Wood'n Bits Workshop

Woodworking Goes Digital

Larry — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 15:03:14 +0000

It’s fashionable on Twitter to “retweet” things said by others. There’s a certain logic to this practice but I have to confess that I mostly respond with annoyance as I get 6 copies of the same original post. And so it is with blog posting, so I don’t often post links to other blogs.

I’m going to make an exception here as 1) the blog isn’t one commonly visited by woodworkers and 2) this “steampunk laptop” is just plain cool. It looks to me as though there is some fun, and interesting woodworking associated with its construction. Enjoy…or not.

Cheers — Larry

larry@woodnbits.com

What Tool Does Kari Need?

Larry — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 22:10:39 +0000

I’m feeling sorry for my fellow woodworker, Kari Hultman, aka The Village Carpenter. Due to health problems her plans to carve wood with a bunch of other folks got scuttled and I suspect there’s been a certain amount of pain and discomforted associated with her health problems.

It may be the case that she’s suffering some delirium to go along with it as today, she wrote a blog post, saying that as a woodworker she “There isn’t a single thing I need, tool-wise..” I think you’ll agree, Kari is just not thinking straight.

I thought long and hard about this, searching for some way to help her out of her funk. It’s true that she’s got a beautiful shop. It’s true that she’s got pretty much one of every power tool in existence. And its true that she has planes, shaves and saws to make any hand tool lover drool. But there MUST be a tool she needs, even if she does now own a set of pocket tweezers.

I think I’ve found a tool that she probably doesn’t have but needs. Several years ago Black & Decker went through a phase where they were creating “innovative” products, like battery-operated C-clamps. I don’t know if they sold much of that stuff but they did take a certain amount of good-natured ribbing by the woodworking community.

At that time, I was writing articles for a miniatures magazine and I was asked if I’d review some products for the magazine. One of the products they sent me was a pair of “innovative” electric scissors. I remember receiving them and as I recall my first impression was to roll my eyes and wonder what I could possibly say about the product.

But there are times when I’m surprised and this was one of them. I use my electric scissors for a single purpose but they work so well for that purpose that I wouldn’t be without them. I go through a lot of small “rags”, mostly cut from things like old t-shirts, towels, and wash clothes. While it’s easy enough to cut up a t-shirt with manual scissors, and if you’re a ‘no-electron’ sort, that’s probably the pure way of doing it. But the virtue of B&D’s electric scissors is that they come with this bench clamp thingie and you can turn them on and then shove t-shirt at its mouth. It’ll cut material as fast as you can shove it into its gaping maw. I can cut a t-shirt into 6″ squares in, literally, a few seconds, eliminated the sewn seams in the process. I drag it out anytime the rag stash gets thin. Kari, you NEED one of these (grin). Oh…I’d say “get better” but you’re already the best.

Cheers — Larry

larry@woodnbits.com

There’s No Word Like “Done”

Larry — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 18:58:31 +0000

Measure not the work until the day’s out and the labor done. – Elizabeth Barrett Browning

The woodworking community spills most of its ink in discussion of process. We talk about what tools to use and how to use them. We talk about choosing woods. We talk about what joints to use and how to create them. We talk about finishing – what finishes to use and how to apply them. Only rarely do we spend much time talking about objects made from wood.

But let’s face it, we can hand cut the best dovetails or sand a glass finish with our whizbang Festool sander. Unless we actually complete a project, however, most of it is meaningless. This is hard for me to say as much of my motivation to be in the shop doesn’t come from the need for an object made from wood unless it’s shavings and sawdust. I just like carving up wood. I like the feel of it, the sound of it (the reason I work mostly with handtools) and I enjoy the serenity of it. Nevertheless, if I never produce anything I would question my sanity. And it does feel good when I actually complete a project.

I’ve talked about the creation of a set of bathroom wall cabinets from my gleam-in-the-eye concept activities with SketchUp and, along the way, I’ve discussed steps I’ve taken to remove wood from wood until the remaining wood resembled parts of a cabinet. I’ve talked about assembling those pieces into cabinets. If you missed all that excitement (?) you can find it here.

