We Made It!
What is it that causes teenage daughters to turn on every light in the house? Our electric bill is just nuts.
Anyways, I was reflecting on 2009. Lots of bad stuff happened but also a lot of really good stuff. This blog has accounted for a lot of the good stuff. When I started it a year ago I never thought I would hit the end of the year having had so many visitors. Thank you all for your support.
I hope you’re looking forward to 2010 as much as I am. It’s gonna be a doozy. Hope you’ll be around and help with the conversation. To all in the woodworking world,
** Happy New Year **
Cheers — Larry
Happy Holidays from Wood'n Bits
Cabinet Is Finished – With A Finish
We’re about to finish a year and I’ve just finished a cabinet – with a finish. On all counts I’m happy as I can move into the holidays unencumbered by pressing schedules.
I’m posting this for two reasons. The lesser of the two is that I’ve talked about this project in previous posts and thought some might want to see it finished. But the larger reason is that when I did a post titled When is a Piece Ready for Finish, several people asked me the popular question “What’s your favorite finish?”
I’m not a big believer in “best solution” for anything without a bunch of “it depends” going along with the answer. And nothing could be more true for finish choices. I love the look of a plain oil finish. Properly applied I believe an oil finish is the most beautiful wood treatment and unless you’re eating off it, probably a sufficient finish for most pieces. If I feel I need a film finish I favor shellac, mixing my own from flakes and applying it in many very thin coats. Still, when I’m sending something off to a place you don’t know and to someone you’ve never met I start thinking of a wipe-on polyurethane finish.
And this cabinet falls into the last category. It’s going to a guy’s “mom” in northern Quebec. It’s also a maple cabinet and maintaining a light-color was part of the directive. A good way to finish with no color change would be something like General Finishes “water-based” polyurethane as these dry very clear and. I wanted to warm up the piece a bit, however, so I went in a different direction.
The first step in my process was to tape off the glass so I didn’t have a lot of scraping to do. If I had it to do over I would have taped a paper cover over the entire glass, though the approach you see here worked pretty well.
Actually, that was the second step in the process. I didn’t attach the back of this cabinet until everything else was done. The back was a framed panel and so while I fitted hinges and doors and did last-minute detailing I finished the cabinet back. Thus, by the time I got ready to do the rest of the finishing, I could put the cabinet on its back, supported by some of those little pyramid thingies and this gave me access to the entire cabinet without having to move it around.
I started by applying two coats of boiled linseed oil. Then I went Christmas shopping for a couple days. Before moving on, I went over everything with a bit of 400-grit sandpaper, just to put a bit of tooth on the surface.
Then I applied four coats of General Finishes Arm-R-Seal, my favorite wipe-on polyurethane. Between coats I went over the entire piece with a gray buffing pad, again, to produce a bit of tooth. Fine steel wool works for this as well. The secret to applying polyurethanes by hand, in my view, is to do it in very thin coats. Most “mistakes” I see come from attempts to slather the stuff on while hoping that its leveling properties will eliminate brush strokes. It won’t.
Once the last coat was dry I stuffed a lump of good-quality paste wax into the middle of a piece of t-shirt material. With the fabric pulled up around the wax I started rubbing it on the cabinet surface. Mostly I use a swirling motion but I’m not sure it matters as long as you get a thin, even coat of the wax on the surface. If you’ve never done this, you’ll find that the wax won’t flow until the friction of the action warms it and then it will ooze through the fabric. This provides really good control over the process. I did one or two panels and then buff it out with a clean cloth.
And here it is. I apologize for the poor photo but it’s dark here most of the time (8 hours of daylight) and it was dark and I was lazy and so “lighting” comes only from the shop lights.
Cheers — Larry
Making Cabinet Pulls in Cherry
If you’ve been following my blog you know that one of my current projects is a hanging cabinet that will house a spoon collection. I’m at the fiddly stage. All the basic construction is done and I’m dealing with hinging, wall mounts bracketry, door magnets – the fiddly things. In many ways this is the time a piece comes together but it is also a time when you don’t seem to accomplish very much per hour.
A quick way to solve the door pull requirement is to let your fingers do the walking through the Lee Valley hardware catalog or run to your Woodcraft or Rockler stores but I thought it might be nicer to create a set of pulls in a slightly contrasting wood. For that purpose I used cherry.
I started by slicing a square stick from a piece that was 3/4″ thick. I guessed about 1/2″ maximum diameter for the pull handles so this was larger than I needed but as it was headed for the lathe, I simply lopped off the corners with a spokeshave and chucked it between centers. A skew made quick work of rounding up the stick.
