If Only You Wood

Crazy busy

2009-11-21T05:16:00.000-08:00

I've got a new job which is mostly field-work, meaning I am away from home a lot. Right now I'm not too terribly far away, so I'm home at least one day per week, but the rest of the time I'm in a hotel far away. This is radically affecting my productive free time. I spend my time at home trying to catch up on house-work.
I was going to do blog entries on all of the DIY stuff I was doing, but I kept either forgetting the camera, or not wanting to have the camera out when I was up to my armpits in thinset or brick mortar, so that never materialized. It may yet happen when I'm doing stuff on my own house. Maybe.
I have a project in mind for a small kitchen island, but so far all I've been able to do is design it. I haven't been able to start on anything 'real' yet. My shop is a wreck because I had to figure out what tools I needed for this new job, and stuff got dumped everywhere while I tried to figure out what portion of my ton-plus of metalworking tools I needed to have with me.
It's very frustrating doing a job while knowing that you have the perfect tool for the job and it's at home, hours away from you.

Anyway, that's pretty much what's going on with me these days. Hopefully I can get back into the blogging, but right now I'm a lost cause.

M.Mike

A Bit Of A Departure

2009-08-31T05:09:00.000-07:00

I've got some non-wood-related stuff going on right now. Yesterday I was doing bricklaying for the first time in... years. Soon I'll be patching drywall and whatnot. Is anyone interested in blog entries on the non-wood stuff?

M.Mike

Sofa Table Completed

2009-08-26T11:56:00.000-07:00

Okay, so after endless sanding, two bouts of staining, etc. I've got three coats of brushed-on polyurethane, scuff-sanded with stearated 400 grit (FEPA 600 grit) sandpaper between coats. The third coat turned out so well that I just left it as it was. I was planning on putting on four heavy coats, sanding it down, then putting on wipe-on poly for the final coat. Apparently my brushing skills aren't quite as woeful as I thought, because the third coat turned out great and I decided to go with it. So it's done. It wasn't as difficult as I thought it might be, but it certainly took a while waiting for the thing to dry or dust to settle before the next coat.
As it sits it still has some sanding-dust in the decorative grooving that I'll have to get out, but it's done.

Some things that I learned on this project:
- a raking light isn't a luxury - it's a necessity!
- the world of wood-finishing solvents is far more complicated than it needs to be.
- having a $40 sanding block doesn't make sanding fun, but it *does* make it more tolerable.
- it can take a long time for wax to settle out of shellac.
- brushing varnish (polyurethane) isn't as hard as I thought it would be.
- some finish fixes are dead easy. Others are a lot of work.
- having a separate finishing room would be really, really nice.

Oh, and if you don't remember how scratched and maimed it was when I started, here it is:

Good luck with your own finishing projects!

Poly for the Sofa Table

2009-08-24T17:16:00.001-07:00

The sofa table top has been stained. Twice. Well, you see the first time I didn't sand it properly. I sanded it. Plenty. What I missed was a proper raking light. Now I know better. A raking light is all-important. If you don't have a good, strong light source to rake across the surface then you don't really know whether you've sanded enough. It looked great to me. I couldn't see any scratches - until I stained it, that is. Oy.
So I had to strip it and sand it all over again, and I stained it again. This time I didn't seal it... I wanted the stain darker, so I decided to take my chances with the potential blotching. As it is I got a very minor amount. I'm happy with it. The natural colour of the wood that this table is made out of varies somewhat. This makes for an uneven colour when you 'strike the stain' (wipe off the excess after wiping on plenty and letting it sit for ten minutes). When you rub the excess stain off you can rub a bit more and/or harder on the areas that had darker wood so as to even out the colour a bit. You can get close enough for jazz just by doing this on each coat.
Anyway, I put the last coat of stain on at about 7am this morning. The instructions on the can say that you can apply polyurethane after 8 hours. I waited 12 hours, but it wasn't really long enough... I was picking up stain with the brush. Not a lot, though. I think it will be fine. I laid on one heavy coat of poly with a brush (the raking light helps a lot with this procedure, as well!) and in the morning I'll see if I can add another coat. I'll probably put four coats on, scuff-sanding in between, then let it dry for a good week, then level the finish, then wipe on another couple of coats of wiping poly. I'm not good enough with a brush to be able to brush on a finish coat of poly, so my final coats are best wiped on. Safer. :) I'll let you know how it goes...

Refinishing the Sofa Table Top -- Seal and fill the pores

2009-08-17T04:33:00.000-07:00

First I need to mix up my shellac. If you use shellac out of a can then you can ignore this. The reason I'm sealing the surface is because I've heard that mahogany, depending on the origin, can be blotchy to stain. The solution to that problem would be a commercial wood conditioner, or for we penny pinchers, a wash-coat of shellac.
Above we see a container of methyl hydrate, which is a very pure (but very poisonous, and probably carcinogenic) alcohol, flanked by two jars. One has my mixed shellac and the other is full of un-mixed shellac flakes. Shellac flakes, properly stored, will keep for years. Once mixed it will begin losing its ability to cure in about a year, the books say.
Shellac can be mixed in different strengths. For a wash-coat you want a one-pound-cut which means one pound of shellac dissolved in one gallon of alcohol. This equates to one ounce, by weight, of shellac in one cup of alcohol. I weighed an ounce of shellac, and added it to a cup of alcohol in a jam jar. Plastic or glass is fine to store shellac. Metal isn't. Every fifteen minutes or so for an hour I'd give the jar a swirl to help the flakes dissolve. You could shake the jar, but there's always that chance that you might seal the lid shut from the inside if you get shellac up that high in the jar, so I just swirl it. Then I let it sit over night to settle. This will allow any dirt, bits of bugs, and wax to settle out. In the morning I pour a bit of the clear stuff at the top into a bowl and wipe it on the prepared, previously-wiped-again-with-mineral-spirits-and-a-clean-rag sofa table top with a clean cloth. Job done.

An hour later the top is ready to have the pores filled. This I have never done. At all. I checked my books and got at it. I mixed up some water putty into a thin paste. Water putty is similar to shellac flakes in that in its dry form it lasts for ages. You mix it with water (surprise!) and the powder can be mixed as thick or thin as you want.

Once my putty was mixed up I wanted to darken it. The fastest way to darken something is using carbon-black, and the most accessible form of that, for me, is india ink. I added some to the putty, and that made it a dark gray, but I wanted something vaguely reddish-brownish so I added some burnt-sierra artists colour. For a water-based mixture like this you could use acrylic colour, but I have a weird water-mixable oil colour that has the benefit of being mixable in either oil or water, so I don't have to worry quite as much about putting the wrong colour somewhere. If I had been able to find dry pigments I would have gone that route instead.
Anyway, I mixed the colour in and applied the paste to the table top with a swirling motion to force the paste into the pores of the wood.

I waited about 15 minutes and then wiped as much of it off as I could. If I had been thinking I would have wiped the edges while it was still wet to make sure none of the putty was over-hanging. As it was it was quite irritating to remove the dried putty from the finished surfaces.
After wiping off the excess I allowed the table to dry over night, then sanded it by hand with 180 grit in the direction of the grain to remove the raised grain and putty residue.

Refinishing the Sofa Table Top -- Stripping the top

2009-08-17T04:17:00.000-07:00

I have already oiled the majority of the sofa table, but I did not oil the top because I wanted to completely refinish the top. I don't really have much experience doing this, but that doesn't usually stop me from trying.
So I took the cabinet scraper to the top only to find that the top isn't level. Apparently the pieces were sanded separately then glued together, because the joints aren't level. The cabinet scraper couldn't get it all because it kept riding up on the higher pieces so the blade would stop cutting. If I kept going to cut down the higher piece I would have torn out the far edge. Having been stopped at this point with the cabinet scraper I switched to a card scraper to get the majority of the rest of the finish off. There were some spots that I just could get at, though, at least not without removing a lot of material. An example is shown below - at the joints there is finish left, and it's ugly. I wiped the wood with alcohol to make it more visible.
I asked for opinions on the Canadian Woodworking finishing forum and decided to just sand the bejeebers out of the joints to level them, then blend them in. It won't be really flat, but it will be closer than it was.
After more scraping, and sanding, I ended up with this:

Now I let it sit over night. I wanted all of the dust to settle before I started doing any finishing.
The next step will be the seal the surface and fill the pores before staining and clear-coating.

Oiling the Sofa Table

2009-08-14T12:46:00.001-07:00

The only real difference between what I'm doing to this sofa table and my normal method of 'Finish Reviving' is that I'm adding colour to the oil mixture. The reason I'm adding the colour is because the table is covered with scratches. Light scratches would be fixed by a coat of normal 'reviver', but some of the scratches on this table are downright huge - bordering on being gouges. They need some colour. I've spent a couple of days playing with commercial solutions, like finishing pens and even wax sticks and nothing has worked very well, quite frankly. At least, nothing has worked better than the cheap solution that I'm going to outline below.

I start with mineral spirits to wipe the piece down with. As I will get into later, I should have spent more time wiping the piece down. Or at least, I should have paid more attention when I was wiping the piece down. If there are problems that show up when you wipe on the mineral spirits then deal with them now rather than later. After wiping down the piece with mineral spirits I add boiled linseed oil to the mineral spirits left in the container. I want a rich mixture (more oil than mineral spirits) because in this case I added a good, solid slurp of wood stain, and since the stain is thin it will replace some of the mineral spirits. As long as the stain is not water-based it will mix right in. I just grabbed the darkest stain that I had and dumped some in. I ended up with some dark finish reviver as seen below:
I then used a clean rag to generously apply the oil mixture to the table. I have a piece of hardboard protecting my bench from drips and whatnot, because I want to be able to slop this stuff on with gay abandon. Get it in all the nooks and crannies. I saved the left-over reviver in a jam jar because after it dries I'll be looking for spots on the table that didn't get dark enough.
I've already noticed an area that I should have spotted while I was wiping the piece down with mineral spirits - a spot of adhesive of some sort. If I had noticed it in time then I could have saved myself some grief. As it is I'll have to strip that spot, then remove the adhesive, then apply the oil again, and wipe it down again. Ah well. Here's the table as it stands right now. I didn't oil the top because I'm going to refinish the top completely - it's too badly damaged and needs to be scraped.
Here's the table with the oil mixture slopped on. I had it upside down for convenience, and I used a corner of the rag to push the oil mixture into the 'decorative grooving'. After the 10 or 15 minutes, I'll wipe off the excess, and...
Here it is. It's looking a LOT better. The vast majority of the problems that it had have been sufficiently camouflaged by the oil mixture. Some of the really big chips need a bit more colour, and I'll get to that in a future posting. Right now I have to wait for this thing to dry over night.
A hint I'd like to pass along is to also pay attention when you're wiping the extra oil off. It's not that hard to miss a spot, and you don't want that, because the oil will take forever to dry when it's that thick, and it will dry with a dimpled orange-peel finish. If you catch it after a day and try to wipe it off then it will be sticky and it will grab the cloth and things will be unpleasant. Use a rag damp with mineral spirits to sort the problem out, then you'll have to wait for it to dry again.

