So, last week, I was on the horns of a dilemma. Debating on a joinery method for a set of bookshelves I’m building for a client.

And, I found myself in an all-too-familiar situation.  Paralysis by analysis.

Your comments to me were great.  Insightful. Profound. I should choose the joinery method that challenges me the most… I should choose a method that could last a thousand years.  And, as I frequently do, my mind started to race.  How could I cut a great joint that I had never done before… one that could impress my woodworking friends and the client?

And, before I knew it, it was five days later, and I hadn’t done squat to get this project done. And, then the client asked,” So, how’s the project going?”

Gulp. OK, then! I broke free from my navel gazing and decided on dowels to join the corners of the frames.. Fortunately, I had already drawn the piece out in full scale on paper, so cutting milling the pieces out and cutting to size was a piece of cake.  Well, I did really take my time to ensure I had the angles down on the front rail.  That did take some time. But, hey, I want this piece to be right.

Doweling with my Joint Genie is just as easy as I remembered.  The jig is a solid steel block with accurately spaced holes where you can drill a series of dowel holes in the wood so everything matches up perfectly when you go to assemble. The jig has spacer leafs on it, which allowed me to adjust the location of the jig to get the piece roughly centered. No, this isn’t a self-centering jig, so you will have to reference from adjoining faces of a board.  Remember this, or you may not like the results.  At all.

Three holes, drilled just over an inch deep into each mating face, and I was ready to slide over to the next location to cut the next joint. Each three-dowel joint held the three spiral dowels snugly in place, ready for glue and the mating piece.

Now, when you are assembling any joints, it pays to not be a block head. If you have the top and bottom pieces ‘capturing’ the front and back uprights, you can’t glue the back one in place, clamp it up and then try to squeeze it in there after the fact…  Don’t ask me how I know this…  But, a little work with some glue,  a mallet and a clamp or three, each of the side pieces glued up nicely and will be drying overnight.

The funny thing is that after this, the rest of the work is very straightforward.  Sand down the sides, cut the shelf dadoes, assemble sand and finish. I’m definitely going to have to pick out a few nights after work this week to push this one along… and stop thinking about it!

OK, so I’m getting ready to build this bookshelf project for a co-worker of mine, but I’m having a big time internal debate with myself. The design is fine, and the client is excited to get started on the project.

But, I am torn.  You see, I have been giving the joinery on the frames a lot of thought. You see, each side is going to be a four-sided frame that will be 18 inches wide at the bottom tapering to 12 inches at the top. There will be four pieces on each of the sides – a 90 degree back upright, two rails and an angled front stretcher. Each shelf unit will have two frames, and there are two bookshelf units in this build, making a total of 16 joints.

What I’m having trouble deciding is how to join these joints. I am trying to choose between a mortise and tenon joint and a dowel joint.

In this corner, there’s the mortise and tenon team. My plan – if I choose to go this route, is to cut mortises into the cross rails at the top and the bottom of the piece. I have a Prazi Chestmate jig with the special mortising template inserted, and I would need to use a plunge router with a 5/8″ guide bushing and a 3/8″ up spiral bit to plow the mortises. I would also need to cut tenons on both ends of the uprights – 90 degree tenons on both ends of the back rails and angled tenons on both ends of the front rails.  Probably using the nibbling technique on my table saw. I would cut them a little thick and plane them to final size with a shoulder plane to sneak up on the perfect fit.

Working in favor of the mortise and tenon is the tradition of the joint.  It’s a stout joint for this kind of application, giving lots of glue area. Against? Well, it’s a bit more complicated to do this kind of joint especially with the angled tenon to fit into the mortise. There’s also a bit of fussing to get the size of the tenon perfect – I have (on more occasions than I care to count) cut the tenon too thick to start, and then pushed it to too thin.  Grrr…..

In this corner is the dowel team. Here I would use my corded drill and my Joint Genie doweling jig to precisely drill for three 3/8 inch, 2 inch long spiral dowels per joint.  Bippity, boppity boo, and I’m done with all 16 joints in probably less than an hour.  Using this method, I could ignore the angles – drilling at 90 degrees to the edge of the top and bottom rails and 90 degrees to the mating surface of the uprights. The 3/8″ dowels would be the same width of the tenon I was planning on cutting.  It’s another traditional joint that I have seen used for some heavy-duty joinery by Norm Abram and James Krenov.

The downside of dowels I have heard time and again is that they aren’t a heavy-duty kind of joint. There have been some Wile E. Coyote-type tests done to demonstrate the strength of dowel joints vs. that of mortise and tenon joints.  The testers used strain meters, bathroom scales and other high-end technical tools to measure the failure point of each joinery method.  And, their results  – expressed in foot-pounds, newton-meters or some other measurement scale – show results that are all over the place.  Heck, the earliest I have seen this debate was back in an October 1979 edition of Popular Science, where they basically claimed that the two joints are at a dead heat.

