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Desk Shelf / Woodworking — 2 Comments
15
Jul 18

Ouchie

Long week. Lots of hours in the office and zero hours in the shed till the weekend. One of those weeks. But, the post kept coming in…

Granted, the clamps were a lidl special (but I’ve been using some for the last year and they’re really quite handy – I could use a few more f-clamps and one wooden parallel clamp to help with morticing and I think I’m good after that). And the poppyseed oil is food grade from the local indian shop, so no drying agents, but for a light oil finish it might be useful. Worth a try at any rate. As to the rest:

Some of China’s finest box hinges. I mean, they’re not that great, but they’ll do to practice with before going off to Isaac Lord or Brusso or someone.

A nice v-tool for the oak panel carving for the Peter Follansbee stuff, and a small spoon gouge for doing the endgrain carving trick – my gouge for that isn’t quite as easy to get scoops with and I’m hoping this will help.

And then this, a dovetail cutter for the router for the sliding dovetail joint on the shelves. It seems too small to me, but I asked a few cabinetmakers who do this sort of thing and they say it’s fine. So, on to the build again. By the way, that friend from the UK who sent me the fantastic veneer convinced me to write this up on the forum as a build thread as well, so it’s going up there as well as on the blog, but the forum thread might be a tiny bit more focussed on the build.

That’s not parallax. After cleaning off the glued faces with a quick swipe of the plane, I put them back together and yeah, there’s major differences in thickness there. Plus, one of the boards is very uneven, so some serious milling is needed.

Time to break out the new scrub plane, get the board butted against some dogs and the planing stop and then hack into it.

First pass shows large hollows. Second cross-grain pass didn’t get rid of them. Gone by the third though.

I mean, nice grain in the board but that’s sweaty work.

Flipped it, chalk lines down to monitor and then on we go.

This time a major bump right over that knot. Took six or seven passes to get it down to acceptable (this is the underside). It’s still not dead flat, but I could chase my tail on this all day. It’s twist-free, should be okay. Don’t forget, I still have to prep this again after the glue-up so I can sort it then if necessary.

Done. For now.

Like I said, sweaty work. And of course, now the board is not so thick, and the other board is a happy smidge over an inch thick, so I planed the face flat and out of twist (there wasn’t much, it took about five minutes of staring at it and swiping bits with the #05), but then the pain in the fundament bit:

The board is a quarter-inch too thick. I set a gauge on the other board’s thinnest bit, marked off the sides on this board (and the other to check) and then planed a chamfer on this board’s edges to stop spelching and marked them off with chalk (because it’s dark wood, normally I’d use pencil) to monitor progress readily. And then it was a case of many, many cross-grain passes. Even with a heavy set on the plane, it took ages and I managed to remove the skin on my little finger and get a nice large blister on my palm which will be so much fun this week as I spent the entire week typing.

Honestly, I spent a full hour today pricing a Dewalt 735 thicknesser. And I’m running out of reasons to not buy one. Thicknessing stock is just not interesting, it’s dull, heavy donkey work that only delays the completion of the job, and I don’t like it.

Not even finished really. I have to spend another ten minutes on this with a #05 but I had to stop and leave it there before I tore open the blister and that would have been too much fun for the coming week even for me.

 

Bother.

Desk Shelf / Shed / Tools / Woodworking — 1 Comment
08
Jul 18

Those five minute jobs…

You know the five minute jobs I mean, the ones that take three hours and nearly set things on fire, like your hair, a pile of sawdust, solvent-based finishes, that sort of thing. Today was their day!

Started off with a quick job I’d been meaning to do for a while.

That panel saw is junk. Uncomfortable handle, not sharp, can’t be resharpened thanks to induction-hardened teeth…

Basically, a waste of shed space. Blade was kinked as well. One of Spear&Jackson’s lesser models, that. So, out with the angle grinder, hack through the rivets (because who uses screws when attaching plates to handles, that’s so passe and repairable…) and after a few minutes of standing in an actual light show and setting fire to the handle twice and almost catching my hair, a pile of sawdust and the box of finishes beside it….

You can’t really see it there, but there’s a fair amount of smoke and crap in the air there. And I’ve had to beat the everloving crap out of the pins holding the handle in place with a punch pin and a lump hammer. I am so not a fan of this saw.

So why not just dump it? Because it’s now raw material…

Out with the angle grinder, cut along some of those lines, nearly set fire to a few more things, and …

That’s a new card scraper and a chunk of stock for scratch stocks, which up to now I didn’t really have (there’s a blank or two in the lee valley scratch stock kit but that’s it and I’d rather be able to make some up as I need them).