Oh, and don't leave rags wet with linseed oil piled up in a garbage can. Although it's quite rare it's possible for oily rags to spontaneously combust, and linseed oil is famous for that. Leave the rags spread out on the bench and they will dry over night. Once the rags are dry they can be safely thrown in a garbage can.

Different Ways to Scrape Flat Surfaces

2009-08-14T11:52:00.000-07:00

There are different ways to scrape a flat surface. Above we see the three most common methods for furniture. Leftmost is a card scraper, which is simply a rectangle of sheet metal which, properly sharpened, will do a lovely job. Behind is a scraping plane, and to the right is a cabinet scraper.
Each method has its pros and cons. The most maneuverable and by far the cheapest is the card scraper. Since the card scraper is held in the hands you can hold it at whatever angle you like. You can push or pull it as you like. You can work on a tiny area of tear-out without affecting the area nearby, and you can work pretty far into a corner when you need to. These are all good things. The drawback to a card scraper is that it is by far the most physically demanding to use. Your thumbs get hot, and your hands get tired. It's miserable to do a large piece with a card scraper. Additionally, since it has no 'sole' it can't be relied on at all to level a piece or even keep an already-level piece level. It can dig into softer areas. You get a smooth finish, but not necessarily a flat one.
The cabinet scraper is more expensive. It's far less physically demanding to use, and it has a sole so it keeps the surface reasonably level. The main drawback is that you can't 'finesse' it much. The scraper blade is held at an angle set by the cast-in angle of the body. You can adjust the hook of the scraper blade to make the unit cut more or less aggressively, and you can add more or less pressure on the screw to adjust the aggressiveness, but you're still locked in to that angle.
The scraper plane has the longest sole, so it keep the surface the flattest. This also means that it is not very useful for working small areas of reversing grain. The scraper plane is the most expensive, but while it shares the ease of use of the cabinet scraper it also has a level of adjustability that the cabinet scraper can't even dream of - you can adjust the angle. This means that you can take a wide, thin shaving, or a narrow, thin shaving without re-tuning the blade. You can fine-tune the presentation of the blade to the wood and you are done - all that's left is to push it. No stress, no anguished thumbs. It's lovely.

Note that a scraper should take shavings as seen below. If all you are getting is dust then you need to sharpen your scraper... but that's a posting for another day.

Fixing a Dull Finish

2009-08-14T10:36:00.000-07:00

This is by far the easiest repair to make to a finish. You have two general options, though it's best to do both.
The first option is a coat of wax. Regular paste wax can do wonders for a finish, and properly applied it will give the finish a small amount of additional protection. If you use a dark paste wax on dark furniture then it will help to hide small scratches and whatnot, as well.
The second option, and the one that I prefer as a first step, is to revive the finish by cleaning and oiling it. You can buy commercial "Finish Reviver" liquids, but essentially you can get that effect with mineral spirits and linseed oil.
Take this old drawer, seen below. I was given an old dresser by a lady I worked with. It's a beautiful old thing. Hand-cut dovetails on the drawers, and good, thick burl veneer on the solid faces. It's good, honest furniture. It also looks like it hasn't gotten any love for a long, long time. I've had it for over a year and I know I haven't given it any. Sure, it does a fine job of keeping my underwear off the floor, but it's dull and un-distinguished looking.
Now, look again at that drawer. That washed out look comes from exposure to UV rays (sunlight). A dead giveaway is that the finish is darker and more 'lively' where it's in the lee of the drawer pull... the light must have been coming from the right hand side for most of the dresser's life. This dark spot gives me my first inkling of what the drawer should look like.

I'm going to revive the finish on this one drawer face. First I take a bit of mineral spirits and pour it into a container. I rub the finish in an inconspicuous spot. Why? If the finish was french polish (shellac) then the mineral spirits would take the finish right off. That's not what I want! So I check to see if I can rub any brown off of the finish with straight mineral spirits. Nope. It's probably coated with a cellulose lacquer. Okay, so I wipe the drawer face down with mineral spirits and that helps to remove dirt and prepare the surface. Now I add boiled linseed oil to the bowl. I want at least 25% linseed oil, but 50% wouldn't be a problem. You could make yourself a container of 'reviver' with 25% linseed oil and 75% mineral spirits. I should do that, but I haven't bothered yet. Now I wipe the mixture onto the drawer front. I leave it pretty thick because I'm going to wipe off the excess after 10 minutes, and I'll give it a good buff with a clean cloth. After it dries over night it's good to go.
I put the drawer back into the dresser so you can play 'spot the drawer'. Can you guess which one has the 'revived finish'?
That drawer is looking pretty sweet. Now I have to do the rest of them, 'cause it looks funny.

I sincerely hope the lady who gave me this dresser doesn't read this blog, otherwise she'll be on my doorstep with a shotgun trying to get it back!

Since it's my dresser so it doesn't have to go back to some anxious relative, I'll give the oil a whole week to really dry, and then I'll wax the piece using a dark wax. It's a 'belt and suspenders' thing. The waxing can be done with the drawers in place (and still full of clothes) but you'd be best off emptying the drawers to do the oiling.

This whole job took about 15 minutes to do, and that included waiting 10 minutes for the oil to 'set' before I wiped it off. Doing the whole dresser would probably take 20 minutes. It would be best to stand the dresser on a cloth - if you drip oil on your floor you'll regret it, though it can be cleaned up easily (before it dries) with mineral spirits.
Don't oil the insides of drawers or furniture - it takes forever to dry and it will smell funny until it does.

I'll put another post up about waxing in particular.

Clamping for PVA glue

2009-08-11T16:09:00.001-07:00

There was just a discussion on the Canadian Woodworking Forum that started to go off in tangents and one point made was that in R. Bruce Hoadley's book "Understanding Wood" he mentions that PVA glue actually requires a lot of pressure for proper adhesion. This struck me as a surprise. I often don't clamp my glued items at all, and he's referencing one or two hundred pounds per square inch for common North American woods. That just flies in the face of my experience, meagre though it may be, so I decided to do a test to make up my own mind about how necessary it is to apply tons of force. I built a simple test rig. The pieces are shown below:

The two pieces of 2x4 have 3/4" holes bored in them. These holes fit over the round bench dogs in my workbench so that I can use my vise to pull the rig apart to test the glue. The middle piece will be glued with one 2x4 piece on each side, so that both joints (clamped and un-clamped) are pulled at the same time. The first to fail is the weaker of the two. The larger 1" hole in the central board is to allow clamping it to the 2x4 on the 'pressure' side while not clamping the non-pressure side. This way I can do both of the joints at the same time so there is no worry about one joint having an extra day to cure before the test. The joints were glued within a few minutes of one another.
In the second picture below we see the clamped side of the rig being clamped by a bar clamp tightened up as far as I could get it (should be around 500lbs of pressure) and the other side has almost no pressure - it's being done in the manner of a 'rubbed joint', so the only clamping pressure is the weight of the workpiece above (and the clamp). Total weight - less than five pounds, so it's probably less than 1% of the clamping force.
I normally use a modified PVA glue - a yellow glue - so I bought a bottle of bog-standard white PVA glue for this test.

I'll let this sit over night and then test it in the morning.

Okay, it is now the morning (time flies, eh?) and I have done the test. The un-clamped joint was the one that failed, but it tore up the wood in the process, so it didn't go terribly easily. The results can be seen below: I'm going to do the test one last time after planing the failed joint again to clean it up. The reason is because I want to be sure that the unclamped joint was sitting right when it dried. When I did it the first time it had the weight of the clamp hanging on one side, possibly causing problems. Today the clamped joint won't need a clamp so the unclamped joint should be a lot happier. We'll see how it goes. It will be one more data point, anyway.

Okay, so I re-did the test, and once again it took a very hard pull to separate the pieces. So hard a pull that I am not really interested in trying to continue the experiments, as I fear for my bench. The non-clamped joint let go again, but again it went only with damage to both pieces so I am convinced that the un-clamped joint is more than strong enough. And remember - this was completely un-clamped. I am certain that a moderate clamping force is more than enough to make the joint far stronger than need be.

So, when next you clamp your glue joints put more effort into getting the surfaces flat rather than clamping them with tons of force.

A Question for the Readers

2009-08-06T09:20:00.000-07:00

My purpose for having this blog is to share knowledge, and help to maintain the knowledge base for hand-tool woodworking. There are many who do this better than I do, but I like to stick my oar in and see if we get anywhere.
The question, though, stems from this: As I looked at the table that I'm refinishing for the Finish Repair Project, I got to thinking of all of the wonderful tangents I could run off in. Scraping begets sharpening scrapers, and where a cabinet scraper works better than a hand scraper, or where a scraper plane trumps them both. I could talk about using lacquer sticks, shellac sticks, or wax sticks for fixing finishes - I could fix a few of the scratches and gouges before I strip the finish, just for the sake of educating myself and others.
Here's the real question: Do the tangents help, or do they cloud the issue? Should I focus on the task at hand and just document the project, and not worry about tangents unless people specifically ask for clarification?
Give me your opinions. Please!

Finish Repair Project

2009-08-06T06:43:00.000-07:00

I've got this piece of furniture that came to me from a relative. It's got good bones, is structurally sound, and I like the lines of it. It's solid oak. The finish, however, is the pits.
I haven't quite decided what kind of table this is supposed to be. The size is right for a sofa table, but it's symmetrical front to back and doesn't sit flat against a wall or other surface, so while it probably would be okay for a sofa table, it wouldn't do for a side table. The openings in the top are to accept glass panels, which I have. I'm not even sure what style I'd call it. At first glance I thought the legs had a sort of 'Queen Anne' look, but the feet go the wrong way. Does anyone here know what style this would be considered?

Anyway, this project is a departure for me, so I'll probably be posting a lot about it. I'm hoping that I get a sense of accomplishment from restoring it, as it is 'frat-house grade' furniture, right now. Regardless of the outcome, I'm looking forward to getting some practice with scrapers and finishing.

The general approach will be to remove the tattered remnants of the original finish, steam out any dents, fill any remaining gouges, decide on a new finish, and apply it. I had considered repairing the existing finish, but decided against it. It's pretty rough, and some of the bare patches are pretty big, and in very, very visible locations.

Oh, and below are a couple of detail shots of some of the damage on this piece of furniture.

Chopping to a line

2009-08-02T12:59:00.000-07:00

There is a simple technique for chopping to a line with a chisel. This is important when dovetailing but comes up in other situations as well. Look at the picture below. I left quite a distance between the chisel edge and the line I'm going for (I should have left a bit less, truth be told).
Now look at the same chisel in the same location, except now I've given it two sharp raps straight down (the chisel is vertical).
The chisel is now touching the line. The bevel of the chisel forced it 'off course' and compressed the wood against the face of the chisel. Pull the chisel out and chop at an angle to remove some material as shown below:
When this wedge of material has been removed you will now be able to set the chisel in the cut again, but by angling the chisel 5 or 10 degrees over the waste material you will be able to hit it hard with the mallet to give a slight under-cut, but not corrupt the edge you have already chopped in its correct location.
When you do the same thing from the other side you'll have severed the piece and have two true edges on it. Lovely.

