Experiences

Bringing woodworking to life

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I’m not sure why this claim was made, but a rumor was going around at Woodworking in America that online woodworking is dead. Deceased. No more.

What a strange thing to say, because the folks I met who blogged about woodworking and marketed their tools online seemed to have a very lively and robust exchange, and they relished the thrill of posting what they were doing for all the world to see.

In fact, I think two more blogs were born in the short time between the end of the conference and this posting, with a few more folks looking to get in off the sidelines.

And, I don’t think it would take much more to convince others about the power of online woodworking. In fact, there are a few opportunities coming up that just might help get more folks involved in the craft and enthused about building.

The first opportunity was created by my friend Chris Adkins at High Rock Woodworking. He and several Atlanta Area friends have been meeting at some local woodworking haunts. This inspired the idea of creating the Modern Woodworkers Association.

It works when woodworkers get together with other woodworkers in the area to build, source lumber, shop or just shoot the breeze. The only thing you would really need to do to be listed would be to take some shots of the event and … well.. we’re still working on a way to get those babies uploaded. But, imagine if we had ‘chapters’ of the Modern Woodworking Association around the country – and the world. Wouldn’t that be a total blast to see what Chicago, London or Sydney woodworkers were doing?

The other opportunity comes with the Woodworking Shows. Yes, it’s that time of the year again, when the Woodworking Shows makes its rounds around the United States. It kicks off this weekend in Dallas, Texas.  Demonstrations, classes and cutting edge products always draw woodworkers from miles around. My friend Jim Heavey of Wood Magazine is also out yukking it up with the crowd while teaching some valuable shop tips. I know that last year, Andy Chidwick and his wife Shari were working with the show managers to get the online woodworking community out in force. I spent my time at this year’s Tampa show working the crowd at a booth of my own, and had a great time talking to central Florida woodworkers.

There are 19 stops on the show’s route this year, stopping in major cities from coast to coast. Again, wouldn’t it be awesome to get a bunch of woodworking folks together at each of the stops for a little camaraderie, fun and telling some big fish shop tales? If you know that you are going to be coming out, why not e-mail the organizers and let them know you’ll be out there in force?  After all, if they know you’ll be there, maybe they’ll help roll out that red carpet for you! The e-mail address is info@thewoodworkingshows.com.

I don’t know about you, but if we’re going to demonstrate that the people  who write online woodworking content and watch it to gain valuable insight into the craft are alive and well, they just may believe the hype that online woodworking is overrun by woodworking zombies.

That would be kind of frightening…

 

Projects

Woah, big fella!

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Back in late 1999, I was still just a budding novice woodworker (sometimes it’s tough to tell that I have improved any), I wanted to build a new project. I think this was my third. But, what to build? I had already built something for my wife.

There was also someone else who was very special in my house – my oldest (and my only at the time) son Dominic. I had already missed the window to build him a cradle. I could have built something practical like a bookshelf, but where’s the fun in that?  That’s when I decided on a rocking horse.  And, I think it’s safe to say that the client was pleased.

Fast forward a dozen years. Marc Spagnuolo is running a charity build where he’s donating $1 for every completed rocking horse plan that is built.  I have been building a rocking horse or cradle to donate to a local pregnancy crisis center every holiday season. And, that little boy who loved his rocking horse so much has been bugging me to get more shop time.

Thus, a plan was born.

So, this weekend, Dominic and I went to the nearby Lowe’s to pick up a glued up project panel and the other supplies. And, we had to make two trips to the local print shop to get the plans enlarged to the right size.  Apparently, 200% in one FedEx store doesn’t mean 200%.  But, Emily at the local shop was able to get everything printed up nicely, and we were off to the races.

Since Dominic had used a jigsaw in his tech class at school, he wanted to show off his mad skillz. So, we spray mounted the plans to the board, and Dominic got right to work with my jig saw. First, he cut off the parts of the board that we had drawn out the smaller parts of the project on. I took those over to the band saw and made those cuts while Dominic cut out the sides of the horse outline.  We were using my holdfasts to keep the board down to the bench, and he was VERY energetic using the mallet to snug them down.

After we cut things out, I broke out my Ridgid spindle/belt sander, and we started smoothing out the rough cuts.  And, they were pretty rough, but that’s what the sander was for!  Dominic took to the sander with skill. I watched him closely at first, but he was so good, I was able to back off and take a few pictures.

Did we get as far as we wanted to today? Nope. Dom had the idea we were going to have a fully assembled horse waiting for a finish on it. Ehh, what we do have is a stack of edge sanded, cut out pieces ready to have pilot holes drilled, surfaces sanded and finish applied.

Dominic left the shop sweaty, covered in dust and energized by the build. I left with the pride a father feels when his son grows up and finds the joy in working with his hands. My buttons were bursting. It brought a tear to my eye…

Hey, Marc and Nicole… Having an infant is a great thing, and you will enjoy every minute of parenting a little one. But, when they get old enough to work in the shop… that’s when it gets GOOD!