Using a parting tool, I laid out two handles as above. The ends were set 3″ apart and taken down to 3/8″ dia., the center to 1/2″ and the halfway points to 7/16″. The spindles extending from each end were taken to 1/4″. You can see that I’ve got a larger spindle than I need for these parts but it was convenient at the time.
With the dimensions of the center and ends established I simply tapered between them. The taper you see here was repeated on the other side and on the other handle (to the right of these photos) but mid-process I decided to make the top and bottom tapers slightly asymmetric. This, in my view, improved their appearance.
I trued up the exiting 1/4″ sections as these are to fit into 1/4″ holes. A bit of sanding and this part was done.
I took another stick of cherry and planed to it to 1/2″ square. This stick was to become the end pieces for the handles.
Using a block plane and scraper I chamfered and smoothed the corners of the stick. Doing this prior to cutting saves a lot of tiny work later and is much quicker.
A carcase saw and bench hook made quick work of creating 1 1/4″ long pieces that become the door pull end pieces.
I used an egg beater drill and 1/4″ brad-point bit to drill holes in one end of each piece to accept a short dowel for attaching them to the door. The lower holes will accept the pull handles.
I used a technique similar to one Marc Spagnuolo (aka The Wood Whisperer) presented (He said he learned it from Darrell Peart) to round off, somewhat, the ends of the end pieces. I wanted the ends to remain mostly flat but with all the edges rounded over. In each case I presented the end of the piece to the sandpaper by swirling it round and round rather than back and forth. I started with 80-grit paper to eliminate the saw marks. Then I moved to an 80-grit sanding sponge. This rounded over the edges. Then I worked through 150 and 220-grit papers, finishing with a 220-grit sanding sponge.
These are the result. I thought they looked pretty good. But now I know how it feels to be a mystery novelist as they write that plot twist at the end so that the guy you think did it, didn’t. You see, armed with these pulls, I stuck them on the doors with some double-sided tape and, well, they just didn’t look right on this small cabinet. They were too large for my taste. Looked good but drew too much attention to themselves. I presented their creation because they are, nevertheless, useful pulls and I’ll find a place for them some day.
And so I took another stick, this time maple with pronounced straight grain. I used rasps, files, knives and spokeshaves and removed everything that didn’t look like a door pull for my cabinet. I came up with these.
And here’s what the cabinet looks like, ready for finish.
Cheers — Larry
An Ad for Woodworking Magazine??
The new issue of Woodworking Magazine is out and I received my copy a few days ago. I subscribe to several woodworking magazines but when Woodworking shows up in the mailbox it’s a good day – a very good day.
The odd thing is that if I describe Woodworking Magazine to someone they look at me and wonder what planet I’m from. Afterall, this is a magazine that comes out only four times a year and only has 32 pages between its covers. It’s done in black and white and uses relatively simple graphics when required, not the fancy color isometric drawings so common in woodworking magazines.
And maybe therein lies the clue as to what makes Woodworking so appealing to me. It’s what isn’t in it. There is no advertising. I’m not opposed to advertising but this explains, in large part, why Woodworking is so thin compared to other magazines. Most of its competition are 3-4 times the number of pages. But those other magazines are at least 45% advertising (only postal regulations limit this), making the difference between Woodworking Magazine and the others to only a few pages of actual text and photos.
What they don’t do with their editorial space is also important to me. I’ve never seen Woodworking show me yet another article for the ubiquitous router table, crosscut sled, push stick or other common jig for lining up wood so you can shove it through a power tool. It’s not that they’re against power tools; they aren’t and use them judiciously in completing the projects they present. It’s just that they don’t seem to feel the urge to repeat, over and over, the basic jigs.
There are no lengthy comparisons like “35 power hand drills”, “Bench Tablesaw Shootout”, “We test 12 Routers” articles in Woodworking. These are great for satisfying advertisers but they hold little interest for me. Woodworking isn’t encumbered by the need to satisfy advertisers.
If you pick up any of your favorite magazines, count the number of actual article pages, and then subtract the sort of thing I’ve just been talking about you’ll see that, in fact, Woodworking provides more pages of hands-on, here’s how you build it, content than most. I’ll admit here that I like working with handtools and so articles, like “Bench Planes: The System of Three”, as appears in this issue, appeal to me but may not to others. Even here, though, the emphasis is on how the planes are used, not which ones to buy. What I can say is that Woodworking Magazine is the only magazine I read cover to cover – issue after issue.
I have only one reservation about making these comments. Is this an ad for Woodworking even if I pay for my subscription? Maybe if I don’t suggest you run out and get a subscription of your own… yeah, that’s it. This is not an ad for Woodworking Magazine.
Cheers — Larry
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