Cut-To-Line or Pare-To-Line?

2009-08-02T12:42:00.000-07:00

I did an experiment. I have never been fond of the notion of paring a dovetail intentionally. Hey, we've all pared to a line after we screwed up the sawing of it, or when there are whiskers left over after chopping, but to saw cut short of the line with the expressed purpose of adding an extra step to pare to the line... It just never seemed sensible to me. However! Never let it be said that I was not Open Minded! An experiment was in order.
I dug a little example pin-board out of my scrap pile and found another piece of wood to cut tails in. The board in question was, sadly, not quite the same thickness as the pin board, and that came back to bite me just a wee bit, but more on that later.

So I marked out each end of this little bit of wood from the same pin board. One set on each end. I then marked them 'saw' and 'pare' and started sawing. The 'pare' end was sawed with about 1/16" left to pare away to get to the line. The 'saw' end was sawed right to the line. Here is the 'pare' end:

The 'saw' end went together as per normal. Unfortunately, since the pin board had come out of the scrap bin and it was slightly thinner material than the tail board, the pins are a bit short, but that's of no real importance here. What matters is the fit between the pins and tails. Here is the 'saw' end of the board:
It turned out well enough, tight enough that the glue-up would sort out its minor problems. It went together with firm hand pressure, and squeaked as it did so (you've got to like the squeak!).
The pared end was a shambles. Why? Despite my spending at least three times longer on it than the saw-to-line end, and using honest-to-gosh paring chisels sharp enough to do cataract surgery with, it was miserable to try to pare a flat plane in the right location. Why is that? That's because there's only a scribe mark on one side of the piece! How are you supposed to get the plane in the right place with only a depth and one side? it was misery. No doubt if you were a person who used various jigs and appliances to cut dovetails such that you didn't have to worry about maintaining the vertical plane, etc. you'd be alright, but I found the experience far from rosy.
Oh, here's a shot of the pared-end of the board, showing the gappy dovetails:

Bottom line? The saw, properly used, always gives you a nice, flat plane and is far more predictable than trying to pare free-hand after the fact. I'm going to stick with sawing to the line, particularly since it's hugely faster!

Layout methods

2009-07-30T10:48:00.000-07:00

Beyond the selection of the type of gauge to use to get the angle you want (dealt with moons ago in this entry) there is the greater issue of laying out the tails and pins on the boards. The first question is whether to do a formal layout at all. Frank Klaus just eye-balls the angle and placing. It certainly works for him.

For those of us who want to do a formal layout we have a couple of options - either the ruler or the dividers. I have seen articles and videos suggesting that the way to lay out dovetails is to decide how many tails you want (3, in this example), add one to this number (to get 4), set a ruler diagonally on the piece of wood such that it spans some multiple of the number that you're looking for (in this case 4", but it could be 8", 12cm, 400mm, whatever you want that is divisible by, in this case, 4), then mark the divisions and use a square to run the lines to the end of the board (hoping that the end of the board is nice and square so you end up where you think you'll end up... otherwise you have to use a marking gauge of some sort to run the lines down to the end). At this point you will now have the centers of your prospective tails marked, so you use the ruler again to mark the width of the tails and now, at least, you know where the tails are, so you can get your gauge and mark the profiles. And if you have any energy left after all of that then you might be able to saw one or two.

There is an alternative, thankfully.

I learned about this method from a Rob Cosman video, and he attributes it to Alan Peters, and from an interview with Peters it seems that he originated it, though certainly it might have been independently discovered by someone else at some point. Regardless, it's a wonderful method and here it is:
Take two pairs of dividers. Set one pair to be the width you want for your half-pins (about half the thickness of the material, is common). Mark the width of your half pins (one on each side). If you cut tails first then you'll be marking the end-grain of the piece. If you cut tails first (like me) then you'll be marking on the outside face of the piece.

This is one of those things that is really simple, but hard to explain without showing it.
Now we set the second pair of dividers to an arbitrary value that represents the pitch of the joint. The pitch is the width of a tail plus the width of a pin. We lightly step the dividers across the piece, starting in the half-pin mark on one side, and the number of steps that the dividers take between the half-pin marks is the number of tails you would have, and the amount that the dividers over-steps the half-pin mark on the other side is the exposed width of the pin when the joint is assembled. If you're one of those skinny-pin people then you want this space to be tight.
Above we see a picture that probably should have been zoomed in more. Anyway, the dividers took two steps and then over-shot the right hand half-pin mark by about 1/4". That's a good pin size for my tastes, so I'll walk the dividers over again and push down to leave marks. I'll step it from the left hand half-pin mark, and then from the right hand half-pin mark, so that it leaves two sets of steps as shown below:

That set of marks establishes the layout for the pins (or tails if you had marked the end-grain).

I hope that makes sense. I might need to rewrite this with better pictures.

I just added the following picture that hopefully adds some sense to the above.

What comes first? The pins or the tails?

2009-07-30T10:04:00.000-07:00

The first 'religious' discussion for this batch of postings is whether to cut the pins first or the tails first.

There is a reason to cut tails first in a production environment - you can stack half a dozen boards in the vise and cut the tails on all of the boards at once. This, arguably, saves you a bit of time. Not a lot of time, as the time spent cutting is not great compared to the time spent chopping, but in a production environment a bit of time saved can be important.
Rob Cosman - arguably the most influential of the current crop of dovetail gurus - tells us to cut the tails first.

Looks like there is plenty of reason to cut the tails first, eh?

Well... maybe not.

There is a drawback to cutting the tails first. A big one. That drawback is that you need to scribe the tails onto the end-grain of the pin board. There are three problems involved in scribing from tails to the pinboard. The first is that you are scribing onto end-grain, so it's much harder to see the resulting line even if the end-grain of the pin-board has been planed to perfection. The second is that you are trying to scribe inside a small cavity where there is not enough room for a pencil or even an awl, so you have to use a blade, and that leads us to the third problem. The third problem is that you have to use a thin blade to scribe, and that can be hard to do without taking a slice from your tail or taking the wrong angle, as the blade wants to follow the path its on whether that path is the right one or not.

If, however, you cut the pins first and use them to scribe the tails then you are marking onto face grain, and you have plenty of room to use a pencil or an awl.

I always get better results when I cut the pins first, and Frank Klaus, the Godfather of Dovetailing, says to do the pins first. So did Tage Frid, before his unfortunate passing.

For me my preference is, and will always be, to cut the pins first.

Thoughts on Dovetails. Again.

2009-07-30T09:59:00.000-07:00

After a bit of a hiatus I find myself with some time on my hands, so I'm back, and thinking about dovetails.

What is it about hand-cut dovetails that plagues the thoughts of the hobby woodworker? It seems you can't swing a dead cat without hitting a blog or two agonizing about the nuances of hand-cutting dovetails. Are we sheep that need to follow the herd? It seems so, and now it's my turn. Ba-a-a-a-a-a. :)

The following topics will be covered in the next few entries-
- Pins first or tails first?
- Layout methods
- Cut-to-line or pare-to-line?
- How do you chisel to the line?
- Best type of chisel for dovetailing?

What IS a hand tool?

2009-05-24T04:12:00.000-07:00

What is a hand tool, really? What distinguishes a hand tool from a non-hand-tool? We would all agree that a simple chisel or gouge is a hand tool. No worries, there. After that, it starts to get a bit... foggy.
I've been feeling guilty about my electric lathe. It somewhat offends my hand tool ideals. Maybe I should have a foot-powered pole-lathe. That would be a hand tool, right? Or would it? A lathe is a machine. It turns the workpiece so that you can use gouges and chisels (hand tools) to act upon it. So a foot-powered pole-lathe is a body-powered machine, as opposed to an electric machine, but it's still a machine and not a hand tool. In that respect any lathe 'should' offend my hand tool ideals.
I'm safe with the rest of my tools though, right? Hand saws, chisels, mallets, drawknife, spokeshaves... spokeshaves? Yes, spokeshaves are alright, as are hand planes, because although they do the holding of the cutting tool for you, they don't move the cutting tool or workpiece on their own. They're not a machine in that respect. What about an egg-beater drill? Well, an egg-beater drill is a machine. It's a hand-powered machine, but in the purest sense of the word an egg-beater drill is no more a hand-tool than a cordless drill is. I, however, feel that an egg-beater drill is much closer to my hand tool ideals than the cordless drill, so obviously I must not follow the purest sense of the term 'hand tool'.
Is it just about the electricity? Is that all it is? If I had a table-saw, planer, band-saw, and all manner of wood-working machinery in a line-shaft-driven shop with a few shetland ponies driving it, would that be a 'hand tool shop'? Obviously not, and yet there would be no electricity.
It's must be the mechanization. The fact that the force of work comes from an agency other than the body of the worker (or at least a human helper). So a great-wheel lathe doesn't greatly offend my ideals, even though the turner isn't powering it (the helper is) but a pole-lathe would be closer to my ideals, because the turner powers the lathe directly. Even closer to my ideals would be a drawknife and shaving horse - bypassing the lathe entirely. What if somebody hooked up a recumbent bicycle to a small lathe such that they can sit and pedal and turn pens or whatever? That would be cool, but is it less of a 'hand tool' than a pole lathe? Is it just the antiquity of the idea that lends respectability to a tool? So are my cutting-edge (har!) Veritas planes less of a hand tool than an old woodie?
These are tricky questions to answer, but the process might be worthwhile.

Photographing Small Projects

2009-05-18T04:12:00.001-07:00

Here's a simple write-up on how I set up a still-table for photographing small objects. A wood turner, for instance, might find such a set-up useful.
I based my still-table on an old work-mate.

I set a piece of old counter-top on top of the work-mate to give me a larger, flat surface. I then added two cheap swing-arm lights with full-spectrum daylight bulbs.
I added a piece of black felt from a fabric store, and by picking different wattages for the bulbs in the lights, and moving them back and forth, I can get different effects.

And here is the final image from this little example shoot:

I guess my point is that you don't need a particularly elaborate setup. By using the swing-arm lamps and the camera on a tripod with no flash, you can preview the image and get the shot you want without much trouble or expense.

Alternative in-use lathe tool storage

2009-05-10T04:12:00.001-07:00

I have seen this style of tool rack around here and there. It can be handy for people who don't have much storage space near their lathe, and can't reach the lathe tool storage easily. There is a block under the ways with a tee-nut in it, and the black knob has a threaded stud in it such that when you tighten the knob it pinches everything together to secure it to the ways.
I see two drawbacks to this style of rack, which is why I haven't, personally, made one. The first drawback is that the tools are stored blade-down so you can't easily see what you are grabbing. The second drawback is that it precludes you from easily sliding the tail-stock all the way back to get it out of your way when you're hollowing or working on a face.
Still and all, it's a far better solution than many, so I thought I'd show it.
The example above is owned by Mack, the same guy who made the other rack that I based my rack on.