Finally, however, the cabinets are done. I haven’t presented the finishing steps as they were conventional. I applied some boiled linseed oil to achieve an ‘older’ color from the cherry, waited a week, and then applied a couple coats of General Finishes Arm-R-Seal polyurethane. I used this because these cabinets were going into the moist environment of a bathroom. For the same reason I use porcelain knobs on the doors rather than my more typical wooden door pulls. The doors are held closed by small magnets. They’re held to the walls using French cleats.

I apologize for the photograph. The bathroom is very narrow. I’m standing in the bathtub to take the photo and if you look in the mirrors you can see behind me the next job in the remodeling effort – tiling the bathtub wall area. If they made bath tiles from curly maple I might be more interested in that job but not by much I’m afraid. I still have to create a shelf under the center mirror. It will reflect the same curve as the top and bottom of the cabinets. I’ll dado the shelf into a decorative backplate to complete the scene.

So there you have it; the work is done. I’m satisfied, or at least as satisfied as I ever am. Mostly I’m thrilled that I can move on to the next gleam in my eye.

Cheers — Larry

larry@woodnbits.com

Back From A Short Visit to Heaven

Larry — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 23:27:56 +0000

It’s been a while since I’ve posted and that’s because my family and I climbed into the Marshall-mobile and pointed it east, launching ourselves from planet Quebec City towards planet Earth. We landed in Moncton, New Brunswick where we set up shop as tourists and started making day trips to places in New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, and a bit of Nova Scotia.

What a time we had. If you’ve never been to the Maritimes provinces of Canada, you’ve missed a great part of planet Earth. Clearly they’ve got the scenery. The Bay of Fundy, its enormous tidal flux reverses the flow of large rivers, and every 6 hours and 13 minutes the flow reverses, exposing huge tracts of sea bed twice a day. The beaches and dunes of Prince Edward Island are eclipsed only by the wonderful farming architecture of the houses associated with Lucy Claude Montgomery and her literary character, Anne Shirley, of Anne of Green Gables. And the furniture there in was a particular treat.

But it wasn’t the scenery that struck me about the Maritimes. It was the people. Everywhere we went, whether it was a tourist area on Prince Edward Island or a shopping mall in Moncton, New Brunswick, the people were so very nice. They even drive nice, for goodness sake. I’ve lived a lot of places and I’ve never experienced anything like it. I wanted to move there immediately. We could all learn something from how the folks in the Maritimes treat their fellow humans.

And there was another thing that amazed me. Here on planet Quebec City we joke that the brother-in-law of the mayor must own the orange barrel concession as it seems there is constant construction going on everywhere. More precisely, there are roads roads marked off with hundreds of orange barrels to slow you down so you can see that nobody is actually doing construction. Mostly this reflects a constant patching of our bumpy roads. The patches have patches on them. And so, as we zipped from place to place in New Brunswick, I couldn’t help but be amazed by a barrel-less landscape and the smoothest highways I’ve ever experienced. No wonder the people are so good humored.

I’ll leave you with one photo of Maritimes wood. It’s a very long (1282 feet) covered bridge that’s in Hartland, New Brunswick. I’ll get back in the shop ‘real soon’ and get things going again on the blog. Stay tuned.

Cheers — Larry

larry@woodnbits.com

A Few Notes About Handsaws

Larry — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 17:13:57 +0000

We’re having a great summer in Quebec, with day after day of sunny, pleasant weather. This has kept me smiling but also reluctant to spend much time in my shop. You may have noticed that the blog posts have been sparse lately.

But a while back I made a comment that you needed a sharp saw to do resawing. I added to this that you don’t find them at the local big box store. I thought I could sidestep the issue but then Troy wrote a comment asking for some information about saws and made me feel all guilty inside for doing so.

I thought I might talk a bit about my use of handsaws – call it a minimalist’s approach. You see, when it comes to handsawing, I’m handsaw challenged myself. I simply don’t have enough of them and when people talk about what you “need” as a basic nest of saws, I feel incomplete. And while I do wish I had more of them, the reality is that I get by with a few saws and don’t suffer (much) for it.

So, what follows are some random thoughts on my handsaw use. It reflects no generalizable “truth” but rather what I do, not what you should do. My goal is to answer (sort of) two questions. They are:

What saws do I use and how do I use them?
Where can good saws be purchased?

I am going to purposely limit comments to keep the length of this post under control but some comments will undoubtedly be spouted by me, Johnny Applesaw. I will avoid discussion of Japanese handsaws, turning saws and specialty saws.