The card scraper is the reason for doing this today. Chris Schwarz was talking about a different shape for a card scraper that he came across and it actually didn’t sound too weird so I thought I’d try it. Here’s the shape, nicked from Chris Williams:
Rather than print it out and trace it onto the stock though, I figured I’d just be a smartarse and draw it from the likely origin.

Now Chris (Schwartz) suggests you just grind away the excess metal, but we don’t all have 2×72 grinders and the like, so we make do…

Think of it as very fast artisanal filing.

Also you want a backing bit of scrap unless you’re better at this stuff than me, or have actual metalworking tools, or skills or whatever.

Because, you know, you don’t want to do that to your bench – whatever about the gouging, the spray of metal bits will ruin your next attempt at finishing…

Some deburring, some filing square, some time on the diamond plates and the strop and then the arno burnisher (which is kindof a cheat code to turning a hook on these things – I cannot get that to work with the usual screwdriver shaft/hardened steel anything/other metal burnishers, but the tungsten carbide on the arno does it every time). And then a quick test.

Control group’s fine as always…

New one acts like a plane with a nice camber – a lot more steerable, the steel in the saw blade was pretty good, and it might actually be a better scraper for scraping small areas in a targeted sort of way.

Then on to the next quick five minute job. The last one only took two hours…

Yeah, I’ve been meaning to try to sharpen these for a while now. I’m not entirely sure why exactly, I mean I get on really well with the japanese saws and the bow saw is fine too, but I got these as part of a job lot on ebay a while back and they’re good examples so I figure I should at least try, y’know? I gave sharpening one of the hand saws a try earlier but you kindof need your saw file to not snap half-way through the process in order to sharpen properly. This time that didn’t happen (sharpening is still a monumental pain in the spine without a higher vice mind you – those saw vices are definitely worth a look if you do this often). Wasn’t hugely impressed with the end results. The tooth geometry still seems off and I think there’s a lot more work to do on those teeth.

The cut is nothing to write home about either.

So, only an hour or so into that five-minute job. On to the next one…

Actually, moving the bandsaw and sander off the “cart” and screwing on the castors only took six or seven minutes. The problem was, with that out of the way…

Well, now I have to tidy up, don’t I? Feck…

Well, granted that took longer than I thought it’d take but okay, I did find a walnut board I’d lost that I wanted to use for the desk shelves project so that was good.

And then I put the bandsaw and sander back, and finally started work on the desk shelves project…

Woodwork al fresco. Just cutting the walnut section for the front of the desk here. Quick rough-cut only, hence the speedsquare and chalk line. You can’t see the tie-dyed trousers in the shot, but it’s 28C in the garden and 36C in the shed after the day of working hard and setting things on fire, so if you think I’m wearing jeans when I don’t have to, well, consider yourself lucky I’m wearing trousers at all.

Right, that will be the desk. It’s a bit smaller than I was thinking originally – 24″ across the back rather than 30″ and 32″ rather than 36″ at the front. That 36″ wouldn’t be seen though because there’s going to be a curve there. But it’s a desk for a six-to-nine-year-old, so it’s big enough I think. Also, this way I don’t have to cut into the good 60″ walnut board and can save that for something else 😀 The angle from front to back, by the way, is the same angle as the sides will be raked at with respect to the ground.

Same angle from the bevel for the desk as for the base and top of the sides.

Then I thought that those boards are relatively flat, fairly well matched in thickness, and maybe I could get away with edge jointing them without further prep…

I mean, that should work, right?

Between the #05 and #08, I got the joint to a reasonable fit, and thought it looked okay…

So I went for the glue-up and nope, not a hope, went from fitting to spinning on the midpoint like a top. Tried for a few minutes to get the boards to align, but nope, there was going to be a gap at one side or the other, so I broke it down before it seized up and wiped off the bulk of the glue.

I’ll try again tomorrow. And maybe skim those boards faces first just to be clean about it.

 

Meanwhile, in the middle of planing the joint, my 4″ square jumped off its perch…

…and did a header into the darkest corner of the shed in an obvious attempt to have nothing further to do with this project.

Can’t say I blame it, but nobody gets out that easily. Extendable lidl magnet light thingy to the rescue…

Seriously, that thing is bloody useful sometimes….

 

So, tomorrow, a swipe or two to clean the glue off the edges, skim the faces a bit with the #05 to clean them up, and retry that edge joint.

