Inside the Oldwolf Workshop

Sampling The Sector

2012-01-25T17:26:00.001-06:00

I don't drink a lot, I don't use any illegal substances, heck most of the time I even drive in the vicinity of the speed limit. I really only have two vices, (the naughty kind, not the attached to my bench kind) that occasionally get in the way of being an attentive husband, father, and employee. One of those is woodworking, the other is studying medieval history.

One of the best things for me is when my two obsessions find common ground, then I can really geek out. this is probably why I've latched on well to panel carving, It's a drug that feeds both of my obsessions.

One thing I have always wondered about with medieval woodcraft is measuring, before standard empirical measurements. I get the idea of story sticks or string with knots at regular spaces. I understand the concept of measuring by finger, hand, and foot. I also get judging by eye and having a working knowledge of how proportions should work. I have played with all these things but there seemed like there was a missing piece to all of these, and I had my suspicions the mystery was contained in a pair of dividers.

I get the basics of a pair of dividers, transferring measurements and scratching arcs and circles, but I have always suspected that was only scratching the surface. I've never made it to Woodworking in America, but I know George Walker has taught a class there that connects the use of dividers to design furniture and I wish I could attend for that class most of all. (There are lots of other good reasons I with I could attend)

I am an avid follower of Mr. Walker's blog "Design Matters" blog and I like his articles in Popular Woodworking Magazine and he recently wrote a simple post on a tool rack he built for his shop without using any "measuring" in the sense that we have all been raised to be accustomed to. This connected me to an article written by Jim Toplin (George's co-conspirator on an upcoming book from Lost Art Press) in the June 2011 issue of Popular Woodworking Magazine called "Secrets Of The Sector."

I dug out my copy of the mag and re-read the article, and I'm not sure how I let it slip by me the first time. In the back of my head, everytime I saw a folding rule for sale I would think, "I should pick up a real cheap one I can sand down and convert to a sector" like Chris Schwarz did in this video. But after re-reading the article I couldn't let it pass me by again.

I stopped and picked up a small maple board from the closest box store the next morning. Why maple? It was one of the best bits of stock on the shelf that particular day, and I wanted something light colored and readable when I marked the lines and numbers.

I gathered from the article that while one sector is functional, a pair of them can be very versatile. One about twice the size of the other. I chose a width for the larger sector and proceeded to rip the width from the narrow stock after marking it out with a marking gauge.

As I worked along I made myself pretty happy, a couple years ago when I started changing my game plan to hand tools there's no way I would have been able to pull off ripping a half inch off a board with a D-7. Now it really didn't seem like a big deal. After sawing I planed the edges first with my #6 for flatness followed by my #3 for smoothness.

Now I had a good ol' pair of sticks to make the longer sector.

The shorter sector could be thinner dimensions so I ripped the two sides from one shorter section of stock.

Toplin's sector puts the hinges on the endgrain. I know he's probably smarter than me and there's gotta be a reason for it, but I had to go with what felt right to me and that was sinking the screws into side grain. This meant creating a little recess so the hinge will lay flush once installed

Then there comes the knife work breaking the sides into 13 equal sections. I cheated a little and used inch measurements for both sectors, The smaller sector has 13 divisions spaced at an inch and the larger has them at two inches. I measured them out and knifed the lines both on the top, then on the inside of the legs.

A very fine Sharpie pen was put to work darkening all the knife lines.

While I was working away I got to thinking about the layout squares I started building about this time last year and the decorative molding cut outs on the Roubo Square and English Layout Square and how they help make the tool attractive and increase the pleasure I get working with them. I decided to repeat the experience here with these sectors. I cut these ovolo silhouettes on the distal ends of the legs on both pair.

Towards the hinge end of the smaller I rasped out these simple covetto silhouettes.

And the hinge end of the larger sector received this bead detail.

Then came the time to number them one to thirteen. One the smaller I used standard Arabic numerals.

On the larger I decided to change it up and use Roman numerals. No particular reason, a little romance that's all.

A quck Danish Oil finish to give them a little protection and when they dry they'll be ready to work. I cannot wait to begin to play with these and explore the possibilities behind them. I know they're going to help me pull more of the mystery out of using my dividers and I'm excited about that. I'm going to see how many secrets I can unlock on my own before the Walker / Toplin book arrives on the scene. I'm excited to read that too, I hope we don't have to wait to long.

Ratione et Passionis

Oldwolf

For More Info:

Read George Walker's post "Design at the Point of a Tool"

Check out Jim Toplin's website.

Chris Schwarz also has a video on using a sector HERE

Signs, Signs, Everywhere Signs . . .

2012-01-23T09:46:00.000-06:00

Over the last couple weeks I have been carving, not the 17th century style carvings I have grown so fond of, but a couple of signs commissioned by folks I work with at the hospital. Carving lettering is a bit more demanding than a pattern because mistakes stand out. The layout is a bit more picky as well, unlike laying out a pattern to carve I had to go dig out the old carbon paper and use the computer to get the letters printed to just the right size.

Zoe is 4 years old and her father just built a new playhouse for her. I work with Grandma and she knew I was a woodworker. She asked me if I knew anyone who made signs, assuming a router and a pantograph. I had to admit I don't know anyone who does that, but I would be happy to carve a sign for her. After all I have a mahogany board that's just begging to be worked over.

I ran a molding plane around the edges to get started. Then laid out the lettering using carbon paper.

Now it was time to dig in and start work. On this sign most of the letter work was done with the V tool.

Wanting to dress it up a bit for a little girls playhouse I added a couple flowery S curves.

And a pin wheel. I had to sneak some 17th century stuff n where I could,.

I was really happy with the way it turned out and more importantly Grandma loved it as well. I gave it a simple danish oil finish but when Grandma got it home she added some very dark stain to the lettering and some paint to the pinwheel and flowers. She showed me a pic on her cell phone and she did a very nice job. It was fun to have her finalize and customize it for herself.

After finishing Zoe's sign, another lady at work heard about my work and came to me. Her husband and her had just finished building a bar area in their basement and her husband wanted to name the bar with a sign. I had some nice cherry around and I hadn't carved any of it yet, this seemed like a good chance to give it a shot.

Her husband is a police officer, apparently the code 10-57 stands for someone who has been drinking. If I look it up on Google it means missing person, I'm not sure what the common usage is in this area but both definitions work if you ask me.

I wasn't given any real specific instructions about what it should look like, just the phrase really. As I thought about it a while and I have always liked the the Woodcraft sign that is being carved at the beginning of PBS woodworking shows like "The Woodwright's Shop" so I decided to do something similar. I outlined the letters with a V chisel and then worked up to the line with gouges, also using broad flat gouges to remove most of the background.

To smooth out the background and help make the letter stand forward from it, I textured it with my waffle punches.

Smaller punches make a deeper impact but don't cover a whole lot of surface at once. It was a while of pounding the punches to cover the negative space.

Fruit wood like cherry can be a little temperamental, especially when its kiln dried. There were no checks or cracks when I initailly sized and surfaced this stock but through the process of carving a crack developed, like a seismic fault line, stretching across the length of the board. It was incomplete but I din't want it to proliferate over time and give Officer Quimbly two half signs instead of one full one.

My solution was to take a large, thick sheet of high quality, linen art paper and glue it to the back of the sign. When I say glued to the back I mean completely, edge to edge coverage. I figure the paper will buttress the thin crack and help hold the sign together as well as stretch and move with the wood over time. Hopefully a very elegant solution.

A danish oil finish, some hard ware hooks added to help hang it and this one was finished as well. Carving this pair of signs was a good learning experience and kind of fun as well. I don't think I'd like to make a career out of it but as an occasional diversion it's alright.

Ratione et Passionis
Oldwolf

Fix a Chipped or Nicked Plane Blade

2012-01-16T22:24:00.000-06:00

Writing a woodworking blog leads to questions. My questions and your questions.

Often I spend my words on this blog trying to answer my own questions. In the background I get several emails a month by other woodworkers with questions of their own. I find this highly flattering and I am always happy to help answer a question if I can, or help point someone in the right direction if I'm just as stumped as they are.

Over time I have noticed a pattern, maybe one out of every five questions I get is about fixing a severely nicked or chipped plane blade. Recently I picked up a nice wooden shoulder plane with a skewed blade for just five dollars and had the chance to get some pictures of fixing a sizable chip in the blade

She was a beauty. Sitting pretty on the shelf in the antique store, surrounded by a dozen other molding planes. The tag tied to the narrow end of her blade was written in black sharpie. I saw the nick in the blade, the one flaw to her beauty but it only made her more irresistible. At only five dollars I had to take her home and make some room for her in my tool chest.

Here is the chip, pretty sizable and on the working corner as well. The only solve I know of for something like this is to grind the nick out. That means grinding the length of the blade back until the nick is removed

I have to remove a decent amount of blade to fix this one, but there's no worries, there's plenty of blade left. The black line here is photo-shopped in but in reality I did use a sharpie to mark a right angle across the blade to work the chip out.

I have a plywood tool rest I use in conjunction with my grinder. It helps me grind off the steel at close to a 90 degree angle to the back of the blade.

Here is the edge of the blade with the nick about halfway ground out.

Then I take away the platform and freehand grind the cutting bevel of the blade back down to sharp, or as close to sharp as a grinder can get.

Then I run the blade through my version of a sandpaper sharpening system. I use man made stone tiles from a home store and I run through six grits on the bevel and then lighter on the back of the blade. The progression goes 320, 400, 600, 1000, 1500, and 2000. Usually I use a simple eclipse style guide but there are times it doesn't work, like the skewed blade for this shoulder plane. When that happens I free hand the process.

Ratione et Passionis
Oldwolf

Final Pictures of The Unconventional Bible Box

2012-01-08T01:28:00.000-06:00

I'm trying to do a little clean up and tying off of loose ends here on the blog. One thing I know I have been remiss to do is post some of the final vanity pictures of the carved box I've taking to calling the Unconventional Bible Box, (unconventional due to dovetailed corners and brass hardware)

It was started as a practice box for learning some of the carving techniques I picked up from Peter Follansbee's great video "17th Century Carving Techniques" and eventually it turned itself into a real project that has found a real home.

If I pick it apart there are things I'll try and improve on next time. I do believe from a purely aesthetic perspective that the lid dimensions can make the box look top heavy from the right perspectives. Of course I can see every missed strike of the carving chisel when I look at it but I understand the reality is that most others could not unless they went in looking for specifically for evidence of mishaps. The sliding till's dovetails were a bit sloppy and the dovetails and the brass now looks very out of place, but again, I was kind of shooting for non-traditional at the moment and that gives me ground to defend those decisions too.

My biggest dislike is the oak stock I chose. It's an edge glued up red oak box store board and if you look it's very evident. Again I bought the board as a practice go, I never expected it to turn out as well as it did, and that makes some of these detail mistakes more evident to my eyes.

The things I like about my work is that the dovetails on the case are nearly perfect in execution. I like tho contrast of the walnut and the red oak, before the danish oil finish was applied they looked too contrasting, but the finish helped even the playing field, and as time goes on and the oak darkens with age, I think the contrast will mellow to simple accent.

I like that I pulled it off! I like the flow of the carvings, the modifications to the patterns I made including the medallion riff on the sides and where I took the pattern on the lid. I can see now where I might have increased the detail, but there are times when less is more.

All in all I have to say this is not a bad foundation to build upon, it grew my carving skill immensely and I even used it to practice some lessons that helped later when I built my version of a traditional tool chest.

If you're interested in seeing more about this box and the work that went into it all the related posts have been collected together HERE, (That includes this post)

Ratione et Passionis
Oldwolf

My Favorites of 2011

2012-01-06T22:50:00.000-06:00

I try very hard to not look at life in the reflection of a rear view mirror, but I do believe it is important to know where you are coming from as you move forward and the start of a new year is an excellent time to write about it. Looking at 2011 from a purely woodworking-centric point of view I had a very good year. I finished a decent amount of projects from a couple of wooden squares to a larger carved box.

I was kind of inspired here by a blog post by the Popular Woodworking Magazine, where each of the editors name a few things that were their favorite new releases of the year. It got me thinking about what items I had gotten over the last year that had made a difference in my work. I came up with an Oldwolf Workshop Studio top five for 2011.

#5 : A 14" Bandsaw

I picked up a 14" Rigid brand bandsaw this spring. I want to be upfront, I am not recommending the brand, but I am saying the tool itself has changed my woodworking with one word, Resaw.

Being able to simply and easily re-thickness wood has made it easier for me to process rough sawn lumber, (which is cheaper) and lumber I had riven apart myself (which is highly satisfying). There is a lot you can do with a bandsaw, I know, but so far, almost a year into ownership and the magic of turning stock into bookmatched parts still has a grip on me.

If you don't have a larger bandsaw, I believe its a good thing. I don't have a brand to recommend, Obviously you get what you pay for.

#4 : A Set Of Antique Carving Tools

I started my foray into hand carving with two Phiel Chisels I picked up from Woodcraft in 2010. A shallow gouge and a "V" tool. In 2011 I found a set of 10 antique carving tools in a case at area antique store. I don't believe you need a huge selection of tools to get into carving, but a selection of a dozen is a nice luxury. t's given me enough experience that I know what I'm going to look for when I get the chance to pick up a few more.

#3 : I Finally have Three Good Planes for Prepping and Flattening Stock.

OK, This one might be bending the rules a bit because one of these three planes has been with me since the beginning.

Prepping and flattening stock is such a basic, every time you work thing, and going through the paces with tools that just aren't up to snuff can make it a horrible pain in the naughty bits. I've had my wife's grandfather's number 5 Jack tuned up and working well for a couple years now, but complementing it with a truing plane and a smoothing plane have been challenging.

My shop has to run on a very tight budget and new quality planes from Maine are out of my league. I make my way like I think a lot of hobbyist woodworkers do, I search around to find bargains where and when I can. I look at the area antique malls and flea markets. Now sometimes this means you kiss a couple frogs before you find a prince, but the search is fun and exhilarating all by itself.

Early summer I picked up a very clean #6 and after sharpening the blade I immediately had very good results. I know a lot of shops use a #7 as a truing plane but I find am getting acceptable results with the #6, and I haven't found a good deal on a bigger Stanley joiner.

Then this fall I found a nice #3 smoother at an antique store. It was also very clean and after grinding a nick out of the blade, I had completed the holy trilogy.

Prepping and surfacing my stock is so much more enjoyable now.

#2 : A Pair of Bad Axe Backsaws

I filled one more big need in 2011 by getting my hands on a couple of joinery back saws from Mark Harrell over at Bad Axe Tool Works. First I picked up the hybrid small tenon / dovetail saw he so aptly named "Wyatt Earp." the truth is I had never owned a quality saw like this before and cutting with it was an epiphany. Everything I had been "making due" with up to that point was left sitting in the dust. The open handle design is super comfortable with a perfect hang angle for my hands and sawing style. I am so taken with the color of the mesquite handle my wife should probably be jealous.

This saw became my go to problem solver for almost everything in my shop. I even used it's rip filed teeth to do some of my fine crosscutting work. I think that if my shop were on fire and I could run in and save one tool, this saw would be it.

I followed up Wyatt Earp several months later with a 12" carcass saw, filed crosscut. By this time Mark was offering an open handle design on most of his saws and I chose to go for the American Black Walnut. In between my purchases Mark changed his finishing method for the handles from a shinier poly finish to a oil and buffed wax finish. It may sound like something of little consequence but I believe the difference in feel from one to the other is palpable. The oil and wax gets you such a better touch with the wood, and therefore a better connection to the saw and the cuts you're making.

The continual quest to improve every detail of his work is what impresses me the most about Mark. It's one thing to buy a saw from a bigger tool company and get something that is just good enough. It's another to buy a tool from a craftsman who cares about the experience his customers receive when they are using his saws, and that care is evident in every element of his saws.

I find I use the carcass saw nearly everyday in the shop, more than my beloved Wyatt Earp. If this fictional shop fire were to occur, I see no reason why I wouldn't grab both of these saws. I have two hands after all.

#1 : A Quality Camera

It was a difficult decision to pick my number one favorite thing from 2011. My number one is hands down the most expensive purchase I have made in a long time, but it was worth every penny. It's a quality Nikon D3000 camera.

In the shop I take a lot of photos. Yes I take them for the blog but also for my own journaling the build of a piece. Only a small fraction of the shots I take make it up here for everyone to see. This camera has given me the ability to take superior pictures in comparison to what I had before, but there is more to it than just getting decent documentation.

In it's own way, this camera has changed the way I look at my work, made it somehow more intangibly intimate. As I pay more attention to the framing, lighting, and set up of a picture, I also connect again in a different way to the subject. It's almost like getting to look at your work through someone else's eyes, and that occasional shift in perspective can be a valuable insight.

