All posts by Tom

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Link of the week

Link of the week

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Utilikilts

So, you are looking for some tough, practical and stylish work wear to put on before you head out to the shop. Are you going to look in one of those big-box retailers for something to fill the bill?  Nah.  How about some clothing discount store?  No way.

Why not a utility kilt?

Utilikilts is an American company proudly making utility kilts for everyday wear. It may sound strange, but their version of this traditional Scottish garment comes equipped with all of the features you would expect to find on a premium pair of work pants or shorts.  Their workman model is made of heavy cotton duck with a key clasp, large cargo pockets and a hammer loop.

Since the only thing traditionally worn under a kilt are comfortable socks and sturdy boots, there is a modesty snap you could close before – say – climbing a ladder.  Ya know – just so you don’t give the ENTIRE neighborhood a peek.

Oh, and if you go out to celebrate finishing an important project, they even have a tuxedo version for those dressier places.

Experiences

Is it failure… or opportunity?

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My days back as a student at the University of Maryland were some I will never forget. Moving away from home for the first time.  Getting along in a large campus and being exposed to many new people holding diverse viewpoints.  And, a class schedule and structure that was very different than it was back in high school.

Basically, college was set up so you attended each of your classes about three hours total a week.  Sounds easy, right?

Well, that was all of the CLASS work you got… the homework, however, took many hours to accomplish.  And, if you didn’t keep up, you were lost in the weeds.

That’s exactly what happened to me the first semester of my Sophomore year.  Inexperience got the better of me.  I thought I had this college thing down pat.  I took a blow-off class everyone told me I could ace even if I didn’t show up.  And, as expected, I blew it off.

That class ended up being the only F I ever got in my entire academic career.   I had failed what is considered one of the easiest classes on campus.  And I was not happy with myself.

Why is it that some woodworkers will look equally hard at their failures? Could it be that they made their goof up on a prize piece of highly figured wood?  Is it that there is only so much time available for woodworking, and that time spend making mistakes is considered time wasted?  Or, is it that they expect that they will never make a mistake – ever?

Certain skills in woodworking require a tremendous amount of practice and skill to execute properly.  One woodworker I know learned how to cut beautiful hand-cut dovetails on his own.  Sure, he watched the videos and read the books.  But, he gained the experience by setting up a stack of scrap wood blanks and cutting one or two sample dovetails a few times each week.

His first attempts looked as if they had been chewed by deranged beavers – gappy and uneven.  But, as he progressed over months of practice, he started to notice where he was making his mistakes.  Maybe he was not holding the saw properly.  Maybe he didn’t have his chisel perfectly perpendicular to the bench.  Maybe he wasn’t marking the cut lines properly.  Whatever the problem, he identified it and figured out a way to correct the issue.

Today, his dovetails are clean, tight and pretty as a picture.

Other woodworkers may be experiencing a fear of failure. Last weekend’s quick poll asked if you had ever bent wood for a project.  Nearly half of those who voted said they never have, but always wanted to.  For those who voted that way, why not?  Hey, I messed up my first attempt at bent lamination.  It’s in my scrap bucket right now, cut into multi-layered pieces waiting for the weather to cool down so it can be burnt in my fire pit.  Instead of saying, “I can’t do this,” I went back to the saw and planer and cut more strips to be laminated into bent pieces.  The results the second time around were much better… and now I’m working on the rest of the project.

What happened after I got that F?  I could have given up and felt sorry for myself, quit college and figured out what my next step was going to be.  Instead, I learned a very valuable lesson about life.  I sat down one afternoon and gave the direction of my college academic career a very stern looking over.  Was I committed to this or not?

I took the report card with the F on it and taped it to the surface of my desk where it stayed through the rest of my Sophomore, Junior and Senior years. Every time I sat down to do homework, I reminded myself what I had done, where I had failed and how I needed to correct my situation.  I studied harder, went to every class and sat in front. I budgeted my time carefully and made sure that I had my studies done before I knocked off for a cold one at the end of the day.

When I went to the mailbox to get my next report card, I just about fainted.  Four A’s and one B.  My best semester ever. I had taken my mistake, learned from it and became a much better student for it.

