IKEA's Got Nothing on Me -- 'cept $$$

     Adding furniture to Diane's studio has really gotten me to thinking about furniture pricing and quality as a whole.  Adam recently purchased a very nice dining table plus 6 chairs for under $400.00.  Sure he had to spend a small amount of time to assemble it but you know what?; it doesn't look half bad and after having dinner at his house last night, the set is functional and comfortable too.  To replicate it I couldn't even buy the materials!  I know that what I build is quality so maybe I have that over IKEA too.
     For Diane's studio she wanted white laminate so I used a Nevermar product on it.  I really liked working with the ultralight MDF as well.  This always strikes me as odd, when the forklift driver brought it over to the truck for loading I noticed that is was marked "Made in New Zealand".  I mean light or not, that's still a long way to ship material.  The driver said the other big supplier for that is in Chile!  Only thing that I can figure out is that American labor has priced itself out of the market or/and the EPA has put so many restrictions on manufacturing that it's no longer feasible or profitable to manufacture this in the USA.
     Okay, off the soapbox.  Here's a shot of the shelving cube in process:

IKEA Quality Plus

     The bottom is dado'd, glued, and nailed in as are the corner blocks and back.  To fit the back I used my somewhat antique Stanley #78 -- not sure that's what it was originally intended for but it sure made some long, continuous shavings!

Stanley # 78

     Since the entire studio has been repainted the doors looked pretty awful.  Decided that they too should get a fresh coat of paint.  I'm really liking the Earlex sprayer.  Can you imagine trying to brush all of the panels in the doors, not for me!

Spraying Again 

     What looks like half of a table is actually the legs for the shelving cube.  I figured that if these were bolted to the cube it would be plenty strong.  The overall length of the unit is 55", making the leg section a separate bolt on unit will alleviate any concern about the strength.  It seems to have been successful:

Shelving Cube and Work Station Installed

     As you can see all of the studio furniture has the same appearance, not matchy matchy like I hear the HGTV designers bad mouth.  This one has the power strip mounted to the side and each of the new units has a hole and grommet in the top to manage the cords.
     Diane has told me she really loves her new space and it's amazing how much more room it seems she has.  Putting all of the furniture against the walls really opened up her studio.  She's blogged it on her website as well, you can link to that here.

Combination of Hand & Power Tools

     Well, here in the desert it's really been heating up and I've spent the last 4-5 days out in the shop until well past 95 degrees!  Usually like to get out of there about 5 degrees earlier but I'm somewhat driven when I get into new projects.  Now that Diane has been working in her studio creating her rag dolls for several months she's decided there were some needed changes.  The soothing green on the walls worked well for her when her entire focus was to create her beautiful oil paintings.  It's unfortunate that the economy has cut into her gallery sales so drastically that she knew she needed to change her focus.  Speaking of focus, the green that worked so well for painting proved to be less than desirable for sewing so the first thing we did was to paint everything white.  Some of the walls needed 3 coats to cover but between her doing all the trim work (Thank you, thank you, thank you!) and me doing the roller work that phase is now complete.
     The next thing to be addressed was to create more horizontal space for laying out fabric and housing sewing machines and a serger.  I had made a table that held two machines but the way it stuck out into the room interrupted the work flow.  That table has become the main cutting table and two new, narrower tables are almost complete that will fit against the walls.  The hardest thing we had to overcome in the design was an angled, 45 degree wall.  Angles may add interest to a room but they're a royal pain when it comes to creating a floor plan -- always end up with some wasted space.
     In any case, last Friday we went to Peterman Lumber to buy ultralight MDF and Poplar to start the build out.  Also picked up a couple of 4' x 8' sheets of white laminate.  Doing laminate work isn't one of my favorites but you can't beat it when you need a smooth and durable work surface.  The first thing I needed to do was to build the tables.  The legs came from 8/4 stock and have a taper at the bottom to lighten them up.  Nothing says quality furniture to me like mortise and tenon joinery, here's my set up for that:

Ready for M & T's

     You can see the taper at the bottom of the leg.  The mortises are cut and need to be cleaned out with chisels.  On the left is a bench hook and saw ready to cut tenons and at the right is another bench hook and a rabbet block plane to trim the cheeks.