---

Well that skims over and sums up my 2011, Now I'm looking forward to a enjoyable and productive 2012 and I wish everyone else the same and more. Let's see where the ride takes us all this year.

Ratione et Passionis
Oldwolf

How I'd Do It: Tenons

2011-12-31T15:26:00.000-06:00

This month's entry into How I'd Do It Friday is the tenon half of the mortise and tenon joint. You'll hear me talk about it in the video, and maybe you've heard me say it before but typically I like to cut my tenons first when I'm making this joint. So even though this is the second video posted in the series, it was the first one I shot.

If you want to see how I do Mortises you can see the How I Do It video HERE, or I found an old blog post I wrote about mortise and tenon joints HERE.

The initial idea of these How I Do It posts was to get a good collection of bloggers around to show how they individually create different joinery. Life and the holidays get in the way of things sometimes and I haven't seen anyone else doing these write ups. If you have, if you are, even f you want to come late to the party, drop me a line and I will add a link to your tenon content on this post.

I believe next month is Dado joints so look for that upcoming and if you want to join in, maybe that will be a good place to start. I like doing the videos for these because it's a change of pace from my typical content but don't feel pressured to do video yourself. a traditional post with words and pictures is great, even a radio style podcast is good. Go crazy and share your methods of work.

I hope you enjoyed the video, I had the most fun shooting the intro and exit videos with my oldest two daughters and one of their friends. I just can't help but laugh watching the whole out-take from their work, so because I can, and especially because I have friends and family who visit my blog too, I wanted to include a Holiday Bonus Video compiling the out-takes. Enjoy.

Ratione et Passonis
Oldwolf

The First Lessons are The Most Difficult.

2011-12-27T18:07:00.000-06:00

There was once a master thief whose skill was renown across the land. One day the thief's eldest son came to him and begged his father to teach him the secrets of his success. The father relented to the son's pressure and agreed to take him that evening. As night fell they approached a large house and together and made their way inside. The son dutifully studied his father's every move, shadowing his steps and mimicking his hands.

Under the ears of the sleeping family the pair moved through the house, Father directing son as they collected specific items of value. Quietly they opened the door into a bedroom and found it empty except for a large closet packed so full of the well-to-do families clothes that the door sat ajar. The father told the son to go and pick through the clothes for something of value and he would return in a moment.

As the son stepped towards the closet, the father shoved him inside and locked the door. Then he made his way outside and loudly knocked on the front door, shouting and ringing the bell to wake up the family inside. When he saw lights start to appear inside the house he quickly slipped away before anyone saw him, and went home.

Hours later he was relaxing in his favorite chair when the front door banged open. In came his son, hs clothes torn in places, dirt smeared across his forehead, and dark circles under his eyes. He was still catching his ragged breath as he started to raise his voice at his father and master.

"Why did you lock me in that closet?" he hollered, "I was scared to death and I was sure I'd be caught!. It took all of my imagination and abilities to get out!"

The old master sat up in his chair and smiled, "My boy, you've just had your first lesson in the trade of thievery."

***

Trying to spend more time with my daughters in the shop. My woodworking resolution for this year.

Ratione et Passionis
Oldwolf

Christmas Rescue Mission

2011-12-26T16:08:00.000-06:00

My dad has managed restaurants for most of my life. Growing up, I learned a lot about real life sitting in the backrooms and listening to the cooks and waitresses banter over their cigarette breaks. It's amazing how invisible a 12 year old boy sitting quietly in the corner can be. Buy me a beer sometime and I'll tell you some stories.

For the last several years my dad's worked for a chain that likes to decorate the walls of their dinning room in a variety of interesting errata. You have been in them before, they have trombones and old Schwinn bicycles stapled to the walls, along with a hundred other random pieces of wonderful crapola. Much to the dismay of myself and other hand tool woodworkers you can occasionally see a great old wooden plane or a handsaw alongside the flotsam and jetsam. Keep your eyes open, it's like a Where's Waldo puzzle.

Once in a conversation I complained to my father about these potentially great tools being wasted screwed to the walls and I jokingly told him he should let me come in at closing one night and liberate them, freeing them back into the wild where they can make sawdust and be happy. For Christmas this year Dad had a surprise for me. The store is undergoing a remodel, a change in concept, and is losing the junk stapled to the walls. Who knows where the items would end up after they were taken down. Some of them directly into the trash. So my dad took a minute and pulled these two beauties from the trash.

The saw in front is a very standard "Warranted Superior" with a Disston sway back design to the blade

It has a good deal more chip carving in the handle than the other similar saws I own. I think what shocked me a little was that the blades are not brown with rust, they've been painted that color, There is obviously some rust underneath, but to start restoring these I need to use some paint stripper. What makes me laugh is that they didn't even take care with the paint job. Just sloppily spraying over the saw nuts and medallion.

The steel of both saws is in good shape and both blades are straight.

This is the saw that kind of excites me, (I know, I know, I'm a geek), but the handle has one of the most comfortable grips I've ever wrapped my fingers around. I couldn't begin to guess at the model or make but I know it's a little unusual. You don't see many with a steel side plate like this. You can tell it's been well used over the years with rivets in the place of lost saw nuts. It is missing a few teeth as well, I'm not that worried about it.

All in all it is very nice to have a chance to rescue these beauties from being lost to nick-knack infinity. I hope to have the rehabbed soon and back to happily making sawdust.

Ratione et Passionis
Oldwolf

The Adventure of Design.

2011-12-25T15:04:00.001-06:00

If you write novels, like my cousin Mark does, then your trade craft is in words, but words are not enough to carry through a great story. Your medium is words, and ink, and paper, but your skill comes in story and plot. The process is simple to explain. You have an idea for a story so you write it down. Then you rewrite it, and then you rewrite it some more, then you rewrite it again, and then, after all that, you probably need to rewrite it some more.

It can be an exacting process, trying to craft and re-craft your work into the best form possible, perfecting your plot, theme, dialogue, and words.

I see correlation to this process in woodworking, specifically when it comes to the all powerful step in the process, good design. In the end it doesn't matter how well you can cut a dovetail or how smooth you can plane a board. If your design is faulty, it can look like a second grade shop class gone wrong. (hopefully minus the glue-eating)

A "car" my youngest glued together from shop scraps.

The problem with design is that it can be a very personal thing. There are some constants when it comes to relating furniture to the human body and it's mechanics, but the softer decisions fall more in the mixed up arena of fashion, personal taste, and a hundred other influences. All these factors may just make designing a piece on of the most daunting processes in woodworking.

The other side of the coin is fretting and worrying about your design to such detail that you end up making a meal out of a snack. You can become paralyzed and bound up in the details. inflexible and unable to move forward on to the actual piece. Frustrated when the entropy sneaks into the build process and requires a change of plans, an "off the cuff" change to the design. Starting to cut to build a piece can be an intimidating thing, You've put work into planing, put money and time into selecting the right stock, and now if you prove to be fallible, you can reduce that stock to nothing but sawdust and firewood.

I understand why a lot of people like to work from published plans, it helps relieve the fears that can come in the midst of toiling away at your own design. I like to work from published plans at times myself, but mostly in just a few circumstances. One is building a reproduction of a piece. In those instances you want to get it right and getting that information from someone who had the opportunity to measure and inspect the piece is a great way to go if you can't do it yourself.

The other reason I like to use someones published plans is because that artisan is someone I want to learn directly from. Working from someone else's plans is almost like getting a glimpse inside their heads. My wife bakes cookies as her stress relief, as a result she collects recipes and cookbooks by the armload. She has said that she can tell a lot about the cook by reading the recipe. The way they order the ingredients and the details to the directions tell her about that person as a cook. I will choose to build a project from a woodworker's plans so I can gather some similar insight, and often that teaches me more in-depth lessons than the proper dimensions of a chest of drawers.

Most of the time a piece starts as a rough idea in my head. a problem to solve, something I've admired and wanted to build for a while, or a request from a rare commission. From there I move onto my sketch book. I have a small, 6"x9" bound sketchbook that follows me around almost everywhere. I have a fine arts background so I express myself best visually, using my hands. Even in other parts of my life, if I'm trying to explain a process I end up sketching something.

In those first sketches I'm not worried about perfect proportions or sizing. I want to get the big ideas down. From there I work my way back into the details, but the sketchbook is always in the rough. I'll write down measurements but they are guesstimates. I may also work out some joinery and details and plan some of the order of the build. Basically at this point I am doing a combination of mind dumping and free writing. I work fast and try and get the ideas out on the paper as they come to mind and as I think of variations.

Often I fill somewhere between 3 and 5 pages like this. Then I work back over the sketches and write additional notes, make changes in the sketches and try and envision the piece as a whole. I know just enough about sacred geometry to be dangerous and I'll play with Pythagorean theorem and golden ratios, but never as a hard and fast rule, only as a way to help fill the holes I've left behind in the fury of the sketch.

Then I'm ready for the next step, I dig out the graph paper and try to get dimensions and details nailed down tight. Here I will really focus on the measurements and the joinery details. I try to end up with a finished piece on the page.

The trick to my somewhat organic design process is that sometimes unexpected surprises happen and things take off in unprepared for directions. I have been working a lot on designing some pieces lately and something I've wanted to build for a long time is a spice chest. A small cupboard containing an apothecary of small drawers behind a showpiece door, traditionally it's an 18th century style piece.

I did quite a bit of research, both in books and magazines I own and using the net to find other examples. But I struggled with the door design. I asked my wife for some ideas, (she has a similar fine arts background) and she suggested trying to break up the door like a triptych. I liked the solution and played with size and shapes until I came up with this design.

The problem was that I liked this door a lot, but it was definitely not 18th century, it was very much Arts & Crafts style. I began to change game plan, to look at my other elements to see if they fit in with the the aesthetic the door design brought to the party. I decided the basics of the chest were safe, mouldings would have to be fit to the style, but the most difficult part was getting the feet of the case right.

You can see I played with idea after idea, some good, some crap. I tried not to judge them as I was working through them. Just put them down on paper and come back to decide later.

In the end I'm not sure if a Arts & Crafts Spice Chest is an idea that would appeal to anyone beyond me, but it is a fun exploration into the form of the chest and into the aesthetics inherent in A&C pieces, and that's really where I'm at in my learning process. Exploration.

I did get held up a little on moving forward with the build of this specific piece. One of my mother's co-workers has recently been diagnosed with a aggressive brain cancer and I wanted to build something to donate to the silent auction. Inspiration struck while I was paging through the woodworking books at my public library. I was looking at a copy of "The Essential Pine Book" (by John McGuane and Megan Fitzpatrick). Inside was a neat little desktop organizer with a couple of drawers. I decided to use it as a jumping off point for designing a similar piece in pine and cherry and donating it. After playing with the measurements, here's the scaled drawings I decided on.

The fundraiser is in February so I'll have to build the desktop organizer before the spice chest, but I'm OK with that.

Merry Christmas and Season's Greetings to you and yours.
Ratione et Passionis
Oldwolf

Metamorphosis in Progress

2011-12-20T00:42:00.000-06:00

"When I was a child, I was speaking as a child, I was led as a child, I was thinking as a child, but when I became a man, I ceased these childish things."
-1 Corinthians 13:11

---

I feel like I'm at a bit of a crossroads in my woodworking journey. I've spent several years now working to learn and re-learn how to go about working in this craft I have some to love. It started with a fascination with hand tools and learning to use them and it has spread across all the aspects of my work. Along the way I have been focusing on building a shop that I want to work in, with the appliances I needed and the storage I wanted. It hasn't always been an easy journey to explain.

This last February I traveled to Millwaukee to attend "The Woodworking Show" it was an enjoyable afternoon and the highlight was getting to meet and make friends with Andy Chidwick and his family. (for those of you who live under rocks Andy runs the Chidwick School of Fine Woodworking in Montana, one of the top two places I would love to go and take a few classes) One of the first things he asked was, of course, "So what are you working on in the shop right now?" and I had to smile at the quizzical look I received when I replied "A couple of wooden squares."

The response isn't Andy's fault. I was at an odd part of my journey and I know the response he expected was akin to "Well I'm finishing up the veneer on this Bombe secretary but I'm having troubles getting the hide glue to heat just right." How was someone so accomplished to understand what I was really up to, stripping my woodworking hobby back to the bare nuts and bolts and trying to rebuild it stronger and more stable. Maybe a more appropriate response on my part could have been, "I'm focusing on skill building with stock sizing and design details by building some layout squares for my shop."

Of course I'm not smart enough to some up with something like that on the spot, It takes me ten months and editing the words on a computer to be that smooth.

I haven't built shop furniture exclusively for the last few years, notably I've finished a nice sized Medieval Hutch Chest and a William and Mary Bookstand along with a few other things, but mostly these explorations were extensions of lessons I had relearned. I would say especially there's a big connection between the lessons I learned building wooden layout squared and the William and Mary Bookstand.

Once I finish the build of my traditional tool chest I will have nearly run out of things to build "just for the shop" in two and a half years I'll have built two workbenches, a saw till / storage shelf combo, a tool chest, a sandpaper storage box, and multiple other smaller projects. It is time to begin to look outside of what to build for my shop and decide what furniture I want to build for myself, my family, my friends, and maybe a couple clients.

The road stretches ahead, but the journey is still the same. On the move between apprentice and master. I will continue to record the journey here, including the bumps along the way. You will see some differences as I focus more on becoming a student of furniture in addition to being a student of woodworking techniques. You will see more words used up on design and preparation as well as the process. With shop furniture I could work from a rough sketch in my book, I've taken to drafting things out to scale on graph paper again so I can really see the proportions. The metamorphosis is in process, and I'm excited to see where the next stage takes me.

Ratione et Passionis
Oldwolf

The Winter Shop.

2011-12-15T22:28:00.000-06:00

Many years ago, before the advent of civilized artifices such as central air. Larger family homes would often have a couple of kitchens. In the colder winter months you would light a fire inside the house, baking the bread and warming the house together. In the warmer summer months you can imagine why you wouldn't want to add extra heat to the house. So a separate building was constructed behind the house to be a summer kitchen, and keep the heat of the wood fired stove from making the main house uncomfortable.

This winter I decided to take a similar philosophical approach to my shop.

Last winter was my first in the shop one my parents land, It's in a steel shed on the back corner of their property. Steel sheds aren't really know for their insulative properties, and I picked up a kerosene heater to help make it through but there were some good treks through knee deep snow until I had a path tromped down.

Not that I minded much, it did slow down my progress, glues and finishes don't work in the cold, supplies are difficult to bring to the shop, and when the temperature drops below 0 degrees, even the kerosene heater doesn't help.

We live on the fifth floor of a big apartment building. Our place has a separate dining room in addition to the standard bedrooms, kitchen, living room set up. The dining room is more often referred to as my study because we've put a couple cheep bookshelves along the wall to hold my some of our books. We are not a sit around the table for supper family, the dining room gets used as a catch all place for a lot of other things.

I decided to co-opt the dining room, or rather half of it, to serve as a winter shop. I had built my Joinery Bench to be portable. I just needed a way to transport and store the tools I would need to continue to work. So I started work building a traditional tool chest and managed to get it finished and the shop moved just in time to beat the first snow. (which has since disappeared in the recent rains, but weather in Wisconsin is interesting, If you don't like what it is right now, hold on an hour because it'll be different)

I managed to get everything into one minivan load. Well almost everything, I made a return trip to pick up some cherry stock.

It was an interesting catharsis to see the shop cleaned out. If I continue to work out of the tool chest when I move back to the "Summer Shop" and I suspect I will. I'm going to have to figure out something different to with the peg board.

The saw till and plane storage shelf look lonely too.

The big thing I'm exited about with the "Winter Shop" . . . a window and natural light on my workbench.

I put down a layer of painter's drop cloth and covered that with some interlocking floor pads. This should keep the majority of the sawdust out of the carpeting and make shaving easier to sweep up.

It's cozy, but I like how it feels so far. I hot glued some pieces of floor pad to the back of the bench to protect the drywall. I love being off the concrete floor and here I can work barefoot and in stretchy pants if I feel so inclined.

The blue plastic tool box has a small assortment of clamps and the wooden tool box on top of it has nails, screws and some hardware inside. The anarchistic tool chest is still unfinished, I ran out of stock for the skirting. I'm think I'm gonna pick up some pine to finish it up soon.

Of course every shop has it's challenges and breaking down longer stock is always a challenge. The problem solving needed to overcome these kind of challenges is keeps me on my toes and continually searching for a better way.

