If you were ever a child stuck in a car on a very long family road trip, no doubt there came the moment during the long time in the car that you piped up and asked the burning question on your mind.  “Are we there yet?”

And, if as an adult, you have ever had to drive during a long road trip with at least one child in the car, you have experienced that sinking feeling as one of the little  passengers in the seat behind you asks that universal question. Of course you will get there when you do, and it’s up to you to ensure that you get there in one piece without collecting any speeding tickets or having an accident.

My inner woodworking traveling child and adult are battling it out on my latest cabinet project I’m building for my friend Paul.

The woodworking child in me is kicking the front seat and growing impatient with the pace of progress.  Plus, the fact that working in the shop  on 98 degree days with a heat index of 110 is bringing out his grumpy side.

On the other hand, the woodworking adult in me is watching the project odometer consistently tick by, adding up the miles until we reach our woodworking destination and can begin celebrating the finished project.

For instance, we no longer have a jumble of cut cabinet parts, but actual cabinets that were built and moved to Paul’s house.

While I was out in the shop, Paul had built a base frame for the cabinets and prepared the area in his living room for work.  While the cabinets were nice to see by themselves, they really came into their  own once they were stacked onto the base and screwed together.

Now, as the rational, well reasoned woodworking adult, I know there are many more miles to go with this project.  Assembling and mounting the other bank of cabinets to the right.  Building nine drawers and mounting them into the right boxes. Face frames. Tops. A bookcase and desktop. Finish. There will still be some tough traveling to go until we get there.

But, boy, with that woodworking kid inside me be jumping for joy once we do!

Bonjour!

Why is Tom writing en Francais today?

Well, if your calendar mentions it, you will notice that today is Bastille Day – the day the French commemorate the storming of the notorious prison named the Bastille – which also happened to contain quite a large stash of gunpowder.  It was this day when the three estates unified and the French citizens started down that long road to today’s republic.

But, that’s not what I want to write about.  I actually want to let you  know about a large project I just started.  It’s actually a big bank of cabinets that I’m building together with a friend from the Woodworker’s Website Association.

You see, Paul lives in a really sweet house built in the 1940s  just a few miles from where I live.  Over the years, as with many homes in Florida, the home was added to.  One of the largest parts of the addition was the enclosure of a large outdoor patio. In this room, he and his wife have created a lovely living room with a comfortable seating area and a bit of a home office.

But, Paul wants more.  So, he asked if I could help him build a home office area in this room.  A number of cabinets with drawers and doors for the lowers and a pair of uppers to serve as bookshelves.  He sketched out the design, and I figured out how many of which parts we needed for the cabinets.  We were building the cabinets just as Norm Abram did in his nine-part opus on building kitchen cabinets.

And then he ordered the materials. Last week, the stuff arrived.  A dozen sheets of prefinished and cherry ply.  A box of hardware he ordered online.  A few boxes of screws.  And one of these…

Yes, he brought over a Festool track saw.  Perhaps you have heard about these saws and the hype that goes along with them.  Every word of it is true.  The saw cuts beautifully, leaving a very smooth cut edge in its path that rivals what I can get on my table saw.  What I liked most about the saw was that we could flip those large sheets of plywood up onto the workbench resting on a few sacrificial strips of particleboard, mark and cut away. No need to hoist and balance large full sheets on the table saw or cut and then recut rough edges…

It took two five-hour days, but we ended up making all of the cuts for the boxes.  We even had a few miscuts that ended in the boo boo pile. It was hot work in my Florida workshop, but we got all  of the cuts done and dadoes and rabbets milled.  Now, I am spending a few hours every night after work putting the boxes together with screws and glue, and things seem to be progressing quite nicely.

Once the boxes are complete, we will take them up the road to Paul’s house where we will build a base frame, install and face frame the cabinets in place.

Believe me, I will keep you updated on this very ambitious project as we progress.

Now, what about the French lesson at the start of the article?  Well, I decided that today would be a great day to reenact the scenes of the French citizens emerging from behind their barricades to storm the Bastille.  Standing in for the barricades are the cabinet boxes.  Look, I know it’s a reach, but sometimes ya gotta do what you gotta do to keep it topical.

No, I’m not wearing the tricolor cockade or flying the banner of the French Republic, but I am hoisting a glass of Pinot Noir as my salute to the viniferous contributions of la République Française.

I work with this guy named Lou.  Lou is a pretty darned worldly guy.  He’s the kind of cat you would expect to find trekking the Andes by himself.  He’s the dude you wouldn’t think twice about if he was called up on stage to jam with a fusion jazz band.  He creates beautiful stained glass pieces in his living room.

In many ways, he reminds me of the character in the Dos Equis beer commercial – the guy known as the Most Interesting Man in the World.

Now, you’d figure a guy like Lou would have a plush home with zebra-skin covered sofas, but, no, Lou is a very practical guy.  He spends more time kayaking the mangrove estuaries looking for rare birds than worrying about his home furnishings.

I discovered this about Lou when he asked if I could build him a rack to store a portion of his large CD and DVD collection.  “I want something plain … nothing fancy.  Don’t  put any of that fancy cabinetmaking mumbo-jumbo on this piece, OK.”

