Process vs Results And How They Relate To Sitting

One of the virtues of being a woodworker is that you can make stuff you can use.  Much to my wife’s chagrin, I don’t take advantage of that fact very often as most large projects I’ve made have gone to other people.

Maybe that’s why I emphasize process as a woodworker.  I enjoy working wood; having stuff made from wood, not so much.  This emphasis on process has sucked me further and further into hand tool use and away from the electron-burning sort of woodworking.  I’ve got things to say about the hand tools vs power tools dialog, that seems endless, but I’ll save those thoughts for another day.

Today I want to talk about shifting from being process-oriented to a mode where the only important thing is the end product.  I’m not recommending this; I’m simply reporting on it.  It’s what I did 4 days ago, motivated by the fact that our outdoor seating had finally died a rotting death and I needed something to replace it.  So process, who cares.  End, in this case a place to put my rear end, the only issue.

The saga starts on the Internet, on Twitter to be exact.  I asked about Adirondack chair plans as those from Norm Abram’s New Yankee Workshop website have been discontinued.  Shannon Rogers and Erik Pearson directed me to Popular Woodworking as they’d done an article on Norm’s chair.  For some reason I couldn’t find the issue (August 2005) in my library but for a few bucks and a few button pushes I downloaded the issue from the Pop Woodworking website.

But a decision had to be made.  Excepting my planer and table saw, my power tools are shoved into the backwaters of my small shop. Was I going to build these Adirondack chairs using only handtools?  No, says I.  I’m no purist; I use the tools that work for me.  In this case, the project didn’t involve high-quality woods or precision joinery and, for me, it wasn’t even a particularly “fun” project.  I would build these chairs (3 in all) from construction lumber and use screws and carriage bolts to assemble it.  Let the dust and noise begin.

I began by making a set of templates from my “favorite” material, MDF scraps.  Finally a use for this modern abomination.  The PW article contains a gridded set of template diagrams and this made it easy to make a full-size set of templates.

Because of my hand tool approach I generally approach projects by rough-cutting pieces (I call this wood selection) and then I cut pieces relative to other pieces as I assemble.  With the Adirondack chairs I went the “make a kit” route.  My thinking is that Adirondack chairs are not precise construction projects and that careful fitting is not required.

And so the cutting began.  I put on my astronaut EVA suit.  Some might call it a respirator, safety glasses, and hearing protection but with all  this paraphenalia hanging on my head I feel like I’m about to do a space walk.  The kit was a result of shoving a lot of  1×6 and 2×6 lumber through my table saw, cutting the curvy bits with a sabre saw (some call it a jig saw), and a whole lot screaming router with a roundover bit.  I’ll spare you the details.  It was not fun by my definition of the word.

I highly recommend the Pop Woodworking article as an assembly reference as it clearly lays out the process.  I just followed their instructions, adding metal to wood until the result looked like a chair.  Then came the hard part.

I needed to add wood plugs to the 52 countersunk #8 screw holes.  I found I only had 11, 3/8″ plugs in my stash.  Not a problem – just run to Home Depot and get some.  They didn’t have any.  Neither did the many other places I went.  You’d think I was trying to locate a mint Stanley #1.  Several gallons of gas and 1 1/2 hours later, I’d found some plugs, paid way too much for them, and I was home gluing them in place.  Sometimes the hard stuff isn’t where you expect to find it.

And so, one down, two more to make.  I have all the wood shoved through the saw for the two more chairs.  There’s some sabre saw growling and router whining that needs to be done.   As Scarlett O’Hara once said, “Tommorrow is another day.”  At the moment, though, I’ve got a chair – it fits my end nicely.

Oh…in the interests of full disclosure, many electrons were sacrificed in the creation of this blog post content.  I think they all died peacefully.