While I’m making up my mind, I’d be interested in hearing what your thoughts are on the topic…

I like to watch comedians perform. Going to a comedy club is – well – a barrel of laughs for me. If I can’t go, I’ll tune in to Comedy Central for my funny fix.  Each comedian approaches the material from his or her  own point of view and with his or her own quirky observations. From the full-force in-your-rapid fire delivery (think Gilbert Gottfried or Sam Kinison) to a more laid back, mellow approach that throws you off guard (Bob Newhart or  Steven Wright), there’s someone out there who can leave you doubled over in laughter.

I still remember one of the stand up routines Steven Wright did.  He would just deliver deadpan lines, one after another, each a little more offbeat than the last.

I’ve been doing a lot of abstract painting lately, extremely abstract. No brush, no paint, no canvas, I just think about it.

Right now I’m having amnesia and deja vu at the same time. I think I’ve forgotten this before.

And, one of my favorites from the show…

I have a map of the United States… Actual size. It says, “Scale: 1 mile = 1 mile.” I spent last summer folding it. I also have a full-size map of the world. I hardly ever unroll it. People ask me where I live, and I say, “E6″.

It was so funny because it was just so absurd. And, later as I was in the shop thinking about the bit, a thought hit me…is there ever a time when a full-sized map would be useful?

I didn’t really need to look any further than my shop for the answer.  I am getting ready to start on a new project – a ladder-step looking bookshelf made of some cool looking cherry from my friends at Bell Forest Products – and I have yet to cut my first board. In fact, the piece right now hasn’t seen anything more than a drawing I made on a sheet of 11 x 17 graph paper.

So, I took the drawing into the shop with a roll of brown builder’s paper, some drawing tools and a cool glass of iced tea.

Using a pencil, a ruler, and a 48 inch rule (can’t call that a yard stick, right?) I marked out the critical measurements.  Length of the bottom and top boards, height and depth of the piece and the locations of the shelves. After I marked them, I connected the dots.  There. A full-size rendering of the bookshelf sides. That simple.

Why on Earth would I do something like this?  Well, there are plenty of reasons. As I cut each of the pieces for the bookshelf, I can hold them up to the drawing and compare sizes.  I can use my sliding bevel to get accurate angles for the sloped front leg.  And, it finally gives me a look at just how deep this bookshelf is going to be. I’m glad I did this, because I think 18 inches at the bottom of the shelf is just a tad too deep. I may be able to talk to the client and ask her about reducing the width two inches for a slimmer appearance.

I’m hoping by doing this step, I can prevent giving each of you more material for your own stand up routines!

What can I say about my maternal grandfather John Schwab that won’t make me tear up?  I loved the guy. I still do. He was one of the first heroes in my life.

He was a very unassuming guy who lived in in Fairview, New Jersey, just across the Hudson River from midtown Manhattan.  He ran a dairy. The big treat for us was to sleep over at our grandparent’s house, wake up early and go to the dairy to ‘work’ with him.  My older brother would get up early and ride in with him, doing some deliveries.  My grandmother would drive my younger brother and me in later, once the sun was up and we had a chance to eat breakfast. My grandfather would do most of the work, selling milk and cream to people who walked into the dairy. We would either help him taste chocolate milk or ice cream.

The other great memory I had of the dairy was watching him do his books. He would sit at a big desk on this stout wooden oak chair and count the money, occasionally stopping to give each of us a piece of Bazooka gum and read us the comics that came along with the pieces. He had a huge pile of old silver coins under his desk calendar – he was keeping them to give to each of us in the future.

My grandfather passed away in 1986 – the start of my senior year of high school. His loss was very difficult for me, as we were both very close. As my senior year went on and my grandmother was going through his property, I was given three very special things of his.  The first was his watch.  The only one he ever wore. The one I learned to tell time by looking at.  The second was one of his Schwab’s Dairy delivery jackets.  An Ike-style jacket with the dairy’s name embroidered on the back. The third was his oak desk chair from the dairy.

I very ham-handedly attempted to refinish the chair back in the summer of 1987 before I went off to college, and brought it with me.  I did my homework sitting on it, and it moved with me from Maryland to Florida. It was the chair we used at our computer desk for years, until one of the original rubber wheels delaminated on it, preventing it from rolling.  I put the chair out in the garage and vowed that one day I was going to repair it.  But, it sat out there, collecting dust for more than two years.