One last caveat. I own a tablesaw. These days it gets used if I need to rip a bunch of boards to a similar width, like rails and stiles for door frames.

My Meager Saw Nest

The “inventory” looks like this:

Spear & Jackson 28″ 5tpi rip saw
Disston 26″ 10tpi cross-cut saw
Wenzloff 11″ 13tpi carcase saw
Wenzloff 9″ 14tpi dovetail saw
Wenzloff 14″ 11tpi tenon saw

I have a couple other saws but they are more useful for cutting tree limbs than for cabinet work. And yes, I am under-equipped. But good saws cost money. Old saws are hard to find around here. And so these are the tools I aim at wood when I want to cut it. Let’s talk about saw use.

I’m a “function” kind of guy so let’s start here. Saws are sharpened and set to cut wood either across the grain (cross-cut) or with the grain (rip). We can also divide them into panel saws (a conventional non-backed saw) and the various joinery saws that typically have a stiff back on the blade. These two dichotomies should allow some structure to my otherwise diffuse thoughts…I hope, I hope.

My Panel Saws

Rip Saw

I use my 5tpi rip saw gets its most use when I need to cut a board to width. I’ll clamp it to my saw bench (you must have a saw bench to use handsaws) and while I’m not the fastest sawyer in the world, it can make pretty short work of cutting a 3-foot board to width. As I’ve mentioned above, if I’ve got a lot of ripping to do, I turn to my table saw as rip-sawing can burn a lot of calories and I’m old.

I also use this saw for resawing. This too can generate a lot of calories and make you wish for a big bandsaw. I wish for a big bandsaw (grin). That said, unless you’re trying to produce enough veneer to cover an 8-foot table top, the process goes fairly quickly. I cut all the shelving for two bathroom cabinets in somewhere around half an hour.

I find a 5tpi saw about right for this work. If I were going to do a lot of ripping I would like something a bit more coarse, maybe a 3tpi saw. These saws do produce a rough cut which is easily cleaned up with a handplane.

Cross-Cut Saw

The flip side in terms of effort is cross-cutting boards to dimension. I find it far easier to do this task with a cross-cut handsaw than I do using my table saw. The reasons are straight forward. First, cross-cutting long boards on a table saw requires a lot of clearance space around the saw and it’s potentially dangerous.

By contrast, with a handsaw, you can quickly drop a board on your saw bench and start cutting pieces off it, sliding it along to make the next cut. It takes only a few seconds to cut a 6″ board in this way so you can dimension parts quickly, efficiently, and quietly. My 10tpi saw works well for this and provides a very clean cut but, as with all tool junkies, I long for an 8tpi saw. If I had an 8tpi saw, of course, I’d want a 10tpi saw. Such is the way of my thoughts.

Summary

One can always “need” more panel saws with fewer or more teeth per inch and you can even specialize the way they’re filed for hardwoods and softwoods. But the two saws I have allow me to dimension wood quickly and efficiently. Thus, with only two panel saws you to dimension lumber for pretty much any project you have in mind.

Backed (Joinery) Saws

There are a lot of names associated with these saws. You’ll see tenon saws, sash saws, carcase saws, and dovetail saws. I would argue that these terms obfuscate more than clarify their uses. The problem is illustrated by the name “tenon saw” that historically was a cross-cut saw for cutting tenon shoulders whereas today we typically think of them as saws for rip-cutting tenon cheeks. These shifts in the name game leave us with a marketplace where many tenon saws are offered in both rip and cross-cut form. So, let’s stick with the cross-cut and rip dichotomy and talk usage.

I’ll start with a heretical comment. Of all the backed saws on the market, the LAST one a newbie should buy is a dovetail saw. Of course, this is always the FIRST one everybody buys, including me. Why? Simply put, it’s cuz the woodworking world has put dovetails on a pedestal and the belief that hand-cut dovetails means you’re an accomplished handtool guy.

Truth is, dovetails are but one joint in woodworking and dovetail saws are the most limited of the backed saws. They are typically very short (9-10″), have a depth of cut less than 2″ and they have a high-tooth count (13-15tpi) which means they will cut slowly and can’t cut deep. So, buy your dovetail saw but just realize that it is more limited than other choices.