So, I had to come up with something that would have that certain kind of ‘industrial’ quality but be well designed.

This is what I came up with.

It’s a pretty large piece.  Made of nearly two sheets of plywood, it has a number of shelves for storage of CD/DVD cases. I used pocket screws and glue to hold it together. My plan was to face the edges of the shelves, but Lou was clear… “Don’t you do anything fancy on that.  Unfinished plywood edges are fine with me.”

Oh, no… that meant I couldn’t use a face frame to help support the shelves.  So, I added the central supports between each shelf to keep the long, narrow shelves from bowing.  I sanded those edges as cleanly as possible and broke the edges so they would be smooth to the touch and wouldn’t splinter.

Right now, it’s still in my garage.  But, Lou has seen a photo of it and said he likes it.

And, when he’s done with his latest safari-at-home adventure, he said he’s going to come to my house to strap the piece to the roof of his car to take his trophy home.

March 2002

You wanna know what’s awkward?

Asking a woman how far along her pregnancy is, and being told that no, she’s not pregnant.

Attending a dinner party at a friend’s house and remembering – right at the front door – that it was actually your friend’s birthday and you forgot to bring a gift.

And, then there’s this awkward corner in my home’s front living room.  It’s a beautiful room with three large windows looking out over the front yard.  There are two solid walls that allow a great place for our uber sweet motion sectional sofa.  And, of course, the ‘fourth’ wall is actually the opening that gives our home a roomy feel.

This means that there is just a very small corner between the windows and a short return wall to place a TV.  Not a lot of space to do anything.  When we were shopping for the house, the former owner used a low entertainment center just placed cocked into the corner.  Very clunky.

When we moved in, we found kind of a semi-circular small TV stand that fit into the corner a little better, but not by much.

What we needed was a piece of furniture.  Something that would fit the corner and hold the TV and much more.

So, this was my solution.  It’s a built-in corner entertainment center that was built as a piece  of carpentry instead of furniture.  The heart of this project is a series of cleats ripped from 2×4′s and screwed to the walls.  These became the supports for the plywood dividers that formed the shelves and top of the piece.  From there, the sides are pine boards joined at 45 degrees.  This was necessary to create the front of the unit while still returning back to the wall.  The face frame was nailed to the plywood edging there primarily for looks rather than support.

These are the first doors I ever built and hung on a project.  I don’t think they look too bad, but, hey, they do the job.

It’s amazing how much this project can hold!  The TV sits in the open middle of the case, all of the audio components are neatly hidden behind the top doors and behind the bottom doors is just about every picture we ever took.  Photo album after photo album are stacked shoulder to shoulder down there, keeping them from overwhelming another area of the house.

The best part is that we took an awkward spot in our home that no one was able to use and turned it into a great storage solution.

Now, this design is kind of interesting.  I know I have seen something like this before in my life… but you will have to wait for a special Sunday edition of Tom’s Workbench to discover who deserves the thanks for this handy design.

There are some really awesome router bits you can use on a router table.  Panel raising bits.  Cope and stick bits.  Lock miter bits.

While these are pretty awesome, some require a risky kind of maneuver in order to use them correctly. Those are the bits that involve pushing the workpiece on edge across the bit.  Vertical panel raisers and lock miter bits come to mind as two types requiring this move.

While some woodworkers may feel comfortable pushing the wood past the bit in this manner, it has always scared me senseless.  I have to coordinate holding the board down to the table and tight to the fence without having it wobble, which would ruin the cut.  Then, how do you prevent massive tear out?

After trying to push a board past a bit like this, I had to make things easier on myself.  I spoke briefly with Jim Heavey at Wood Magazine and, with a little inspiration, came up with this design.

VERY easy to build.  The upright is two pieces of 3/4″ scrap plywood.  One is 8″ tall by 8″ wide, the other one is 8 3/4″ tall by 8″ wide.  When glued and screwed together, I created a rabbet for a piece of 8″ long by 5″ wide that rides flat along the table.  I put a gusset to hold the assembly at 90 degrees and to serve as a handle.

The trailing edge is a piece of maple that was planed down to 1/4″ for another project.  That was screwed to the back edge of the assembly with a 1/4″ overhang to serve as a push cleat. Don’t use glue here… just in case the cleat gets chewed up and needs to be replaced.

I used it by placing my board against the router fence and sliding the push shoe until is captured the board against the fence.  Now, instead of concentrating on three things at once, all I had to do was push the piece through the router bit.  No panic, no fear and because the cleat was supporting the back edge of the piece… no tear out.  Very easy stuff.

By ensuring the cleat was as tall as the top of the push shoe, I could also use it as a horizontal push shoe for the mating piece as well.

Believe me.. anything that makes your work safer and more accurate is something worth looking into.  And, when it is that easy to build… all the better!

April, 2010

(Yes, I am aware that there are very few close-up photos of this project.  I was rushing to get this finished and given in time for this past Sunday and it totally slipped my mind.  However, I asked my niece to snap a few photos to add to the article… coming soon!)