As woodworkers, I hope each of you takes the mistakes you make and learn from them.  Understand why things went bad, and seek out ways to improve your work.

I remember once reading the signature line of a fellow woodworker on one of the forums I follow – “It’s OK to make mistakes, but it’s to your credit if you don’t make the same ones over and over again.”

So, go make your mistakes boldly.  Learn from them.  You’ll be a much better woodworker for it.

How-to

Bow, Bow, Bow Your Wood…

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Are you looking to add some flair to your next woodworking project?  Sure you are!  You are a woodworker, and after building lots of square things, you are ALWAYS looking to do something out of the ordinary to spice up the woodwork you are doing.

But, how can you do it?

Well, there is an easy way you can add graceful curves.  And, if yesterday’s link of the week is any indication, there are LOTS of people who want to give bending wood a go.

By no stretch of the imagination should you look to me as an ‘expert’ in wood bending.  In fact, I am building a table to hold a piece of custom pottery that a co-worker will be throwing, and this is the FIRST time that I have tried to bend wood.

From all that I have read, there are three primary methods of bending wood.  The first is kerf bending, which involves cutting saw kerfs into the back side of a piece of wood in order to make it bendable.  It could work if I was building something where only one side was going to be visible, but that’s not what I am going for in this project.  So, that method is out.

The next method under consideration is steam bending. I went to school at the University of Maryland, so I have lots of experience with steaming – blue crabs – YUM!  The process is very similar – you have a container (a pot for crabs – a box for  wood) and you have a source of heat to boil water.  You place your lovelies into the container and put the spurs to the heat. After a set amount of time (20 minutes for crabs, a different calculation for wood), you can pull the lovelies out of the container and do what you have to with them (crabs = eat, wood= bend).  Some species of wood do exceptionally well with steam bending (Ash is the first that springs to mind), and it is a time-honored way to do this, but it was too involved for me.  Besides, the feels-like temperature in Florida right now is about 105 degrees F – definitely NOT steam bending weather.

The method I settled on is making a bent lamination.  I have seen this done before at a woodworking school I attended, and it looked like a neat trick.  Basically, you take wood and rip it down to several flexible pieces. I was using ash, which has legendary bending ability, and walnut… which I wasn’t so sure of.  I was going to alternate strips of ash and walnut to give the piece it’s own set of racing stripes.

For the pottery stand legs I am building, I aimed to have the wood rough sawn to 3/16″ thick. I then used an auxiliary planing bed at my planer to get the wood down to 1/8″ thick.  I understand that you can make the slices thinner if you have a more radical bend, but all I needed was the arc of a circle to for the legs.

Now, I had 9 strips of ash and six strips of walnut, and I had to get them glued up into a coherent shape.  My first thought was to use a form to bend them over.  This is the way it should be done.  I bought a sheet of particleboard and cut it into six 15″ wide by 48″ long blanks.  Then, I tried my best to make a fair curve nice and smooth in the stuff.

Perhaps I was a bit hasty or careless, but that form I built was terrible.  I couldn’t bend the wood to meet the form, and I wasn’t about to start cutting tissue-thin slats to showcase my bad cutting job.

So, I struck on an interesting idea.  Grabbing my band clamps which see very little action, I made my stack of boards and slipped them into a loop.  From there, I pulled the strap tight while guiding the wood to flex in one direction.

The result kind of looked like a bow under tension.  I had a perfect arc for the pieces with little effort.  If you are planning on doing this, some ratcheting tie-down straps might be cheaper than buying outright band clamps.

I took the pressure off the stack, then I started to glue them up.  I have heard several times that yellow glue will ‘creep’ over time when tension is applied.  Since these legs will be under a considerable amount of tension, I decided to go with a traditional, less-toxic glue, bottled hide glue.  Hide glue gives a more rigid bond, and is very creep resistant.

This stuff is just like hot hide glue except it stays fluid at room temperature.  I spread a generous amount on both sides of each slat to be glued and made myself a sandwich of ash and walnut.  Then, I looped the band clamp around the stack again and tightened up the group until I had the amount of bend that looked good to me.  I took strips of packing tape and wrapped them around the stack at several places to serve as clamps, and – for good measure – I added more small clamps to the assembly to ensure everything held together well.