Like the panel saws, general furniture construction requires both cross-cut and rip cuts and so the same is true when considering what backsaws to buy. It can be argued that you can use a rip saw to make cross-cuts. This is true, but with joinery saws you want smooth cuts and a cross-cut saw will produce smoother cross-cuts.

You’ll want to cut things like rails and stiles to length (cross-cut) and you’ll be wanting to cut things like a small cabinet case top to depth (rip cut). If I were to start over and buying a “first” backsaw, I’d be hunting for a 14-16″ cross-cut backsaw simply because there’s more ‘cutting to length’ being done in cabinet work than rip-cutting. If I had it to do over again I’d choose the 16″ saw.

The reason is two fold. The 14-16″ backsaws typically will give you 3 1/2″ – 4″ of cut depth and they’ll typically have 11tpi I or thereabouts, which will let you cut quickly and yet the cut will still be relatively smooth. The other thing that’s nice about larger backsaws is that the center of gravity of these saws is high, making it easier to “feel” whether the saw is vertical. This attribute has to be experienced to be appreciated.

For myself, when I bought my backsaws there weren’t any new, high-quality 16″ saws available. I use my carcase saw (11″, 13tpi cross-cut) and tenon saw (14″, 11tpi rip) saws constantly to do final cuts on furniture pieces, cutting mortise & tenon joints, bridle joints, and many, many other operations. Oh…and I covet the Bad Axe 16″ and 18″ backsaws. As soon as I can plan and execute the bank job I’ll be picking up one of each.

Last, but not least, the saw I bought first, my dovetail saw (9″, 14tpi). I use it to cut dovetails. It’s also handy for cutting small notches and such. Of the 5 saws I’ve outlined, it’s the one I use the least. I also use my 14″ tenon saw to cut dovetails and my carcase saw to cut off the half-pins on the ends of the board.

So, What Should I buy?

This is a personal thing. My goal here is to point out how much you can do with just a few saws. I’m just as convinced (by the evil tool devil on my shoulder) that you can never have too many saws. As I’ve noted, I do most of my cutting with only 4 saws. If you owned these four saws and used them, you’ll know better than I what you want to add to your saw nest. Sawing is more about knowing how than how many tools you own.

Where do I buy them?

I’ve not used all of the fine saws on the market. I’ve used Wenzloff, Lee Valley, and Lie-Nielsen saws. I like them all. I covet the large backsaws available from Bad Axe Tools. Rather than try to say intelligent things about the various brands, however, I’m just going to list their websites and let you read what they have to say about their products.

Hey, What About Old Saws?

I haven’t mentioned old saws as a source for good quality saws for a reason. To me this is a Catch-22. If you know how to take an old saw, restore and sharpen it and put it to use, you don’t need to be reading about saws from me. It doesn’t get more complicated than that.

Yes, you can find and and restore older saws. My panel saws are examples of Disston and Spear & Jackson saws that I have restored and sharpened myself. Find one that’s straight and sharpen it and you’ll get a lifetime of use from it but be prepared for a learning curve. I recommend Tom Law’s Handsaw Sharpening video for guidance.

Learning to sharpen saws is something you will need to do eventually. The question is how to know when you’ve succeeded if you’ve never used a saw sharpened by someone who really knows how. One way to get these old saws in ‘out of the box’ working condition would be to buy one (both backsaws and panel saws) from Bad Axe Toolworks. Mark Harrell typically has a bunch of restored/sharpened saws available for sale on his website.

One more thing. Rumor has it that Chris Schwarz has a handsaw video coming out. If you want to learn about handsaws, keep checking the Lie-Nielsen DVD section as it’s supposed to show up ‘real soon.’

Cheers — Larry

larry@woodnbits.com

http://www.badaxetoolworks.com/

Installing Cabinet Mirrors

Larry — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 23:21:32 +0000

I’m finally able to get back to my vanity cabinets and really, there isn’t much to do before I start finishing. I’m using a small magnet to hold the door closed and simple, no-mortise hinges so the only operation worth talking about is the installation of the mirror panels, using cherry backer strips.