Even though the chest isn't finished I am currently working out of it, and enjoying the experience. I thought I would give a quick little video tour of the chest and the tools I've decided to fill it with.

Ratione et Passonis
Oldwolf

P.S. I just wanted to drop one more quick note of thanks. I try not to concern myself too much with numbers when it comes to this blog, I try to write what makes me happy and things I think I would like to read and let anyone who chooses to come along for the ride. I do keep an eye on the numbers though and I am always curious about how people find me and whether they are interested enough to come back and read some more.

To that end I am tickled to say that the month of November was record breaking for hits and readership and on December 7th we set a new one day record.

This is super humbling to me and I wanted to take a minute to offer a big thank you to everyone who takes a minute out of your day to read about my adventures in sawdust. I'm having a blast continuing to work here and I'm glad you're along for the ride.

Thank You
Derek

Filling the Top of The Chest

2011-12-07T00:50:00.000-06:00

After I finished filling the bottom of the tool chest I was really psyched to start filling in the top of the chest. It was getting cold and I could almost feel the snow coming and if you remember, the biggest goal for finishing the tool chest is it would allow me to bring enough tools home to our apartment so I could continue to work over the winter and remain frostbite free.

I've already designed my version of a Joinery Bench to knock down for travel, I needed a way to pack up the goodies that make a bench worth having.

I like the simplicity of the Anarchist Tool Chest sliding tray design. The baseness of the concept is infinitely versatile and will let me grow into my own comfort level of where I want my tools stored. It took me a bit of thinking and studying the pictures in Chris's book to really get the concept of how to put together the rails. I've rarely been accused of being a particularly quick study. It took some time for me to wrap my head around exactly how I should go about it.

I may have missed it but I think Chris understates the concept of supporting the rail system from the bottom of the chest. The trays will be holding a lot of weight in tools for a very long time and even though he shows this support in pictures, I don't recall reading a word about it. Maybe I'm off base but the support seems kind of important to me.

It's entirely possible I missed it's mention in the reading. I'm fallible. But I did read the construction sections of the book over and over as I worked my way through the build.

The bottom rail is a 1 X 1 section of hickory. The supports are the same size. One support helps sandwich the divider for the saw till, the other just takes up a little footprint in the corner.

The rail itself, in my version, stretches from the back of the chest to the support rail I made for the front tool rack. Not pictured here is a little corner glue block I placed with a little rub joint so the rail gained some support against the front of the chest as well.

From the bottom 1" wide rail you then build up the next rails. The next one up is still hickory and a 1/2" thick. It measures 6" wide to accommodate the deepest of the trays. This one I had to notch around the front tool rack. Another thinner rail weighs in at 1/4"thick and 3" wide to support the upper tray.

Oh and you can see the small glue block I placed to support the front of the widest rail.

A little glue on the back of the rails and some counter sunk screws to hold them in place. The bottom wide rail is glued and nailed to the side and also nailed to the supports.

With the rails in place I started working on the trays themselves. I cleaned up a bunch of hickory and resawed it to thickness using my bandsaw, until I dulled my blades beyond recognition, then I finished the job using the tablesaw. I may be a hand tool geek but I am also fat and lazy and not terribly interested in resawing to thickness by hand. Sorry to disappoint.

The upside to this process is I was able to butterfly my drawer bottoms. I know the detail of this will be hidden by the tools in the trays, but I will know it's there and when I do get to see it, it will make me smile. The thickness for the bottom, deep drawer is 3/8ths" and the top two shallower drawers are 1/4" thick.

I planed ship laps in the bottoms and moved on to constructing the sides of the trays.

One of the several mistakes I'll admit to in this project happened in my planing stage. I just didn't buy enough poplar. I should have ordered closer to 70 to 80 board feet instead of stopping in the neighborhood of 60. I had already planned to use hickory for the long wearing surfaces like the tray bottoms and the side runners, but I just wouldn't have enough poplar. So I made a stop at the local home store and picked up some pine.

In hindsight I am not sad about this development at all, I love the smell of pine and everytime I open the chest, I get a puff of that sweet resin smell that triggers some kind of primal endorphin response. It makes me happy.

After cleaning up the home store marks and planing the boards straight I sized the sides of the trays to specific length and width. The they were resawn down to 1/2" thickness.

More dovetail hijinks ensued.

And in the end, I had a glued up and finished tray. . .

. . . Or three.

The hickory bottoms were all attached with nails and a couple dollops of glue to try and allow for wood movement issues. All the burn marks from the power saw blades were buffed out with a sander.

And now I had the top of the chest to fill. Each drawer slides back and forth on it's own rail. I used a little wax to reduce the friction. The real trick to these is to get the fit of the trays piston tight to the sides of the chest. A tight fit makes the sliding work better because the tray can't kick off center and bind.

I got close, very close, but I do have some racking as I move the trays back and forth. Most of the time it is not an issue and I just have to move a tray with two hands instead of the nonchalant one handed sweep The Schwarz uses in his demonstration videos. I'm not too bothered or worried, the occasional stick is a minor issue and we'll see how they work after they've seasoned in for a few years.

Just like when I finished filling the bottom of the chest, I couldn't hardly wait to throw my tools into the top trays and see how they work. Here's where my work showed one more mistake. In my calculations for the width of the trays I must have somehow added an inch to each trays width. The result is more room for tools in the trays, I like that, but you do not get that nice stacked effect where you can look down and see every corner of all the trays at once. At times a little fiddling is needed to get a specific tool out.

In truth, I think I came out on the winning side of this mistake, I like having a little more room in the trays.

As I said before, I could feel the snow was nearly ready to fly and once we received a significant amount I wouldn't be able to get my van closer than a football field away from my shop. I needed to get the lid on and the chest to my apartment before it became snowed in.

But that is another story for next time.

Ratione et Passionis
Oldwolf

How I'd Do It: Mortises

2011-11-28T22:41:00.000-06:00

After some initial struggles with getting my video to render, I have conquered my computer demons and I am now prepared to make my monthly entry into the "How I'd Do It Friday" series. The subject this month is the Mortise side of a mortise and tenon joint.

I enjoy shooting the video for this series, it gives me a chance to do something a little different on the blog and it gets me more comfortable with the medium. I think that even after a few sessions at this I may already have enough footage for a blooper reel. Its been a cool excuse to get my daughters involved in my shop, as they help me come up with the quick intros and my oldest daughter Chloe helps out as my camera operator. (I upgraded her to cinematographer this past session and boy did she get bossy after that).

So pop some popcorn, sit back, and enjoy the show, Thanks for watching.

The collection of woodworking bloggers and podcasters who participate in the How I'd Do It Friday joinery smorgasbord are kind of a loosely formed bunch. If we have time, chance, and opportunity we participate, if not, we just let this month pass us by. If you want to participate we are working on this the last Friday of every month, feel free to join us.

So far I think I may just be the lone wolf this month, of course I may be wrong. If you participated in this months show off and I missed you please drop me a line at oldwolfworkshop@gmail.com and I will gladly add a link to this post. I don't think it's too late to join in so anytime.

Ratione et Passionis
Oldwolf

Filling the Bottom of the Chest

2011-11-26T02:35:00.000-06:00

I know tonight should be my mortise entry into the "How I'd Do It Friday" co-op with several others in the woodworking blogging community, but unfortunately I'm having some technical difficulties with the video. Hopefully I'll get it up really soon. Instead, and perhaps to help distract me from my technological frustrations, I changed my focus tonight to write some more about my traditional tool chest build.

*****

By all rights, if I were to follow standard logic and the plan, then the next step in my build of a traditional tool chest (in an anarchistic style) would be to wrap the carcass and lid in skirts. Well here in the Oldwolf Workshop we follow the standard substandard logic and I think we lost the plan a couple months ago so I decided to change it up and attack things out of order. I filled the chest with the varrious tool holding apparati first.

Seriously there is some logic to the decision, mostly it is based on the fact that I live in Wisconsin, and that my shop is really a tin can with some nice tools inside. It's not the best shop I've ever had (I've had some nice basement shops in the past) and it's not the worst shop I've had, (long time readers will remember the Wood Shop Jr. a 5X9 closet at the bottom of some stairs). Eric Bushèe over at the Breen Bush Design Blog listed mine on the top of his "Poor Excuse for a Shop" workshop list, and he's probably right. (though I think I am in good company.)

In the end I don't believe it's the quality of the shop that matters as much as the quality of the work that comes from it. I would rather be making sawdust working out of the back of a '68 VW van than no making sawdust at all. But the reality is that winter in Wisconsin slows down my progress, and heating it as much as I can is getting pricier and pricier. This year I decided to try something different, I'm going to clear out some space in our dining room and move in my portable joinery bench so I can work in comfort and warmth this winter.

The decision to build the tool chest now came from the exercise of trying to decide what tools I should bring along. The best answer I could think of would be to bring all the basic ones I could use. Now it's November and the snow hasn't really flown here yet. but once it does I won't be able to get my van up the hill to my shop to load the chest and bring it home. So the smart money is on making the chest usable first, in case the snow flies, and finishing off the skirting after that, and that's how we come to building the apparatus to hold and store the tools.

The first strip placed with glue and a couple finish nails.

I wanted to start by making sure I utilized the advantage of vertical height in the chest. At several points in "The Anarchist Tool Chest" Chris makes mention of the front of the tool chest as a great place to squeeze in a tool rack to hold joinery saws, chisels, or tri-squares, but he doesn't demonstrate anything. It really is a simple concept to come up with something though. At first blush you may be tempted to to just run a thin board with a couple spacers to hold it out from the chest wall.

This was my first consideration but I worried a little about storage through the centuries. If I hung a joinery saw in this configuration I decided it may put some pressure on the blade's toe as gravity pushes it against the rail and the chest wall. I decided I would run two strips, one against the chest wall and one seperated by a couple spacers.

Three spacers for between the strips, a little thicker than 1/4".

I located the strips far enough up the wall that the handles will sit below the top edge comfortably but there is enough height to hang up to a 16" backsaw

A drop of hide glue on the spacing buttons.

I did have to make a switch up to the wood I was using for the insides of the chest. Originally I was going to use poplar like I did for the shell. I miscalculated my poplar purchase though and 60 bf turned out to not be enough, I had estimated 50 board foot with a 20% mark up for waste, and for a while I thought I was going to get away clean. In the end, I will end up using most of the 60 bf for the shell, bottom, lid, and skirts, with a very small amount of waste.

This works out well though because I was able to pick up some pine for the insides, and I had always planned on using hickory for the portions that need to be "long wearing."

Nailing the outer strip into place.

Once the rack was in place, of course I had to set the chest down off the workbench to get a good look at how things hung in the rack.

Not for sure everything that would live in there eventually, but I wanted to weight it down and fill it up to see how much I could get away with and I was surprised at how much.

By now the chest was getting pretty weighty and it was a bit of a struggle muscling it up and down from the workbench, but I was too excited not to give the rack a proper try.

As I looked at what I had accomplished a thought occurred to me. If this chest managed to survive intact for a century or more, would the glue and the nails be able to support the weight of these tools for all time? Sadly, I decided I probably needed to reinforce it with some support columns that ran to the bottom of the chest.

So I milled up a couple blanks of poplar to be wide enough square to support both of the long rails.

Then I attacked them with the spokeshave to bevel the edge that would be facing away from the walls. The corner braces each had one corner chamfered, the center support had two corners chamfered.

I planed away the end grain on a shooting board until they each fit in place snugly, Then I tacked them into place with some finishing nails.

With the rack done it was time to move forward into the saw till. I liked what Chris had done in TATC, but I had a few ideas I thought might improve it. First Chris's was made to hold four saws and I wanted to hold 5, A full size 24" rip and crosscut saw with larger aggressive teeth, some shorter 20" rip and crosscut saws with a finer tooth set, and eventually a larger 18" tenon saw. So first I needed up upsize the width of the till boards.

I also understand that underneath the saws is a great place to store a decent amount of those "every once in a while tools" like a hacksaw, saw files, metal punches and a taper reamer. Some of my files are a little on the long side so I decided to make an arched cut out beneath the saw kerfs to allow space for longer items if need be.

The tool rack I had just installed had to be taken into account as well. I had to move the start of the tills over a bit to make space for clearing the saw closest to the wall easily past the rack.

I ganged the two pieces of pine together with some screws and took the work to the bandsaw. To get the right cut for the kerfs I made a couple of passes to remove the waste.

I was super happy with how this turned out.

I set it on the bench and played around a bit to see how I wanted the saws to fit. I mocked it up inside the chest as well and found I could remove another 1/2" off the front side of these tills and still clear the hanging rack just fine.

I know it's only another 1/2" of space but inside this chest I'll take every little bit I can.

I chose to set the tills in place off center so the handles would all bunch up on the right side. This left enough room on the far end for my saw vise. I measured out and installed a couple cleats for the outer wall and secured it to the till boards with some more finishing nails.

I also toe-nailed in a couple nails connecting the till boards themselves to the chest wall.

The saw till was in. Again I lifted the chest down off the workbench, hopefully for the last time, and I started playing around with the spacing I had left.

Chris installed another long, shorter partition along the back wall for his moulding planes and his hollows and rounds. I am still in the market for most of those things. I decided I was pretty happy leaving the whole side open until I tried to decide how to fit my sharpening supplies into the chest.

At this point I use the Super Scary Sharp Sandpaper Sharpening System (try saying that 3 times fast) I know it will cost me more over time, but the initial buy in is very low cost compared to other methods, and that is important in our house right now. The big supply you need for this system is a reliable flat surface. Some folks use glass plates, When I was looking around I decided upon manufactured stone tiles from the home store.

They come in 12" X 12" sizes which holds 3 1/3rd sheets on a plate and they are plenty flat for my purposes. They have held up well for a couple of years now and if I break one I can go and replace it for less that 2 dollars. They are a big item to store though and I wanted to fit them in nicely.

I decided to put in a cross till with a pine board I could just life out from between it's battons if I so desire. My box for my carving chisels fit very nicely in the space as well. This will be easy to modify and remove in the future if it turns out to be a bad idea, but for right now it seems like the right move.

With that all said and done I filled the bottom of the chest as much as possible (for now) and rested the lid on it for the evening. I really am very happy with the way the inside is working out. It gives me high hopes for the upper half of the chest. Building in the sliding trays. But that will have to wait until next time we visit the chest.

Ratione et Passonis
Oldwolf

Hidden Magic

2011-11-23T14:03:00.000-06:00

I have always had a deep relationship with books, I can understand e-readers like Kindle or Ipad, but I just can't see ever giving up real books. I read a lot beyond what I keep up with online. I drive my wife nuts because I read between two and six books at a time, and she is a strictly one book at time person. the other issue is inevitably my books end up piled high on my side of the bed, and occasionally under her feet when she makes a midnight trek to the master bath.

Marital issues aside, I am very fortunate to live just a few blocks from La Crosse's public library and it has a great selection of woodworking titles to help feed my habit. Once a month at least a couple of them follow me home. Some I read in depth, others I skim through for ideas. A few weeks ago I checked out Thos Moser's "How to Build Shaker Furniture."

There was a passage in an early section of the book that caught me by off guard, so much so that I put down the book to collect my thoughts about what I 'd just read. I even had to get my wife to unplug from her Ipod so I could read the passage to her, (another of her favorite things, I'm so lucky she puts up with me).

Railes and stiles cut to length and width.

The passage reads as follows:

"With experience one learns to anticipate what to look for in ancient cabinetry, since the methods of joining are relatively few and, in time, become predictable. Unlike today's craftsman, the old-timers didn't have a convenient glue and therefore used it sparingly. It is for this reason that our task of disassembly and repairing is made so much easier. I often think the eighteenth-century joiner knew that someday his work would be so exposed. Why else would he have been so precise in stamping roman numerals on the pieces of a joint inside the joint itself? Or why would he take the time to gently chamfer all the edges of a concealed tenon? When inspired, I will often write a message inside a joint or under a support or hinge in hopes that someday, years hence, somebody will read my message about Watergate or the temperament of my oldest son, Matthew."

At first when I read this I was taken back. Several years ago we owned our own version of "This Old House," The basement plumbing that had been retrofit had the date of 1903 stamped into it, so we knew the house was pretty darn old. We also knew it had gone through an extensive remodel in the past, we guessed around the 50's based on the kitchen cabinets design and other clues. The carpenter who did the remodel was like an artist, he had signed everything. Every baseboard I removed, almost every piece of trim had the cursive signature of "G. H. Baltz" and the date 1947. I haven't thought about it in forever and I didn't really understand it at the time, but I think I may get it now.

I flattened and glued up a couple boards for the center panel

After the glue dries I go back over the panel to re-flatten.

