Book Boxes

I started building a book box for Lara on Saturday. It started off with a 5"x7' plank of rough cut alder that I dressed, jointed, and cut to length. And unfortunately jointed and jointed and jointed the end grain. The joinery I used for this is dovetails, but I got the idea for the box from Roy Underhill who based his book boxes off of Thomas Jefferson's who used these to ship his books around.

Neato.

I used a Stanley No. 5 corrugated jack plane, a Stanley No. 7 jointer plane, a marking gauge, bevel gauge, 1/2" chisel, and a Crown gent's backsaw to convert the plank into a box.

Lessons learned: start off by making sure all your tools are sharp. I don't know why, but I'm really sensitive to my plane irons being dull. I sharpened my jack and jointer plane which made dressing this board last all of 20 minutes. My block plane was another story. It took me a full thirty minutes of struggling to square up the end grain before I realized the iron was dull. But this was also thirty minutes of jury-rigging for a woodworking vise by just clamping the board upright to the workbench and thirty minutes of bashing my fingers into the bench top and having the board shift back and forth with every stroke of my plane while mumbling to myself that the pain and frustration were all part of the job. My little Crown backsaw is probably meant for cutting dovetails and the like in softwood stock that's less than 2/4 thick. The board was a little over 4/4 and it was a hardwood. Ugh. So that meant hideous dovetails until I took the time to file my saw, stone the sides, flatten the sawplate (it was slightly curved when I got it, probably from the factory sharpening), and tension the blade. It was worth it for the last board's tails, as it cut straight and true. The 1/2" chisel had about 5 different bevels on it in various skewed angles. When I'd gotten the pins and tails cut, I tried chopping away the waste between the pins and the tails which successfully ripped huge chunks of wood from the baseline, which made me whip out the coping saw to remove the waste. But that meant that I had to pare down to the baseline to get a flat surface for the mating board to rest on. And that's when I realized the chisel's bevel was all kinds of screwy. Fortunately I've improved at grinding, and using a light touch with a finger close to the edge to make sure I wasn't burning the steel, I ground a new bevel and sharpened up the chisel with my Spyderco stones so that I could easily pare away the waste. But I obviously need to work on my paring skills considering I pared away waste to create sloping, oblique spaces in between the pins and tails.

I did a dry fit earlier today and glued everything up. It's pretty snug for having large gaps in most of the dovetails which I repaired by cutting 1/32" slivers with the backsaw to hammer into the gaps and make the joint snug. Tomorrow I plan on chiselling off the hardened glue, smoothing the face boards with my No.3 smoothing plane (the iron's sharp; I checked) and applying a few coats of Danish oil to put this project to bed. Though knowing what I know now, I don't think a second book box would take this long to complete...

Oh well. For the positives, it took very little time for me to plane the board down and get rid of the small twist that was present towards the ends of the board. And keep in mind, I didn't cut it to length just yet, but dressed the full length of the board. My sharpening and grinding skills are improving since I turned a chisel that could've doubled as an icepick into a paring chisel that was leaving burnished wood in its wake. And my handsaw skills are improving in terms of sawing, sharpening, and tensioning. The tensioning was really apparent in this saw. I had to tension it twice, but now instead of the blade flexing, it's nicely taut and very easy to start. My only grip is that in the blade towards the handle the saw plate gently bends away from the main toothline, but I suspect this is just left over from it's original filing. Whatevs. I got the rest of the curve out.

For now the one thing I definitely need to get/work on is some sort of vise and a saw vise or saw sharpening horse. The saw sharpening horse should be easy enough to make. The vise I'll have to think about.

Somewhat of normalcy

The cast finally came off and I can shower without the use of strategically placed trashbags and rubber bands. So everything should be back to normal, right? Nope. I'm still limited to lifting 10 pounds with my left hand until the start of September. But at least I'll be able to start cycling again.

Sawbench by Chris Schwarz

I'd started work on a sawbench designed by Chris Schwarz (who when shaven bears an uncanny resemblance to my RDC) because I got fed up hunching over my work while attempting to rip it on a squat bench. I'm slowly, with an emphasis on slow, getting better at this woodworking stuff. The rabbets I cut for the end stretchers on the sawbench were actually decent in that they fit snug up against the legs without the use of a shoulder plane, and the rabbets I cut on the long side stretchers were perfect on the tulip poplar. The rabbets on the pine stretcher not so much.

I'm not sure why. The only thing I can think of is that the pine has a tendency to buckle and I'm still having issues securing my work, so buckling pine plus shifting board equals quivering carcase saw equals crooked rabbets.

Looking back, I still think it's cobbled together pretty shoddily, but I expect to get my money's worth out of it.

On another note, my pu'er from JASetea came in! Another mini brick of Douji wild arbor sheng pu'er, and a bing of 2010 Douji Red Da Dou sheng. I better up my intake of tea otherwise I'll soon run out of room!

Small table continued

Well in my last update I had my table essentially built with the exception of the top. That hasn't quite changed, but when I was helping my dad move wood from his old house I saw off cuts of what looked like hard yellow pine which he gave to me. So much for me guessing what I should do for the tabletop.

My first step was to rip it down from its 2" thickness to 1". After 30 minutes and getting 4 inches cut, I stopped (mostly because my heart was about to pop at my heroic attempts at sawing) to reevaluate. "Y'know, maybe the 8 inch width is just too darn wide for ripping." And indeed it was.

So I ripped it width wise in half to continue onward. But it still took an eternity to saw the durn pine to size. Right now I've got all the pieces cut and I just need to plane them to thickness and nail them to to table rails and I'll have a sturdy little coffee table that's ugly beyond belief.