These strips will be removable in case the mirrors break. It may also be the case that I’ll get sufficiently irritated by the lack of a wooden back plate on the mirror and remove them so I can add one at a later date. The reason I’m not doing so now is that I’m concerned about door weight. Seems something got lost in translation (story of my life here in Quebec) and I ended up with 3/16″ mirror panels rather than 1/8″ thick panels. The upside is that they’ll be very strong. The downside is that they’re fairly heavy and I’m concerned about how the 1 1/2″ wide frame pieces will hold up under the weight. Anyone with experience with thick glass like this – chime in please. I guess the virtue of building something to put in your own bathroom is that you can take a ‘wait and see’ attitude towards some of this stuff.

Sizing and Fitting the Pieces

I started the process by ripping a bunch of 3/8″ strips from a board that was just a bit more than 7/16″ thick. These dimensions were because I needed backers that would be 5/16″ wide and 3/8″ deep. I took the width down to 5/16″ as I smoothed the faces.

I started by cutting/fitting the pieces to the frame. This required a bunch of miter cuts but it’s a straightforward, measure/cut process.

I placed all of the frame pieces in the frame and behind the mirror panel. As I planned, these stuck out of the back of the frame by about 1/8″. I wanted a reveal of around 1/16″ to form a border. Using a smooth plane so the process would go slowly, I started bringing the 4 strips down to the desired height.

Once I got the height I wanted I pulled the pieces and rounded both edges. Here It’s good to do one piece and then, slowly, round over the adjacent piece(s) to match the roundover to the existing piece.

This is the result. At this point the pieces aren’t screwed in place, nor has the frame been finish sanded. But you get the idea of what I was after and I was happy with the result.

Installing Backers

So, the pieces were pulled and holes drilled for screws. These holes were countersunk as well. At this point I finish sanded the inside of the door frame as well as these pieces.

This photo is to remind you that it’s best never to drive brass screws, even if you’ve pre-drilled holes for them. They’re soft and it’s easy to break one off in your piece, ruining your whole day. Here, I installed a backing piece with 2-4 steel screws. Then I removed those and, one at a time, replaced them with brass screws.

Here’s a photo of one of the cabinets, needing a bit of finish prep and then it’s on to applying finish. You know, it’s hard to take a photo of a mirrored piece in a shop. The cases already have a coat of boiled linseed oil and I’ll add that to the doors as well. I’ll be applying some polyurethane I think, since they’re going into a bathroom.

A New Vise Because of My Vice

Larry — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 13:59:14 +0000

I enjoy using handsaws. I own a table saw but more and more, I use it as an assembly/work table. I just like the freedom and quiet of handsaws.

There’s a problem with handsaws, however. While I can send my table saw blades out for sharpening and it’s easy for me to rationalize this as I don’t have the tools to sharpen carbide-tipped blades, I can’t do that for my handsaws.

First, it’s getting hard to find people who sharpen handsaws. Mark Harrell, at Bad Axe Toolworks will do it. Medallion Tools here in Canada will do it. But this involves packing a saw into a box and handing said box, and a wad of money, to the post office to get the saw to the sharpener. The other problem is that it just seems that I should be able to run a file over the steel teeth and sharpen handsaws myself.

But there’s a rub. One needs a saw vise to hold the saw. I’ve used an old metal saw vise that I picked up at a flea market. It works, sort of. The problem is that the old cast iron eccentric that locks the saw into the vise is worn and no matter what I do, it won’t stay locked. I fight it every time I use the vise.

Recently, while I was resawing, the saw told me that it needed to be sharpened and I decided that the time had come to solve my saw vise problem. I dug out the SketchUp plan for a saw vise created by Popular Woodworking. I used red oak and cut the boards quickly – I even used the rip saw I needed to sharpen. I tapered the jaw pieces using a scrub plane and jack plane but otherwise the parts are all straight cuts. Everything is held together with #8 screws. Nothing fancy here.

As designed and described by Popular Woodworking, you’re supposed to clamp the base to your bench. This works really well. Next you’re supposed to clamp the saw between the jaws and use an F-clamp to apply pressure to the jaws/saw to hold everything in place. I’m sorry but I don’t have enough hands to do that. I tried it and it was a miserable process.

So, I got out my 3/4″ threading kit and created a screw from a hunk of dowel. Then I drilled/tapped the front to accommodate the screw. The hole on the other jaw needs to be a bit larger and remains untapped. A small block, tapped and screwed onto the screw (all the way to the base of the threads) acts as a stop block for this mechanism. This system makes locking/unlocking the vise a one-hand operation and it works quite well. I highly recommend this addition. I suppose you can do it the same thing with metal hardware but I prefer the wood approach.