What Mr. Baltz was doing was making a connection with what he was building. He was adding a component of himself to his work that stretched beyond his labor.

Labor by itself can be an impersonal thing. I can build furniture piece after piece and as it leaves my hands it has the potential to become something valued by the new owner, or it can become just another object to fill their lives. I often wonder where the furniture we build fits into the scheme of things created. Where does it reside on the bell curve between factory made, press board bookshelves, and recognized works of high art like the Mona Lisa, or the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

When does the magic happen that transforms the chair holding your butt up off the floor, into something worthy of a place in a museum. Surely age, design, and craftsmanship all pay their roles in this but there is something else that resonates. Something else that connects with an audience and makes that chair more than a chair, more than the sum of it's wooden parts, more than the hours of labor and effort put into it's creation, even more than the skill of the hands that worried it into existence.

I love plane shavings, but traversing shavings are a different kind of cool.

You don't want paper thin shavings when you're traversing, you want a heavy cut. but wood is such a cool medium, even a heavy shaving has translucence when held up to the light.

High art carries the same sensibilities as well made piece of furniture: technical skill, craftsmanship, proper design and proportions, and a presence that people notice. But art carries with it something that can be difficult to invest in a piece of furniture. Great art, the kind that people connect with, the kind that people remember, has a bit of the artist themselves invested into it. The work is personal, often times intimate, even when it's not immediately evident, trust me, it's there.

For years Leonardo Da Vinci's, the Mona Lisa has been heralded as one of the greatest masterpieces of all time. Everyone knows the work, everyone has seen the painting on display, in prints, in photos, in advertisements, and in satire, since forever. One of the mysteries is "Who was the girl?" Then several years ago a team decided to run the image through facial recognition software and amazingly it hit on Da Vinci himself. The Mona Lisa, may very well be a self portrait. All other theories aside, how much more personal and intimate can you get?

I cut the grooves on the panel using the table saw. I used a couple test pieces to get the spacing just right and where it was just a bit tight, I planed the back of the panel down a hair.

What stopped my reading of How to Build Shaker Furniture cold in its tracks was Thos's mention of writing something hidden in the joinery about the temperament of his son. At first I thought "Why would you do that?" Maybe if you were building something for yourself, but at the time he was writing the book, Thos Moser was building Shaker reproductions out of his shop for sale to many people. I got completely hung up on the thought that you would be scrawling something so intimate, making that personal connection with the piece, and then see it leave in the hands of strangers. It doesn't get more intimate than a message about your feelings about your child.

It felt akin to sharing your deepest, darkest secrets with a perfect stranger you'd just met on the street, but somehow they would have no idea you're sharing with them.

What do you gain from enclosing these small messages, these bits of hidden magic into the secret places of your work?

Here's the lid dry fit together.

Adding these tucked away messages is kind of like sending a letter to the future, it's a hidden magic carrying a bit of yourself, your personality, you experiences, your influences, your wishes, and your dreams into the future. It's a hidden magic that connects you with that furniture forever, and through that furniture, can connect you to the rest of the world. Because in the best of all worlds real art is about making those connections.

At the thinnest levels, it is something that starts the process of distinguishing a chair that is just a chair, and a chair that is art.

And I have to believe in that distinction. I have to believe that the work I put into a piece gives it greater value than anything that can be turned out by a factory, and I have to believe that what sets it apart is not just that it's better built using superior materials. those tangible, physical things can be replicated if those factories have a mind to do so. So I have to believe it's the intangibles that really count in setting my work, and the work of others serious woodworkers, apart. And taking a lesson from the art world and inserting a piece of intimacy into everything built is a start along that path.

Once you make the decision to invest a part of yourself into a project, you start to look at that project a little differently. And maybe that little change in perspective is enough to show through in your work, and thereby change someone else's perspective about shop built furniture altogether.

I started with the tenons, writing messages both to the chest itself . . .

. . . and to myself.

Some of the messages were thoughts on how I wanted the chest and it's contents to inspire and hold up to time, others were thoughts on the path of apprenticeship to mastery. Another was a message to myself, a reminder of my influences and advice for my future summed up into two words. The title of the first chapter in "The Anarchist's Tool Chest" "Disobey Me"

This is a practice I plan to continue on every piece that passes through my hands, and I encourage you to try it as well. I know it sounds strange, but it helped me come to terms with this tool chest build. I dislike playing follow the leader on anything, I rarely use plans. As I started this project there was a voice in the back of my head that was giving me a hard time for following Chris Schwarz again. Even though I had wanted to build a chest for a long time, and even though a chest is the right solution for me now. I felt like the popularity of the book coupled with the fact that I've built a couple of his other projects made it feel like I was just buying in and selling out. Allowing someone else to substitute my judgement with their own.

Along the way I've had the feeling like I've been building Chris's Chest, even though I know that's bullshit, the critics in the back of my skull would herald and scream it at the top of their abilities. Sneaking in some hidden magic writing has somehow helped me reclaim this chest as my own. Yes I'm using Chris's ideas and plans for the most part, but I cannot argue with the logic of almost any of his choices. This is the strongest, most stable way I can think of to build a lid, and I don't want my desires of nonconformity to compromise my results.

I want the chest to both be mine, and I want it to be the smartest construction possible. I'm asking it to follow the divergent logic of the phrase "Disobey Me" and Thos Moser helped me to find that path. I'm not building Chris's Anarchist Tool Chest, I'm building an Oldwolf Workshop version of a traditional tool chest following the good advice of someone I've been reading for so long I consider his words like an old friend's.

As an interesting coincidence, as I've been struggling to find my right words on this difficult to write post, I saw that there has been a release of a new, revised and updated version of "How to Build Shaker Furniture" It's availible through Popular Woodworking's books store here:

http://www.shopwoodworking.com/product/how-to-build-shaker-furniture-w0714/new-woodworking-products

I'm going to pick up my own copy so the library can have theirs back. I humbly suggest you pick up a copy as well.

Ratione et Passonis
Oldwolf

By Rabbet and Nail.

2011-11-12T21:35:00.001-06:00

With the shell dovetailed and cleaned up, the next step was to put a bottom on the box. This wasn't the most difficult of jobs, infact this might have been the easiest of them all because I didn't bother to do any real milling to prep the poplar stock. It's for the bottom after all. This rough cut stock was run, one pass, through a planer on one side. The result was a kind of subtle ripple in the surface of one side. Nothing significant or even terribly noticeable, in fact I fould believe that after a few years of tools and planes sitting on it, I'll wish for the ripple back, if I ever see the entire bottom again after I fill the chest and start using it.

I started with sawing up some stock to length. I over cut the boards by a quarter inch so I could plan on planing off the 1/8" overhang on both sides when I was done. I like to cut enough stock to cover the width of the chest, with allowances for narrowing with jointing and joinery. I usually plan for a couple inches overhand on the sides, this allows me to center the boards on the piece and remove the excess from both ends. Without doing this stock widths will undoubtedly leave you with one board that is just an inch and a half strip hanging on one end, (if you are lucky.) And I think that looks like crap, my brand of OCD can't handle it.

In the book "The Anarchist's Tool Chest" where I took the pattern and overall design sensibilities from. Chris Schwarz uses tongue and groove joints for the bottom stock. He refers to it as a satisfying kind of over-kill. Grooves are a difficult thing for me as I still lack a plow plane of any sort. (Yes I will get on that and get one, it's just taking me a while). So I backed up and opted to go the ship-lap route. I have a rabbet plane and I'd rather get to using the tools I have than sit around and wish for the ones I don't.

Grooves become an issue later in the build and I have to solve that problem then, but that is a future post.

I have really been loving how sweet this poplar machines, I have never used it a whole lot before and, despite being a kind of homely wood, referring to the color and grain pattern, it planes beautifully and makes nice crisp joinery. I can see it's value as a long wearing secondary wood.

I just started on one end of the bottom and moved my way across. I would joint two board to fit together, then cut their rabbets, then joint the next seam and rabbet again. It was a pleasant day in the shop witha definite feeling of accomplishment when I was done.

With all the joining done it was time to nail the boards in place. No glue, just nails. I know I can almost hear it now, No Cut Nails??? Well the cut nails are waiting in the wings with the plow plane for now. Wire nails will work fine and hold for longer than my lifetime.

I was fortunate to have my apprentice with me in the shop this day and I let her get to work pounding some of the nails in. What's a few french marks on the bottom compared to the memory we'll both have of her helping me.

Now even though I used the "inferior" wire nails for the job, I did use a technique taught to me by my best friend's father. he had spent most of his life working construction and when I was over helping build a garage he stopped me as I was swinging the hammer.

"No, not straight." he said, "You got to drive them nails in at angles so they meet like a 'V' then the don't work themselves loose"

I didn't understand what he was saying so he took my hammer into his own callused hands and quickly drove in a pair of nails coming from opposing directions.

"There. Now unless you pull the nails one at a time, the boards don't come apart."

The effect was kind of like this.

Remind you of something? The angles and mechanical strength inherent in a dovetail perhaps? Old Fred sure knew what he was talking about.

After an evening of banging and hammering my apprentice and I were ready to call it a night, but I left with a real feeling of accomplishment. I started the day with a dovetailed shell. now, other adornments and embellishments aside, I was a lid short of a chest.

Ratione et Passionis
Oldwolf

A Whole Nest Of Dovetails.

2011-11-08T22:22:00.000-06:00

One of the big jobs in the traditional tool chest build is cutting the dovetails for the carcass. For a while, as I considered the build I was worried that one of my main weapons might not be up to snuff, my Moxon bench vise. I was concerned I wouldn't have enough width. I know I could have pulled it out and measured it to make sure, (I just couldn't remember the measurements off the top of my head) but it seemed more like me to just keep working along and lightly worrying in the back of my mind.

As it turns out, My fears were unbased. The panels are 23 3/4" tall, and I could pass almost 25" in between the screws. A small beginning victory is not a bad way to begin.

Set on top my already slightly taller joinery bench makes the height very nice for dovetailing. No real stooping and lower back pain involved.

Because I wanted to make all four corners the same I decided to use one other old dovetailing layout trick. I made a story stick where I played with and pre-laid out the spacing for the pins and tails.

I transferred the spacing and did a little work with the marking gauge, tri-square, and marking knife. Yes the lines are penciled, but I like to run a pencil in the knife lines, both to help me see and to help things show up better in photos.

Then it was down to some quality time with my dovetail saw.

I love this picture, lines of sawdust as I work my way down cutting one side of every tail. After this I work my way back cutting the other side.

I use a coping saw to remove most of my waste, and then clean up the bottoms of the tail with a little chisel work.

With everything refined, I give the joint a test fit. Only halfway, I don't want to push anything too far and halfway should be enough to tell if you're going to have any real problems.

Repeat another four times, and you have a carcass to glue up.

The next day, after the glue dries. Clean up them tails.

Then you get to work putting a bottom on it.

Ratione et Passionis
Oldwolf

Words Aren't Enough

2011-11-05T16:46:00.000-05:00

It's difficult to come up with something to say that makes a post about flattening boards and joining panels together interesting. So tonight I thought I would just run with more pictures and less words as I show the start of my build of a traditional tool chest.

Edge Joining:

Flattening and truing a face:

Traversing with a jack plane can simplify your laundry by removing crayon from your whites and unmentionables as well as your standard poplar lumber.

Gluing up a panel:

I know the purists out there will dislike seeing the biscuits, they say they are unnecessary, and I could agree, but the fact is I have a biscuit joiner and a jar of the wafers laying around the shop so I figured it at least best to use them up. A little belt and suspenders maybe, but there should never be harm in that.

I also used good old standard wood glue for the panels instead of my preferred liquid hide glue, I was worried I wouldn't have enough hide glue for the dovetails in the carcass and also, you use hide so it is reversible and therefore repairable, I can't think of any reason to disassemble a panel in the future.

A side and an end, and all my long clamps.

I then re-flattened the panels, joined the edges and trued the ends.

Tah-Dah, Four sides ready to go.

Ratione et Passionis
Oldwolf

Better Than Monopoly

2011-11-05T15:38:00.000-05:00

Ladies and Gentlemen, Hurry! Hurry! Gather round and listen in. There is a new and better game in town. It's one the whole family can play. It's more interesting that last week's 'Guess What's For Dinner?" and it's more rewarding that the old standby "How Does My Finger Smell?"

So everyone put down your copy of Sudoku Digest Weekly, gather your friends and family around the warm glow of an LCD monitor, and let's get ready to play a round of . . .

NAME
THAT
TOOL!!!

This week's contestant is a reader of the blog, Kenneth D. and he writes:

Hi there Oldwolf,

I'm trying to do some artifact research on this tool but I can't seem to figure out what it is? It seems to be some sort of prying tool but do you know what it might have specifically be used for? Bottle opener? paint can opener? horse-shoeing tool? Relative dating with other associated tools (small and large hand planers, level and pulley) place the item around the same time as the occupation of the homes original architect: 1890 to 1920. Any and all help would be appreciated.

Thanks for your time,

Ken

There was a picture as well:

When I first heard from Ken I was interested, but clueless. If I got my hands on this I think my first instinct would be to us it to pry the top off a good bottle of beer. Somehow I didn't think I was right. So I told replied that there were lots of smarter people than me when it comes to old and antique tools. I gave him Patrick Leach's and Josh Clark's email addresses and hoped that when he was blessed with the right answer from the Rust Gods, he'd drop me a line and share the knowledge.

Ken sent emails to Patrick and Josh, and to my shock and horror, they were as mystified as I was. It was like there had been a great disturbance in the force.

Patrick Leach's response was:

Ken,

I haven't a clue what that's used for.

It almost looks like an inverse nail puller for
shingles, and if I had a gun against my head, that
would be my guess.

Patrick

I had offered to bring the matter to my readers if he could find no other info, Ken hit me back adding this little bit.

I've brought the picture to the attention of my facebook friends and one of them suggested it may be a specialty tool used with a machine. The owner was known to do woodworking and have a foot powered lathe. Could it be a wood gouging tool for this purpose? If it is, I can't seem to find any others quite like this. It just looks really odd.

The treadle lathe gives me another idea beyond beer. Could it be a sizing tool for use with the lathe? I have seen guys use open end mechanics wrenches with one side ground to an edge so they can turn down stock to a precise measurement. Like modifying a 1/2" wrench to turn out a 1/2" diameter result. Could it be a specialized wrench for the treadle lathe? It does make me think of the wrenches that came with my table saw to use in changing the blade.

Other than that I'm out of ideas.

But I do know that I am blessed with some of the smartest readers in the world, and yes that is blatant pandering and no I didn't think I could sneak that fact past your massive collective intellect. So I turn this over to you. Can you help? Can you answer the challenge?

Can you . . . NAME THAT TOOL??????

Ratione et Passionis
Oldwolf

Nobody's Apprentice

2011-11-02T00:23:00.000-05:00

Nobody's apprentice. It's a name I've called myself for a while. I have never taken a real woodworking class in my life. No shop classes in high school, no woodworking or tool related vocational training after high school. Heck, money and time have always been in slight supply when it comes to traveling to take a woodworking class, or even attend an event like WIA. So not a whole lot of in-person instruction.

What I have had is a voracious appetite for woodworking books, magazines, some videos and, of course, the outstanding world of woodworking bloggers and podcasters. Thanks to this blog I also get lots of help, often via email, from guys who have been there and know better. They see me do something wrong, make a mistake or have poor technique doing something and they feel confident enough to offer advice. I really appreciate when that happens because it means a couple things, 1: they care enough about the craft that they want to see it done well and done right. and 2: they are reading my work, and care enough to offer advice that will help me enjoy and perform better in the craft.

Really, I couldn't be more wrong when I call myself "nobody's apprentice" because, in the best way possible, I could almost call myself "everyone's apprentice." I pray all my teachers out there consider me more of a Thomas than a Sam.

But like all apprentices, I would like to grow up eventually.

Early on in my sawdust years, back when power was king, I read somewhere that in order for an apprentice to make the jump to journeyman they must pass the test of building their own tool chest. I know enough now to feel that this particular statement of fact is suspect. We know from "The Joiner and Cabinetmaker" that the apprentice Thomas had already started buying his own tools very early on, starting with a folding rule. I would assume that in a shop with multiple joiners, that apprentices would want to secure their tools somewhere safe as well.

I wasn't ready then and I knew it. There's no guarantee I'm ready now, but I'm going for it.

60 board feet of 5/4 rough cut poplar, 18 board feet of rough cut 6/4 hickory, and 12 board feet of 4/4 cherry take up a decent amount of room in the back of the mini van. The poplar and some of the hickory are tagged for the chest. The cherry is for some future projects.