Adventures in Woodworking

I finally managed to cobble together the rails and legs of the table I've been making over the past month. For as long as it's taking, it's extremely rough around the edges. The shoulders on the tenons don't exactly meet up flush with the legs, and the tenons themselves were a huge pain in the proverbial hindquarters to get in the mortise. The whole process of dry assembling, disassembling, paring down, and then repeating got to be monotonous and also made me look closer at the tenons. Most were cut just fine, but the rail somehow got canted offcenter, so the tenons had a sloping angle to them, making it hard to get a good fit with the mortise. I didn't have any clamps long enough to provide pressure on the sides of the table (an oversight on my part; I'll rectify that) so I glued as best as I could in stages, with the whole table minus the top being assembled early this morning. My key take aways from this were: for cutting tenons, you need to ensure the board is vertical and not canted back or forth, otherwise you end up with angled tenons; use the mortising chisel to pry away wood down to the bottom of the mortise instead of letting the bevel on the chisel do all the work while you hammer away; make sure your mortising gauge's pins are sharp, otherwise they'll track along the grain instead of a straight line. It was definitely a teaching experience with the first mortise and tenon being shabby, and the last mortise and tenon fitting together snugly with a little effort.

This was my first project that required me to rip the rails to width. I'd bought a modern Putsch handsaw from Woodcraft simply because I'd attempted ripping boards down to thickness with my cheapo Japanese style saw which had little respect for any straight line, and I needed something that could get the job done faster. I first picked up one of their panel saws (made by Lynx, I think) and looked at the toothline to see if the saw was bent. And lemme tell you, if the saw plate was bent any more, it'd be a full circle. I grabbed the Putsch saw simply because it was the straightest of them all, and went home and attempted to rip the boards. It didn't take long for me to realize something was wrong, so I decided to look at the teeth. They were triangular, as in equilateral triangles, and duller than the beach at wintertime. Long story short, I hammered the saw plate straighter, tensioned the saw, set the saw, shaped and sharpened the teeth to a legit ripping profile, and now it performs like a champ, zipping through the wood. Is it worth the money for all the work I put into it? I'll find out after I use it more, but for a new handsaw, it's loads cheaper than the Lie-Nielsen or Pax handsaws that are on the market today. My main gripe? The poor job of stamping the teeth. It's 7 teeth per inch, which meant I had to file down 168 teeth to a rip profile, set them, and then sharpen them considerbly before it cut worth a damn. Think of this as a kit that requires some assembly and you won't be disappointed.

Finishing Up

Tomorrow I start to head back home from RI after chewing gum and kicking ass at SWOS. I can't say that I'll exactly be thrilled to go back to a maelstrom of paperwork, busywork, and boringness but hopefully my career will start looking up with the prospect of going to fleet week in NYC and starting to actually apply some of the stuff I've learned here. My biggest disappointment the whole time I was up here? The weather and the fact that I couldn't find any woodworking shops that aren't already back home. I guess there just isn't that much demand up here, despite the boom that New England had back in the day for handmade furniture.

Woodworking projects

I finished making a tool tote from Roy Underhill's "The Woodwright's Apprentice." It's about as ugly as a cross-eyed dog with the mange, but somehow the stars and planets aligned when I was knocking the thing together with 1 1/4" nails and it's steady like a rock, fully capable of holding 20 pounds worth of tools. When I first glanced through the pages, I thought it'd be a snap to put together. But after I dog-eared the page and came back to it and actually started reading, I realized the ends and sides are canted outwards so that the whole thing resembles an upside down triangle with the apex truncated. In as few words, it blew my mind as to how I'd make it.

Fortunately after I'd prepared all the stock, it wasn't that difficult to figure out. The bottom gave me the most grief. I attempted to put a bevel on its edges so that the tote's sides would neatly join up to it. But I somehow fouled it all up to where the bevel was far too much and resulted in the sides splaying waaaay out.

In the end I had to go back and replane the bevel on the bottom. Throughout the whole process of measuring, planing, fiddling around with the T bevel, hitting my thumb with hammer and spilling all the nails out into a pile of shavings, something seemed amiss. It wasn't obvious until I put the thing together that I realized I'd somehow cut the bottom's lenth about an inch and a half short.

But instead of channeling my artistic angst-neo-deconstructivist side (aka getting pissed off and destroying it with a hammer) I cobbled it together with nails and stood back to look at it.

My eyes shortly began to burn and fill up with tears. It was extremely homely. But I piled it up with all the adrift tools, clamps, blades, and squares that I had on my workbench and hoisted it up to see if it would hold. I could hear angels in the background, and I felt a golden glow surround me; I'd just performed a miracle.

In all seriousness, the workmanship of the thing is a pretty low standard. The sides' bottoms aren't fully flush with the bottom's sides, the mortices are cut a little too deep (the handle perceptibly shifts about 1/16" back and forth), the rabbets aren't cut very cleanly, and there's that obvious gap in the bottom where it's too short.

However, I'm improving and progressing which is encouraging to me. The rabbets are the best I've cut so far, I was able to plane and joint the boards dead flat and actually plane the proper bevel on the end pieces and the sides' bottoms (but not the bottom), the mortice and tenons I made are decent and hold, and the saw cuts I made to shape the handle are extremely accurate and very clean. Overall, I'd say it's a success. My whole intention was to make a tote that I can carry tools around, and this certainly meets that goal. I plan on making one for Lara pretty soon for her gardening tools, and I'll definitely be using the lessons applied. And hey, practice makes perfect.