Looks sort of cool, right? And my rip saw is now sharp again.

Cheers — Larry

larry@woodnbits.com

A Woodworker Road Trip

Larry — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 14:33:45 +0000

It’s been a few days since I’ve posted and there’s a reason… honest, and it has nothing to do with my laziness.

It’s been excruciatingly hot here in Quebec City and like most Quebec homes, ours has no air conditioning. We just don’t need it – at least we haven’t needed it.

We do have air conditioning in our car, however. And we’re not complete idiots. So, what better time to jump in the car for a road trip? That’s what we thought. Besides, our daughter had never seen any of the Ottawa museums and she’d never seen the homes we used to own in Petawawa, Ontario, or the place both my wife and I worked there. Let’s go!

We had little plan other than to follow the old “go west young man” plaintiff of earlier generations. And so we found ourselves heading down the highway, daughter programming the music and parents tolerating it. My mind started to wander. It does that a lot.

It occurred to me that I could stop at Langevin & Forest, a large woodworking store in Montreal. I could look for some 3×3 stock for a couple Krenov-style planes I want to build. Oh, and I need some Deft danish oil too. While I’m there I’ll check to see if they have Craig Stevens’ book too, though it’s become hard to find. And suddenly, the trip became much more interesting.

And we did stop there. No book, but they had one called “Country Pine” that I just had to have. I picked up some 3×3 birch but the only large size exotics they had were way too expensive. $70 for cocobollo? I don’t think so. The ebony sticks were pretty cheap. They’ll make nice Greene & Greene joinery pins.

Back in the car and we discussed the “itinerary.” What museums would we visit. Would we drive to Petawawa right away or spend a night in Ottawa first? What bookstores would we visit? It was decided to spend the day in Ottawa, visit one museum and then play like the proverbial farmers coming to the big city, gawking our way through the big stores, particularly the bookstores. And so we did.

Of course, with several hours on the road, I had more time to think. “Is it ok if we visit Lee Valley?”, I asked. “Sure, we’d be fools not to”, my wife said. I’m lucky as Lee Valley is smart enough and sell gardening stuff too. And so we did. I found a really nice block of padauk that will form the carcase for my next plane and I picked up a 1/4lb of square-cut nails. Otherwise, I played nice, though the new Veritas skewed block plane called to my wallet and I’m sure I whimpered a bit as I walked away without one.

We had a great time in Ottawa, and I enjoyed seeing the sawmills in the Petawawa area. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen an actual sawmill. Such is city life. We spent several hours in the Chapters bookstore in Ottawa, buying so much treeware that it required the three of us to carry everything. The high point for me was finding a copy of “Shop Class as Soulcraft” by Matthew Crawford. This book examines what we’ve lost as we’ve become a society that no longer creates things with our hands and are so separate from the devices we depend upon that we can’t repair them and mostly don’t even know how they work.

Such is the nature of a road trip by a woodworker. It’s a bit sad to be home, but I’m charged and ready to do some shop work – as soon as it cools down a bit.

Cheers — Larry

larry@woodnbits.com

Making A Simple Outdoor Table – Pt 2

Larry — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 11:32:24 +0000

Do you ever have one of those moments where you wonder “This ain’t right.” I’m having one of those moments right now as it’s clear that it’s taken me longer to take photos, edit/size photos and to write about this project than it did to build the table. “That ain’t right!”

But here we go with part two of this saga. For those who missed it, you might want to read part one first. At this point the legs are built/assembled and the long aprons connect pairs of legs.

Finishing the Table Base

I cut the short aprons and planed them both to smooth them and to fit them into the notches in the legs. What’s important in this step is that as you fit each end of the apron into its leg, do everything in your power to get the apron square with the leg in all directions. This will determine whether your table base is square or not.

Once you’re convinced the pieces will fit together, it’s time to glue/screw the base together. At this point it starts looking like a table.

If you’ve taken the time to study the design you can see that I have made an error. I forgot to cut the dados in the long aprons that hold the cross-pieces to which the top planks are attached. I was just glad this table wasn’t made of hard maple as cedar is easier to chop. I marked out the dados using a cutting marking gauge, cut the dado sides using a carcase saw, and carefully chiseled out the waste.