I gave the piece 48 hours in the clamp setup, then pulled them out.  They came out looking decent, with only a few separations of the plies on the edges.

Hmm….

I guess maybe next time, I’ll have to work more carefully to build better forms and try a different method or try a different glue.  But, with a little more glue and a few clamps, the big issues have been taken care of and the legs look as if they are ready to work with.

Will I ever bend wood again?  You bet I will.  Taking that first step of just doing it has gotten me off the straight and narrow path.

Quick Polls

Quick Poll

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When it comes to woodworking, woodworkers are always looking to get arrow straight boards, completely flat and true.

Yeah.  Right.

First, there are turners, who take nice straight stock and turn it round.  Then, there are carvers who – with chisels, gouges and other tools turn those pretty chunks of wood into works of art.

And, then there are the folks who like to bend wood to add flair and drama to their projects.

Bending wood is typically accomplished one of two ways.  The first is to steam the wood in a contraption for a certain amount of  time to loosen the lignin in the board, then taking it from the box and bending it quickly over a form.  The other method is to slice thin pieces from a larger board, then laminate them with glue and clamp them to a form.  Both give spectacular results.

So, this week, I want to know if you have ever bent pieces of wood for your projects, and if you have, how did you do it.

[poll id=”84″]

Link of the week

Link of the week

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The Tattooed Woodworker

There is no such thing as a ‘typical’ woodworking blogger. Some are older, others younger.  Some love hand tools, others can’t get enough power.

One of the newest bloggers in the woodworking community is Robert Giovannetti a.k.a. The Tattooed Woodworker.  Rob may appear radical, but his love for traditional hand tools comes to the fore in his entries and videos.

Unfortunately, because of his skin art, he has gotten a lot of anonymous flack from some readers who think he has no business writing a blog.  It was so bad a week ago, he nearly pulled his blog off the web and sold his tools.

That would have certainly been a loss for all of us in the woodworking community.

Bloggers such as Rob, Marc Spagnuolo, Matt Vanderlist and scores of others put themselves out there for others to learn from. Folks who take of their time to help others learn the craft have earned my support and a great deal of respect.

If you would like to read the works of other talented and entertaining woodworking bloggers, you can also check out the members of the Wood Whisperer Network.

Projects

Stuff I’ve Built: The Nakashima-Inspired Bench

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  • July, 2009

I have been a George Nakashima fan since my neighbor lent me his autographed copy of Soul of a Tree. Nakashima was a master at blending crisply-cut details with wild look of wood slabs cut from the log.  Live edges, bark inclusions and all make his tables something much more grand than just a plain old table.

For the past few years, I had wanted to find a suitable piece of wood to use to build my own slab bench, but my hardwood suppliers here in Florida weren’t able to easily lay their hands on such a board.  When I had mentioned what I was looking for to Eric Poirier of Bell Forest Products, he located the sweet board for me.  Hard maple with both bird’s-eye and tiger effect in it.  The wood makes the bench for me… And, the live edge of the board… WOW.

For the base, I used some mahogany and a strip of tiger maple.  My friend Craig Andrews drew out the base for me on Sketchup, and it looked very cool.  I used a jigsaw and my oscillating spindle sander to bring it to final shape.

The stretcher passes through two open mortises in the legs, giving some visual interest to the piece.  There is a top stretcher that is mortised into the two legs.  This provides a more than adequate surface to screw the top to the base.  Yes, I used screws.  The thought of cutting and chiseling through that board’s surface for through tenons didn’t do anything for me.  Maybe for a more ordinary looking piece of wood on a later project…

I had to start the finish at my hardwood supplier, Weiss Hardwoods in Largo. They had the big Powermatic wide format belt sander that took the wood from rough to baby’s bottom smooth in about three minutes. I gladly paid the very reasonable fee to have this done for me instead of trying to scrape and sand it smooth myself.

Once I got it home, I used card scrapers and my cabinet scraper to fine the surface up even more.  A coat of 1# cut shellac sealed all of the wood on the project, and I sanded that down with 400 grit wet/dry paper to make the wood velvety smooth.   I followed that with three top coats of my finishing mix on the entire project, sanding with 600 grit paper between.  Then, two coats of wipe on poly were added to the top to provide additional protection.  This was finally followed by some paste furniture wax.