 

Quick Polls

Quick Poll

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Let’s build on last week’s poll…

Salt and pepper. Laurel and Hardy. Macaroni and cheese. Some things are just natural partners. And, when it comes to woodworking, there are few partners as famous as the mortise and tenon.

While cutting mortises presents its own challenges, cutting the tenon can be tricky as well. In this week’s poll – how do you cut your tenons?

Link of the week

Link of the week

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Gorilla Glue

Hello again, everyone. It’s me, Iggy the Trained Shop Monkey.  I had to write today’s link of the week because Tom is ***STILL*** prancing around the shop bragging about how good of a job he did on that Monkey Stool. It’s a good thing, if I don’t let him celebrate his small victories, he’ll spend MORE time playing that bass of his (poorly).

That’s OK. Besides, if he was writing this, you wouldn’t get to hear about my new primate friends down at Gorilla Glue.

 

Yup, my bigger cousins make some seriously awesome glues. They have their signature polyurethane glue, their newer type II water resistant PVA offerings, epoxy, instant glues, duct tape… they have it all. They even sent me my own care package to help with my ongoing efforts to make Tom a better woodworker.

Now, all I have to do is keep the big galoot from getting his fingers stuck to the project!

Projects

The busted chair… y’all are good!

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OK, so this morning, I’m wrestling with the reality that I have to bore some very accurate holes into some very thin turned spindles that are now missing their tenons. I thought about this while dropping my son off at school. I thought about it when I got my cup of coffee and turned on the computer. Heck, I thought about it during a brief meeting I had this morning.

That’s when inspiration hit me… in the form of a guy named Steve Sander who commented on my post over at my Google + account. His suggestion was so blindingly simple, I just had to come home and give it a whirl.

Steve is firmly in the KISS (Keep it simple, stupid) camp of woodworking. He recommended that I simply get a piece of 2 x lumber and bore a small hole all the way through from one side to the other. On the ‘bottom’ side, drill a hole the diameter of the spindle width. On the ‘top’ side, bore a 3/4″ hole through until it meets up with the one beneath. This means that the larger diameter will support the outer rim of the spindle, and the smaller hole will guide the bit.

As long as I do this carefully, using the small bore as a centering mark and keeping the bits perpendicular to the board’s faces, everything should come out fine. Of course, I blew it on the first attempt. But, that’s why I got me the longer board.

I put the spindle into my vise just high enough to ensure enough stuck up above to fit into the block. I also wanted to make sure the spindle was plumb, which greatly simplified my drilling. Just keep everything nice and plumb.. and we’re off to the races.

Next up, I chucked a 3/4″ auger bit into my cordless drill. I went cordless because I wanted to go on the slow setting used to drive screws… I just didn’t want to hit it with too much speed.

As Bob Ross used to say before he painted a huge tree, here was my bravery test. I put the auger bit into the guide hole, hit the trigger and let it roll. The bit at first brought up dust, but then it bit. And, boy, did it bite. It was bringing up nice slices of wood and spitting them out at the top of the hole. Since I hadn’t heard a crack or anything bad, I was hoping against all hope that things had gone well.

Heck, I don’t know if it was clean living (wait. We’re talking about me here. No way that’s in play) or what, but the dang thing actually WORKED!  I went to the band saw, cut some of my home improvement center dowels to size (they are long, I will trim them down to final size once the glue is dry) and glued them into place with hide glue.

Shoot… I’m already into a sweet bottle of red wine to reward myself… and – again – today’s success proves once again that Internet woodworking is very much alive and well…

 

Projects

The busted chair

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I have this really good friend. She lives right down the street from us.  Our kids play together. Both families get together for picnics, dinners over and movie nights. Her husband is a Washington Redskins fan, but this New York Giants fan can still allow him into his house.

She also happens to be Swedish. Well, she used to be, but she became an American citizen a few years ago. Anyway, she still has family and friends over in the homeland, and she recently visited her brother to celebrate his 50th birthday. It was a total surprise.

Before she made the return trip to Florida, her brother brought out a family heirloom. A piece of furniture she had always loved. It is a three-legged corner chair known as a Munkstol. What’s a Munkstol? Glad you asked. According to the Swedish Wikipedia and a bad translation from Google Translate:

A monk’s chair is a seating piece of furniture that was particularly popular during National Romanticism. Munk The chair is made of three straight, vertical poles, which constitutes both legs and holds up armrests. Between these there is a horizontal, triangle shaped seat with a tip pointing backwards. Munk chairs are often equipped with hand-woven, thin cushions of wool. They are quite uncomfortable to sit in.

And, as you can see, it’s a pretty sweet looking corner chair. My neighbor told me they were very popular after World War II. The three posts are turned beautifully, the crest rail is very ornately carved. The seat is an elegantly raised panel, with its edges held in a groove in each of the three turned seat stretchers. Quite the interesting looking project.