Whether you do this at this stage or before you assemble the base, you should work from both sides to avoid tearing out one side. Fit the cross-pieces to the dados and the base is complete.

Adding the Table Top

The top consists of five 1/2″ x 4″ x 36″ boards. I crosscut the boards to length using a handsaw but ripped them to width using my table saw. I laid them out on my table with 3/16″ gaps between them and centered the base (inverted) on them. I attached the top boards with screws through the base cross-pieces using a “hybrid” approach. I predrilled the holes with an electric drill, countersunk them with an eggbeater drill, and then drove the screws with a Yankee spiral push screwdriver. If you haven’t used a push screwdriver for driving screws, give one a try. It’s my favorite way to drive screws.

I used a beam compass and marked out an arc that fit each end of the table. I believe it was around 11″ radius but I just set the beam to ‘looks about right’ and used it on both ends of the table. Then, with an ancient Craftsman jig saw I rounded the table top ends. It gave me a good reason to dust off the jig saw and it was probably feeling neglected anyhow.

That’s it…fini! This would be a good project for those taking early steps into furniture making. I enjoyed the project as it came together so quickly. Though I did use an occasional power tool, mostly I used handtools and darn few of those. The simplicity of the joinery allowed me to create it in 4-5 hours and it could have been done more quickly by someone more interested in “quick” than I am. I painted it light blue to match the chairs I made. Have I mentioned how much I hate painting and how bad I am at doing it? Anyways, here is a view of the table frolicking in its native habitat.

Cheers — Larry

larry@woodnbits.com

Making A Simple Outdoor Table – Pt 1

Larry — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 01:31:11 +0000

When you make Adirondack chairs for your family the darndest thing happens. The family sits in them. Quickly the fact that there is no table in front of them becomes apparent, as I commented here and here.

Quick and Simple Design

The requirements for this small 15″ high, 18″ x 36″ table are small and I didn’t want to spend a lot of time on it as my vanity cabinets are getting bored collecting dust in my shop and they want me to finish them. Before we discuss the build, let’s talk quickie joinery, Larry-style.

I planned on making the legs by screwing two 2×4 pieces together and so the first “design” question was how to attach aprons to them. Obviously the simple way is to screw them directly to the outside of the legs but I thought I could do better than that. Here was my first idea:

This creates a surprisingly clean design. But, thinking of how low this table would be to the ground, and about the amount of overhanging I was planning for the top, I decided to simplify this approach a bit more and came up with:

Cutting the rabbet in one side and the slot in the other is a piece of cake using handsaws and so I settled on this as the design for the base:

Trying to match the Adirondack chairs, I built the top by attaching slats to the cross-pieces in the base. I decided that rounding the ends would improve the looks so I planned for that as well. If you’re interested, you can download a SketchUp drawing here.

Creating the Legs

I had two cedar 2x4s and half a dozen 1×6 fence planks and that’s what I used for this little table. The fence planks were only around 1/2″ thick. The first thing I did was to cut 8, 15″ long pieces of 2×4 for the legs. I sort of matched them up for grain but since I was planning on painting this hardly mattered. What did matter, however, was that I treated them as pairs, keeping track of the faces that would come together to form the legs. You need to end up with a set of 4 legs with the slots pointing in the proper orientation so burn a neuron or three as you give some thought to how they have to be oriented.

Yes, I could have used a dado head to cut the rabbets. But in less time than it would take to install the dado head in my table saw I used a carcase saw and a tenon saw to cut the rabbets, thus avoiding the time required to get the dado head back on the shelf.

Cutting the notches in the other leg halves was nearly as quick. I just made the two long cuts with the tenon saw and then chopped out the waste using a chisel. Unfortunately, I got involved in the work and forgot to take a photo of the chisel work.

I cut the aprons at this point as I wanted to attach the long aprons before screwing the leg pieces together. What’s important here is ensuring that the structure is square.

With this accomplished it’s a simple matter to line up the two leg halves and screw them together. I use #8, 2″ screws for this.

This post is getting long and I’ve got some more photos to show of the process so I will put them in a separate post in the next day or so. The “hard” work of this project is over, however.

Cheers — Larry

larry@woodnbits.com