This was a very rewarding project.  I love to watch people run their hands over the polished top and the live edges when they see it for the first time.  That tells me that I think I may have done Nakashima proud.

Safety, Shop Talk, Tools

One tough sucker

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I have this friend on the Woodworker’s Website Association named Jim.  He’s a now-retired grizzled veteran of the competitive northeast construction and cabinet trades.  He’s seen it all, heard it all, tried it all and shoots straight from the hip. Ask a question, you get an honest answer with Jim. He’s that kinda guy.

But, that’s not who this article is about.  It’s actually about something he dropped off for me this past March when he was down for a visit.

Now that Jim is retired, he has time on his hands to travel and to tinker.  Before his trip this spring, he called me and asked if I was interested in looking at something he had built.  One Saturday morning, I drove to the travel trailer park Jim was staying at, and after our greetings and some shop talk, he showed me something that looked like Rube Goldberg himself had created. Old plumbing fittings, waferboard, 2 x 4’s and weatherstripping had been cobbled together.  It looked as if it had been picked over in a rubble heap.  MacGyver would be proud of this…

The total stackWhile it did look nasty at first, it may prove to be something that will change how I work in my shop.

Jim had created a modified cyclonic dust collector. He started with the plans drafted by Phil Thien.  Phil’s plans show how to create an inexpensive dust collector which fits onto the top of a metal garbage can.  A shop vac and an intake hose to suck up the dust is everything needed to create your own dust collection system.

Jim’s improvements include extending the cyclone separator in a compartment above the trash can, which Jim says improves the airflow by removing any potential debris interference.

Since it was nearing the start of hurricane season, I had left the collector in the corner of my shop to – err – collect dust.  Finally, this past weekend, I was able to run to Home Depot and pick up an old-fashioned metal trash can to affix the collector to.

Jim had routed a groove to fit over the rim of the can and had sealed the bottom of it to get an airtight fit.  I hooked it up as described, and I was initially thoroughly unimpressed.  The collector didn’t seem to generate enough suction to lift even the finest of dust.  I fiddled with the collector for a while, and then I discovered my problem.  I hadn’t fit the lid deep enough into the groove.

A quick shove down on the offending side,  I got that sealed up and WOW…

The suction generated by my standard issue shop vac was impressive. Planer shavings, sawdust, small animals – what couldn’t this thing pick up?  Jim had also warned me that if I drew a vacuum by sealing off the intake hose, the trash can could collapse due to the air pressure.  Well… sure enough, the silly thing’s sides did buckle when I put my hand over the intake hose!  I’ll also have to follow his advice and cut a brace for the inside of the can to give it extra support.

To put this unit to the test, I set up a field experiment.  I had been planing strips of ash and walnut for a project, and I had a good pile of shavings there ready to be cleaned up.  The shop was a mess.

I took my shop vac outside and emptied it.  I banged out the filter – the works.  It was as squeaky clean as I dared make it.  I stacked the empty shop vac on top of the unit and hooked up the hoses.  That’s when I went to work, sucking up everything.

The suction worked as I had expected it to for a dust collector.  There was a large rush of air headed into the hose, and everything was sucked through into the can.  I love clear hoses on my collector…

After working the hose for a while, cleaning up the mess of a long day in the shop, I stopped the shop vac and took a peek inside.  There was some fine dust in the vacuum’s tank, but that was it.  None of the larger shavings made it to the vacuum.

A peek into the trash can showed me why… there’s where I found all of the planer shavings, silently resting in the can.  A quick trip outside, and the can was clean once again.

The collector was extremely effective.  I have a 1 hp 500 cfm Delta model in my shop, and I rarely use it.  The system gets clogged up frequently and it doesn’t have the ‘oomph’ to get the planer shavings.  Then, there are the bag changings… something I never look forward to.  That metal ‘belt’ I have to snap in place rarely goes on the first – or second – try.

This system exceeded all my expectations. In fact, I will be looking into getting a dedicated shop vac to mount on top of the collector on a semi-permanent basis.

Hey, Jim, I gotta hand it to you.  You are one tough sucker after all!

P.S. – If you are interested in seeing Jim’s plans, I can forward the messages to him