Tea Caddy Finished

The shellac I used was regular ol' orange shellac.  I had to strain it and decant it off of the wax, but it looks the exact same color as the garnet shellac, and it's 4 times less expensive ($10 per pound vs $40 per pound from Brooklyn Tool Co.).  I put the caddy in a sunny spot in my dining room, but unfortunately most of the sunlight hit the top, so it has a distinct reddish hue compared to the body of the tea caddy.

It was different working with stock this thin and small, and I learned a fair amount on resawing wood by hand. And that I'm horrible at making moldings and mitering them.  But I'm not sure I'm cut out to be a box maker.

Sideboard From Rough to Smooth

I have no clue where the idea came from to build a sideboard. I think it was just the fact that we had more space than ever in our dining room and it looked fairly barren, coupled with the fact that we seemed to have an endless supply of dishes, silverware, stemware, and tablecloths. I'd purchased "Furniture in the Southern Style" almost a year ago to this date, and pored over the photos, drawings, and exploded diagrams of the different pieces from the MESDA collection. The one piece that I kept leafing back to was a simple three drawer sideboard with a back splash, some corbels around the front legs, and banding, constructed using mortise and tenon joinery.

I drew a design based off it, but stripped out the back splash, the corbels since they looked really clunky, and the banding because I wasn't sure how it would look against cherry (the original piece's primary wood is black walnut native to the southern USA. The secondary wood is southern yellow pine AKA longleaf pine).

I bought 47 bf of cherry and 10 bf of tulip poplar for the sideboard, based on calculating the bf requirements for the cutlist given in the MESDA book and then adding a little extra just in case. As it turns out, this was actually a little bit too much, and I wound up making a coffee table with the top and rails made out of the clearest and straightest cherry and using some left over white ash for the legs. I asked the guy who was selling me the lumber if he possibly had any leg blanks in the rough.
"Leg blanks? How thick do you need it?"
"Around 2 inches rough"
"No...I got a 10 foot slab of  cherry 3 thick and 10 wide. Will that do it?"

And so I purchased a huge ass slab of wood that will give me hernia problems when I hit 40.

The first thing I did when I got the lumber was to pick out boards that were clear of knots, straight grained, and mostly flat. Unfortunately there were very few boards like that. What boards I did pick, I cut out drawer fronts, sides, and tops from. But because I used most of the flat and clear pieces of cherry for the coffee table I built, I had to go back to the lumber stacks and pick out some pretty crazy looking pieces of cherry that had some serious cupping.

The Legs

After I got my parts cut out, I started work on the legs. I'm not sure if you've had the pleasure of ripping 10 feet of 3 inch thick cherry, but it's the kind of pleasure that you want to reserve solely for a tablesaw or bandsaw. And because of the small, small size of my shop, I had neither. Just a lowly 700mm bowsaw with a 5 tpi web. After I cut the leg blanks out of the slab, I started work on them.

After mortising

Tapered

The tapers were done by using a drawknife to hog off waste. For something like this, though, there was a lot of material to take off. A hatchet or ax may have been a better choice. Mortises were cut with a 3/8" Narex mortising chisel which was a godsend.  It's unique in that it's trapezoidal in cross section which allows you to better steer the chisel which is exactly what I needed in the wild figured cherry. The case sides are fairly wide, and more than likely the original side was one piece of black walnut, so to accommodate wood movement, I chopped the top mortise as the fitted mortise and left the bottom two a little longer than needed for their tenons and left them unglued. The reason is simple: if the wood attempts to contract, it'll be able to shrink on its lower half, and if it attempts to expand, it can do so on its lower half. Had I fitted the tenons tightly to the mortises and glued all three, when the side would try to expand or contract, it would split the sides.

The Sides and Back

After some serious handplaning, the case sides wound up being in the neighborhood of 12 inches wide. I used my dinky Stanley rabbet plane (the type with a one arm fence and depth adjuster that uses a lever instead of a nut and yoke) to cut rabbets to the proper tenon thickness, and then cut out the tenons from the one long rabbeted edge. Let's just say the Stanley leaves a lot to be desired when it comes to cutting rabbets. I now have my eye on the Lee Valley Veritas model. The back was done exactly the same way, but I mortised it for the drawer runners.