Haunched Mortise

     One of the mortises is haunched for the longest span, the short span is not.  A technique I use to lay out the haunch is to use a 1/4" spacer to lay it out on the tenon:

Laying out the Haunch

     Once the sawing is done my go to tool for trimming the tenons is a rabbet block plane:

Trimming Tenon Cheeks

      Once all of the joints fit the way they should the final step before assembly is to plane all of the surfaces. The bronze smoother plane left a beautiful finish on the Poplar.  I use the block plane to put a slight chamfer on every edge.

Final Surfacing

     This is a rather long (5') and narrow (22") table so assembly was done in two stages.  First the ends were glued and clamped, then the long apron pieces were assembled.  Good thing Diane is good about helping on these projects as it's pretty hard to span 5' and bring the joints together!

Glued up and Ready for Paint

     There is another unit for the room. It features a 30" wide area that will accommodate a chair and has a set of open shelves at the opposite end.  This will need a filler piece to go into the angle on the wall.  Given up trying to visualize and figure out how to deal with that.  After wasting many brain cells on it decided to just put everything else in place and deal with that odd piece later.

Boxes, Lids, and More -- Oh my!

Ready for .......?

     I've mentioned that I'm gearing up for a show this September which will feature various small boxes that are currently under construction and in the design stages.  I'm playing around with several different and unique styles and hope they will appeal enough to the public so they'll vote with their wallets!  Another advantage is that these will be an easier item to ship than furniture is.
     Just because they're small really doesn't make them any easier to build, if anything, the smaller sizes add the challenge of how to hold them, especially if there's machine work involved.  I sure am fortunate to have Diane as my style guide, she has an eye for the way things go together and work out style wise.  As an example, the two toned lid in the upper left was designed to go with the box that has the extended and pegged finger joints.  She suggested that there was too much going on, either the box should be the star or else the lid should be the star.  I took that into consideration and it makes perfect sense to me but not until she pointed it out did I truly see it.  That lid will go on the box in the right of the picture which features some  curly Maple and mitered corners with Cherry splines as a contrast.  The lid that currently has the clamp on it will be for the finger jointed box.  I created a different pull for it that mimics the joinery on the box.  This box was tricky to assemble and finish:

Extended & Pegged Finger Joints

     The tricky part comes in after you figure out how to clamp and glue this box together.  You have to be careful not to get glue on the part of the joint that extends and once that's accomplished the area between the two joints (short side) is hard to get to.  Time consuming process but I'm thinking that the final design is worth it but.....is it a money maker?  Probably not but I really just need enough profit to feed my wood addiction!
     See the big, blue brush?  That's something I just purchased which seems like such a good idea but fell short.  It's made by Rockler and the bristles are silicon so glue will not stick to it.  The advantage is that you can let it go and once the glue is cured it will peel right off.  Good concept right?  However, it is so big and awkward I couldn't get it between the joints without making a mess all over the place.  I'm going to stick to the little acid brushes, they're washable and last for 4-5 projects before the bristles come out.  Check this out:

Gorilla Glue

     I had used it the night before to laminate two pieces together for a lid.  For that I prefer a polyurethane glue (Gorilla Glue) so I used this brush for it.  Large and cumbersome but did the job.  The next morning I attempted to clear away the dried glue but it hadn't cured completely which resulted in my fingers getting permanently stained!  When I use Gorilla Glue it's about the only time I ever wear gloves, you can't get the stains off of your skin easily so it's just there until a new layer grows in.  Once the glue cured completely it did pull off of the bristles with some effort.  Like I said, it's a good idea but I'm not a fan.

Another Box Design

     So this blog will be backwards!  I started it last night after figuring out how to design and make the top for what I'm calling my Elliptical Box.  Wanted to get that down on paper (so to speak) before those senior moments could erase them.  The process worked and here's the lid for the new box concept.  This is somewhat backwards too since now I'm building the box to fit the lid!

It Worked

     Now that the Slanted Dovetail box is complete and I know the basic design and construction is what I was hoping for there's another design that's been floating around in my head.  Rather than make a series of the Slanted Dovetail box (4 boxes total) I'd rather work on this new design.  I think I'll name it the Elliptical Box since the main design theme will be an ellipse of sorts.  Years ago I did an experiment where two different species of wood were cut out together and then re-joined.  If you're familiar with intarsia this is a very elementary form of it for lack of a better term.  My goal is to combine two pieces of curly Maple with a piece of Cherry, both of which have some interesting grain, for the lid to this box.