I have been dwelling on the idea of a tool chest for a long time. I had collected a sizable folder of photos copied from eBay auctions and other sites, to use as reference as I tried to figure out how I wanted my tool chest to look and work.

Then last summer my Father In Law gave me a tremendous gift. The tool chest brought over from Norway as they immigrated to America. It was packed full of cacophony of old tools. I recorded the whole experience under the heading Old World Tool Chest. But the result of that experience was that I had an old traditional tool chest, but it was in some seriously rough shape. I decided that the right thing to do would be to build a new version of the chest

Then, this past summer, Chris Schwarz published what I thought was a great book. The Anarchist's Tool Chest. Since I had my mind turning my way towards a tool chest it almost seemed written for me. It answered the questions I had about this build in such a convincing fashion. I decided it was the direction I had to go.

Re-reading the sections on the sizing of traditional chests, trying to make up my mind on the lengths and widths I need to achieve the goals I had set forth for this chest

I've spent a lot of time and effort the last two three years focused on my shop. I've built other pieces as well but since the summer of 2009 I've built two workbenches, a full sized one and a smaller joinery bench, a pair of saw benches, a saw till, a storage shelf for my planes. I've focused on making some tools and getting my hands on some others. I've focused on bringing myself from a shop where I spent the day with ear plugs stuffed in my ears to protect me from the the whine of electron driven steel and carbide blades to a shop where I can hear "A Prairie Home Companion" or an NFL game play on the radio while I play in the sawdust.

Dimensions decided upon, I start to move forward with breaking the stock down to size.

Speaking of sawdust I sweep up more shavings than sawdust most of the time these days and I'm kinda proud of that.

I'm not saying I'm at the point where I've completed my hand tool education and I'm ready for anything. The journey still continues, but the path looks different from here on in. It's like driving through the mountains and coming down into the flat broad plains of middle America. Suddenly your surroundings look very different, The sky is bigger and you can see for long distances in many directions and there are possibilities that just didn't exist while you wove your way along the serpentine mountain roads.

All four sides of the chest, cut, set, and ready for the process to begin.

I'm not making promises, but I think this may be mostly it for shop projects, at least for a long while. I'm not saying a small one might not sneak in from time to time, but once I complete this chest, I've managed to fit all the major components into place. It will be time to stop building my shop, and start building furniture. In many ways I believe I saved the best for last.

Ratione et Passionis
Oldwolf

Re-Finishing an Antique

2011-10-30T00:23:00.000-05:00

Finishing a piece may just be the weakest part of my woodworking game. I have a few tricks, a few go to standbys that I use and that's about it. Don't get me wrong, I own "Flexner on Finishing" and Jeff Jewitt's "Great Wood Finishes," and I've read them both cover to cover a couple times. I enjoy the concept and the chemistry of the process, I think my fault lies mostly in lack of experience

So, I can figure out how to repair the physical damage. No problem, well some work and worry, but that was just plain old workshop fun. Now I had to repair a trashed finish.

I wish I had a genie bottle and when I rub it, Bob Flexner would pop out to help with the finishing process.

We've all seen Antiques Roadhouse on PBS, and we've all heard the appraisers say something like "Wow this is really a great dresser, you have photographic documentation that Presidents Washington, Lincon, and Reagan have all stowed their underwear inside at one point and time, (It could have been Clinton too, unfortunately you also have photographic evidence that he doesn't wear any underwear), but since some amateur tried to refinish it, I estimate it's value at one cool nickel, Thanks for wasting our time."

OK, so maybe not that drastic. It's not that incredible of an antique and I'm not going to submit the thing to a museum. It's a good piece of furniture for our home, I keep my underwear in it's drawers and I want it to be A: usable and B: decent looking. So I decided to give a go at it and see where the refinishing process took me.

I picked up a quart of Formby's Furniture Refinisher. I had no real experience using it, so maybe I'm naive, but I followed the directions on the can and got some decent results.

It works more like a dissolving agent instead of a chemical stripper. I've used strippers before and this was different, better. It didn't get me back down to bare wood, but that's not really what I was after. I needed a surface that would take a fresh stain and a new shellac finish over that. All I needed was a light finishing sanding of 180 grit and I was ready for color.

I tried to choose a stain that would be reminiscent of the original finish with a reddish tone, but I also wanted something a bit darker, hopefully that would blend and cover over areas that hadn't "stripped" as well. (stripped for lack of a better word) It comes out very chocolate brown in the pictures but there is a red tone underneath that I like very much.

Pieces of the mirror that mounts over the dresser. It was in good repair and not part of the original plan, but when it came down to recoloring and refinishing the whole thing. I was obliged to take it apart and give it the same once over as the rest of the dresser.

The dresser top turned out extremely beautiful. On the right is the mirror.

There is one problem, I started this project too late in the season, and by the time the stain had cured and was ready for the shellac finish to go over it. It had grown to cold to apply it, even during most days. I'm a little stuck about what to do with that. I live in an apartment building and I don't think I can get away with applying the shellac at home. I think I will put the pieces back together and bring the dresser home to use for the winter and when the spring warms up again. I'll cart it up and bring it back to the shop to finish the job.

But until that happens, this is it for this project.

Up next, something a little more . . . traditional.

Ratione et Passionis
Oldwolf

How I'd Do It: Half Lap Joint

2011-10-28T09:40:00.001-05:00

I enjoy those summer mornings my wife and I sneak out of the house and leave our girls to find their own breakfast (have no worries, two out of three are old enough to stay home alone and even the youngest has been pouring her own cereal for years). Naomi gets her coffee, I get a Diet Pepsi and we hit the area garage sales.

I don't enjoy these mornings because of I get to see mounds of toddler clothes, or various brick-a-brack and keepsakes, or even for the occasional circa 1970's jig saw. Two things make me drag my carcass out of bed on these mornings, the first is the time I get having my wife's attention all to myself, (I'm a selfish guy what can I say), the second is that I get to look around another dude's garage. If they're woodworker's I get to see their shop layout and some of their stationary tools and that is like a little bit of crack to an addict.

I am not interested because I'm casing the joint for nefarious reasons, in fact I'm not completely sure why I like this so much. I think I feel a little validation when I see, in person, evidence that someone else finds the same tree sacrificing endeavors enjoyable. I also find ideas in those visits. I get to see floor plans that work and some that don't. I get to see storage solutions and individual answers to the same conundrums we all face in our shops.

With the idea that not everyone has the same answer when it comes to shop solutions, its also true not everyone has the same approach when it comes to executing joinery. More than a peek inside someone's shop, I love a peek inside someone's joinery decisions and process, and I know I'm not the only one. Joe Ledington from the Sleepydog's Woodshop Blog started a bit of a movement, connecting woodworker's through Google+ and inspiring several of us with woodworking bloggers to join in what's been dubbed "How I Do It Friday"

On the last Friday of the month, we will all do a post covering how we chose to create one type of woodworking joint. This month, the inaugural month, we're going to be starting simple and working on half lap joints.

I think I will be using this format as an excuse to play with a medium I have only dabbled in so far . . . video. I'm hoping to get better and appear more relaxed than I have in previous attempts. I have worked in a classroom as a teacher and I regularly make presentations in front of crowds (sometimes a couple hundred people) with my living history hobby, but video is different for me. Maybe it's the fact that the moment is preserved and I can come back and critique my perfectionist self again and again.

Unfortunately. after shooting and editing up the video, I came to the realization that through the whole thing, I consistently call the joint's shoulder and the cheek by each other's names. What can I say, dyslexics of the world untie! So, please bear with me. An now, without further delay, here is How I Do Half Lap Joints.

Take some time and check out the other contributors to How I Do It Friday
Joe Ledington at Sleepydog's Wood Shop
Andrew Detloff at Ravinheart Renditions
Matt Vanderlist at Matt's Basement Workshop
Allison Slay-White at Scroll Dust Woman
Al Navas at Sandal Woods
Steven Taylor at The Taylor Garage
Tom Iovino at Tom's Workbench
Jeremiah Rodriquez at Sawdust Is Life
Kenny Comeaux at The Wood Ninja
Dyami Plotke at The Penultimate Woodshop
M. Scott Morton at M. Scott Morton Woodworks
Chris Wong at Flair Woodworks
Todd Clippinger at The American Craftsman Workshop

If you blog and are interested in adding to the crowd and offering your own joinery two cents I suggest you drop Joe Ledington a line over at Sleepydog, He's been voted our How I Do It Friday Team Captain. Or you can look any of us up on Google +

Ratione et Passionis
Oldwolf

Silence in the Movement of a Saw

2011-10-23T00:57:00.000-05:00

"There is something to be learned from a rainstorm. When meeting with a sudden shower, you try not to get wet and run quickly along the road. But doing such things as passing under the eaves of houses, you still get wet. When you are resolved from the beginning, you will not be perplexed, though you will still get the same soaking. This understanding extends to everything."

-Excerpt from Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai

recorded sayings of Master Yamamoto Tsunetomo

Translated by William Scott Wilson

This quote has followed me for years. It is actually the quote that made me search out and buy a copy of The Hagakure. I have taken these words to heart over time and I try and remember them often. There is deep truth in the last words, understanding the difference between running and walking to the same destination with the same results extends to life and everything in it.

I suffer from a persistent interior monologue that consists of many, varied voices. The majority of them are pretty critical of everything I do. Age and experience has taught me to give the worst of them none of my attention, but they are still there. I relish the moments in life when I can live without those voices, especially the ones that plan every moment in the future and dissect every second from the past. Those quiet times come when I can focus on something that requires I'm "there" and completely in the moment.

For me, to a varying degree, I collect many of these moments when I am standing at my workbench. Different operations yield different silences, the most profound is when I am sawing. It does not matter if I am sawing joinery or breaking down basic stock. The time with the saw in my hand is golden. I've done all my thinking and planing leading up to the moment I get ready to apply steel to wood. The layout lines are marked, the worrying and thinking about this cut has past. Now is the time to still my mind, and draw the teeth into the fibers.

Starting the cut is a leap of faith. I'm human after all, I could have made a miscalculation and wasted a beautiful piece of stock that I already invested significant time and effort into selecting and preparing for this moment, but once the saw begins to plow it's divide there is no point in concerning myself with those thoughts any longer. There is just the concentration on the rhythm of the cut, focus on following the line I've struck, and the wonderful quiet in my head.

I have spent a good amount of time trying decipher why I gravitated away from my beginnings as a dedicated Normite and morphed into a mostly Neanderthal hand tool user. (Why is it Normite vs. Neanderthal, I think it should be Normite vs. Roy-ite or maybe Underhill-ite don't you think?) I have tried to consider the question of what would an 18th century woodworker gravitate towards if they were suddenly dropped into this modern age. Would he hold tight to his hollows and rounds or would he find merit in a router table. Would he take to a 36" wide drum sander like a fish to water?

I don't believe that any of our sawdust making ancestors were any smarter, stronger, or weaker than we are today. A person is a person, simple and complex at the same time, whether that person was born a thousand years ago or yesterday. The difference is the time you live in defines the circumstances and technologies you rely on. There were no diesel powered cranes to help build the pyramids, but there were also no hard hat or safety harness laws. Different technologies, different circumstances.

In the end, I think our time traveling woodwright would be true to what he is. A craftsman. His priorities would be first: to get the best results possible and second: to get those results as efficiently as possible. One truth I know is that while power tools are good, reliable and fast, they are not always the best results, and sometimes they aren't the most efficient either. I also believe there is more soul in a project built by hand tools than one pulled of the production line up that power tools can be.

When I worked with mostly power tools I was hemmed in with a factory, production mentality. Saying things like "I've got to cut all these stiles and rails at the same time so the table saw fence is set exactly the same for all of them. For me the power tool process wasn't creation as much as it was advanced model building. I did not find that same "in the moment" silence around the loud grind of electron driven steel.

The results I ended up with were not as satisfactory either. The work was technically correct, but it lacked something that is difficult to describe. When I attend a craft show there is inevitably a woodworker who has thrown up his shingle and is showing the fruits of his labor. Of course I'm interested in looking at his work, but there is usually something disappointing in what I find. I admire them for putting themselves out there and trying to scratch out a dollar or two from the sand, but for the sake of that dollar the results are often closer to soulless Walmart chip board then they are to items I would like to have around me. Routed profiles and dovetails pushed through on a template are just not items I want surrounding me in my life. I believe that, given the choice, even the average person could tell the difference between the things built by hand and things primarily built by power, and I believe, were cost no issue, they would be pulled to the item that carried feeling with it.

Then again I could just be morphing into a snob.

Coming back to the original quote, I believe there is a difference between calmly striding through the "rain" in my shop and perplexing my efforts trying to run. Both paths undoubtedly result in a work of some merit, but the moments of silence I receive create a piece that carries something more than the stock that makes up the parts, something more than the proportions and the design, something more than the abilities invested in the act of creation. The work carries with it a soul, and that is the ultimate in intangibles.

Ratione et Passionis
Oldwolf

Check Your Drawers.

2011-10-22T10:48:00.000-05:00

OK admittedly an immature title, but I am what I am.

I'm working through a rebuild and refinish of an antique chest of drawers and I have finished an almost complete disassemble and reassemble of the carcass and it was time to work on some of the other details. The chest has four drawers and three of them were in decent shape but the fourth one had taken a beating over the years.

I know the pictures were to show the damage that I faced, but even as I look at the pictures I have to say I am still blown away by the simple width of the bottom panels. Those are one width poplar panels you can see the circular marks from the re-sawing on the bottom side and the top is planed smooth. I hate plywood, I'll use it if I have to but I seriously wish I had stock like this available on a regular basis, I would never even blink in plywood's direction again.

As you can evidence from the photos the majority of the damage came as the bottom of the sides wore down in use and this over time lead to the back separating from it's dado and the front developing a fracture along the bottom.

I pulled the whole drawer apart. Thank god again for hide glue being reversible with denatured alcohol. I'm not sure what I would have done if I couldn't pop apart the dovetailed corners and cut out the damage. Some of it was pretty straightforward, a little glue and clamp fixed the split suffered by the front of the drawer. The sides however were another story.

I considered replacing the sides all together. I had a 1x poplar cutoff sitting in the bin that was wide enough to do the job, but there was something that was just unappealing about that. Instead I decided to cut off the damaged areas and edge glue in repair pieces.

I started by cross cutting the poplar to length.

Then rip the strips of the appropriate width. When I'm cutting these smaller, shorter pieces I often like to work right off the bench with an overhand grip on the saw instead of working off a lower saw bench.

A little plane work to clean up the saw marks and I had a couple of 1 1/2" pieces. I like hand sawing, but I don't really like re-sawing to thickness by hand and I needed to get these 3/4" thick pieces down to 1/2" thick. Cue the bandsaw.

A little more plane work to clean up the saw marks and bring the piece down to a final, matching thickness.

Then the trick was to decide where to make the cuts and sacrifice the original sides. on one side the dovetail end was in good shape and so the trick was to remove just the back section. I knifed in a cut line, took a deep breath and made the cut.

Some hide glue and some clamps and I had the simpler side repair done. I would come back after the glue dried, cut it to length and get the final shaping done.

The other side I ripped off square and glued in the repair piece. I didn't worry about replicating the width at this point, I would plane it to the width later.

I had to sacrifice one of the original dovetails to get the board properly repaired so I had to cut a new one.

To finish off the repair I had to plow some new grooves into the sides, one to hold the drawer bottom and one to make the rabbet and dado joint that held the back of the drawer.

There is one major hand tool that I have not managed to get my hands on and that is a plow plane, I have a Stanely 45 on my shelf I have yet to refurbish but I have been holding off because it only came with one iron, a beading iron, which is not a whole lot of help. I just haven't been able to find any blades for a price I can afford, so for making grooves like this I use my router plane, actually and excellent tool for the job.

And some shots of the repairs in place as the drawer is glued up to finish.

Ratione et Passionis
Oldwolf

There Was A Right Way To Do Things, And There Still Can Be.

2011-10-12T22:16:00.000-05:00

Working my way through the rebuild, repair, and refinish of an antique dresser we own that had been loose in the joints for a while and finally failed completely as my wife tried to move it away from the wall. This type of project has always been a little intimidating to me, there is a slightly different way of thinking and skill set involved, and while there are similarities to your standard "build it from scratch" woodworking, there are enough differences to make it interesting.

If you missed where we started from, you can catch up HERE.

The first thing to do was to take apart the piece. Not all repairs require the piece to be taken apart here there was so much damage there was no other way I could think to do it. To repair everything along the front, It required that I get the top off the dresser.