The Front Rails

The front rails were a nightmare. By this time, I was running fairly low on cherry. What were supposed to be the rails for the sideboard were now the rails for the coffee table. So I had to use some seriously twisted wood with crazy grain pattern. Grain run out, sapwood dispersed throughout, reversal, grain diving down, coming back up, undulating...it had it all!

Dry fitting to check the mortise and tenon

Dry fit to test for square on the case front

The Top

Because my best pieces went to the cherry coffee table, I settled for some lesser boards that had a lot of sapwood and a ton of warping. I did my best to flatten each piece, but after an hour I threw up my hands, and glued the three boards together. I think the real trick to getting flat panels from rough boards like this is to try and joint the edges so that the faces are approximately coplaner, and then roughly flatten the back face, and get the top dead flat and smooth from tear out. But now I know.

The Drawer Runners

This part wasn't too bad. After dry fitting the front rails I mortised the lower rail and cut tenons on some cherry off cuts and pine for the drawer runners. Looking back, it would've been much better to have had the side drawer runners as wide as possible so that they mated with the inside of the case sides. That would've made putting in drawer guides a cake walk, as I could've glued strips on the wide runner so that they butted up against the drawer. Because as of right now, my two outside drawers have no guides on their outer edges since their outer edges line up perfectly with the outer edges of the drawer runners.

At this point I should've said, "Hey wait a second..."

The Glue Up

The glue up is the most exciting time of any project. It's the time when you're nearing completion, and it's also the time you'll most likely pay if you haven't done a dry fit, especially with larger pieces. After a particularly exciting glue up involving an out of square stool, a lone too long tenon for its mortise, a paring chisel, and my thumb, I always do dry fits to rehearse the best way to put the piece together and to find any mistakes while I can still fix them.

The Drawers

The drawers were constructed using half blind dovetails in the front and through dovetails in the back. I remember this being somewhat routine, although I wish I'd practiced dovetailing a lot more before jumping into the half-blinds. While I was chopping out the waste for the center drawer front, a large piece of cherry cracked out of the back despite my best efforts to use as little force as possible to chop the waste out and to keep the back well supported to prevent this from happening.  But happen it did. I cut a triangular patch that was larger than the damage out of the drawer front, and cut a piece of veneer to cover it. I clearly hadn't had enough sleep the night before, since you should always cut the patch of veneer first, and then scribe the shape of the patch over the damaged area for a better fit.

The Finish

I finished the coffee table first before getting into the heavy work on this piece. But the thing that irritated me is that the garnet shellac over the cherry coffee table top looked really...orange. Not at all what I expected. I knew I'd have to stain the whole sideboard since all of the boards I'd used to build the top had cream colored sapwood in it, and the front rails were hideous with sapwood and crazy mineral streaks. I purchased red aniline dye from Lee Valley and applied it until I got the color mostly evened out. The top was the first part that I finished, using the French polishing technique and the same garnet shellac. The drawer fronts got the same treatment, and the rest was brushed with about 4 coats of garnet shellac. I used a card scraper to level the finish on the front legs, rails, and sides, and French polished on a small amount of shellac until I got the sheen I was looking for.  The hardware was bought from Lee Valley.

Sideboard finished

Aaaand we're done. I finished the sides by humping the whole case minus the top out to my back porch with a drop cloth laid down and using a brush to put on three layers of garnet shellac. After three hours of letting it dry, I used a card scraper to scrape flat the surface on the rails, stiles, the fronts of the legs and the case sides, and then charged a pad and polished on shellac until my pad began dragging slightly (approx. two coats). The end result looks great. It's not a highly polished surface compared to the drawer fronts, but it's got a great sheen to it, it's smooth, and the grain is partially filled, giving it a little bit of texture.
I debated about refinishing the top. Although I had French polished it, I hadn't done quite enough bodying sessions, and the shellac had shrunk back into the pores which also highlighted low spots in the top. This set it apart from the high gloss drawer fronts, and not for the better.
I'd also run out of BT&C dewaxed garnet shellac. I could wait for two whole days for my other batch of orange shellac to dissolve and then decant the shellac from the wax, or I could press my luck and try to rub out the finish to see if I could get a better sheen from it.
I haven't had much success rubbing shellac out with pumice and rottenstone. Part of me wonders if the shellac was on its last legs (I French polished the center drawer front and let it sit for 3 days to allow the shellac to fully cure. But when I clamped it to my bench top to install the drawer pull, the shellac was still too soft and cloth indentations were left in it. On the other hand, we had some pretty intense heat that week in the upper 90's and my shop doesn't have A/C). Whatever the reason, I took a chance and used just the rottenstone to polish it up. And it worked great! Over time I expect it to acquire a more semi-gloss look after dishes and plates slowly scratch the surface.
I'll do another blog post detailing the build from start to finish and lessons learned along the way.