Lathe tool storage - finished for now

2009-05-09T17:59:00.000-07:00

So here is the current state of affairs. It stores both chucks, the jumbo jaws, the various live and dead centers, tool rests, and calipers. The tool rack above has been modified for storage of a knockout bar and extra-thin cutoff tool. I have more tools on the way, so the storage will need to be expanded soon. I'm adding a special place for the drill chuck and a few bits. I also want to make a proper depth drill.

More Storage for Lathe Stuff

2009-05-08T04:04:00.001-07:00

Those who have been reading this languid journey for a while will know that one of my favourite solutions to tool storage problems involves a sheet of wood on the wall, and a bijillion shaker pegs all over it. It's the old-timey peg-board.
I've got the sheet of wood set up, and now I'm trying to arrange upon it the things that I want to store. No doubt I will change my mind a bijillion times during this process, but I'll get there eventually.
I haven't had much time to work on this recently, having had many call-ins of late, but I'll get it done soon enough, and then my workshop can be tidied properly and all will be well again.

New Medallion saws

2009-05-03T14:57:00.001-07:00

These are my two new Medallion hand saws that followed me home recently. The bottom one is a five-point rip saw, breasted, with progressive rake. Lovely saw. The blade is ground for minimal set. The tote, shown below, is of a figured apple wood, and has plenty of real estate for a good two-handed grip for heavy ripping.

The other saw is an eight-point cross-cut saw with a caramelized birds-eye maple tote. Just lovely. This saw is also ground. It cuts like a laser, but like a fine dovetail saw you only get one chance to get your line right on the cut. It's not easy to correct the cut once it has been started. Of course, this is only a problem when cutting joinery where you're cutting with the line of the saw teeth perpendicular to the face of the board. If you're cross-cutting normally where you have the teeth at a 45 degree angle to the face of the board it's no problem to keep it in line. In the photo below, note the nib on the rip saw below the cross-cut tote. Both saws have nibs. :)
Beautiful saws with beautiful totes (check out those lamb's tongues on the totes!) that are hand-made by a guy who still cares about quality. Just lovely.

Experimental Rack is finished. For now.

2009-05-02T05:38:00.000-07:00

Yes, this rack is done. Sort of. I mean, I finished cobbling it together, and it works, but it needs some tweaking. The bottom rail needs to be moved up a bit to give the chisels a bit more force inwards, for one thing.

Additionally, the 5/8" bowl gouge (second from the right) actually touches the wall when it's in the rack. This is sub-optimal. Another obvious issue is the little 1/4" spindle gouge, which looks ready to fall right out of the rack, though in actuality it's probably more solidly placed than any of the others. I think I'll make a couple of 'bushings' to adapt individual pockets for the two tools that don't fit right, then it should be golden.

This, of course, is only the first of a series of storage devices that will be required for the lathe. I need to store tool rests, chucks, centers, and all manner of goodies. Can't wait. :)

Turning Tool Rack

2009-05-01T17:19:00.000-07:00

It is time to make some racking/storage for my turning tools. My shop is becoming a nightmare with stuff piled everywhere. The general concept of this rack comes from American Woodworking, March 2008 edition, and more particularly I found out about it from a fellow turner on the Canadian Woodworking forum. This is a picture of the rack that he made, based on the aforementioned plans:
This is a very simple rack and yet it appeals to me for several reasons. Firstly, it doesn't really matter how long the tools are, and turning tools can vary a fair bit in length. Secondly, the bottom board being angled is very clever because it not only sheds shavings but it 'pushes' the tool handle into the recesses to hold the chisel in place. I think it's very clever, so I'm trying the idea out.

First, to make the 'corrugated' cross-pieces. I take a board and lay out the hole centers and drill about half way through with a hole saw in a brace and bit.
Now I flip the board over and finish the holes from the other side. By drilling them part way from each side they won't splinter out on the back. After drilling I planed each side to get the worst of the whiskers off, then I re-drew the line through the hole centers and ripped the holes in half. Now with another rip cut I will have two corrugated boards.

All I need now are the sides and the bottom piece. Easy peasey. I'll probably finish making it in the morning and post it then.

It's been a while

2009-04-29T16:06:00.000-07:00

Yes, it's been a while, gentle readers.

Several circumstances conspired to keep me from my appointed blogging. The first circumstance was that I totally butchered one of the dovetails on my chest of drawers. I chopped a tail when I should have chopped a pin. I didn't have enough material to re-make the piece. Disgusted with myself, I haven't looked at the project since. Every now and then I thought to myself that I really should get back to it, and get back to the blog. Needless to say, I didn't.
Then I had a bit of a focus change and the shop didn't see much action for a couple of months. My interests can be cyclical.
Now we find ourselves in a deeply wood-ish phase, but not with flat things. No, I find myself draw to the dark side: wood turning.
Oh, I had a wood lathe. Two, actually, but one hardly counts as it is a nasty off-shore piece of garbage. The other wood lathe that I had is the one that I blogged about back in late October / early November 2008. It's a very solid bit of kit with a great deal of character, but that character comes with a price - the headstock spindle thread is a rare one, and every other aspect of it tended to be non-standard, making purchasing accessories an exercise in irritation. I played with it for a while, then I bought another one. A made-in-Canada classic General 160-1
Above we see my lathe, ready for action with a partially-turned bowl in the chuck. Yes, the chuck. I was able to effortlessly buy a proper chuck for it because it has a bog-standard 1"x8tpi spindle thread. Nice.
For the first week I didn't have the chuck yet so I was doing spindle turning, but once I had the chuck I was able to start on bowls, as well as boxes and other cup-chucked items. The world is my burrito. :)

Above we see a few items I have turned so far. There are two beech bowls, one box of an unknown wood, one maple froe-club at the back, a maple carver's mallet at the right, and in the left-front is a spinning top which I made as an experiment.

So turning seems to be my new thing. I'll try to be a dutiful blogger and keep you abreast of developments, gentle readers, as I embark on this new and unusually addictive aspect of woodworking.

Mike

Hand-cut cross-grain rabbets

2009-01-11T08:00:00.000-08:00

Now to cut the rabbets. The rabbet locations were all set out directly from the story-pole. The marks were placed on both sides and the marks joined with a straightedge rather than relying on a square to be square.

I planed the edge of a piece of scrap to act as a fence for my back-saw. I used a piece of material the same thickness as the cheek on the saw to space the fence out from the line. I could have also put the cheek on the other side of the saw so that the saw blade could run directly against the fence, but then you have issues with the teeth rubbing against the fence due to the kerf width. I also could have used a consistent thickness of material for the fence, and then made the cheek narrower so that it would ride on the top of the fence instead of on the surface of the material as a depth-stop. The benefit to running the blade directly against the fence is that you don't have to space the fence back to locate the cut. Regardless, this way works. I cut the first slot, then spaced over for the second slot, making sure to cut on the waste side both times.

I then used a chisel and mallet to remove most of the waste from the slot. After that I finished it with a router plane. I used the spear-point cutter for cross-grain work, even though it wasn't really that important since the rabbet was narrow and the sides were pre-cut.
At this point the rabbets are cut, but I still haven't cut this long piece of material into individual sides/top/bottom. This is because it's easier to hold a longer piece to the bench without having issues with clamps getting in the way of the router plane.
Next I will cut the sides, top and bottom from this material, and then cut the dovetails to join the sides, top and bottom together.

Beginning the bedside chest

2009-01-11T06:33:00.000-08:00

I've decided on the term 'bedside chest' for the piece of furniture I'm making. I think it's reasonably descriptive.
Oh, and I mentioned to a lady at work that I was building it, and she told me that she has one in her daughter's room, so they can't be as rare as my experience would indicate.

Anyway, today I'm starting on the carcase. I have made a few design changes already. The most pertinent is that I will be using web-frames for drawer runners instead of using solid wood. This will be more work, but I don't happen to have enough wood to do solid, and I'm trying to use up what I have, so web-frames it will be.

Regardless of how I choose to support the drawers I will need to cut rabbets to receive the supports. Cutting stopped rabbets is not my idea of a good time, so instead I'm going to cut rabbets all the way across and then add extra pieces to extend the sides, which will stop the rabbets.

Below you can see the material I'm using for the case, with the story-pole lying on top. This material is 3/4" thick by 16" wide laminated southern yellow pine. It comes in 8' lengths and it is cheap like borscht. I think these things cost me less than $20 each. I use them a lot for shop fixtures and such. Since I paint everything it really, really doesn't matter that there are finger-joints here and there. It's a huge time-saver. The first step I'm going to take is to cut the dado for the back to fit in. Since I'm using virtually the entire 8' piece for the two sides, top and bottom of the case, I'm just going to rabbet the whole length in one go.
And done. The Veritas skew-rabbet plane (it's a moving filister, really) is my new best friend in the shop. I love it. After cutting the dado for the back I mark out the rabbets for the drawer supports. Once they had been marked out I made up a cheek-piece for my back-saw to allow me to cut the sides of the rabbet. Once the sides are cut I will use a router plane to remove the waste. Below we see the 'modified' back-saw lying on the case side that has been laid out for the rabbets. The cheek piece is just a bit of scrap that was planed to the right width to allow for a 1/4" depth of cut.
More coming soon...

Design Decisions

2009-01-01T13:40:00.001-08:00

Now I must decide how to join the carcase. The standard method in country furniture is to use dovetails to join the casework, then hide the ugly things with moulding. Now, granted that nowadays we see dovetails as being a desireable feature in furniture, but back then it was strictly utilitarian joinery, done for structural reasons only, and hidden away if at all possible. The only ones you could see without trying hard was dovetails in drawers, where it was just too much work to hide them, and when the drawer was closed you couldn't see them, anyway. So this is my current dilemma. Do I dovetail the carcase and add moulding (which I don't really want to do) or do I use the dovetails and leave them exposed with the knowledge that someone would have to be crawling on the floor to see them, and even then they'll be painted and not very prominent. Tough choice. Of course, I could claim it's a Shaker-inspired design and just bang it together with cut nails. :)

Below we see an exploded view of how dovetails would normally be hidden in country furniture. The side and top of the case are dovetailed and then the applied top covers the view from the top and the moulding covers the view from the side. A tall case that was too high to see the top of under normal circumstances wouldn't have an applied top, it would just have tall moulding around the sides. By the way, this is my first real attempt at using SketchUp, so be kind. :)

The Story of the Pole

2008-12-31T12:18:00.000-08:00

A story pole is a narrow piece of material with crucial measurements marked on it in 1:1 scale. You use it as a big ruler. Instead of using a tape measure to measure parts, which involves remembering the dimensions and is a process prone to error, you use the marks on the story pole to directly. No measuring, just comparison. As you can see from looking at the picture of the story-stick on the right you can see the physical construction of the piece in vertical cross-section. If the story-pole is held against a partially complete piece of casework you will be able to verify that the assembly is accurate. Any inaccuracy will be painfully obvious, as will be shown when there is casework to compare to the story pole. You use a rule to produce the story-pole, but inaccuracies in the design show up on the pole.