Cheers — Larry

larry@woodnbits.com

So Many Blades to Lose

Recently I bought, and discussed,  a Lee Valley plow plane.  At that time I bought the blade set for it.  I love this plane.  I also know me.  The next time I would reach for it I’d wonder where I put the blades as they would be buried under a bunch of other stuff or hidden in a cabinet somewhere.  I try to be organized, honest.  It just rarely works out that way unless I do something up front to, as Jean-Luc Picard would say, “Make it so.”

So I was determined to aggregate these blades in some way so they’d stay with the plane itself.  As I have absolutely no imagination when it comes to such things I started searching publications by smart people, looking for a solution.  Now that I have Tom Fidgen’s Made in Hand book these quests have become shorter and Tom came to the rescue this time too.  Right there, on page 14 of Tom’s book is a photo of his tool cabinet and in that tool cabinet, Tom’s LV plow plane.  Sitting behind it is a small block of wood with the blades sticking out of it.  No detail in the photo but it was sufficient to get me watching the included DVD, fast-forwarding through it until there it was, on his bench, the plow plane and a block that looked to be two blocks of wood glued together, with the blades sitting in grooves.  Easy peasy to make grooves, I have a plow plane.

And so I made grooves.  I took a piece of pine and quickly made appropriate grooves using the plow plane.  I spaced these 1/4″ apart, the only measurement done during this project.  I cut off the end to eliminate a bit of tear out and then cut off a hunk of grooved stock long enough to house the blades while leaving enough blade protruding to grab them.

Then I glued two layers of craft foam on the bottom to protect the blade edges.  A piece of cherry, cut to the exterior dimensions of the pine and foam was glued in place.  One blade holder… finished.

But then I thought, “Why don’t I make a place for the long fence extensions too?”  And so I did that.  I found a scrap of red oak with TLAR dimensions, cut it to the width of the blade holder, drilled a couple of holes to accept the extension rods and glued it to the front of pine piece.  Looking good.

Then I thought, “It might look nicer if I add a base”, and so I took a scrap of maple, cut it to size, chamfered the edges with a block plane, and glued it in place.  Geez….talk about feature creep.  Enough…  I slapped a couple coats of shellac onto it and called it complete.  And so it was.

Cheers — Larry

larry@woodnbits.com

Fitting Cabinet Doors

I’m closing in on the end of construction of my vanity cabinets.  With the cases assembled I was faced with the task of fitting the doors.  I tried to think of a way to show this process in a photo sequence but, I’m afraid, I failed miserably.  Most of the process is mental and my camera doesn’t do well at recording that stuff.  And so I’m left with some babbling that will have to suffice.  Apologies in advance.

I prefer to build the doors first when building cabinets.  I figure if I can get square and true doors, and build to those doors I’ll end up with a decent cabinet.  I know others who prefer case first construction and they don’t suffer for it.  But when I build my doors, I build them just a wee bit wider and taller than the cabinet they’re going to fit.  “Wee” is defined as 1/32″ to 1/16″ wider/taller.

And so, because these particular cabinets have top and bottom overhangs, the doors don’t fit into the space once the cases are assembled as they’re too tall.  So, I start by planing the bottom style so that 1) the door can be scrunched (technical woodworking term invented by Moxon I think) into the space, 2) that the hinge side of the door aligns with the cabinet, and 3) that the door bottom is parallel to the bottom of the cabinet, like this:

This generally shows me what must be done on the top of the door to get the top to fit.  Below you can see where the door is hitting the top of the cabinet (circled).

Because the bottom and hinge side are in proper alignment, it’s easy to mark what has to be removed to achieve proper top/bottom fit.  The resultant top gap should be twice the desired gap as this gap represents both the top and bottom door gaps.

Doing this with hand planes is really easy as you simply mark the area to be removed and plane down to the line you’ve drawn.  Because you must plane across the end grain of the rail a sharp blade and a fine cut are required.

Here are the cabinets in their current state.  It’s an example of “Clients – you can’t live with ‘em and you can’t live without ‘em.”  In this case, the client is my wife, Chantal.  She’s been fairly passive about this project thus far, mostly because most times, when I show her something I’ve built that isn’t a shop thingie, it has left our house and resides elsewhere.