Sketching in the Arc

     The Cherry will be the center of the lid so I needed to establish an arc.  This can be done by clamping the piece to the bench with the bench dogs, they are at the same distance from the center.  The thumb of my right hand is pushing this slat towards a mark I'd made to show the top of the arc.  All that's left was to draw the line.  Here are the two pieces of Maple I want to use for the lid:

Marked for Grain Direction

     Whenever you laminate boards together you want the grain direction to be the same on all of them for when you plane the board.  This holds true whether you're using a power plane or the nice, quiet work of a hand plane.  You can see the basic design on the Cherry.  Next was joining the pieces together.

Temporarily Hot Glued Together

     In the picture you can see how I laid this out, marks were made on the Maple pieces that corresponded with the end of the design on the Cherry.  Using a hot glue gun, they were temporarily held together and then cut out on the bandsaw.  Once they were pried apart with a dull screwdriver and a mallet they separated without any problem for reassembly.  What you see on top below the clamp is a piece of 1/4" thick polyethylene.  I use these whenever I glue up because nothing sticks to them and there is no possibility of the clamp bar reacting to the glue and causing stains.

Together Again!

     Now it's just a waiting game to see how they will turn out.  For laminating panels together I prefer to use Gorilla Glue because it has never failed me and is easy to clean up.  It was a little tricky aligning the three pieces and I guess we'll see once it's dry how well things went.  Another new thing I'm using is the glue brush, the large black and blue thing next to the glue.  It's made from silicon and glue will not stick to it, at least that's the claim!  This brush is available from Rockler Hardware and after using it a few times my only complaint is that it's rather large but glue does peel right off of the bristles as advertised!

P.S.  The brush isn't quite what I expected.  It is extremely large and with the polyurethane glue it still hasn't fully cured in between the silicon bristles.  Matter of fact, my fingers are now permenantly stained!  Gorilla glue is about the only thing I used disposable gloves for because of that.  Anyway, not a fan of the brush; I'll probably stick with the little acid brushes. 

Dowels with a Lie-Nielsen Dowel Plate

End of the Day

     I've done a blog before on making dowels with the dowel plate sold by Lie-Nielsen but thought it was worth repeating now that I think I have my system down.  When I taught the class on plane making my students weren't all that enamored about forming their own dowels.  It's a process and from everything I've read, you can't expect to get perfectly smooth and round dowels but you will get accurately sized ones out of pretty much any species of wood you want.  In this picture is everything I used to make them other than the planer to get the wood down in size, in this instance 3/16".  I plan to use them to peg large finger joints for the box series I'm currently working on.
     When researching on the web much of what I found indicated that riving your wood and finding straight grained pieces was the way to go.  Riving is similar to how you would split firewood.  Well, I tried that but not too successfully -- ended up with quite a lot of wildly splintered pieces of wood!  Since I don't have an unlimited supply of material I chose to make squared pieces with the planer instead.  In the photo you can see that Cherry, Walnut, White Oak, and Purple Heart are the species used.
     The dowel sled is made from some MDF and has a V-groove running down the center.  With the stop on the bottom it functions just like a bench hook.  As you start to take the four sided blank and make it an octagon it wants to start moving all over the place.  The first edge is easy enough but as you take the corners off of the blank it gets a bit squirrely!  You have to keep in mind that you're not going to end up with a perfectly shaped dowel like you'd be able to buy.  Here's what I did; first of all I would place the blank in the V-groove:

Beginning of the Cut

     You hold the front of the blank in the groove while you start to skew the block plane towards the front.  It takes a bit of practice but you can get a rhythm going where the hand in the front slides forward while you move the plane to cut.  Then the trick is to move your hand to the back of the blank and plane until you reach the end.

Shifting Hand Position

     You can actually develop a rhythm to this, I found that 6 passes on each squared corner seemed to get me a good size.  Once the blank looks pretty decent the next thing I did was to use an old pencil sharpener:

Tapering the End

     This made it much easier to get it started in the dowel plate which is the next step.  I cut the blanks to roughly 5" or so and found that some would drive fine while others shattered.  Surprisingly, the White Oak was the easiest to drive through the plate, probably because it's a hard wood to begin with.