The design for this bedside dresser was begun with the rough sketch shown in the previous entry, and the design is continued on the story pole. I started by finding a suitable piece of wood. I needed one that was longer than 27", because I had decided on that dimension for the height of the piece. I drew the applied top of the piece on the story pole, then marked 27" below that and drew a baseline. I fleshed out the applied top piece, 3/4" thick (because that's the thickness of the stock that I have) and added the bevel detail. I then drew in the side, though the side 'peters out' near the bottom because the length of it isn't critical because the base overlaps it. I drew the top of the carcase (which is immediately below the applied top) and drew the base. I had decided on 4" tall as the appropriate height of the base, and I wanted the bottom of the carcase to be overlapped a bit to make sure there wouldn't be any cracks showing. This gave me a set location for the top and bottom of the carcase. I grabbed the rule and checked and found that I had 21" between top and bottom. I thought maybe 7" might be okay for the bottom drawer and drew that in, but I didn't like it so I erased that and moved it to 7-1/2". A bit of trial and error got me drawers that are, bottom to top, 7-1/2", 6-1/2", and 5-1/2". These are deep-ish drawers, but I want them to be suitable for clothing, so deep isn't a bad thing, particularly when some depth will be lost to the drawer bottom.

So now the story stick is done in the vertical dimension, and the next step is to flip it over and draw the piece showing the horizontal sizes. Needed will be the top, and indication of the width of the unit, and the width of the base. That's it. Additionally I might throw a detail of the drawer construction on the reverse side, but I haven't even decided whether the drawers will be flush or lipped yet. Right now I'm leaning towards making the drawers with through dovetails then applying faces that will be lipped with a bevel detail similar to the underside of the applied top. Of course, I could change my mind. :) I might build the carcase first and worry about the 'details' later.

Picking a Project

2008-12-31T07:02:00.000-08:00

Here's my wood supply at the moment. The nicest stuff is the poplar on the bottom shelf. There is some left-over pine here and there, including some laminated stuff 12" and 16" wide (handy as all get out for painted work). I don't have any heavy stuff except for some odd lumps of maple and oak, not nearly enough to do four legs for a table. So a frame-and-panel project seems to be in my future. Either that or a chest of some sort.
So what do I actually need? A narrow cupboard would be nice, and I can think of a bijillion things to make for the shop, but I should make this a furniture project, so I think the thing that I need the most right now is a bed-side table for the library (which doubles as a guest bedroom). Right now it has a stack of Rubbermaid containers for a side table, which is functional but perhaps a bit too bloke-ish. So a side table it is. Now, if it was just a table then I'd need legs. I could cut legs out of construction 2x4s, but since that room also lacks a dresser maybe it would make sense to make a bedside 'dresser' with three drawers that would serve all of these purposes. Time to scribble.
Okay, I think I have something feasible. It doesn't look 'unusual' and yet I can't recall seeing anything quite like it. Surely I must have. It's basically just the pedestal part of a desk, squatting on the floor.
Below is the result of my scribbling.

Several elements are left open. I haven't decided how to finish the drawer face edges, and I haven't nailed down the choice for the base. The scrolly-looking Quebec Provincial style doesn't match the simple chamfered top, so that's out. I think I like the plain base best, so far. It might depend somewhat on what I end up doing with the drawer edges.
The pulls I think I have narrowed down. I don't like the hardware pulls of most furniture styles. My personal taste is largely colonial, but I don't like drop pulls. I prefer craftsman or shaker wooden pulls. A single, chunky pull in the center of each drawer will be the most practical, and will look good to me. Usually when I'm working on a project I make it up as I go along, but this one is complicated enough that I'm going to make up a story-stick before I start cutting up material. More on this later.

Lost in Space

2008-12-31T06:24:00.000-08:00

I can't say that I've been too busy to post. Well, I could, but I'd be lying. Instead, I've been too lazy to post. The less I have to do, the less I want to do it.
I just finished a small project. A shelf. Not a big, opulent, dovetailed black-walnut shelf, but a humble, painted pine practical shelf that blends into the wall and quietly does the job of holding my keys when I walk in the door. I should have taken pictures, and done up something special to make up for my woeful lack of energy in maintaining this blog. I didn't. So, for penance I'm going to start a larger project, and document it thoroughly. It will also be a painted project, though I'll likely add some poplar into the mix. Maybe a side-table. I'll mull it over and post back soon. Honest!

Tool Technology

2008-11-30T15:00:00.000-08:00

The recent release of Lee Valley Tools' new Veritas Dovetail Saw has caused some consternation on the hand tool forum I frequent, and the OldTools mailing list.

I can understand the initial scepticism, as the design is quite different from a traditional western dovetail saw. See below, in this image from their website, used without permission, but I'm willing to risk it since I've been a customer for over 20 years. Anyway, that's not really what a traditional dovetail saw looks like. Not at first glance. If you spend a bit of time looking at it then it actually gets more reasonable. It's still a pistol-grip backed dovetail saw with 14 tpi. Pretty normal, that. What's not normal is the material the back (or spine) is made from, and the way the tote (handle) is mounted to the saw.
Instead of a traditional brass back the saw has an injection molded composite back which Veritas says has glass fibres added for strength and rigidity, and stainless steel powder added to increase weight.
Instead of having a large tote that bolts right onto the blade, it actually bolts onto the spine. A traditional saw uses the blade as the primary structural element - the brass back attatches to the blade, and the tote attatches to the blade. This saw uses the spine as the primary structural element. The blade and tote attach to the spine.

Injection molding is a very efficient manufacturing method for producing parts with consistent tolerances, so if the molds are made properly the saws will be very consistent with few quality problems in terms of misaligned blades, etc.

This efficiency has left the saw with a very attractive price of only $65 Canadian. This puts it in the price range of decent Japanese dovetail saws.

I have several reasons for being fond of the manufacturing process... I used to build the type of grinders used to make the stainless powder for the spine, and I now work in the plastics industry.

So will I buy one of these saws?

Probably not. I'm quite happy with my traditional saws, but they cost a lot more than $65 each, hand-made by Ed Paik at Medallion Toolworks in Oakville. The hand-made approach allowed me to get a custom saw that is 2" longer than traditional, and almost an inch deeper. I wanted a big saw, and I was able to get that from Ed. I wouldn't be able to get that from Lee Valley Tools, and that's just fine because I'm not their target buyer.

I think the target buyer for this saw is a power-tool user or new hand-tool user who wants to try dovetails or other hand joinery, but doesn't want to have to pay a great deal for a new, premium-make dovetail saw, and doesn't want to buy a garage-sale reject and learn how to fettle it, sharpen it, and generally make it work. You might have seen my entry about this process in "New Life for Old Saw". Keep in mind that in that entry all I did was fix the teeth. I didn't bother cleaning the rust off of the blade, etc. Anyway, fixing such a saw is by far the cheapest way to get a decent dovetail saw, but saw sharpening is a new skill to learn, and not everybody has a saw vise, so then you'd have to buy or make one of those as well. So fixing an old saw isn't for everyone. Buying a new saw is fraught with peril because the known good brands of western saws are expensive. This might lead some to pick a Japanese saw on price alone. Now there is a western alternative in a similar price range, and I think that's great.

Those who have tried the saw claim that it works very well.

Lathe Tool Sharpening

2008-11-05T15:25:00.000-08:00

I have a dirty little secret that woodworking videos put me to sleep. I have to watch them a few times to get all of the information in between naps. I love them, and keep buying them, but they put me out.
My all-time favourite cure for insomnia had been Rob Cosman's "Rough to Ready" wherein we get to spend an hour watching him plane one board. Little did I know that I hadn't seen anything yet.

I bought the video "Sharpening Woodturning Tools" by Mike Darlow. Oh boy.

First let me say that there is excellent information in there. His is the very first woodworking-oriented sharpening... thing... that mentions that you should never quench high-speed steel. This is something that machinists and metallurgists have known for almost 100 years, but woodworkers who use a bench grinder seem to be addicted to dunking their tools in water every 10 seconds as they're grinding them. You should never do this to high-speed steel as it will develop micro-cracks and you'll be just begging for a future fracture. Feel free to quench your regular carbon steel, but never quench HSS. Anyway, lots of info. TONS of info. Almost THREE HOURS of info. It's going to take me a week to see it all, between naps, but I'm glad I bought it. It covers every jig I've ever heard of, and sharpening every common lathe tool, though not hook tools or other esoterics... at least, not that I've been awake for so far. :)
The production quality is not professional, but it gets the point across.

Driving the Lathe

2008-10-26T11:42:00.000-07:00

I've been asked how I drive this lathe, since it's made to be line-shaft driven. The answer is in the image below:
I added a cantilevered track for a motor to slide on. I can slide the motor back and forth to make the belt drive sheave line up with the different diameter pulleys on the lathe headstock. The track runs the full length of the lathe because the headstock on this lathe can travel. Really. I can slide the headstock down to the tailstock end to do off-board turning. It's an interesting way to do things. The weight of the motor takes care of the tensioning on the drive. It works surprisingly well. The steel was all surplus, as was the wiring and the motor, so the whole thing was thrown together in a couple of hours for little to no money. It's ugly, but it works. I'll spiffy it up a bit.

Resurrecting a Lathe

2008-10-25T16:47:00.000-07:00

I've had this lathe for years. It's been sitting in the shed at my folks' farm for all of that time, but I've finally brought it home. I'm going to put a fresh coat of paint on the old girl, and this will be the story of that process. I think the lathe was made in Toronto quite a while back. Some time near the turn of the 20th century. It's also possible that it was merely sold by a Toronto company, and may have been made elsewhere some time previously. If it was, indeed, made in Toronto then it would have had to have been made after about 1910.
The first decision to be made is whether to treat this as a restoration or a re-creation. Do I try to maintain the ancient patina, and keep the aged look, or do I try to make it look the way it would have when it left the show room all those years ago? I'm leaning towards the latter. I think it would look dead sexy with a fresh coat of bondo, a new skin of gloss black paint, and gold pin-striping. Below is a shot of the maker's plate. Actually, maybe green... deep green... with gold highlights.... hmmm...

Thoughts on Kerf Width

2008-10-21T03:04:00.000-07:00

The current push in dovetail saws is for the narrowest kerf you can get away with. My dovetail saw has four thousandths of an inch of set, which is a hair less than the thickness of a sheet of copy paper. That's not a lot.
Reworking the Crappy Crown Gent's Saw got me thinking about kerf because when I finished filing it the first time the kerf was still far too wide, I thought.
I did the test cut and the cut was fast, effortless and straight, but it was wider than I wanted.
Now I'm wondering about the effect of kerf on joinery.
Where you have two cuts forming an angle of significantly less than 90 degrees, a wide kerf will give you a poor corner. Either you will have a groove in one kerf wall, or you will have a slightly rounded inside corner. The narrower the kerf the less effect there is.
However, when doing something like a dovetail, the wider the kerf the easier it is to release the waste when chopping it out. The waste won't wedge as easily - you have more room for the chisel.
When cutting in general, the less kerf you have the harder it is to steer the saw, however having too much kerf is a poor choice, as you need to expend too much energy keeping the saw cutting straight.
The minimum amount of kerf is dependant on the wood being sawed, the depth of the saw blade, and desired radius of cut, when cutting curves. Green softwood requires a great deal more kerf than dry hardwood, a panel saw requires more kerf than a bow saw, and a turning saw requires more kerf than a dovetail saw.
I don't know if there is a magical formula out there where you can punch in your requirements and it tells you the proper kerf to use. I suspect most manufacturers just use traditional values as a basis point and modify it as required.
More mulling on this matter is required, but I'm starting to wonder if striving for the narrowest kerf is the correct path.