I think I caught her by surprise to finish something to stay in our home. When I wiped down the cabinets with mineral spirits so she could get a feel for what they’ll look like, she got excited…i.e. involved.

“Wouldn’t it be neat to have some engraving on the mirrors?”, she said.

“Sure, remember the SketchUp drawings and the trim pattern I proposed?  Maybe we could have it engraved on the mirrors”, I said.

“I was thinking more like flowers and leaves”, she said.

“Oooookay… the only requirements for that are that you give me 1/4″ perimeter around the mirrors that will be hidden behind the door frame AND, that you negotiate whatever you want with the glass company.”, I said.

And the cabinets sit in the corner of my shop.  She has all the dimensions and the cabinets I’m waiting for their flowery faces as she investigates the possiblity.  I’m pondering my blue tape approach to hinging and latching.  It may not hold up.

Cheers — Larry

larry@woodnbits.com

Safety Week 2010: What Will Happen If Things Go Wrong?

Wisdom consists of the anticipation of consequences.  — Norman Cousins

Let’s face it.  We woodworkers use tools with sharp edges so there is some risk of injury involved in much of what we do.  Our best defense against accidents is knowledge of our tools and skill in their use.  We can and should acquire these skills and few would dispute that.

But we humans seem limited in our ability to anticipate something going wrong.  We believe our skill will prevent problems but, as they say, fecal material happens.

And when it does, we can often avoid injury by anticipating what could happen when things go wrong.  For instance, when you step up to your table saw, do you think “What will happen if this kicks back?  Am I in the way?”   If you’re using a chisel, do you identify where the chisel will go if it slips or the wood splits out?  Are there fleshy parts along that trajectory?  This sort of thought routine requires no time and requires only  a few calories to feed the brain activity.  It may, however,  save you a trip to the emergency ward.

Cheers — Larry

larry@woodnbits.com

Safety Week 2010: Most Accidents Are Planned

It’s Safety Week 2010 and rather than talking about using push sticks and wearing safety glasses I thought a few words about another tool, the brain,  might be more useful.

Accident: any event that happens unexpectedly, without a deliberate plan or cause.

There are other definitions for this word and the distinctions between common and legal definitions of “accident” are illuminating.  It’s interesting to note that this common  definition nicely avoids any personal responsibility for accidents which is very fashionable.   But for purposes of Safety Week 2010, let’s consider accidents.

It’s an accident if you drive your car into another person’s car.  It’s an accident if you meet the love of your life while doing your laundry.  It’s an accident if you spill your beer.  It’s also an accident if you lose your fingers while using your table saw.  We all understand this use of the word “accident.”

But I contend that, most times when the word is used, the accident has been planned and not an accident at all.  For instance, was it an accident if you were texting or on your cell phone when you drove your car into another person’s car?  Was it an accident if you had been hangng out in the laundromat because you knew the girl of your dreams would show up?  Would it be an accident if you lost your fingers to your table saw because you were shoving wood at it without using a fence while also spilling your beer?

I don’t think so.  These are all examples of outcomes that are predictable from the observed  behaviors and by the behaviors they were “planned” by the accidentee.  Using the word “accident” only deflects us from acknowledging the factors that caused the outcome.  I would contend that most, though not all,  shop “accidents” are planned.  Take a look at the mechanic in the photo.  He backs up a bit, knocks the 2×4 and the newspaper reports that an ‘accident’ occurred.  Really?

And the sad thing is that in a wood shop, so many ‘accidents’ have their “planning”  acknowledged by the operator before they occur.  Thoughts go like “just this once”, “it’ll be ok”, and “what could happen?”  Ever heard the joke women tell about us?

“What does a man say just before he hurts himself?”

“Watch this!”

Planning your accidents doesn’t make you smart; it makes you bleed.

Cheers — Larry

larry@woodnbits.com

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