This weekend, I finally was motivated enough to head to the local home improvement store to buy a set of new wheels.  While I had the chair up on my bench, I started to notice some things about the old chair that I had never truly seen before…

It’s a very austere looking desk chair that has seen a tremendous amount of service. The piece is plain, yet graceful in its simplicity. On the back rail is a maker’s mark – the Johnson Chair Company of Chicago. From what I have been able to learn, the Johnson Chair Company built Mission-style chairs from the 1890s through the 1930s.

The chair has a beautifully sculpted seat that’s very comfortable to sit in. It also has two large side rails with five gently bent splat pieces that rise from the seat to the curved crest rail. There are two bent pieces that help to anchor the side rails to the seat. One of them has a split on it and lost its glued plug.

The undercarriage of the chair is very interesting.  When I had the piece flipped up on my bench, I could see how the legs were attached to the central column of the chair. The four legs radiate out from a cast iron base, which is threaded through to allow the height adjusting rod to screw up or down, allowing he user to set the height of the chair exactly where they want.  The action is smooth, and requires a little work to operate. But, once it’s set, it holds the adjustment very well.  The legs themselves are joined through a massive mending plate on the bottom of the chair, with beefy screws holding to the iron inner workings and each leg. The space between each of the legs is filled with a thin piece of bent oak, which slips into a pair of kerfs cut into the base of the legs. One of these is missing on the chair, but the three others are in very good shape.

The seat adjustment control determines how easily you can rock the seat backward. It consists of a hefty iron handle that screws into the workings of the adjustment device.  Screw the handle in, and a coiled spring in the back gets stretched, making it more difficult to rock backward on the chair. I had never noticed how massive the control was until I had it up on the bench.

Once I fixed the broken wheel on the caster, I wiped all of the cast iron pieced down to clean them, and then wiped them again with a silicone lubricant to allow easy movement of the pieces. I also took the opportunity to carefully clean all of the dust off the piece and vacuumed the thing spotless.  After I wheeled it into the house, I made a decision. Something this important to me doesn’t belong out in the shop or at the home office… I am going to bring it to my desk at work and replace my 12 year old chair that’s getting more uncomfortable by the day.

And, when I’m sitting on the same chair my grandfather worked at, I’ll get inspiration to work harder to be more like him….

I often wonder why two things that go together often don’t match up.

A few years ago, a hot dog manufacturer proudly announced that their dogs now came in a bun-length size. Color me curious, but as far as I could tell during my 42 years of life, hot dog buns have pretty much been a standard length.  I’m just wondering why dog manufacturers took so long to adopt this new size?  That will make you go ‘hmmm’ at your next cookout for sure.

Another place I have seen this involves the width of a range hood vs. that of an over-the-range microwave.  When my wife and I moved  into our house, we had a pretty standard issue contractor grade range hood in a lovely shade of avocado above our range.  It was disgusting, and we needed to have it ‘taken care of’.  So, I took a can of high-temperature black paint and – heeding the advice of Mick Jagger – I painted it black.

That was great until we noticed that our microwave oven was taking up space in our efficient kitchen. Why not combine the best of both worlds – get an over the range microwave that also functioned as a range hood?  So, about five years ago, I vowed that we would do that.

Well, imagine my surprise when I discovered that the cabinet above our range was too low to install a microwave into.  Bummer.  So, my friend down the street and I got ambitious, cut the cabinet free and created a huge void above the range top.  I had to build a simple ‘filler’ cabinet above the range to drop the unit lower than the ceiling and to hide the electrical connections and venting.

When we went to install the new unit, my stomach sank. You see, over-the-range microwaves are about 30 inches wide, but range hoods are 36 inches. What was I going to do?

Back at the home improvement center, they wanted to sell me a ‘filler kit’ – basically a few filler panels to close the unused space in.  But, that didn’t seem right.  After all, we have a number of cutting boards we need to store, and all they do is clutter up the cooktop. So, I thought for a while and came up with this insanely simple yet useful idea.

Basically, what I created were two slip bookshelves out of some scrap red oak plywood. They were very simple to build – the tops, bottoms and backs were strips of 3/4″ plywood  cut to width and rabbeted to accept the side panels.  Those were made of some 1/4″ ply which was glued and stapled into place.  They fit snugly into the opening and are screwed into the bottom of the filler cabinet with a pair of pocket hole pan head screws.

In place, they provide a convenient area to stash the cutting boards and keep them off the counter top. They were very easy to build and – I think – provide a convenient place to stash the cutting boards until they are needed.

Why am I writing about them now?  Well, after five years of popcorn, reheating and way too many door slams, we had to replace the microwave.  The new model is a sturdier, brawnier one which – I hope – will be able to handle the force of the two growing lads in my house as they enter their teen years and eat us out of house and home.