Shelves / Woodworking — No Comments
27
Jun 18

Can you tell what it is yet?

Well, that empty In Progress… list lasted a while, didn’t it?
Though I actually went back through my notebook…

Five euro or so in TK Maxx, the very height of bohemian luxury

Five euro or so in TK Maxx, the very height of bohemian luxury

…and every project in there bar this one is marked as Done or (in one or two cases) marked as Won’t Do, What Was I Thinking. This one will be a small bookshelf for Calum. Well, small to you and me, but not to him. The idea is this will have his books and toys and assorted child-related detritus now (he’s six and between kindergarten and vorschule so just learning to read and write at the moment) and we figure he really won’t have “homework” in the traditional I-need-a-proper-desk-and-I-still-don’t-want-to-do-it sense until he’s nine or ten, so off to the internet I go and I grab the UK90 based growth rate charts for boys aged 2 to 18, and find Calum’s centrile, so now I have his current height and his predicted height until he’s nine (it’s not that accurate, they change centriles faster than they change their socks if you don’t tell them to, but it’s better than pulling a number completely out of thin air.

Then I grab my copy of The Woodworker’s Guide to Furniture Design (thanks to a Richard Maguire recommendation and so far well worth buying) and dig out the bits on figuring out things like how high the underside of a table has to be from someone’s height and how high someone can reach given their height and so on and I spend a few minutes sketching stick figures and working out the height of the top of the very top shelf (which is to be the highest part of the build) and come up with 48″.

Then I dig out my copy of the bible…

And grab the tangential and radial expansion rates for poplar over the 30% relative humidity span you see in an Irish home in the average year (3.2% and 1.2% respectively), discover that my copy of the bibles is too old to have that data for american black walnut (7.8% and 5.5% respectively according to the woodbin’s online calculator but it lists 8.2% and 4.6% shrinkage rates for poplar respectively so I’m now doubting the bible, again).
Then to the sagulator to quickly see if the shelves would snap if Calum stood in the middle of them when he’s nine and no, should be fine – 0.05in deflection so that’s grand.

For the general design, I don’t yet have it nailed down. I’ve been looking carefully at Paul Seller’s leaning wallshelves because they have a lot of elements I want to steal:

But I don’t want the half-lap joints he uses because this is going to be abused by a six-year-old boy who likes hammers and those joints seemed to be giving up a lot of the strength of the boards. Plus I hate the little end bits off the sides of the bookshelf because anything you put there is just going to wind up on the floor. And I want the bottom shelf to come forward from the sides by a fair few inches and to have a curve across the front that’s echoed in the upper shelves; and I might want to put a cantilevered support element or two under the desk as well to add strength once the shelf is forward of the sides, but we’ll see – the sagulator is saying I don’t need it, but it might look better for it.

That gives me :

  • Top shelf at 48″
  • Bottom shelf at 17″ (it’ll double as a play surface/desk)
  • One intermediate shelf about 18″ above the bottom shelf
  • Poplar for everything bar the bottom shelf
  • Stringing on the bottom shelf to inlay things like a racing track for toy cars into the surface as well as things like letters and the like in various places
  • Curves everywhere instead of sharp edges and corners for little eyeballs
  • A serious set of problems with clamping curved bits into housing joints during construction.

So, time to think it over for a few days, do some sketches on paper, maybe a few SketchUp cad sketches, get a sense for it in my head, and ask a few construction-related question on the woodworking forums to see if I can steal more good ideas.

Until then though, the stock of poplar that I have needs to be dug out and looked at for stocktaking, and the stock of walnut…

It’s a mess back there and that’s after I extracted the boards and tidied it back up. Now, let’s see….

Right. We’re shy on wide long boards of poplar, but we have some just-about-9″ wide ones that would do for sides, a few 12″ wide boards that could be picked from for the intermediate shelf, and some choices for the top shelf as well, even if we didn’t get that from an offcut. I’ll have to leave them out in the sun for a day or so though, that green staining on the boards will dissipate into that yellow honey colour of the wider boards there in a few days with the 30C weather we’re getting at the moment here.

The bottom shelf though – if I want it to be 36″ wide, I pretty much have to cut into both my remaining walnut boards to make up the panel. Or I could settle for 30″ and hack one board in half and edge joint it to itself. Or if the sides splayed out from ~30″ at the back to ~36″ at the front of the shelf, I could probably get that from one board as well.

Decisions, decisions…

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