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
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
Orbital Sander Is Too Slow For Hand Tool Guy
My last post described me turning to my electron burners to make some Adirondack chairs. There is no doubt in my mind that I saved a lot of time ripping boards with my table saw rather than cutting the same hundred feet with a handsaw. As I said, this was a project about the end result so I sacrificed the enjoyment of the process to get it done.
Well surprise surprise. I learned something about myself and about tool choices. We all have a feeling for how long something should take us to accomplish something. I think this is why a lot of power tool guys think they work so quickly as we don’t tend to count set up and clean up in our time estimates. But I had to chuckle to myself after I saw what had happened in my shop and I thought I’d share it with you.
I had a significant pile of pine pieces that I needed to smooth on both sides prior to assembling the second and third chairs in this series. As I did with the first chair, I took my Bosch orbital sander, slapped a 60-grit disk on it and started making noise. After about 1 1/2 hours I was, maybe, a bit more than half done with this when I said to myself, “This would go faster if I’d just plane the surfaces.”
And that’s exactly what I did. I grabbed my #7 and a smoother and went to work. It took less than 1/2 an hour to finish up my pile of parts. Planing was sooooooo much faster that I regretted not thinking of it earlier. To make the comparison more clear the boards that had been planed were also shiny smooth, whereas those treated to my orbital sander would need another go with 120-150 grit.
In the end, I could have saved myself at least 2-3 hours by planing the parts for the three chairs rather than using a sander. I can’t say if this would have completely offset the handsaw vs table saw time difference but it sure would have taken a huge chunk out of it. Interesting… at least I thought so.
At this point the 3 chairs are ready for paint, and just like it was planned, it’s supposed to rain for the next two days.
Cheers — Larry
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
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
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