Regardless of where you go in the world, you are likely to find ‘coming of age’ ceremonies for kids reaching their mid-teens.  Confirmation in Roman Catholic churches, Bar or Bat Mitvahs in the Jewish faith and the Quinceañera found in Latin American cultures.  Debutante balls. Getting your driver’s license. All of these ceremonies show the community that the child has now reached an age where he or she can start taking charge of his or her own life.

In most western cultures, we celebrate a Sweet 16th party for girls.  This tradition goes back to the bad old days, when life expectancy was only a sobering 45 or 50 years.  When a young lady reached that milestone, she was considered eligible to be courted for marriage in order to  start a family while she was still young and healthy.

To help get the young lady ready for marriage, the family would start to build her trousseau or dowry – the items she would bring with her into the union. Cooking pots and pans, serving dishes, linens and other daily items were typically included, as well as any small favors given to her while she was younger – perhaps a treasured blanket made by a grandmother or something else with meaning.

In order to safeguard these items, many times a hope chest or dowry chest would be built.  This way, the items could be collected and stored until the big day, when it would be loaded onto the horse and buggy for the trip to the couple’s new home.

Starting in the 1950s, with the arrival of registering for bridal gifts at local department stores, the tradition faded into memory in many families . But, of course, as a woodworker, I can’t let such a tradition go silently.

Since I don’t have a daughter of my own, I feel a close tie to the four nieces in my family.  Carolina, the eldest, recently celebrated her 16th birthday.  Since I knew she was going to be busy with parties involving her friends, and she was going to be joining us for Easter dinner this past Sunday, I figured I could be a little late with her present – a hope chest.

Many thanks to the folks at Wood Magazine for providing the plans for this blanket chest in the November 2009 edition, and I can’t say enough about Eric Poirier and the folks at Bell Forest Products who contributed the gorgeous tiger maple for this project.

The body is glued up (now you know why I was posting so much about panel glue ups this past week!) tiger maple with variably-spaced dovetails cut on my Keller jig.  The top has battens across the middle glued right at the center and screwed in to allow it to expand and contract while still remaining flat.

Figuring the maple might look a little too stark without any contrast, I glued a strip of walnut down the middle of the top and also used walnut for the base molding. Since I also messed up the miters on the base molding (I know, don’t dwell on the accidents!), I rounded the mitered molded top over with a rasp and sandpaper.

We had been leaving clues for Carolina all week. The sound of the table saw on her phone mail.  A few hints on Facebook.  But, she didn’t have any idea what was coming.  We ate Easter brunch together with many of our family members, but didn’t let on what was in the trunk.

After we left the restaurant, we all proceeded to the back of the minivan for the big reveal.  I told Carolina that I had gotten her a new set of jumper cables to keep in her trunk as a present for getting her driver’s license.  She didn’t fall for it.

As I was opening the tailgate of the van, a thought ran across my mind.  Would a girl born in the age of text messages, the Internet and other modern conveniences even like something as old fashioned as a hope chest?  When I lifted the canvas drop cloth that was hiding the chest from view, I got my answer.

She loved it.

Do I want her to go out and get married now?  Nah, she’s still too young.  But, knowing that the hope chest I built will be part of her life from here on out is a pretty amazing thing.  Maybe something she will share with her daughter or granddaughter when she reaches her sweet 16.

Now, only three more nieces to go!

July 2005

Before our neighbors had their daughter and son, they had a very cool all-glass dining room table. A glass top and two pedestals each made of 12″ wide glass strips joined at a 90 degree angle with two screwed together brackets.  It was stylish. It was striking.

And, after they had kids, and those kids started to walk, they discovered just how unstable it was. In fact, after one energetic evening of their son and daughter running near the table, our neighbors ended up holding the heavy table top once a little one slid into one of the table bases.

To help get the dining table issue under control, they asked if I could build a sturdy wooden base for the glass table top.  Something that would be a little heavier, a little wider and a whole lot more stable.

Since the husband of this couple was born in Japan, I thought I would go with an Asian-looking trestle table base. Something a little more graceful, something a little more muscular and something out of maple.

I built a pair of trestles starting with a massive base built up from three strips of  maple.  The middle strip was cut and glued into the sandwich allowing spaces to make ready-made mortises.  The same process was done for the top trestle.  Rather than build the upright support in the traditional manner, I glued two uprights into place, using the space between them as a mortise to receive the crosspiece. The uprights are glued and through doweled into the trestle base and bracket to ensure they don’t go anywhere.

And, what a crosspiece it is. A solid piece of maple – 8″ wide by 2″ thick.  Planed and sanded, the ends are tenoned to fit between the uprights. I drilled 1″ diameter holes in the uprights and drove dowels through the uprights and tenon to hold it in place.  I think it gives the piece a nice accent.

I sanded and scraped the piece smooth and finished it with a coat of 1# cut of dewaxed shellac sanded smooth with 600 grit paper.  Then I applied several coats of wipe-on poly to give a tough finish.

Today, their family has grown to also include a dog, two cats and their much older, bigger, faster and stronger children. And, the glass table top sits firmly on top of the table base, unmoved by the commotion and evening dinners.

Not bad for the strong silent type.