Sideboard Case Glued Up

The title says it all. And like I predicted, it's too darn cold in Richmond to use hide glue for the glue up, so I went with yellow PVA. I'll try moving the case inside tomorrow, and flatten the tops and stain everything this weekend.

Sideboard dry fit

Yesterday I cut the mortise and tenons in the front rails for the drawer runners, in addition to the drawer dividers, and today I cut the mortises in the sideboard back and the tenons on the back end of the drawer runners. I made a mistake in marking the right drawer runner; I had the piece inadvertently turned over when I marked it, so there's a gap between the inside leg and the drawer runner. The problem with this is that although it's not wide enough for a drawer to slip through, there's no room for a drawer guide. I'll fix it with a piece of scrap and hot hide glue, or just use a wide piece glued directly to the case side instead of the runner.

Wrangling this thing into place was a real chore. It's not heavy, but it's long, it's rather tall, and fairly deep. And this is complicated by the fact the drawer runners have to be set into their mortises in the bottom front rail and the case back, all while trying to keep the drawer dividers up tight against the top and bottom rail, and then squeezing everything into the case sides. Sheesh.
Right before cutting the joinery for the drawer runners, I had a brief thought about making the mortises in the back the same width as the runners. That way, I could put the front and back together, and then just slide the runners through the mortise in the back, and then seat the front tenons into the mortises in the front rail.

I (perhaps wisely) chickened out from doing this. The only way that could work is if I glued the front tenons and left the back of the drawer runners unglued. But this would mean that there would only be the glue holding the tenon in place, and that every time you pushed the drawers back, you would cause the runners to slightly pull on the tenons. I'm not sure if this would cause the glue to fail in 5 or 50 years, but there's also the fact that a mortise that big in the back (about 1" across and between 2 to 4 inches wide with a 1 inch depth) could potentially cause the back to split off along the mortises, especially if the drawers are loaded down with china and silverware.
So I wisely, if not adventurously, went with 3/8" mortises and side by side double tenons for the two wider drawer runners.

Dry fitting was done by putting the case back into the two sides, sliding the drawer runners into the mortises in the back, and then gently pushing the sides out so I could get enough clearance to slide the top and bottom front rails into the sides. And then a lot of finagling went on trying to get everything nice and flush. As much as I hate to say, I just don't think using hide glue for this glue up is going to be feasible. Even with my heater on full blast, the shop never got warmer than 37 degrees, and temperatures are supposed to be continuing in the lower 30's this week. Plus, there's no way I'll get everything together in time before the 260 gram hide glue sets. I guess I'll use good ol' yellow PVA.

After I get this thing glued up, I'll probably move it into the house (if possible) to give me space to work on flattening the top. Once the top is in order, I'll fit it to the case and then start work on the drawers. After the drawers are fitted, I can then start on the most exciting part: staining and finishing. I ordered a packet of red aniline dye stain from Lee Valley and I have plenty of scraps to test stains on. I'll see what it looks like with different strengths of the stain (two applications, one application, one application and then wiped) underneath two or three coats of 2 pound cut garnet shellac.

Sideboard Coming Together

The sideboard's coming together. It's exciting because this is the biggest case piece I've ever worked on. It's also a bit of a one-shot deal. I've made three different shaker tables with slightly altered proportions, but that's okay. There's plenty of room for them in the home. I can design newer sideboards to get a feel for what I like, but actually building them isn't the best idea. Where the heck would I put it?!

This thing is huge. It's about 20 inches or so in depth and around 5 feet in length. I'm weighing the pros and cons of these dimensions. Serving on the top of the sideboard will be easy because of the length and depth. But having wide, deep drawers will make it harder to get stuff that's at the very back of it. I guess we'll be limited to storing large tablecloths and the like in it. I do like the height (38 inches). It's right at elbow level for me, and though I'd never consciously think of it, it's nice to pick dishes and the like up without bending slightly.