The only problem?  Well, her brother – in a totally kind effort to make it easier to carry back – basically beat the piece apart with a hammer.  So, these are the pieces…

Ehhh. This wouldn’t normally be an issue, but part of the plan when things were being busted apart was that my neighbor’s good woodworking friend – you know, the guy who likes to woodwork in the neighborhood – would be more than happy to put things back together…

Gosh, it would have been easier had her brother – in his zeal to pack this baby up – not busted the piece up so roughly that he broke off the tenons on all of the turned seat spindles…

Fortunately, I was able to spend some time cleaning out the broken off tenons from the mortises (And pulling out the incredible number of cut nails that had been driven into the piece to keep the spindles from twisting), so they are ready to have new tenons prepared for them. And, I also discovered that a standard-issue 3/4″ hardwood dowel from the local home improvement center fits into the round mortises perfectly.

Now, I just need to figure out a way to bore a hole into the end grain of the  spindles, set the dowels into those spindles with some epoxy, and then epoxy them into the mortises without blowing out the sides of the spindles… This is going to be a real challenge.

The other one is to get the assembly put back together in the proper order. You can see from the finished piece that this is going to be one complicated build to get everything together….

Now, my neighbor’s husband is a professional sushi chef. So, I’m going to be plied with some prime Hawaiian tuna as a repayment for this job. So, with visions of some tasty Japanese treats dancing in my mind, I’m going to have to find the way to do this project soon… So I can enjoy  the sushi while admiring the completed, serviceable Monkstol.

 

Shop Talk

Mudflapping

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Last week, a computing pioneer passed away. Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple Computer, succumbed to the pancreatic cancer he had battled so bravely for the past years. His vision helped to revolutionize computing, music, phones… a lot of what we take for granted today.

While he is being memorialized, many of his more famous quotes are being posted on the Internet. Some are inspirational. Some are snarky. Some are full-on competitive. And, then there’s this one, which seems aimed at the woodworking community.

When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.

Of course, if Steve Jobs was going to build a piece of furniture, he would probably make an app for that.And, I get the point he was trying to make – that if you are going to invest the time and effort into building something beautiful, don’t use ‘inferior’ products and methods to finishing things off.  But, this quote did make me stop and think about the work I do in my shop.

No one is going to deny that nothing quite captures the beauty, depth and richness of solid wood other than solid wood itself. And, when it comes to building certain types of woodworking projects, there is nothing quite like solid wood. Small boxes that can be picked up and handled?  You bet. Pieces that will be opened and examined closely… sure.

And, I have no issues with the plywood that Jobs pointed to as substandard. The cabinet grade plywoods I use for higher-end cabinet projects costs upwards of $100 a sheet. In effect, it is stacked, glued up veneer instead of a crud-filled piece of sheathing. So, I would feel fine going with plywood on a project.

But, the spirit of his quote  – do you put the same level of care into the hidden parts of your projects as you do into those that are seen? You know, I don’t always. And, that’s something that was once referred to as Mudflapping.

If you have ever driven behind a truck, you will notice that some drivers love to embellish their rigs with fancy looking accessories. High end paint jobs. Fancy chrome. And, if you look down at the wheels, you will often see fancy mudflaps. Sometimes sporting the chrome silhouette of a nude reclining woman. While they make the rig look snappy, these flaps serve a utilitarian purpose – preventing the dirt on the road from being flung backward toward the cars behind the truck. So, as you can imagine, the inside of these snazzy looking flaps is just ugly and covered in mud.

When I know the piece I’m building is going to be permanently attached to the wall, I won’t do a darned thing to finish the piece. There’s simply just no reason to. The home office setup I built last year for my friend Paul was built from a series of boxes, and when they were secured to the wall, no one was going to see them. Ever. I guess maybe when they get ripped out 40 or 50 years from now, but no time soon. The unfinished backs were the perfect place for me to write notes about where they were going to be placed, what was going to be stored in there and if I had to do anything special to accommodate wires or other electronics.

For projects that are going to be seen ‘in the round’ – from all directions and angles – of course I take the time to carefully finish all sides. Everything gets sanded down to 180 grit, planed or scraped, sealed and finished. You never know where or how the piece is going to be used, so it’s best to go on the side of caution.

However, there is a case in which I need to more carefully consider my finishing regimen.  For the recently completed stair-stepped bookshelves, I carefully finished the ‘front’ side of the piece. I sanded it carefully, applied the gel stain, buffed it down with some 400 grit paper, applied the wipe on varnish, re-buffed and wiped on a coat of wax. It looked really nice.

The only problem was that I didn’t put the same level of care into finishing the back. I wasn’t quite as careful in the sanding, applying the stain or the finish. My thought was that the piece was going to be pushed against the wall, it wasn’t going to matter much.

What I hadn’t counted on was that the client was having her walls painted. So, she had the two shelves out in her living area. And she had to look at their backs until the painting was done.  So, she asked for the can of stain, and was going to apply it herself.

D’oh! Never something you want to hear about your work once it has been delivered. In this case, mudflapping was NOT the way to do things… And it provided me with a valuable lesson.  After all, if you are going to be following me on this blog, I can’t be flinging mud your way!

 

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