New Life for an Old Saw

2008-10-20T02:42:00.000-07:00

I have an old Crown Gent's Saw that I bought new a long time ago (15-20 years) and never liked. It's got far too much set, won't follow a line, and basically cuts terribly. When I got it I had no idea how to fix up a crappy saw, so I threw it into a box and forgot about it. I found it a while back, but now I have good saws that I love so I had no intention of putting any effort into this saw. It could stay in the box.
Recently a thread started on the Canadian Woodworking forum that included the notion of refurbishing a Crown Gent's Saw. A suggestion that I made was not taken gladly by some, so I've decided that I will refurbish my own elderly Crown Gent's Saw in the interest of proving the point that the method works.
First, the saw. Here it is in its crappy glory.
It will be refurbished into a dovetail saw, so for that it will need a rip-pattern tooth form, and it needs to have its set radically reduced. First, reduce the set. Take a pair of hardwood blocks and lay the saw between them. With raps of a hammer you can squeeze the teeth together to reduce the set. Depending on the size of your blocks, it can take a surprisingly hard hit. Below is the setup that I used for reducing the set. A chunk of red oak (would have preferred something harder) with another piece of red oak as a 'punch'.

Once the set was reduced it was time to file. I put the sad saw in the saw vise and got out my smallest saw file - brand-spanking-new. Only the best for the crappy old Crown Gent's Saw. :)

Now to file it to a rip cut. First I ran a mill file over the top to joint the saw. Not that I expected the jointing to be off... this saw had never been sharpened (or used, really) so the teeth should be in factory condition, but by taking a light jointing pass I can more easily see where I am in the filing process. After filing the saw I tried it out. I had done two test kerfs in a piece of white pine before starting on refurbishing the saw. The test board can be seen below. The two 'before' kerfs are each the result of 50 strokes of the saw. The 'after' kerf is the result of only 12 strokes of the saw, and I had to stop because the spine had hit the top of the board and I could go no deeper. The saw now cuts fast and straight, and all for about 20 minutes of effort. If I had it to do over again I would have done some more beating on the wooden blocks to reduce the set even more. The last kerf in the test board is from my Medallion dovetail saw. Only 8 strokes. Nice. Much longer saw, though, so it has a bit of an advantage, there.

Anyway, that was my refurbishing of a Crown Gent's Saw. It's not hard, so if you have one that you hate then have a go at fixing it up.

Dovetail Angles

2008-10-18T02:51:00.000-07:00

Dovetail angles are often described by the ratio of rise to run. Historically, in the western tradition, dovetails would be made with an angle of 1:6 for softwood, and 1:8 for hardwood. This equates to about 9.5 degrees and 7.1 degrees from normal to the end of the board, or basically 9.5 or 7.1 degrees away from being a finger joint instead of a dovetail. Some people feel that the easiest way to get by in the dovetailing world is to use 1:7 on all material as a compromise. This equates to an angle of about 8.1 degrees.
My question, of course, is who cares? We're talking about less than two and a half degrees difference between the whole range of them. Who is going to be able to tell what ratio you used when looked at from any kind of a distance. A person with a good eye might be able to guess, but you'd need to take a gauge to the piece to be sure, and anyone who takes a gauge to anything I made deserves whatever disappointment might be forthcoming. :)
So what do I use? I use the 1:6 ratio for all woods. I figure if it's going to be a dovetail then I might as well pick the one that looks the most like a dovetail.
Below we see a quickly cobbled dovetail that I just did this morning for the sake of illustrating this point. This joint has two tails. One is at 1:6 and one is at 1:8. Even right side by side and zoomed in it's not that obvious that they're different angles. At most you might think that it was a minor variation caused by hand-cut joinery. Certainly it wouldn't scream at you from across the room. So I, for one, don't get all excited about dovetail angles.
Frank Klaus, master cabinetmaker and father of dovetail excitement on this continent, doesn't use a gauge. He eyeballs the angles. He doesn't even measure out the spacing. He eyeballs everything except the depth of the cut (which must match the thickness of the board being joined to). Despite his carefree methodology, his experience is legendary and he can cut seemingly air-tight dovetails in the time it takes most experts to do the layout.

Dovetail Gauges

2008-10-17T16:48:00.000-07:00

There are a whole bunch of different dovetail gauges on the market. I've bought a few, and made a couple, and these are what I have left. At the right in the image above is an adjustable bevel. This is the traditional way in many western cultures to gauge your dovetail angle. You set the bevel to the angle you want, then use it to mark the work. This works, but the adjustable bevel is relatively heavy, and the angle could creep when you set the gauge down and pick it up again for the next board, etc. The adjustability can be a drawback. The next gauges, moving to the left in the image above, are the Veritas Dovetail Markers. Very inexpensive, very light, generally inoffensive, but they lack an important feature, and that is being able to mark the angle and the square line on the adjacent face with the same tool and placement. It is a great luxury to be able to set the gauge in place and mark both lines without moving the gauge, thereby guaranteeing that the marked lines are in the same plane. The lack of this ability is a failing of the adjustable bevel, as well. At the far left in the above image we see a dovetail gauge that I made. I'd seen a gauge in Ernest Joyce's "Encyclopedia of Cabinetmaking" which I thought was almost perfect. It was a double-sided affair that had two angles on it, so that one gauge could be used for hardwoods and softwoods. Rob Cosman found the same image, and uses it, (and sells them) himself. I didn't like that it had two angles on it. It wouldn't take that much inattention to pick up the gauge and use the wrong side. Also, you had to flip the gauge over to change the direction of the angle when you're marking the other side of a dovetail. I would prefer to have one gauge for each angle that I'm likely to use. The first one I made was like Joyce's original, but I soon started modifying it, then started over when I realized that the two-angle design wasn't good for me. To this end I made mine with only one angle, but both edges have the same angle so it can do both sides of the dovetail by just sliding it back and forth. No flipping and flopping, and no chance of using the 'wrong' angle. This was the best gauge so far, and in some ways is still my best gauge.
The last is the best commercial gauge I have. After using my wooden gauge for some time I discovered the Veritas Dovetail Saddle Marker. it is a commercial version of mine. I guess great minds think alike. :) It has all of the features of mine, and is larger. What makes mine still a bit better is that it is much lighter, and warmer in the hand (being wood instead of metal). If you want to buy a commercial dovetail gauge, I think your best bet is the Veritas Dovetail Saddle Markers.

As to which angle to use? Well that is a discussion for another day...

Puttering - good for the soul

2008-10-14T02:49:00.000-07:00

This weekend was a puttering weekend. I installed a garage door opener so that I won't have to drag my weary carcass out of the car to open the garage door when I get home from work in the winter, I cleaned up the garage a bit, and worked on the new saw till. It's now structurally complete except I still have to make the drawer. I still need to put the finish on it, and I wanted to put a few plugs here and there. Unfortunately, the plug cutter I got from Lee Valley doesn't seem to be particularly good at being powered by a brace. I'll need to put a custom driver on it to fit the drive socket on the brace, or modify the stem of the plug cutter to be tri-lobular so the three jaws of the brace can hang onto it properly. I also did some mechanical work at the folks' farm to fix an old yard hydrant. It's ancient, worn out, and should be replaced, but replacing it would require knocking out part of the barn foundation, so basically I'm trying to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear because the price of silk just skyrocketed.

I have added a few new planes to the stable. I might have mentioned them before, but now I'm showing them off. :) At the back is a matched set of Veritas bevel rabbet planes, one right hand and one left hand, and at the front left is a Veritas rabbet trimming plane, and at the front right is a Veritas bull-nose plane, which would have made those stopped rabbets on the saw till a lot easier to deal with had I had it at that time. Next time I'll be ready!

Tools of the Trade sale

2008-10-05T15:56:00.000-07:00

I just got back from the Tools of the Trade sale (TOTT) in Pickering, Ontario. I think I did alright.

This was The TOTT of the Auger for me. I wanted a set of auger bits.

Right away I stumbled upon the two sets in ratty, smelly old fabric pouches, plus the brace shown, all for $20. I didn't try to haggle at that price. There are three bits with spurs missing, but there are enough duplicates that I've got at least one of everything.
The brace turned out to be a sweet user, and is now my second-best brace.

However, as is often the case I didn't stop there. I found a boxed set of 13 Irwin bits that cover more ground than the sets I already had in hand, so I bought them. That set included another expansion bit. All in excellent condition. Then I started wondering if I'd rather have Russel Jennings pattern augers, so when I saw a boxed set of 13 of them I bought them as well. All in excellent condition, though the smallest one is actually an Irwin, not a Jennings. All told I spent less for these 46 auger bits than I would have for one set of 7 new Russel Jennings pattern augers from "Traditional Woodworker". Nice. I can use some of the beaters to make augers for end-grain applications where you don't want spurs.

Finally I looked at my list to remind me of what else I had planned to get, and soon found a lovely Mathieson adjustable panel-raising plane, which I have wanted quite badly, and a downright devious match plane, which I have wanted even more. I'd never seen such a thing as this match plane, though they are apparently not as unusual as it seemed to me. The fence rotates on an eccentric mount to allow the same cutter to be used for both the groove and half the tongue, with another cutter mounted for the other half of the tongue. Bizarre, but effective. It was about twice the cost of a regular Stanley match plane, but it was too cool to resist. I've already tried it, and even with the nasty dull cutters in it it works a treat. Lastly I've got a big old Sorby in-cannel gouge, which I might convert to out-cannel... not sure yet... and a very nice saw set. Oh, one thing that I missed adding to the picture was a tiny little pair of fey-pattern dividers that I got for $5. Very nice, indeed.

Chestnut Sharpener

2008-09-30T17:34:00.000-07:00

I know what you're thinking. You're wondering who in their right mind would want to sharpen chestnuts. I wondered the same thing, but wonder no longer! I just got this little dealie here from Lee Valley Tools (and pinched the image from their website). It's a knife sharpener. It's made in Canada (well, the handle is made in Canada and the company manufacturing it is Canadian), it's guaranteed for life, and it works! No, it's not going to put a polished edge on your chip-carving knives, but I had brought home my cable knife from work to try it out. My poor cable knife, used by electricians and me to cut things that really shouldn't be cut with a knife, like copper wire, and doing horrible things like digging plastic out of metal cavities with the tip, was in rather sorry shape. Not hideous shape, because, hey, it's still my knife, but it was rough. I pulled it across this pocket-sized sharpener a few times, and I could shave hairs off of my arm with it. No, not perfectly cleanly in a honed-on-16000-grit-ceramic-and-then-buffed-on-virgin-sheepskin-with-sub-micron-diamond-paste kind of way, but there was shaving going on, and it took less than 5 seconds to do the sharpening, so I was pretty darned impressed. Impressed enough that I'm typing this blog entry instead of going to sleep like I would be doing if I wasn't suffering from temporary insanity over this knife sharpener. I'll have to buy another one to keep at home because this one is going to work with me. Oh, and it cost less than $16. Sweet.