I turned the work upside down on the bench to get a good look at what I had to work with. I found half a dozen glue blocks between the base and the top. At first I thought about just taking a beater chisel and tearing up the blocks. A very caveman like approach I agree, but it did cross my mind as a first answer and I pried a little with no good results.

I pondered my options. The rail parts I had been able to get off easily showed obvious evidence that the piece had been put together using hide glue. I thought about Stephen Shepherd and his great writing over at Full Chisel Blog. Stephen covers a great many subjects most directly related to 18th century woodworking and one of those subjects is his work repairing antique spinning wheels. Coincidentally while reading about these repairs he also taught me a good deal about hide glue.

One of the best properties and reasons to use hide glue in your woodworking is the fact that it is a repairable glue. What does that mean? It means you can undo it by dissolving it with denatured alcohol, and there by take the work apart to rebuild, and reglue it.

I took a quick trip down the street to the hardware store and picked up a can of denatured alcohol, what did I have to lose. You can see in the picture above how I flooded the area around a couple of glue blocks, I also used a small brush to make sure I flooded the nooks and crannies around the blocks. Of course the picture above shows the absence of glue blocks as well. The real experiment was finding out how long to wait for the process to work.

I'm sure individual milage may vary, but I only had to wait around five minutes for each soaked block to be loose enough to pry it free with a chisel.

Ok I lied about a half dozen glue blocks, now that I count the ones in the picture I come up with around 10. Math is hard.

Besides the glue blocks there were four cut nails connecting the top to the base. Here I am lifting the top front rail off it's nail attachments.

I wish I could have stopped here, but the joints in the three remaining sides were all loose as well. Some more alcohol soak and a little light wooden mallet persuasion and I had the dresser looking more like a pile of kindling than anything.

This was the most intimidating moment of the whole process. I snapped a pic of this with my phone and sent it to my wife and her response was a worried, "Can you get it back together?"

I believe there are few things straight up black and white, wrong and right. I usually see lots of shade of grey in my world. But I do believe that there was a lot of "right" things our fore-bearers knew that we have managed to forget.

One of those things is hide glue. Without my predecessors use of hide glue the repair of this piece would have been incredibly more difficult how could I go any other route but to use hide glue to fit the piece back together.

I reglued every joint in the carcass. It stands strong and rock solid again, ready for another century or so. There was one more big repair that I had to work at quite a bit, but more on that next time.

Ratione et Passionis
Oldwolf

Doc...Do Ya Think I'll Make It?

2011-10-03T22:03:00.001-05:00

You've seen the scene in movies before. A M.A.S.H. unit tent, helicopters swarming in delivering the casualties from whatever disaster of war is in the air. A young field surgeon, too good looking for real life, stalks the triage area surveying the work that will make up the next 10 minutes of celluloid footage. A young man reaches out with his hand and catches the psudo-physician's attention. His hands are covered in contents of a hundred ketchup packets as he reaches out and with pleading eyes says the words. "Doc...Do ya think I'll make it Doc?"

Army nurse monument in Kolobrzeg, Poland. Taken from Wikipedia Commons

"CUT!" yells the director, stopping everyone in their tracks, "Let's back up and do it again and this time I want to see more Matt Damon and less Will Ferrel!"

. . .

Ok, a little dramatic maybe, but a few nights ago the scene crossed my mind after I heard my wife's voice, colored with an annoyed tone, call from our bedroom. We have an antique dresser that belonged to my wife's grandmother, and she was trying to shift it out to reach the plugin the dresser was strategically placed infront. A pull and a chift and the glue in the joints gave up the goose and failed. The mortise and tenon joints of the dividers seperated all the way up, the drawers fell out, and my work started.

The dresser after transporting it to the shop. It doesn't look so bad now because I held it together with several ratchet straps to make the journey. You can still see it has led a long hard life.

All the tenons of the front divider rails were loose all the way up on both sides.

My wife squawked when she went to pull it out from the wall and the dividers all popped loose and a couple of drawers dropped.

Event the top rail was separating though it was being held in place by the top.

Three of the four drawers were in good solid shape, but one had some pretty good issues.

On both sides of the drawer, the sides had disintegrated or broke at the grove that would hold the bottom. I wasn't sure how I was going to fix that yet.

The other side of the drawer displaying similar issues. I have to admit one of the cool things about getting to inspect this piece this close is the drawer bottoms. They are planed smooth finished on the upside, but on the underside you can see the deep whirls of the circular saw blade that resawed the stock. Kind of cool.

Even the back was separating from the corner on one side.

Of course the finish had taken a beating over the years. My wife remembers having the dresser in her bedroom as a child and that some decals had been on the top.

Can you see the giraffe? There were five stickers on the top at one point.

Now full disclosure requires me to explain the dresser had been wobbly and delicate for quite a while, but I am a big old chicken when it comes to refinishing and repairing antiques. I just wait for the moment when I turn what was a functional piece of furniture into a pile of well dried kindling, so I put off the inevitable for as long as possible. In the end though the fix up of this piece wasn't bad even though, in fact I'm feeling better with my comfort level on these kind of things.

As the dresser sat in my home I couldn't have told you for sure what wood it was made from. One, I hadn't paid that much attention before but two, it also had a thick stain and shellaced finish on it. If pressed I would have guessed a cherry or other fruit wood. As it turns out the whole damn thing is poplar, so if I had to guess I would say that this was a fairly cheep piece of furniture at the time it was made, but there is not a glued panel in the piece. the wide top and the solid wood bottoms of the drawers are all single piece solid wood.

The joinery is all machine cut, but there is evidence of hand planing and I'm pretty sure hand assembly by someone who knew what they were doing. It's funny to think of this as being a cheeper piece of furniture. Recently I picked up an order of poplar from my hardwood dealer and I specifically asked for the widest stock they could find and the best I got was a board 11 1/2"wide. It's a sad thing that wide stock has become such a rare thing in this day and age.

Ratione et Passionis
Oldwolf

A Sliding Till

2011-09-28T21:21:00.000-05:00

I was working my way towards gluing up the dovetail joints on my unconventional bible box and I was facing a delima. Did I want to add a till to the piece or not? The answer was yes and no.

Broadly defined a till is a smaller storage space inside of a chest. Traditionally bible boxes had a static till fit into dadoes with a lid similar to the one I placed inside this Hutch Chest I built a while ago. I have done several of these styles of till and they are both challenging and satisfying, but this time I had something else in mind.

The other type of device that comes to mind when I hear the word till is the sliding variety, like those found in traditional tool chests

This picture was borrowed from Chris Schwarz blog at Lost Arts Press. Since he is the reigning king of the traditional tool chest at this time I figured I had to give a little shout out to him while I was at it.

This was the type of till I wanted to install. I've been ramping up to build a traditional tool chest myself, more on that in the future, but what I was getting now was a little dry run at fitting one, albeit on a smaller and less finicky scale.

The first thing to do was install some runners for the till to slide back and forth on. I had used black walnut as a accent wood on the outside of the box so I decided to repeat it's presence inside. On the bandsaw I cut a couple thin runners a 1/4 inch thick and planed them up smooth at the bench.

Then I predrilled and countersunk some screw holes and installed them with a little glue and a couple of screws each.

The more I thought about the small sliding till I was working on here the more I decided to do the opposite of the wood scheme I had used on the outside of the box. I decided to use walnut for the majority of the box and then accent it with the red oak.

The important thing about fitting a till is the tolerances. You might almost fool yourself into thinking a slightly lose fit would be the way to go. That would mean no sticking, right. But the truth is that a snug fit is a better idea because then the till will ride straight on the rails and not shift crooked and impinge itself. A snug fit makes the till easier to move one handed. I sized the bottom of the till first, with that done I could build up from there.

Resaw some more walnut to about 3/8ths thick, mark and cut some dovetails and you have yourself a box.

A little planing to get a perfect fit and it was ready for me to make the lid.

I took my red oak stock I had left and resawed a thinner section, again around 3.8ths thick. I didn't want the lid to be a let down after all the carving on the outside of the box. I chose to just go for a simple arch pattern. I nailed it to the bench and scribed the arch lines with a pair of dividers.

This is a very quick and simple pattern and it took less than 20 minutes with the "V" tool to finish it off. I eased the lip to a slight bullnose with a block plane.

Then it was the moment of truth as I dropped the till into place. I was really happy with the way it turned out, in the end I think it was a decent decision. It allows the owner to keep some small items or even remove the till and use it seperately if they desire.

After this I put a couple coats of my Maloof finish (1 part BLO, 1 part Wipe on Poly, and 1 part Tung Oil) The oils deepened the walnut and darkened the oak and mellowed out the difference in contrast. I will have some good pictures of the finished piece up here soon so until next time.

Ratione et Passionis

Oldwolf

Read more about the Unconventional Bible Box and the rest of the building process HERE
Read more about the Medieval Hutch Chest HERE

First Intention, Then Enlightenment

2011-09-25T20:25:00.000-05:00

"It is spiritless to think that you cannot attain to that which you have seen and heard the masters attain. The masters are men. You are also a man. If you think that you will be inferior in doing something, you will be on that road very soon . . This is the same as the Buddhist maxim, 'First Intention, then enlightenment.'"

-Excerpt from Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai

recorded sayings of Master Yamamoto Tsunetomo

Translated by William Scott Wilson

Ratione et Passionis
Oldwolf

The Unconventional Bible Box

2011-09-24T12:04:00.000-05:00

I've been writing about my build of what I'm calling and unconventional bible box. I was a way for me to do something with pieces I used to practice the 17th Century carving techniques I picked up from Peter Follansbee's DVD on the subject. I call it unconventional because I strayed from traditional joinery on the corners by using dovetails instead of nailed rabbet joints, and I did a panel carving for the lid where I believe traditionally they were left plain, maybe with a molded edge. I consider my steps outside the coloring lines acceptable here in the fact that I was doing this as practice on the techniques.

If you want to see the sections on the carvings you can read about the sides of the box HERE and the panel carving for the lid HERE

With all the major pieces of the box finished it was down to some assembly. I glued up the dovetails on the sides and after they dried I cleaned up the joints with a little plane work.

For the bottom of the box I decided to go with ship-lapped pine boards. So I made some measurements and cut some pine to size. A little work with the rabbet plane and the pine was ready to be placed.

I laid out all of the boards on the piece to mark the nail holes for the first one. Here I'm using a bird cage awl. You will notice that I oversized the boards both in length and in spacing width wise. More on why later.

The I set to working my way along securing the boards with some finishing nails. I know cut nails would be so much more correct. Well I haven't purchased any cut nails yet and finishing nails will do. By the way I love the echo of the hammer's motion in the photo.

I then worked my way along securing each board in kind. I used a couple of dimes as spacers between the ship lap boards. Why dimes and not nickles or quarters, well dimes are the only coin I had two of in my pocket at the time. So dimes it was, but I don't really have a preference, any consistent spacer will do.

Then I fit the last of the ship lapped sections, and the oversized bottom is terribly evident. You have choices in woodworking, often times between the easy way and the harder way. you see when the user of this box opens the lid they are going to see the joint lines on the bottom, and I want those lines to be space symmetrically. I could do that with a lot of measuring and figuring in board width and rabbet widths and the mess up the whole thing and have to start over or accept the screw up, Or I could skip the long division and oversize the boards, center the whole thing on the box and remove the overlap like this.

This is another of my favorite shop photos ever, with the shavings flying off the plane and caught in mid flight. Seriously though this is the only way to size this kind of work. I've done it the hard way before, and in the end I recommend easy.

So now you have a box with these ugly ship lapped edges sticking out underneath. You can't just leave it like that, so what can you do? You wrap it of course.

I decided that some black walnut would be a great accent to the lightness of this batch of red oak. I planed a little moulding in a piece of scrap and took a close up picture to see if I liked it. I loved the color but in the end I decided to not use the moulding plane but just chamfer the upper edge instead.

I wrapped the walnut around the box and dovetailed the corners, reversing the pins and tails to what's on the box itself. Then I took my block plane and ran it over to chamfer the edges.

To complement the accent of the walnut around the base I wrapped walnut around the lid as well.

Cutting the rabbet on the already carved lid is one of those "put up or shut up" moments in the shop. It's not a difficult operation, but if I screwed up the panel then my effort in the carving would be a waste, Well not a waste in the fact that I got the practice in, but I had kind of become attached to the work now, I didn't want to see it go wrong. To that end I used the table saw to make the shoulder cut in the red oak, then I planed down the rest with a rabbet plane.

Then I sized some strips of walnut and plowed a grove to fit the edge of the panel. I'm hoping that this small breadboard end will help keep the panel flat over the long haul. I used only a spot of glue along the back end and secured the rest with nails.

A few shallow mortises to hold the brass hinges and what you get is a box. My unconventional bible box.

But there is more surprise and unconventional takes on the form to come. So hold on for the next time.

Ratione et Passionis
Oldwolf

Panel Carving

2011-09-19T21:18:00.001-05:00

I've been writing about my build of an unconventional bible box. I was using it as a chance to practice the carving techniques I recently learned from Peter Follansbee's great video "17th Century New England Carving" The box is unconventional in the fact that I used dovetail joinery in the corners instead of nailed rabbets. Another unconventional decision was to carve the lid.

I admit, in my limited experience I have not seen a carved lid on a "bible" box. I guess it may exist out there, but I don't think I have seen Mr. Follansbee carve a lid on his blog either, but what I wanted to accomplish was practice carving a panel similar to the panels you may see between the stiles of a joined chest.

I figured as long as I'm going to build a box... I might as well incorporate the panel into the box as a lid. I love the panels on this joined chest I took pictures of at the Chazen Art Museum in Madison, but they didn't seem to fit with the fleur de lis pattern I chose for the boxes sides. I did a little searching through Mr. Follansbee's reproduction work and came up with this example to work from.

This photo is borrowed from Mr. Follansbee's incredibly inspiring blog Joiner's Notes.

The arches and the flowers in this panel seemed like they would pair pretty well with the side panels I had carved.

I started by dividing the piece spacially and scribing the arch. The arch is also where I started to carve. As you look at the next series of pictures I should explain that the panel wasn't carved in one sitting so there is some variety in the look of them.

From there I scratched in and carved out the the four lower circles with a V tool.

Then it was time to start filling in the flowers within the four circles.

Here I began to go off the map. I love the artistry in the reproduction I took as inspiration, but as I worked at carving the piece I had a little additional inspiration. The vines and flowers I had carved seemed to need roots, and leaves and so I started to stray from the path.

Some may believe it was the wrong changing it up would be the wrong decision, but you have to understand why I wanted to begin learning these techniques to start with. I am not as interested in creating copies of templates as I am in using carving to add my own flairs to basic woodworking items like boxes. the techniques and the execution of them is higher on my priority list than completing an accurate reproduction.

There is a time and place for reproductions, and when I am trying to accomplish that I will work very hard to remain accurate and true to the original. In this instance, like I said, I took inspiration for what it was and let the piece talk to me.

I took a pencil and sketched out where I wanted to go. I took the photo home to ask the only person who's opinion really matters to me. My wife's. She offered a few ideas that I liked and I took those back to the shop with me.

With those things in mind I worked the panel to a finish.

The next trick is to take these pieces and turn them into a respectable box.

Ratione et Passionis
Oldwolf

Working On the 17th Century and Earlier.

2011-09-13T18:01:00.001-05:00

Earlier this summer I picked up a copy of Peter Follansbee's video "17th Century New England Carving" and I started on a bit of a journey that has taken most of the summer to complete. After practicing a few basic techniques I decided to jump into the deep end of the pool and build a carved box sometimes called a bible box. I did make some, non traditional decisions with the box.

At the time I had just gotten a new dovetail saw from Bad Axe Tool Works and I hadn't given it a run through in any hardwoods yet, and I was using red oak for the box, thus the box became dovetailed instead of nailed rabbets. It started out as a practice piece anyway so what the heck right.

I sized the pieces, precut the dovetail joinery, and got to work carving . . .well, ok not really "got to work" in the truest sense of the phrase. As many of you are aware, one of my other passions in life is historical reenactment, I am a member of a group that does Viking Age and Medieval Reenactment, we are a not for profit organization that does educational shows for fairs and schools and similar things. (You can see some pictures of me in action HERE) For a long time I searched for a way to combine my loves and do something that was a demonstration of a woodworking skill in a medieval style. This style of carving was very similar and used a lot of techniques that would translate well into a demo. Finally I had a way to go about it.

Initially the box initially progressed slowly, carving a panel at a time at different events. I started with the sides of the box, choosing to carve the front facing section first. I borrowed heavily from Peter Follansbee's work to get started but in my mind that only made sense because I had used his video to pick up the techniques I needed to refine.