Driving them Through

     Through experience I've learned that a finish hammer works better than a rubber mallet.  When you have driven the dowel almost through the plate you use the next one to drive the first one out.  If you're interested in seeing how I made the holder for the dowel plate here's a link to that blog.  It's my second version and I'm pleased with how well it works.

Dovetails with a Slant

     In previous posts I've mentioned a plan to create a line of boxes to hone my skills and to market as well.  You know, have to make some money to feed my wood addiction.  In any case, here is an almost completed box I've been working on the past couple of days:

Design by:  Seat of the Pants!

     It still needs a handle of some sort, a sliding tray for the inside, and final planing, sanding, and finish.  I've been intrigued by cutting dovetails and then putting them into a piece that has some angles to it.  The dovetails themselves are in line with the side piece but by placing them in an angled block they appear to be slanted -- interesting optical illusion.
     The size of the box was determined by what I had laying around the shop:

Material Used & Practice Piece

     I had a small amount of Spalted Maple left from a stand up desk I built years ago which is what's used for the sides.  The Walnut is some of the scrap from the elliptical shelf project last month.  For starters, the 8/4 piece of Walnut was cut at a 15 degree angle with the panel raising jig.  I didn't realize it at the time but it's important to keep the off cut from that process, it's behind the practice piece.  The box is approximately 3" tall and 6" x 12".  The first step is to cut the tails for the dovetail joints.
     There is a technique called the 140 trick.  It's named that because a Stanley #140 skewed rabbet plane was used to cut a slight shoulder on the inside of the piece.  Not having one of those or the funds to purchase a pair of them from Lie-Nielsen I use this technique which I'm sure isn't OSHA approved:

Pay Attention = Very Doable

     I set the height of the blade on the tablesaw to the length of the dovetail.  Usually that's less than 1/2" or so and then it doesn't look quite as scary.  Because of this design the tails needed to be an inch and a half long.  This is cut on the inside of the board.  It'll help when you transfer the markings to the tail board and also hides any discrepancy you may have cutting them out.  My preference is to cut both sides at the same time:

Cutting Tails

 
     Even here you can see how the shoulder you created with the 140 trick gives you a definite stopping point.  Once the saw cuts were made it was on to the chisel work.

Removing Waste Between the Tails

  
     I was really surprised to find how hard the Spalted Maple is!  I figured that since the word spalt means diseased it would be fairly easy to chisel but not so!  Actually created a burr on the back of this chisel that needed to be honed away.  Once the tails were cut on all the sides it was time to transfer them to the sides and lay out the pins.

Transferring Tails

     Here's where keeping the off cut is important.  Since the piece now has one side flat and the other comes to a point you won't be able to secure it in the vise.  I've put chalk on the off cut piece to illustrate why it's important to keep.  Same goes for when you chop out the wood, that cut off piece is crucial for securing it to the bench while you work the chisels.
     Another thing I found to be helpful is to make a series of cuts in the waste part between the pins:

Extra Cuts Between Pins

     This made it a bit easier to remove the Walnut.  That's a lot of end grain to chop away!  Once the dovetails fit a groove was made in the sides to hold the plywood bottom and the box was assembled with Liquid Hide Glue.  The top is fairly complicated with several different levels rabbeted out.  So far, so good.  I used to always tell my students that you learn from your mistakes and I'm a bit smarter now!  The next one should go easier.  Here's another photo of this box with the lid removed so you can see all of the rabbeting required.  They were roughed out with a dado head then fine tuned with a block plane.

Parting Shot

The Last Jig

Panel Raising Jig

     Well, here it is; the last of the jigs I need to make.  This is the panel raising jig that's set at the angle of 15 degrees.  Nothing overly complicated so fairly straight forward to build.  I suppose it could have been adjustable to set the bevel for any angle but I really didn't want to get into that much detail.  Fifteen degrees seem to be the acceptable angle for raising panels.  If I ever need a lesser angle I could tilt the blade to change that pre-set 15 degrees.  For box lid that needs a small angle I'd just as soon use a block plane to do that.
     With every solution there comes another problem -- where the heck will I store all of these jigs I finished making?