A Tale of Two Saw Tills - The Beginning

2008-09-27T02:39:00.000-07:00

My old saw till works just fine. It didn't end up as quite the saw till that I had originally planned... I had intended it to hold 6 panel or back saws, but I had forgotten about all of the small saws, so in the end I used it for 2 panel saws and 2 back saws, with the small saws mounted on the back. When my two new Medallion saws arrived the old panel saws were relegated to a nail in the dark closet which has become the Purgatory of Unloved Tools. By the time I have my two new Medallion panel saws I must have a reasonably worthy saw till. The old one is simple but effective. The large back holds the small saws in a very visible manner, where they are reasonably easily removed and replaced. The back-saws are even easier to remove and replace. The bottom of the till is a sort of 'bin' that holds dovetail gauges, saw files, and other saw-related things. However, as the bin fills up I worry that I might accidentally (and the thought makes my marrow quake to think upon) scratch the tote of one of my Medallion saws when grabbing a saw file from the bin. This is unacceptable!

The new saw till will be larger, yes, but it will have a drawer into which to shove the various bits and pieces that now fill the bin. The bin will still have some use, but it will have a vertical divider to keep pointy, scratchy things away from the saw totes. At the right in the picture of the current state of the new till we see that the front wall of the bin has a large cutout. This will allow easier access to the contents of the bin, which will be primarily the saw wax and other things that are used very often. The bin will be smaller than it was before, but more accessible, and not prone to harming the saw totes. The drawer, which will be below the front wall of the bin, will hold the majority of the stuff.
The only things that I have done thus far to try to make this till a bit more visually appealing is to add a shallow rabbet and chamfer to the edges of the back, and chamfer the edges of the sides, etc. The rabbet was wonderfully easy to do with the new skew rabbet planes from the good folks at Veritas... at least until I got to the 'stopped' part. These are stopped rabbets, and it was a pain in the butt to clean up the stopped ends. I tried a few different methods to sort it out, but in the end I just pared them with a chisel.
Some of you might have noticed that the back and sides of the till are all vertical grain, but the front is horizontal grain. This may well come back to haunt me. Particularly with the drawer.
So far so good. OOoops.. 6am already... time to get ready for work.

No Rest for the Weary

2008-09-26T03:25:00.000-07:00

No rest for the wicked, and the good don't need it. That's what they say. I must not be very good, because I could use a bit of rest. The six-day, sixty-plus hour work weeks are irritating. This week will be a bit of a novelty since it will be a seven-day work week. I haven't added up the hours. Ignorance is bliss. Actually, the long days wouldn't be so bad if I wasn't getting phone calls in the wee hours asking how to fix things at the plant. Two calls last night. No sleep. There but for the grace of my paycheque go I.

I've been trying to work on my saw till.

Right now my saw till holds four saws of back-saw or larger size, with other little saws pinned to the back. Since adding a couple more Medallion back-saws to the collection I've been storing my nasty old panel saws by hanging them on a nail in the store-room. Sub-optimal, at best. Since I have every intention of getting some lovely Medallion panel saws to replace them, I will soon need a bigger saw till.

The plan at first was just to make another like the first, just wider with room for six saws instead of four. Then I decided to make it taller so that it could have a drawer in it.

The existing saw till is just held together with screws.

I cut out a bunch of pieces, then thought maybe I'd try to spiffy it up a bit. Put some sexy joinery in it.

I tried to figure out how I could add joinery given that most of the joins are in the long grain of the wood, not the end grain, and the pieces I've already cut are size-for-size with no extra room for joinery.

I've given up on the idea of sexy joinery. I'll screw it together and be done with it. I am still adding a few embellishments, though, which I need to post about, but not right now... it's after 6:30 and I have to get to work.

Sharpening. What works for me.

2008-09-07T13:23:00.000-07:00

Sharpening blades is a metalworking activity, and metalworking is what I do, and what I'm used to. At first I automatically gravitated towards diamond stones, because that's what I'm used to. I've got a diamond hone that I've had bouncing around in my toolbox for over a decade. Maybe 15 years, now. Still works great.
So when I got into woodworking I bought diamond stones, and used them, and liked them.
Then I needed something finer, so I bought ceramic stones. Again - something I was used to. I didn't want oil stones (which I'm also used to) because of the mess.

Eventually I got tired of hearing about how great water stones are and how they are the One True Path for sharpening, so I bought a few to try them out.

The following is about what I have, and what I actually use.

Firstly, here are my diamond stones. The small one is a roughing stone, 250 grit, 6"x2". It is rarely used.. it's only needed to fix a chip in a chisel or something like that. The larger stone is double-sided with 600 grit on one face and 1200 grit on the other. This is still my most-used stone, and if I had to have just one this would be THE ONE. These are DMT stones with the drilled sharpening plate, obviously. I like these a lot for plane irons and chisels because the swarf (that's the 'metal dust' that is abraded from the object being sharpened) falls into the 'holes' and doesn't cause scratches in the finish. These are not great for small gouges or small knives or anything else that will poke into the holes and get maimed. For that you want a flat, undrilled plate, which DMT makes as well.

Next comes my first polishing stone. This is a ceramic stone.
I like ceramic stones a lot because they cut fast, and will happily do the job with just a touch of lubricant, which can be anything handy. I use mineral spirits as the lubricant for both the diamond stones and the ceramic stones, because it evaporates and won't cause rust.

Here are the water stones. I've got two 1000 grit Nortons, plus an 8000 grit Norton. The reason I got two 1000 grit stones is so I could use Rob Cosman's method of keeping the stones flat. It works.

And here is my current sharpening jig which I use when grinding the bevel. I do honing by hand, and I'll get to that in a minute, but I like the jig for getting the angle right on the bevel. I use the Veritas Mark II, and I have the cambered roller for lightly cambered blades (smoothing planes).

So what do I actually use? Good question. At first I used the jig on the diamond stones and was happy. The blades weren't really sharp enough at only 1200 grit, but most of the time it was actually just fine. When I needed more sharpness I bought the ceramic 8000 grit stone. It's too small to easily use with the jig, but I used it anyway and it worked.

When I heard the siren call of the water stones I pulled out the VISA card and bought them, took them home, and spent a weekend sharpening everything I owned. At first I liked them. I really did. If you're going to do a serious hours-long sharpening session, they work great. For touch-ups they suck. Why? Mud. They get mud all over everything. It's horrible. And if that wasn't bad enough, I found spots of rust on some of my blades the next day, and also on the bedding surfaces of the planes. I thought I'd wiped them off well enough, but I guess I hadn't. That wasn't a good morning for me. I wasn't happy at all.
At one point I considered using just the 8000 grit water stone, because it doesn't need to be soaked, just spritzed with water. I could use a diamond stone to keep it flat, and just leave the 1000 grit stones in the cupboard. Then I got wise.
I got myself a 'secret weapon'. Yes! Cast a loving eye on this beauty!
What? You expected high-tech? From the hand-tool-only guy? Nope. An elderly Craftsman hand-cranked grinder with a hard felt wheel charged with the green honing compound that Lee Valley sells. Oh, it's... it's just magical. I can take a chisel from the 1200 grit diamond stone, give it a quick hone on the hand grinder, and it is shaving-sharp. I mean, the unwary could shave clear down to the bone in a heartbeat. It's wicked sharp. So once in a blue moon I use the non-rusting-mineral-spirits-lubricated diamond stones with the jig to establish my angles, then I just buff the tool as required on the wheel. No need to remove the wire edge, either... it just 'vanishes'. When it's gone, you're done. You don't touch the back of the blade, you just hone the bevel. This thing works gangbusters for carving knives and whatnot.
Of course, 19 times out of 20 you just need to touch the edge to the wheel again to re-hone it. Re-grinding the bevel is a rare occurrence around here.
I'm considering making a grinder (yes, a powered one) that would have easily replacable wheels so that I could have different firmnesses of felt, or a buffing wheel, or different profiles (for gouges, etc.). I'm still mulling over the design.

In praise of paring

2008-09-07T11:40:00.000-07:00

My natural inclination is to hit things with a hammer. It's in my blood. I got into metalworking by way of blacksmithing, so it might be excusable.
This post is not about hitting things with hammers. This post is about using a paring chisel, and it's a process that can be peaceful or poisonous depending on how well you sharpen your chisel.
Firstly, let's meet my favourite paring chisel.
Normally, a paring chisel has a very long blade to allow more control, and to help to get into places that are far from an edge. My favourite paring chisel is no different, but because it is so wide, and the handle is so long, it looks perfectly in proportion.
Shown are two chisels. The paring chisel, below, doesn't look particularly unusual until you realize that the chisel above is a 1" Hirsch firmer chisel. That would normally be considered a pretty beefy bench chisel. The 1-1/2" Sorby paring chisel dwarfs the Hirsch considerably. The blade on the paring chisel is quite thin, and the bevel is long, with an angle of around 20 degrees.
The chisel is so big, with so much surface for registration against the work, that it is easy to take the cut that you want. It's lovely.
It is paramount that you keep a paring chisel very sharp. Very, very sharp. I'm going to get into sharpening in another posting very soon.

Here is a shot of paring to a straight line. I intentionally stopped short on the hacking cuts because I wanted to leave the 'shavings' (chunks, really) in place so you could see them. Paring need not be delicate. Normally I wouldn't pare right to a line, I'd leave a bit for finishing with a plane or spokeshave. You can't take too thick a section of wood at once or it will split out. If you begin hacking at the far end then what you're paring off is flexible enough that it won't interfere and works just dandy. This was all done just by pushing the chisel. No mallet.

Another shot, this time of paring to a curved line. Same process.

Something that a paring chisel is particularly good at is cleaning up end-grain. If you just push the chisel then you get the same kind of cut that a plane would take, which isn't always optimal. The cut to the right was taken with a straight push, and the shaving is sitting there. The cut is pretty good, but it's a bit 'cheesy' as the old books say. It has the slight voids and general visual texture of sliced, aged cheddar. It looks okay, but it feels a bit rough.

However, there is a cut that the old books call a 'compass cut' which works wonders on end grain. In this cut you select a point on the chisel, usually about as far back from the tip as the blade is wide, and this will be your axis or swivelling point. You press your thumb hard on this point of the bevel-up blade, and swing the handle back and forth while pushing forward and the net effect is that you get a slicing cut. It's not as fast as a straight push, but it leaves a finish as smooth as glass. You can see in the shot to the left that the left-hand side of the surface, the part done with the compass cut, doesn't reflect light from ragged end-grain the way the right hand side does. It doesn't look hugely different, but it sure feels different. Oh, and I didn't even sharpen the chisel before paring that end-grain. I haven't sharpened this particular chisel since the last time I used it a couple of weeks ago. More on sharpening later.