I find it difficult to take pictures of the process while I'm carving, with joinery and other woodworking operations there are some clearly defined steps and that makes remembering to pick up the camera easy, but carving is almost one long process, and once I get started working I get drawn in. At that point pictures become a secondary thought, but I am trying to get better about that. Above is the start of the front panel with its opposing series of arches

I did blog about the demo and the other things that went on that weekend HERE.

Mix in a couple of days of visiting with the public as they came through our demo and you get this finished panel, below is the print out of a picture of Peter's work that I used as reference. This was my first time really carving anything like this and I am still pretty proud of the way it turned out.

A close up of the carving.

After that weekend the pieces went back to the shop, until the next event a month and a half later. Now I was ready to tackle the sides but I had some decisions to make. I could carve them exactly like the front with the arches reaching all the way to the edges, or I could change up and do a more encapsulated design. I really liked the idea of the stand alone medallion on the side and besides, this piece was for practice so mixing it up would be good.

I started it out with a vague idea of one arch and one fleur de lis, so I used dividers to scratch in the top arch and the two half arches that reach up into the flower. Then I just stood and stared at the piece for a while, trying to visualize where to go next.

I started by conecting the arches together. From there I filled in the space inside. If you click on the pic to look at it bigger you can see the divider scratches in the yet undone side. I laid out both of these at the same time so I didn't have to try and recreate the settings on the dividers over from scratch.

With the front and sides carved I couldn't help but bang the dovetails together in a dry fit and place the stock meant for the lid on top to visualize things a little. Then I moved on to carving a larger motif on the lid, but we'll talk about that more next time.

Ratione et Passionis
Oldwolf

A Separation of Status.

2011-09-08T22:16:00.000-05:00

I have one more series of thoughts on the William and Mary Book Stand I recently completed. As I was pondering the finish of the piece I spent a little more time on Chuck Bender's site to get a look at how he did the finish. He took a little bit different of an approach than I did, creating a finish that looks aged, but what I began to really notice was the finish pictures he had staged of his piece. Pictures just like this:

Now he also had a picture of the original piece. that picture was staged very similar to the picture of his work.

So I figured I had to keep up the tradition and stage a similar picture of my own. I wanted to personalize it somewhat though. I didn't have a nifty chip carved box or a blue glass vessel to show off in the picture. I thought about it quite a while. I wanted some items that represented me and yet, I also wanted to do something that was an update on the piece itself.

This is a piece with it's roots in a different era, a time when books were a status symbol of wealth and affluence. The other day I was sitting in our local Barnes and Nobles with my wife. We each were enjoying a quiet moment together in the coffee shop area, each of us paging through a book.

I'm not sure if everyone remembers such antiques as books but they are made of paper with words printed right on the page. The words don't move, light up, or hyperlink to a web page, but they can be highly entertaining. On the whole, I recommend books!

But while we sat there I took my eyes from the print in front of me to take a sip of my lemonade, and I happened to look around me. We were not alone, at least six other tables were occupied and we were the only ones with books in our hands, the rest of the tables were a collection of different digital tablets and readers and one dude with another antique known as a laptop.

In 1711 a book was a status symbol, in 2011, to my sometimes chagrin, the tablet reader is the new status symbol of the literary world. So I borrowed an tablet reader from a friend and used it to set up this picture. For what it's worth, I'd rather see a book on the stand.

Ratione et Passionis
Oldwolf

To Finish a Book Stand

2011-09-07T23:53:00.000-05:00

The toil of the William and Mary Bookstand was approaching a close. I had dodged all the pit falls that could have done the both of us in and now I was to the moment in a project where it becomes make or break. The dreaded glue-up.

Now glue ups get a bad rap sometimes as a time for high stress. It can be that moment in time when all the hours sizing, planing and joining result in nothing better than flotsam driftwood floating in the cow pasture pond. It can also be that wonderful moment when all that hard work comes together into a realized piece that pulls together your individual effort, ingenuity, and creativity.

Or, preferably, the experience exists somewhere between those two extremes.

But anytime you add some moving pieces to the glue up mix, you do up the ante some.

So the glue up for this book stand required a little planning and staging. In the end the simplest way for me to attack it was to move from the inside out. So the first piece is the leg and it's cross member, gluing the tenon of the wedge into the mortise in the cross piece.

Next was the frame that surrounds the leg and supports the book. The ends of the central cross piece fit into some drilled holes.

I am a firm believer in building something to be bulletproof, or as near as possible, if you can. Joinery should be something done to last several lifetimes. To this end I decided to add a subtle little help to the corners of the inner frame with a single peg through the joint.

The joinery of the dovetail joints of the outer frame ended up encroaching on the drilled holes for the pegs of the inner frame. I didn't want any glue to grab the pegs at all so I gave myself a little insurance and coated the pegs in a little wax.

Then comes the glue up of the dovetails for the outer frame. We've almost made it to home plate, but not quite yet.

Everything was going swimmingly, then I hit the first snag of decision. Once the legs were all glued on the top flare of the nob stuck out past the frame. I hadn't rally paid attention to it on the dry fits but now, it kinda bugged me.

I grabbed a chisel and shaved off the offending flare. I was kind of nervous making the choice, not that it would have been a momentous blunder, but it would have been something I was stuck with on this piece, right or wrong. I am happy with the choice I made, it makes the legs appear as if they are at one with the rest of the frame, where the flare I had turned had made the feet seem set apart from the frame.

The glue ups done, and the final sanding over, it was time to work towards the finish. I will readily admit that finishing is the weakest of all my skills in woodworking, so I did some more reading to solve the question of how I should tackle the task this time. I had this beautiful air dried walnut and I needed to do it justice and yet retain a look that was in congruence with the William and Mary style. My savior was Bob Flexner and his great book "Flexner on Finishing"

In that book was a specific article on finishing walnut, and it included the idea that you should use a stain to help even out the variation between the light sap wood and the dark heart wood. Here's my admission, I hadn't used a stain product in years, when I started in sawdust I often fell on the singular thought you finished pieces with a stain and polyurethane and I was always disappointed with my results. Then I happened upon the oil finishes of Danish oil and Tung oil and my world changed.

But now I was ready to put my toe back into stains. I went and perused my options at the local home center and came home with a small can of a dark finish named "Jacobean"

I first took a scrap of the walnut I had been working with and did a test of the process and I was happy with the results so I jumped headlong into the piece.

I applied the finish and wiped it off after several minutes. Then I hit it with a hand sanding of 400 grit paper to lighten the effect a bit and expose a subtle amount of the color difference underneath the stain.

I then applied three coats of my Maloof finish, a concoction I found in an article written by the Master himself. It is one part wipe on poly, one part boiled linseed oil, and one part tung oil. This finish adds a depth to color and grain like any top finish should but the neat thing is the "feel" of this finish under your fingers. The touch of it is a smooth, silk like feel that still translates the feel of the wood beneath. I love using it and I'm glad I found it.

With that the story of my take on the William and Mary Bookstand is pretty much over. I am very proud of this piece and all the work that went into it, more challenge than I imagined when I first spied it on the pages of popular woodworking and thought, "hmmm, that would be a cool weekend project" but the fun and enjoyment in this piece came in the discovery of it nuances. I appreciate subtlety, and this piece is subtle in it's challenge to the craftsman.

In the end I think that makes it a very worthwhile piece to spend some time with. There are many lessons to learn, not just when it comes to joinery and planing, but more importantly, lessons in making a piece that is complex in it's creation, yet simple and elegant in it's appearance. There is true beauty and art in such endeavors.

To finish up this article, a couple of vanity shots of the completed piece.

Ratione et Passionis
Oldwolf

What Can You Do With A Saw Tooth Rail?

2011-08-31T20:15:00.000-05:00

Prop up a book silly.

Now where was I . . . Oh yes, building a version of the William and Mary Book Stand built by Chuck Bender and showcased Popular Woodworking Magazine. If you need a refresher of where we're at, what we're talking about, and the ultimate answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything. Then you can find two of those things HERE. Now back to your regularly scheduled program.

As I said before when talking about this piece, I was super impressed at how much of a challenge it was. There is a ton of joinery in this little 12" by 12" by 4" pile of walnut. As I neared the end of the build I became more worried about the Derek Factor involved here.

"I've come so far on this, I screwed up the last time I tried this piece, it all seems to be going so well, when will the other shoe drop and I deflower the pooch on this one."

I was down to cutting and joining a piece critical to the proper function of the stand. The frame I had finished is really just a frame but two pieces inside the frame make it into a book stand. that's the saw-tooth rail and a tapered leg that spins on a pivot inside the inner frame.

The first thing to do was mill a piece of walnut to size and then cut the tenons for the through mortises in the front and back pieces of the frame.

Here's where the plot thickens...(pause for dramatic effect). I'm working away, knocking out the mortises with my 1/4" bench chisel.

The first mortise goes off without a hitch, so I move on the the second mortise, I'm halfway through the thickness of the stock, I drive the chisel in and lever back to clear the chips and BAM.

Now I know these Irwin chisels aren't Ashley Iles or Lie-Nielsen chisels, I've never claimed that they are even close. But really these chisels are pretty decent for the price you pay, I was planning to upgrade someday but not really just yet, and here my 1/4" is broken. I haven't abused it or did big modifications on it. The usage was not beyond what a bench chisel should be able to handle.

To Irwin's credit, I visited the companies website and filled in a comment and in a couple days I heard back from a representative. Irwin was sending me a replacement chisel for my trouble. In the end I think they redeemed themselves. I will still find myself upgrading in the future, but that was always the plan.

I found another 1/4" chisel in a drawer with other older chisels, it took some time to tune it up and get back to work. Once that ordeal was done I had another decision to make where the inner frame pivots in the older frame. Left alone the inner frame impinges on the saw rail as it raises.

There are a lot of ways to fix the issue. I could bevel the backside of the bottom stile, but I was worried that would weaken the round pins I had cut from the ends of the stile.

In hindsight I realize I could have made a localized round over right at the contact of the rail and stile. I guess I just didn't think of it at the time.

With my first failed attempt at this piece I made the choice to notch the stile to move around the saw-tooth rail. I have gotten to look at that decision alot while it's sat around the shop, and I hate that decision. I wasn't going to make it again.

The answer I decided on was to grab a small gouge and make a small groove in the saw tooth rail so the inner frame could travel up and down unimpeded.

Now to make the saw teeth that give the rail it's name. I measured and marked out the spacing and depth and made a series of cross cuts

I used the bandsaw to back cut the slope into the cross cuts.

Then I used a chisel to clean up the bandsaw marks.and refine the slopes.

Now half of the mechanism was done. The swinging leg was what was remaining. I sized a small square section of stock to ride on two pin tenons inside the inner frame. I cut a small tenon into a piece of sized stock and a matching mortise into the small cross piece.

A little work with a block plane and I had the leg properly tapered.

I can't help myself, I had to dry fit the piece together once again. I was so tickled to see the piece together I had to reach into the backpack I carry back and forth from the shop to home and pull out a book to see how it looked.

I'll bet you can't guess which book this is???

Now it was on to do some finish planing, some sanding, and some finishing.

And one more thing, if you were disappointed that my earlier link did not contain the ultimate answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything. Well if you don't know already . . . the answer is 42.

Ratione et Passionis
Oldwolf

What I Did on my Summer Vacation

2011-08-26T13:41:00.000-05:00

As my post before explained, I often take a few weeks off in the beginning of August for some vacation time with family and friends. In the past I have prepared by writing up several posts ahead of time so I can just pop on and post them when I get a chance. This year that just wasn't in the cards so it appears that I have been quiet for a while.

I have not been quiet, I have in fact been busy. The first two weeks of August are the busiest time of year for my hobby Viking Age Reenactment (I guess I cannot classify woodworking as a hobby in my life any longer, words like addiction or passion would probably serve better) We have a big show up in Ishpeming Michigan for a renaissance faire on the first weekend in August and our annual Midsummer Feast and Tournament the second weekend.

Now there was some woodworking involved in both weekends. When we set up our encampment at a faire I bring along my portable joinery bench and set up doing some woodcarving demonstrations for those interested. I love doing this because other woodworkers I have never met before stop, look, and then begin to talk sawdust with me.

I also got the chance to visit with an old piece of mine that I traded to a bladesmith friend for a nice dagger. the chest was actually one of my first successes at dovetailing. They use it to carry the stuff they need for rustic cooking, and his wife is an amazing cook!

But that isn't all we do at faires, we also perform a show where we talk about how weapons were used in medieval combat, we show several examples, and then we use padded versions of those weapons and do actual combat. No choreography, no stage combat tricks like telegraphing, no pulled punches, we go for it and go hard.

The steel is just for light demonstration, so far. We are working towards passing the padded weapons on and using wooden ones, and in some cases, real steel weapons.

This is the first combat I've participated in for over a year, since I hurt my knee doing this last June. As you can tell from the last picture, it feels good to get back in the "swing" of it.

The next weekend was the feast and tournament. I did a short presentation on carving techniques for the members in attendance.

After my presentation and ones from our blacksmith, bow maker, and a herbalist. We started the martial games.

I took second place in archery.

Second place in the axe throw

First place in the spear throw.

I took first place in the balance log combat, were we use our weapons and sometimes our bodies to remove our opponent from the log first.

And I took first place in the heavy combat tournament, a great weekend for me overall which added to me winning the overall competition and the prize of a couple of pieces to add to my armor.

After all that I admit it took a week or so of resting up and healing from the bumps and bruises of two weekends in a row of combat, but now I'm feeling much more like myself and I'm ready to hit the shop and the blog, batteries recharged and ready to go.

In fact I just put in an order at my hardwood dealer Big River Lumber Company for 60 board feet of 5/4 poplar. I'm starting work on a traditional tool chest in an Anarchist style. So from here on we'll finish up talking about my build of Chuck Bender's William and Mary Book Stand, and we'll talk about my finishing of a carved box. After that we'll follow up on my build of an anarchist's tool chest and some of my own individualist ideas I intend to include. (Nothing really too far off the map though) Until then. . .

Ratione et Passionis
Oldwolf

If you are interested in seeing more info on my Viking Age Reenactment Group you can visit our website www.tribewodenthor.org

If you like what you see and maybe want to see more pictures of the events The Tribe has a Facebook page as well. you can check that out HERE. Become our "friend" and stay up to date with what we're doing and where we're going.

My Apologies.

2011-08-09T23:20:00.001-05:00

Greetings all,

This is just a quick note to offer an apology for my recent absence. I had no intention of taking a break in the middle of writing about my build of Chuck Bender's William and Mary Book Stand, but sometimes life happens. The first weeks of August are always packed full for my family and I, and though I still get some time in the shop, I usually have little time to write about it. In the past I have prepared for this by loading up on some pre-constructed posts I could use to fill the gap. This year I just did not get the chance to do so. Those of you who connect with me via social medias like Twitter, Google+, or Facebook may have noticed that lately I am more erratic in my presence there as well.

At any rate I want to thank you for your readership and your patience. I will be back pounding the keyboard into submission soon. Until then here's to summer evenings with a good beer and better friends, sunny afternoons with my beautiful daughters, and maybe a few days of sleeping in until 9am. . . maybe.

Ratione et Passionis
Oldwolf

Turning the Feet

2011-07-27T20:41:00.000-05:00

I enjoy using my lathe, it's one of the few times in woodworking where you clamp a piece of stock into a machine and come out with a nearly finished product on the other side. The only issue is I have never been able to devote enough time to become a truly skilled turner, I'm middle ground at best. Up until recently, my biggest turning success was a maple gavel for a non-profit group's meetings. I was using a cobbled up, Frankenstein monster of a lathe, it was more than a little scary to use.

Apologies for the poor picture quality.

I gave away that lathe a couple years ago, I don't miss it.

I have never been able to successfully pull off a matched set of four turned legs or in this case, feet. For a while I considered altering the feet to be more of an 18th century pedestal foot kind like this.

But I just couldn't do that. It didn't seem to fit. I had to man up and make the turning work. I picked up a couple new turning tools this spring that I had not put to use yet, a big roughing gouge and a parting tool, and they really made the work more enjoyable.

I selected one of the beefier sections of walnut from the pile.

And liberated a lengthy section with a crosscut saw.

The joiner, bandsaw, and fore plane turned roughness into a nicely milled blank about 2"x2" x18".

I put on the Darth Vader helm and went to work. I never used to wear a face shield but a while back, on the Frankenstein Lathe (I've gotta get some pictures of it) I was roughing a blank and it let loose. Flying off the lathe and flinging itself across the shop. When I picked up this cheep replacement lathe I also decided I was going to pick up a face shield, just in case. You can also see my ginormous 1 1/2" roughing gouge advancing on the blank.

