lasts till you remember what happened yesterday and/or turn on the news. [...]
Think I need a new mug to turn on the news to. [...]
Says a lot that the US has fifty bajillion militias and republicans and jingoistic flag shaggers and the only crowd who even tries to stop a coup is a pinko [...]