In addition to watching the Kentucky Derby at the big soiree this past weekend, we also held a wine tasting event.  At the same party.  The wackiest wine name or label won a prize. (For the record, a wine named Cardinal Zin took the top honors)

So, I had to figure out what to give as the big award.  Some of those wine glass charms are always appreciated.  A waiter’s corkscrew was also a nice addition. But, I knew I had to add something special.  But, what to build?

I had thought about those balancing wine holders.. you know, the simple sticks with a bevel cut on one end and a hole drilled in the other… and realized that it could be a simple but interesting project to build.

Yes, it is an insanely simple plan.  But, as with all simple plans, you have to get the details right.  In this case, how large of a hole to cut, how long a stick of wood and what angle to cut the bevel? That could be critical later when actually putting a wine bottle in the holder.

I did a quick search and found a drawing at the Timeless Treasure Trunk Wood Shoppe that showed the details of the project. Easy Peasey!

I fished around in my scrap barrel and found a few choice pieces of walnut, spalted maple and purpleheart that were big enough for the pieces.  I cut them to rough size and planed each of them by hand to get them square, flat and true.

From there, I cut the bevel on one end of a test piece.  I wanted to make sure that everything was going to work well when I put the bottle in. The plan called for a 40 degree bevel – not sure how that was arrived at, but I wasn’t going  to mess with the plan – for now, at least.

The next task was to cut a circle on the other end of the board to accommodate the neck.  The plan called for a 1 3/16″ hole, but I wanted to go a little larger so it would work with fluted bottles and other larger bottle necks.

When I took the bottle  holder inside, it worked.  VERY well. Once I got the measurements done, I jumped on the other ones.  If it was easy to make one, it was easier to make a dozen!  I cut the bevels on the other ones and started to drill. I used a 1 1/2″ forstner bit to cut the hole on the walnut holders, but the going was much tougher with the maple and purpleheart. For that, I switched to my drill press and a circle cutter.

I put a 1/4″ roundover bit in my table mounted router and rounded over all the edges except the ones at the bevel. I then sanded the pieces down with my random orbit sander and used my spindle sander to make the inside nice and smooth.

I finished each of them with three coats of Watco Danish oil.

Now, the trick to using these is to push the neck of the bottle in as far as it will go, then set the bevel flat on a (stable!) table. Slowly let go of the bottle, and then let go of the stand, and it should stay put. The weight of a full 750 ml bottle of wine will counterbalance the tendency of the holder to tip, making a very impressive display.

I went with the basic rectangular shape for the holders, but you could go with a fancier design if so moved!

No, no post yesterday.  Instead of writing something for the blog, I spent the day cooking Easter dinner for 16 folks. My two sisters in law with their families, my in-laws and my mom and step dad. And, boy, did we ever eat. Roast lamb. Ham. Roasted potatoes. Two veggies. Two different kinds of salads. It was nuts.

And, when it comes to the kitchen prep in our house, we like to keep a lot of the staples close at hand. Different oils, vinegars, rices, pasta… the works.  This way, we can whip up a meal fit for guests whenever we need to.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t always so easy to store these staples. We had very limited pantry storage area in our kitchen – basically a linen closet in one hallway and whatever space we could eke out of our cabinets. Very tight and sloppy.  We needed a solution.

To help contain all of these goodies in one convenient place, I built this freestanding pantry unit for my house. Based on Danny Proulx’s design in his book Fast and Easy Techniques for Building Modern Cabinetry, it is a very simple yet useful design.

Basically, it’s a large cabinet built out of red oak plywood. About seven feet tall and 18 inches deep. Rather than sitting on the floor, I built a frame for the piece to make it look a little more graceful. The piece is held together with glue and pocket screws, and I built the doors for it. I figured the curved top rail would allow it to look a little fancier. It’s as plain as plain can be… but when you get into the inside, this is where the piece shines.

Inside, there are five full-extension heavy duty pull out shelves on runners that can handle 100 pounds each. This baby is designed for heavy lifting and ease of use. I built the shelves from pieces of 2 inch wide by 3/4 inch thick red oak runners with 1/2″ plywood grooved inside. The sides are held together with more pocket screws.  I purposely graduated the height of the drawers from the bottom to the top of the piece to allow for taller storage on the lowest shelf, and to restrict the number of canned goods that could be stacked on the upper shelves, preventing too much weight from being placed on one shelf.

The best thing about the piece is simply how much stuff it can hold. We store all kinds of goodies in there – the breakfast cereals, the bags of coffee, the large mega-retailer packs of pasta – the works. This way, we can stock up at the local membership clubs and keep all of those things out of the way safely tucked in the pantry.

This piece has allowed us some great flexibility in storage at our home, and we’ve had more than one visitor remark how they would like to get their own copy of the pantry for their kitchen.