My dad made a smaller sideboard about 20 years ago that's scaled down to about a 4 foot length with an 18 inch depth. I'm still wondering if that would have been a better choice.

The only thing left to do know is to tease the joints together for the front rails. There's a slight gap on the left hand side of the front rail, so today I'll determine if there's junk in the mortise preventing the tenon from fully seating or if the mortise isn't deep enough. After that I'll start work on the joinery for the drawer dividers and the web frames so the drawers don't fall through empty space.

In between that, I picked up some aniline dye from Lee Valley and I'll be testing it out on different scraps of cherry with garnet shellac to see if I can't get a color I love.

The New Mutt Workbench

I'm finally getting around to posting the pictures, but I completed my workbench towards the end of December 2013. In the beginning of 2012 I purchased a Sjoberg hobby workbench since it was on sale at Woodcraft and it lasted for about 2 years or so. But it was a total piece of junk. The top was laminated maple that was barely over an inch thick, the legs were fir that were fastened with cabinet-type Robertson screws, and the rails were fastened to the legs with nuts and bolts. After about a year, the top warped horribly to the point where flattening boards was akin to playing the lottery (chances of getting the board flat are 1 in 650,000) and because of how thin it was, I was seriously concerned that if I completely flattened it, I would have a half inch thick top that would crack and split during mortising. The Robertson screws became bent and eventually stripped the threads to the point where you could lean on the bench and it would sway. And the rails? Since they were connected to the legs with butt joinery, I had to crank down on the nuts and bolts to prevent them from rotating like a prayer wheel whenever I worked.

Even though this all happened within a year, it was obvious I needed a new workbench within the first few months. Fed up with the thin top, lack of workholding capability, and the short length, I began looking for replacements to purchase. The only problem I had with the benches I found is that the tops were too thin (1 3/4" thick) for mortising by hand, they were way too high (36"), and their legs looked like they were made with eastern white pine from the home center. The others were just too damn expensive (ranging from $2000 to $4000).

It took me another year before I finally got around to building it, but I'm already happy with the results. In another year or two I'll update this post with changes I'd like to make to it.

The trestle base is made up of 3x3 leg blanks for the bottom and top, and the legs are 2x2 red oak. The top portion is through mortised, wedged, and drawbored. The rails are southern yellow pine half-lapped and bolted to the legs. The bottom is mortised about a third of the way through and is also drawbored. The shelf was made by simply cutting up a 2x10 and screwing it to the bottom of the rails.

The top is southern yellow pine laminated face to face. This was far cheaper than purchasing so called "workbench tops" (I suspect they're countertop production overruns) from Woodcraft and other specialty stores for close to $200. Those things are pretty thin (1 1/2") and more expensive than countertops sold by Ikea. You could certainly purchase two countertops from Ikea, but all told it'll cost close to $400 for shipping and the weight surcharge. The boards I purchased cost close to $75 and I still had material left over.

The vise I installed is a quick release Jorgensen. I still haven't gotten around to building a chop for it. For the tail vise, I ordered a face vise hardware from Lee Valley and will eventually get around to installing it along with constructing the chops. For the time being, I'm making do with holdfasts and a Veritas wonder pup.

Lessons learned:

• I used a 700mm E.C. Emmerich frame saw with a 9 tpi web. Cutting tenons and the half-laps was a breeze. 
• Mortising was horrible. After completing most of the mortises with a 3/4" bit and 8inch brace and cleaning up with a mortising chisel, I'm convinced the right tools for this job are a 1" bit and a 12 or 14 inch brace. There's no need to go out and purchase Jennings auger bits; 1" auger bits with hexagonal shanks are available at Lowe's for about 1/4 the price of the NOS bits. 
• The shelf is extremely handy. Right now I'm using it for pieces of the sideboard that I'm building. It adds weight to the bench, it keeps things close at hand, and the weight of all the pieces stacked on top of each other keeps them flat.
• I think the Jorgensen vise is better suited as a tail vise. The quick release feature doesn't offer any appreciable advantage over conventional face vises.
• If I had the time, I would have constructed the rails with through joinery and then bolted them to the legs. However, I can't get the bench to rack at all, and it only took about two hours of doing the joinery by hand and massaging all the joints to where they fit perfectly. Deep mortising is a completely different beast. I spent hours fiddling around with the walls trying to find out where it was humped in its 3" depth, carefully paring, and then testing the fit. Absolute misery.
• The overall bench is a little bit short (69"), but it fits my shop. If I had to, I could build a new top, and make new rails using the same base and stretch it out to 7 feet or whatever would fit.