Acquisitions

2008-08-23T13:17:00.000-07:00

It has been a little while, gentle readers, but I have crawled back up on the wagon and I'm hanging on with grim determination.
In the past little while I've been on a bit of a buying spree, having picked up the new Veritas rabbet trimming plane, as well as all three of their 'normal' spokeshaves, the missing sizes from my mortising chisel collection, spoon bits, beading cutters, and I have the new skew rabbeting planes (the pair) on order, though they aren't actually available yet. Curses! From Robert Sorby came a 90 degree chisel for those pesky mortise corners, and a 1-1/2" paring chisel, which is a glorious piece of work. I am liking this chisel. I'm going to buy the other sizes in a few weeks. The bevelled edges are nice and thin for those tight dovetail corners, and the blades are loooooong and easy to control.
A bit of good news is that I heard from Ed in Oakville at Medallion Tools and I should have my two new back-saws in a couple of weeks. Sweet.
Now I just have to do something with all of this stuff. Or do I? Am I allowed to acquire and amass these tools and do nothing particularly 'important' with them? It's an interesting question.
Still, I would prefer that I was doing more with them than I am, so I will endeavour to do so. More on this later.

Thoughts on painted furniture

2008-07-20T04:27:00.000-07:00

People have been making painted furniture for a long time. It ranges from gilded, lacquered, 'regal' furniture, to homely painted country furniture. Some feel that 'painted' means 'inferior'. I disagree. If I have to pick between press-board furniture with a thin veneer of hardwood on it, or solid wood furniture with paint on it, I'll take the real wood, thanks. When it comes to furniture that you're likely to find in an average person's home, painted pine is probably the most common painted furniture. There are other common finds, like 'princess suite' bedrooms which are painted white with faux gilding, and whatnot, but painted pine is probably the most common, in my opinion.
I like this furniture. I'm going to focus on making a few pieces in the near future. I'm not 100% decided whether I'll use poplar or pine, but I'll pick some wood up in the next few days and get going on at least something simple.

A plethora of Woodworking Books!

2008-07-15T14:27:00.000-07:00

In the last two days I have received in the mail:
"Ancient Carpenter's Tools" by Henry C. Mercer
"Illustrated Cabinetmaking" by Bill Hylton
"Hand Tools" by Aldren A. Watson
"Tage Frid Teaches Woodworking" all three books including
"Joinery"
"Shaping, Veneering, Finishing"
"Furnituremaking"
"Identifying Wood" by R. Bruce Hoadley
"Understanding Wood" by R. Bruce Hoadley
and
"Pleasant Hill Shaker Furniture" by Kerry Pierce

I read the book on Shaker Furniture last night (most of it) and today I'll be starting on "Ancient Carpenter's Tools." Sweet.

To crown or not to crown

2008-07-06T07:42:00.001-07:00

Gentle readers, I have had an epiphany. It has to do with crowning plane blades, and names for planes.
I read an article by Adam Cherubini about the subject, and it resonated with me to such an extent that my ears are still ringing.
An archaeologist and historian named Henry Chapman Mercer wrote a book in 1929 called "Ancient Carpenter's Tools" wherein he decided to classify tools in order to give them 'true names', similar to the way biological nomenclature works. I liken it to genus and species. Using this analogy, the three genus of planes were set as levelling when the plane is used on a surface to make it flat and/or smooth, fitting when the plane is used on a surface no wider than its blade to create a new surface that will match another surface, and lastly ornamentation, which is where a plane is used strictly for a decorative effect.
Within each genus there are many possible species, but all share common traits. Yes, there are exceptions. There are always exceptions. However, here are some common traits:
Levelling planes like fore planes, smoothers, and try planes, have crowned irons and tight mouths. Exception - the fore plane has wider mouth as the surface finish isn't as important as speed.
Fitting planes like rabbet planes, match planes, plow planes, router planes, etc. have irons ground straight across and are used to produce the surfaces of joints. They have wide mouths because the surface won't be seen in the final product, so the surface finish isn't important. The exception is the jointer plane, which should have an iron ground straight across like other fitting planes, but it has a tight mouth because leaving a rough surface can be visible from the side when the joint is glued.
"But Mike!," I hear you exclaim, "the experts pretty much all use crowned irons in their jointer planes!"
Here's the interesting bit. Are you ready for this? Those aren't jointer planes. Those are try planes. Try planes are levelling planes, with a crowned iron. A jointer plane is used only for jointing edges for glue-up. Making a joint. That's it. It's a fitting plane.
Long has the nomenclature been rather... lax. Jack planes and fore planes are, in some books, the same, and in other books different. The same goes with try planes and jointers. I think Mercer was on to something.
I have a 'jack plane' which I use only for fitting, with a straight iron, so it is actually a short jointer.
I have a 'jointer plane' which I use for levelling, with a crowned iron, so it is actually a try plane.
I have a 'block plane' which I use for levelling, with a crowned iron, so it is actually a smoother.

It may seem complicated, but for me it has made things a whole lot clearer, and also clears up the reasons for some of the previous confusion. A wooden plane 24" long could be either a jointer or try plane depending on what you were going to use it for. Put a flat grind on it and it's a jointer. Put a camber on it and it's a try plane. If the plane didn't have an iron in it, then what kind of plane would it be?

The common jack plane, I suspect, was called such because you would have multiple blades for it and convert it from a short jointer to a fore plane to a short try plane on a whim.

Overhead Rack

2008-07-06T07:29:00.000-07:00

Above the bench I mounted a 12" wide, 5' long piece of laminated pine shelving, which I drill into and mount shaker pegs on. I don't have that much on it yet, but I'd rather have the space and not need it then need it and not have it.
Currently I have my small egg-beater drill, breast drill, three braces, drawknife and pull-knife, and hammers all mounted there, with lots of room to expand.

Saw Till

2008-07-06T07:13:00.000-07:00

Now that I have some saws worth having (Medallion Tools... nice...) and more on the way, it was time to build a saw till. My needs are relatively meagre compared to a serious saw aficionado, so I went with a relatively meagre saw till. Still, it stores all of my saws, so far, and also stores all of my saw sharpening gear and other 'saw oriented' stuff.
Right now I'm light on cross-cut saws. I have two on order from Medallion, but it takes a while. I have my saws made with light coloured steamed-beech totes if they're a rip pattern saw, and dark totes (some weird carmelized maple) if they're a crosscut saw. It keeps me from grabbing the wrong saw as easily. At the top left of the rack is a Veritas 'dovetail saw'. It came packaged with a magnetic dovetail guide that I got as a gift. It actually has its moments. Moving clockwise, next comes the legendary Rip Tooth Dozuki from Lee Valley Tools. Great little saw, but after trying them, I'm not so happy with pull-saws, and I'm going back to push-saws. Next is a somewhat generic 'gent's saw' which I rarely use. My big rip saw is a Disston, but not old enough to be particularly good. It works. The cross-cut panel saw is also a Disston. Same comment. It works, but I'm looking forward to replacing it. Next is my Medallion Tenon Saw. Nice... and my custom big-ass Medallion Dovetail Saw with a 12" blade and 2.5" depth of cut below the back. Ooooh baby. Lotsa beef, there. Fab on hardwood. Grabby on pine. It's worth it. Oh, and last but not least is the Kugihiki from Lee Valley tools. It's a flush-cut saw, and a pull-saw is better for that particular application. It's a great saw, particularly for the price. "Woodworking" Magazine did a comparison between several brands of flush-cutting saw and this one won. Colour me smug. :)
Past the saw till is the clamp rack for the gluing clamps. Those are the Lee Valley 30th anniversary aluminum clamps. Not fabulous clamps, but an excellent deal.

Main tool shelf

2008-07-06T07:05:00.000-07:00

This shelf was my first storage project for the wood shop. The general idea is cribbed from Robert W. Lang's column in the Autumn 2007 issue of "Woodworking" magazine. When I first built it it was so full of tools that it was virtually unusable. Now that I have the plane till and saw till and overhead storage... it looks a bit bare. :)
This shelf will be used to store my more often used chisels and layout tools. My gimlets and awls are in holes along the left vertical of the shelf. I also store my surface clamp and bench dogs here.

Plane Till

2008-07-06T06:38:00.000-07:00

When I built my plane till I first built it much flatter to the wall. I did some experimentation to show that the angle was sufficient for the planes to stay in place. What I didn't calculate in was the 'pucker factor' every time I set a plane on the till and just wondered if this would be the time that it would fall off. After a week I hadn't dropped a single plane, but it was wearing on my nerves so I rebuilt it with almost twice the depth. This causes more 'shadow' over the bench, but it's worth it both for my peace of mind, and for the extra shelf space below.
To the left we see the plane till. From left to right, top to bottom, we have a Veritas Bevel-Up Jointer, which I use as a try plane, not a jointer, and old Stanley #6 which I use as a fore plane, a Veritas Low-Angle Jack plane, which I use as a fitting plane, not as a levelling plane. Next comes the Veritas Bevel-Up Smoother, the Veritas Scrub Plane, a Veritas Low-Angle Block Plane with the extra tote and knob to turn it into a "#3 Smoother", Veritas winding sticks, a Stanley G12 low-angle block plane that I bought, perhaps, 15 years ago, and a Veritas low-angle block plane which normally always has a Veritas Chamfer Guide on it. On the shelf below we have a Veritas Router Plane with all of the trimmings, a Veritas Small Router Plane, a Veritas Jointer Fence for the Low-Angle Jack, a Veritas Small Plow Plane plus the blades, a Stanley #78 Duplex Fillister plane, and a Veritas Small Shoulder Plane.
Attached to the side is the piece of 2x4 that I use as an index for my augers, and that stick hanging on the tie peg is just a piece with different sized holes in it (all bored by my auger bits) which helps me figure out what size hole I need for various applications.

First entry - my shop, and why I have it.

2008-07-06T03:21:00.000-07:00

I'm a metalworker by trade and training. In the past I've worked in structural steel, machining, welding, fabrication, and machine building. Now I've dusted off the other half of my training in industrial mechanics, and work in maintenance keeping machines running for a manufacturing company.
My shop is an anodyne for what I do at work. I don't want to come home and turn on a milling machine. I'd rather do something different. I went with woodworking, which believe it or not I had some training in as a millwright. At first I considered getting a planer, jointer, and other woodworking machines... after all, I like machines... but the environment that I work in requires eye protection, hearing protection, etc. I wondered how much fun it would be to have to put ear plugs in to work in my own shop after wearing ear plugs all day at work. I decided I'd rather give that a miss. So my shop is pretty much hand tools only. I have a cordless drill that I use when I need to drill a hole with one hand, or where an egg-beater won't fit, and I have a grinder to grind primary bevels on the plane irons when that is required (rarely).
My shop is a modern hand-tool shop. Although some of the techniques that I use may be 18th century, as a general rule I like new tools. The boys and girls at Lee Valley Tools and Veritas have made a ton of money off of me. :)Above is the widest aspect picture I could take of my shop. I ended up using a digital super-zoomer to get this much in. At the left is the plane till, then the main tool shelf, then the saw till, then the clamp rack. Above is the overhead storage.