Shelf-making Without a Neander-buddy
I’m getting back to my bathroom vanities project and decided to make some shelves. I need 6 of them and they’ve got to be 12 1/2″ x 4 1/4″. I targeted a thickness of 5/16″. This last dimension was the most work.
Once upon a time I had a frame saw that did a decent job of resawing by hand. Sadly, when I built it I built it too light and it broke. So here I was faced with the need to resaw 3, 13″ long, 4/4 pieces of cherry. This is when I start wishing I had a Neander-buddy. Those of the power tool set call them bandsaws.
I find it sad that I bought into the “buy a table saw first” dogma when I started in woodworking. Nothing wrong with table saws and if you’re never going to develop hand tool skills this advice probably makes sense. But if you can handle a hand plane and quickly true edges, a bandsaw provides much more versatility, in a lot less space, and it’ll do it more safely than will a table saw. When it comes to resawing, a bandsaw is THE tool to use if you’re going to burn electrons. I have a baby bandsaw that I’ve used in my modeling work for decades but it’s not up to the task of resawing 4 1/2″ cherry.
Enough of the whiny lamentations over a tool I don’t have. I cut three 13″ pieces of cherry from a 4/4 board. Above you can see two of those boards and two shelves that result from the burning of many calories. I did the resaw steps with an old Spear and Jackson 5 tpi rip saw. I think it’s time to put it in the vise and sharpen it as it was slow going. Maybe I’m just getting old. Who am I kidding. I am getting old. Where’s a Neander-buddy when you need one?
Once I had divided the boards I shoved the resultant planks through my thickness planer, taking them to 3/8″ and finished up getting them truly flat and smooth using hand planes. Here are the finished shelves.
Some day I may buy a Neander-buddy but right now I think I’m going to build a new frame saw.
Cheers — Larry
How To Be Busy Without Getting Anything Done
It’s been a while since I’ve posted and I thought I should spend a few minutes to provide an update. It’s not that I haven’t been busy. I just wasn’t doing anything very photogenic or interesing. Here’s a few examples:
1) Today I went to the dump, culminating a bunch of clean up work. They had a cool machine for smashing junk but dump trips don’t seem bloggable.
2) I’ve been culling my scrap and reorganizing what I kept. I was overrun by short pieces of wood. A pile of scrap didn’t seem worth showing.
3) I Sharpened my new Lie-Nielson bench chisels. They’re photogenic but geez…how many chisels do you need to see?
4) Cleaned out stairwell into my shop. Much of the dump visit related to this activity. Definitely not photogenic.
5) Did some gardener support work. I don’t want to document such things as the less I remember them the better.
6) Did some minor work on my trailer so I could go to the dump. Seen one trailer, you’ve seen them all.
And so there are but two things to actually show you. My new LN chisels require a smaller hole in a chisel rack than the Marples they replaced so I removed my nice tiger maple chisel rack and replaced it with a pine one. Sometimes we take a step backwards. I really need to build a tool cabinet. I’ve been saying that for years.
By a stroke of luck I acquired a significant hunk of box elder for use as a chopping block. It’s about 18″ in all directions and it weighs a ton. Felt like two tons as I wrestled it down the stairs. I’ve got a hole in the drywall to prove it.
The good news is that the bench is cleared and I can get back to my bathroom vanities. But now, I’m going to go sit in the sun in my new Adirondack chairs.
Cheers — Larry
A Woodworker Goes Gardening
My wife is a gardener. I’m not. My wife likes plants. I like to cut up big plants. I’m not a mean guy but in the eyes of tree justice, it doesn’t look good for me.
And so when my wife came home and said, “I need your help in the garden tonight”, my lizard brain started scheming for a way out. Fight or flight? Fighting with my wife never works out for me. Flight in this case required an excuse. She’s had me and visions of weeding or some other horrible task skittered between my ears. “Ok… I’ll be glad to help dear”, I said, in what was a less than enthusiastic tone.
When we went outside she headed for the car and opened the hatchback. There were two aspen/poplar logs there. Each was a foot in diameter and about two feet long. I should add that they were heavy. All I could think of, though, was how fun it would be to clobber them with my froe. I guess I am evil.
But these logs were different. They’d been girdled heavily on one end and this slot and the end face were covered with a whitish, fuzzy material. My wife says, “I’ve already dug the holes but they’re too heavy for me to carry them. I need you to carry them and put them in the holes, with the mushrooms on top. ”
Of course my immediate response was “Mushrooms? Will they be mushrooms we can eat?” After all, eating plants is almost as good as creating sawdust from them. She reassured me that these will be the eating kind (she’s a mushroom-ologist) and so we planted our poplar logs in a shady corner of the garden. If ever there were a form of gardening I could get into it is this. Who’da thunk you could plant logs?
Cheers — Larry
My Adirondacks Have Left the Building
What does this photo represent?
Several things, I suppose. It suggests that:
- My Adirondack chairs are finished and ready for the butts for which they were intended.
- I need to build a table for the pretzel bowl.