Coffee table in cherry and ash

During the move we made earlier this year, the movers in their infinite wisdom placed a bed rail leaning almost vertical against the wall. It was no longer nearly vertical when the second mover brushed up against it and sent it crashing through our coffee table's glass table top. And so the pictures begin...

I had an 8/4 board of white ash which I used as leg stock for shaker tables. I ripped 4 legs out, crosscut the 4 aprons for the table, and then ripped them to the correct length. And I did this all by hand. Sigh.
Right now the top is still in halves, because the entire table top is 25 inches wide and my ugly duckling of a bench is only 18 inches wide. The picture above shows one half of the top. I'm planning on flattening the two halves separately, and then carefully glue their edges together to get the entire top. And then probably smooth it on my shop floor or something like that.
I used titebond to for gluing up, but I noticed that it had frozen overnight. Slightly concerned, I thawed it and used it on the top anyway.
Bad idea. I was able to break the joint easily by hand. I reverted back to using hide glue, because the cold doesn't seem to affect it quite the same way.
After re-gluing the top with hot hide glue, I flattened it with a jack plane and then a jointer plane. There was a little bit of sapwood on one edge of the top. I was fine with it because it acted as a slight accent to the long edge of the top (it'd be a completely different story if the sapwood was in the center of the top). However, it was also a live edge at one point that had its bark removed, and was at a 45 degree angle that made it very difficult to get good clamping pressure on it with bar clamps. So I ripped it off.
After that I glued up the two halves with hot hide glue again and then coarsely flattened the bottom to work on the top.
It seems I never fully learn whenever I do this, but I think it's just best to leave stock oversized, glue everything up, and then flatten it. I flattened this panel about 6 times or so instead of just once. Maybe when I get around to building the sideboard...

As I found out the hard way, it doesn't really matter to what extent you finish the vertical edges. For the base of the coffee table, I wiped on about three coats of wiping varnish and let it cure for about a day until the varnish smell dissipated. I had it sitting out in the sunlight to give it a little bit of color, but since it's going in a living room area, it'd develop a darker cherry color over the years.
For the top I wanted to use French polishing with garnet shellac just to see how easily cherry takes a finish and what the look would be. The bodying session was done in about an hour and a half. The next morning the finish had sunk back into the pores a hair, so I filled them back up with shellac again and then began clearing the top of oil and smoothing out the final finish.

It's not exactly my best work for finishing, but I think it's a good start.

What I learned:

1. Cherry is somewhat brittle. I'm not sure if this is true of all fruitwoods, but I couldn't help but notice the boards I'd selected for the long edges of the top had somehow chipped quite a bit. I didn't want the top to be flush with the base, and I was pretty close to being there with the overall width, so I let the chips stay. I'm not sure planing them out would have done really anything, though. Sure it would have gotten rid of them, but then my dog would probably knock the table over starting the process again.
2. Frozen PVA glue is useless. If it's frozen, toss it. If your shop is unheated and not insulated, like mine, you're better off taking your glue inside or sticking with hide glue.
3. Garnet shellac may be better suited for woods that are a little bit darker than cherry. It may be just my eye, but I'm wondering if buttonlac would have been a better choice than garnet. I'm using the Brooklyn Tool and Craft garnet shellac and it just looks very orange. I may have to stain the cherry or tint the shellac for the sideboard.
4. White ash is extremely tough. I chopped out the mortises using a 1/4" Narex mortising chisel and it was a beast to get down to 3/4" depth.
5. Using jojoba oil for French polishing isn't a great idea. This time around, it was a real bear to get it all off in the clearing session of French polishing. I think I'll stick with olive oil or mineral oil instead.
6. Heat your boards up if you're using hot hide glue. I'm using 215 gram strength hide glue from Lee Valley, and I work fast in using it. But as you can see in the pictures, there's a definite glue seem that's there. When I did a dry fit, it was a nice and tight joint, but I think when I started gluing, the glue began gelling too quickly to squeeze out and acted as a spacer for the panels. When I saw it, I was concerned, so I grabbed two long edges and began twisting and pulling, but I wasn't able to break it apart. It's not noticeable in natural light, but the camera's flash was able to reflect it very well.