- I need a pretzel bowl.
- Clearly I’ve got to figure out how to get grass to grow in an area that’s been compacted by a huge glider/swing that has sat there for a couple decades.
But this photo says something of far greater importance to me. It says, in “shouting to the rafters with glee” fashion, that these chairs are no longer in my shop. They’re no longer in my way. I’m a happy guy this day.
Cheers — Larry
Lie-Nielson Comes to Quebec
I’m sitting on my front porch, writing this on my laptop. My mailbox is right above my head. It’s a beautiful morning but my thoughts are still in yesterday. Quebec City is somewhat isolated from the rest of North America. In spite of 700,000 people in metro area there is no woodworking store. There are no woodworking clubs. It’s also a long way from the many events that take place in the US like Woodworking in America and the Lie-Nielson events. I call it planet Quebec City.
So, when Lie-Nielson announced that it was going to do a show in Montreal, only 2 1/2 hours away, I did back flips, or I would have if I weren’t so old. Yesterday was the day and so at 7AM I pointed the car towards Montreal. All I’d heard about these events was that you got to play with Lie-Nielson tools. Truth is, these events are so much more.
I’d never been to the Rosemont Technology Centre before but it’s cool. Lots of oversize power tools everywhere. They have tech programs in cabinetmaking, finishing and even in how to start a business. And in the middle of the room, right behind door 14 (identified as the entry point on the map) was hand tool heaven.
The first thing I noticed had nothing to do with tools but everything to do with how classy Lie-Nielson is as a company. The first sheet of printed material I picked up was in French (available in English too). Most Quebecers won’t expect an American company to have such things available in French but I can tell you that they all noticed and appreciated that nice touch.
The tools were on display racks surrounding the work area. Calling them display racks, however, gives the wrong impression as they are on display only when someone hasn’t grabbed a tool and started cutting, planing, or chiseling. Benches were provided for that purpose. They even had a sharpening station set up to provide sharpening instruction. It was like being lead to the park when you were a little kid and there they were: the swings, the slide, and the sandbox. Where should I go first? Can I really just pick up the tools and abuse the pieces of wood lying around on the workbenches? I was overwhelmed.
So what did I do first? Talk to the women, of course. I introduced myself to Alex, short for Alexandra. Later I met Angie. I gotta tell you that if you think Thomas Lie-Nielson is a genius tool-designer, he’s even better at hiring people. These two beautiful women are absolute gems. Not only are they friendly but, as we say on the farm, “they’s smart fer girls.” They know tools and they know woodworking. Truth is, as much as I enjoyed getting to see and touch the LN tools I’d only seen in pictures, the true value of the day were the conversations I had with these women.
I had conversations with Alex about sharpening. She showed me how she sharpens a highly-cambered scrub plane blade in a jig rather than my sloppy way of doing it by hand. I asked her about the LN edge plane and why I would ever need one. She showed me. I’d always seen is as a ‘clean up’ plane but she squared up the edge of a board right before my eyes. And besides, it’s just plain cool. Oh, and the tongue and groove plane she demonstrated… wow. And have you ever used a miter plane? I’m left-handed so using a shooting plane in my right hand felt clumsy but… more wow.
I’d come, of course, to buy some stuff too. Isn’t that what we woodworkers do best? I won’t say ” do most” as I don’t want all the woodworker spouses to start bobbing their heads up and down in agreement. Unfortunately, due to an odd Canadian approach to US companies selling in Canada, it’s impractical for LN to have stock on site for sale but they did provide significant benefits for ordering at the show. I’d decided that I just had to have a set of LN bench chisels and nothing I saw at the show dissuaded me from that view. So I started talking chisels with Alex. We discussed A2 vs O1 steel, sharpening angles, micro-bevels and other sorts of chisely stuff.
Alex involved Angie in the discussion and we talked some more about angles, mostly me telling them what I was thinking which is always a precarious thing, and Angie pointed out some of the drawbacks of hollow-grinding.
I had a great conversation with Angie about the proverbial bevel-up vs bevel-down debate and it confirmed my view that it’s mostly a “less filling / tastes great” sort of debate and that “sharp works, dull does not” is a dichotomy that is more to the point.
And so I ordered the chisels and a couple DVDs. I took the quick snapshots you see here. I was really enjoying the woodwork talk, the tools, and a day where I could speak English to real humans.
I was preparing to leave and chatting with Angie about ‘next time’ and I mentioned that I wanted to get some planemaking floats. These are tools that sort of look like files but they’re more like a metal stick with a lot of tiny, very sharp knives on it. She said, “I like to use those for shaping.” We went to the float display and she picked up a large, flat one and started shaping the top of a cabriole leg. She used it just as you would a rasp but the results were different. The results were VERY smooth, as though you’d used a stick with a lot of tiny, very sharp knives attached to it. I’ve just got to have some floats. Next time.
And so here I sit, on the front porch, with mailbox above my head. I’m waiting for the UPS man with my package from LN. And I’m dreaming of floats.
Cheers — Larry
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