The big ol' gouge made short work of the blank in the initial rough up. What was always a lot of work in the past was an easy and enjoyable process. I was almost sorry it ended so quick.

Then I used the parting tool and a caliper to pare the blank down to a uniform radius. Is this a necessary step? maybe not with someone with a lot of experience, for me it seemed to make sense.

Then more parting tool work to set the wide radius at either end of the feet. I decided to build in a fudge factor and turn six instead of just four.

I used the skew chisel to flatten those six areas out and define where I had to work.

A little more work with the parting tool.

A small gouge, a skew chisel, and a fingernail scraper allowed me to rough out the basic sweep of the foot shape.

Then I shaped the knob that would get glued into the frame. This followed with a liberal amount of sanding. I have to say that there is nothing quite like sanding on the lathe. Your hands hold the paper and the lathe does the work. Watching the sawdust swirl around the spindle somehow reminds me of ocean waves.

Well I screwed up one of the six beyond all recognition, but five reasonably close feet is not bad. There is one of these that is not quite like the others. The dude on the right ended up a little tall, so he's out. Whew . . .I just barely made it to four feet. There's a joke in there somewhere.

I used my dowel plate to finish all the dowel ends to a consistent sizing.

I'm actually pretty proud of these little feet. They're not perfect, but they're not far off either.

A few holes placed in the bottom of the frame.

And another dry fit, this time with all the drama of the cut outs in the sides and the feet. Now to mill up and cut the center pieces that do the real work.

Ratione et Passionis
Oldwolf

Joining The Inner Frame

2011-07-24T01:00:00.001-05:00

As I work through building my own version of Chuck Bender's William and Mary bookstand, I am continually blown away with the amount of work that goes on in this little piece. I recall looking at in in the "Art's and Mysteries" section of Popular Woodworking Magazine and thinking to myself, what a cool project to eat up a little stock and a weekend or two. Well I was wrong when I thought that and if I really paid attention, I would have realized that.

I cannot recommend a better workout for an array of basic woodworking skills. For a smallish size piece, its at least an intermediate level build. (I know, I know, don't judge a piece by it's size) Just off the top of my head the skill set includes.

Milling pieces to size and thickness.
Through dovetailing.
Proportional layouts with dividers.
Decorative relief cut-outs.
Blind mortise and tenons.
Turning small pieces.
Through mortise and tenons.
Planing for moving elements in a piece.
Complex glue ups.
Careful finishing strategies.

Much more than I originally thought, but so very rewarding in carrying it all out. I suggest you give the piece a try if you haven't already. There is a cut list and measured drawing available to download through the Popular Woodworking's Blog HERE. (A word of warning, even though it is revised, it is not without errors, so use it as a guide, but not a bible as you explore this piece yourself.)

At this point I am ready to cut the mortise and tenons holding together the inner frame that will eventually support the book itself. I start by marking out my tenons using a marking gauge. I like to darken the lines in with pencil to help me see them as I cut, especially on this dark walnut.

A small tenon saw cuts on the waste side of the marked lines.

On small tenons like these I take the cut in two stages, I start on the closest corner and saw until I nearly touch the baseline. . .

Then I level the saw and draw the cut down until it's level at the baseline on both sides of the stock.

A little chisel work then because it's "first class" saw cuts all the way.

With both tenons cut, I'm ready to start the mortises. I am unconventional because I cut my tenons first and use them to layout my mortises. I know most people cut mortises first, but this way works for me and garners good results. I stick with it because in the end, its the results that matter.

Using the tenons as a guide, the mortises get marked out.

I learned this trick from Roy Underhill. The piece is so narrow and chopping mortises has the possibility of blowing out the thin sides. With the stock placed in a wood clamp the thin sides are reinforced and blow out is much less likely. I don't always drill my mortises but removing stock to make the mortising easier seemed to make sense this time.

It was off to work with the mortising chisel, some call it a pig sticker, but I can't say that, or type it, without some immature giggling, I know sometimes I'm just stuck in middle school mentality.

With the mortises chopped out, I dry fit the frame together. You'll notice the bottom section wider. this gets cut down and sized with the doweling plate to make a pair of 3/8" round pegs. These will be the hinge that the books support turns on.

I mark the drill points for the hinge in the sides of the outer frame. . .

. . . and drilled them out with a brace and a 3/8" spade bit.

Then a dry assembly. Yes I drove my marking awl into my benchtop to make the frame sit up pretty, but it's just a benchtop and it's meant to take abuse. When its toast, I'll build another. Wait until you see me nail something down to it, then you'll really freak out.

How's this for drama? Next is turning the little bun feet.

Ratione et Passionis
Oldwolf

Creating the Drama

2011-07-21T17:34:00.000-05:00

When I see a piece of furniture, it's the joinery I'm drawn to.

I love to cut joinery, I should add to that. I love to cut joinery by hand. For me there is just no better way to spend a day in the shop because I find it to be one of the most satisfying processes in woodworking. I understand some people find fulfillment in finishing and some just find it in the end product, some probably even find it in the initial milling boards to size, I've never heard anyone say they enjoy glue-ups or assembly but I'm sure there's someone who loves that as well. (glue up time seems to be my most irritable time)

Here's the problem, I think that all of us a workers of wood can appreciate well executed joinery as a mark of craftsmanship and sometimes refinement. On some level, non-woodworkers can appreciate those things too. But often joinery is just not enough to supply the drama good pieces need. Projects need an element that draws people to look at them, to pick them out of a room or a picture. Something to draw the eyes of woodworkers and non-woodworkers alike. Whether its complex drama like carving, inlay or marquetry or simpler drama like a tapered leg, a simple turning, or an eye catching moulding, there needs to be some aspect that will tell a story.

Lately I've been writing about my building a version of Chuck Bender's William and Mary bookstand. When I saw it in Popular Woodworking Magazine I knew I was going to have to build one for several reasons. One reason was that even though it was a smaller piece, there is a ton of joinery going on in this baby. Another reason was I fell in love with the subtle drama of it. The combination of small turned feet and scalloped relief cuts makes this piece sing out a story most everyone wants to hear.

The turning comes later, for now lets start with the scalloped relief cuts or cyma curves.

No templates were harmed in the creation of these relief cuts. Instead I carried out a simple layout using a pair of dividers to scratch in the eventual saw cuts. I used a marking gauge to define a line down the middle of the piece. Then I set the dividers to the depth of that mark and from the center of the board, scratched in the center curve.

Without changing the divider's setting I took three steps down the center line, I placed my post pin on the outer edge of the board and scratched a matching curve, but in the opposite profile. I repeated that until I had three semi circles total, one in the center and two on either end.

Then I took a different pair of dividers and set them to around 2/3rds the width of the first setting. I did not measure, I used my eyes. I then played with the distance to find the "sweet spot" that would connect the end of the center's circle with the sweep of the outer circle and I scratched that in place. I darkened all the scratch lines with a pencil and shaded the areas to remove.

Now I was ready to begin to cut them out. I had meant to cut these out on the bandsaw, but for whatever reason the wood gods were not on my side while I tried to change out to a thin 1/8" blade. After an hour of setting, tensioning, and swearing, I gave up and decided I would have to resort to the coping saw. Not really a defeat, I like to work with the coping saw too, so closer to changing gears.

I dug out my Moxon Vice, set it up, clamped in the first piece of stock, and went to work. First I sawed out as much of the waste as possible.

Then I set about cleaning up the lines and making them as crisp as possible. To accomplish this I moved back and forth between a couple rasps, a couple chisels and even some paring with a relaxed sweep carving gouge.

This method of ding it by hand does not create carbon copies on each of the four pieces, but the truth is you will never see them stacked in profile like this.

Instead they will be spread out around the four sides of the frame, and even though they are not perfect copies, unless someone breaks out a ruler and goes to town measuring them, no one will ever be the wiser. So if you are the type that gets hung up on these things, my advice is that you gotta relax a bit man. In the end if it looks right, it is right.

Ratione et Passionis
Oldwolf

If you missed them and you want to catch up on the rest of the William and Mary Book Stand story all the articles have been collected together HERE.

A Hundred Little Decisions.

2011-07-16T09:06:00.001-05:00

In every build, in every piece of a build, there are a hundred little decisions you have to make. The pressure is on to make good decisions at every bend because if you don't the overall work can suffer. Good decisions are an essential part of good woodworking but how do you tell a good decision from a not so good one?

I cringe a little when I look at the woodworking book section of my local Barnes and Nobles because a third of the books there refer to woodworking "done easy" and that's a shame because being good at woodworking is hard. It takes a lot of time and dedication.

After reading that you might think I have something against beginning woodworkers, and you'd be wrong. I remember starting myself and all the poor decisions I made. (buy me a beer and ask me about the pencil post bed debacle) But what's missing for many of those would be apprentices is some perspective. The idea that learning is a linear process, that you have to build one mastered skill set on top another, that knowing how to build a picnic table from 2x4's does not translate into being able to build a highboy. You can pull off a highboy shaped object, but not a real highboy. Not one done well and done right with all the right decisions made at the right times. There has to be more in between the two, and I think our modern society doesn't understand that.

Highboy on display at the Chazen museum of Art in Madison Wisconsin.

Without anyone to tell me, it took half a dozen years of making sawdust before I realized that though I had made stuff from wood, I was not a woodworker, I was closer to a child who has made mounds of sand on the beach and then imagines they are magnificent castles.Once I realized that, I knew I had a long way to go, but I still wanted to make the journey. Hell, I needed to make the journey, and I am still on that journey. Here on this blog I get to record the steps of my journey, and if I go back and read where I've been, I'm proud of how much I've grown.

The thing that nobody says in those books for beginners is that anything worth doing well takes time and dedication. In our world of instant gratification that's a tough horse to sell. You've gotta put in the hours, so when you make one of those hundreds of decisions, you have the experience to know what will "most likely" work well, so your piece will "most likely" turn out satisfactory.

I say "most likely" because the interesting thing about woodworking is that there are no guarantees, no matter how much experience you have, each piece is a journey.

This piece did not come from a novice's hands. A 17th century Joined Chest from the same museum display

I started writing about decisions because as I work on my version of the William and Mary book stand that Chuck Bender wrote about in the November issue of Popular Woodworking, I have my own set of decisions to make. In the original piece, and on Chuck's version, the corners of the frame were joined with one single stout dovetail. As I built my failed attempt earlier this year, I used that single tail without thinking about it. When it was time for this rematch I decided that one of the mistakes made was letting the cut list and measured drawing I had from HERE make decisions for me.

I have never been good at follow the leader. Things work better when I use pieces as inspiration rather than a strict blueprint. (One reason I am a better woodworker than I am a carpenter) I don't even follow the exact recipe when I make Mac 'n' Cheese from a box. Me being me, I have to make my own decisions and then I can stand or fall on them, and I can deal with that.

It took a while to decide to bypass the single dovetail. I cut some test joints and I looked at them from different perspectives. I actually kind of agonized over the decision divert from the original, but in the end I decided on a pair of tails over the single.

After I finished cutting all the corners I dug out the failed attempt from the back corner of the shop to get a look at both of them.

The twin tails just feel better to me, and as far as the look of my work, no contest. I almost didn't put up this picture because of the gaping in the oak attempt. I've done a lot of dovetail cutting this season and practice makes perfect but I believe another big factor is my purchase of an incredible quality dovetail saw from Mark Harrell over at Bad Axe Tool Works. A quality too can make the difference, another lesson I've been learning. The sticky question is, has the saw made dovetail cutting easier and there fore I get better results, or is dovetail cutting just that much more enjoyable so I tend to cut them more and the practice equals better results?

How many licks does it take to get to the center of a tootsie pop? The world may never know.

In the end, did I make a good decision? That's not a question I can answer yet. The important thing is I made a decision and that there are lessons to be learned from each decision.

Ratione et Passionis
Oldwolf

Rematch In Walnut

2011-07-12T19:20:00.000-05:00

A few months ago, as winter gripped Wisconsin in it's sharp black talons, I attempted my own version of Chuck Bender's William and Mary Bookstand. The one he built for the November 2010 issue of Popular Woodworking Magazine. I'm not going to rehash my issues except to say that I failed to do a good job of choosing my stock.

As I banished the white oak catastrophe into the dark, cobwebbed corners, I vowed to return for a rematch, and this time I would win. While I could have just burned it or scrapped it, I left it sit, so it could stare at me in judgement, day in and day out. There was something about the piece that spoke to me the minute I saw pictured of it, whether it's the proportions or the novelty of the work. I just really dig it, and woodworking skill wise there is a lot going on here that isn't obvious at a first glance. It has dovetailing, mortise and tenons, turned feet, proportioned decorative cut outs, and moving parts. There's a lot going on in this little guy that's going to take up a square foot of room on a table or desk someday.

This picture was shamelessly borrowed from Chuck Bender's Blog "Parings" But it's difficult to talk about the piece without having a finished picture here to help you visualize it.

Last autumn, friends gave me some black walnut culls off of their land. I split them with mallets, wedges, axes, and mauls into a whole bunch of very rough stock. It had been weathering in the woods for more than a year before I brought it home. After waiting the last several months I had the feeling that it was ready to be worked. I don't own a moisture gauge to tell me anything, I went a little older school and put a jack plane to a smaller piece and when I arrived at a reasonably level grade, I used an old fashioned moisture meter, my hands. This stuff wasn't green anymore, and by the quality of the shavings I was getting, crisp and clean edges, no dragging or feathering. I decided it was ready enough.

I didn't know how much I was going to get from each split, I had never worked wood this rough before, so I pulled four candidates from the pile and lined them up against the bench.

Then I sat down and stared at them for the longest while. Half intimidated, half excited, but all over, unsure where to start the process. I weighed my options and decided the best way to start was with the outer frame. There was four pieces of stock to the frame each approximately 12" long by 3/4" thick by 1 3/4" wide. If I started by sawing up one board into four 14" sections, I should be able to at least mill one stock board from each section.

The piece I selected had been somewhat flattened back in the fall just after it was riven apart. (Sometimes I have the patience of a toddler with ADD, I just had to plane at least one board that day, just to see) I marked some rough lines in pencil and just went to work with my course crosscut saw.

Once I had the pieces sawn I could see the benefit of riving the lumber. Just look at the growth rings and how they run vertical and all line up. As good as or better than quarter sawn. I had chosen my stock very well for this go around.

I then took one board over to the power joiner and flattened one face.

I then used that flattened face as a reference to joint one edge square to that face. I then used the table saw to cut the other edge parallel to the first face.

Now I had stock that was square on three sides. I do not own a thickness planer so I took the resaw route.

On the bandsaw I cut the stock down to just a little over 3/4" thick, leaving enough to hand plane the board smooth and keep the thickness I wanted. When I was done with the first experiment I realized that I had enough stock in one of these pieces to get two sections of the frame. I ran another section of stock through the same process and ripped them to width.

Man the color in this walnut is incredible. It feels good to be back at this project and feeling like I can finish it off this time.

Ratione et Passionis
Oldwolf

Want to see the process of splitting the Black Walnut culls click HERE.

Want to get a look at Chuck Bender's notes on his blog Parings Click HERE

If you want to read about that failure you can catch the misery by clicking on the link HERE. (This post will be collected there as well, you'll just have to scroll past it)

The Woodworking Trilogy

2011-07-09T22:17:00.000-05:00

In my opinion all the best stories I know come in the form of a trilogy, including my favorite book of all time, J.R.R Tolkein's "The Lord of The Rings."

This week I have been devouring the recently released Anarchist Tool Chest by Chris Schwarz and a possibility occurred to me. I think it's possible that the woodworking world finally has it's trilogy. Three books, not all written by the same author, but all coming from the same publisher. Lost Art Press.

I own three books published by Lost Art Press, the tome mentioned above, Robert Wearing's "The Essential Woodworker," and "The Joiner and Cabinet Maker." and I wish like hell that someone had put these books into my hands ten years ago when I decided the same tools and skills I was using to remodel our house would also allow me to build furniture. (It's been a long, strange trip since that day) Yes I know these books were either not around or not generally available then but if someone would just hurry up and invent a time machine and help me out here, I'd be much further along my path.

If I knew someone who was seriously interested in starting woodworking I would not hesitate to put these three books into their hands. In fact I would consider it to be the most generous gift a novice woodworker could receive, but that isn't to say that veteran saw-dusters can't benefit either, it's never too late to learn the right things. The only issue I have is I believe they were released backwards. Given a new No-Name Apprentice to give advice to I would go about it like this:

The first book I would give this No-Name Apprentice would be The Anarchist's Tool Chest. In it Chris talks simply and factually about the basic tools that are important to start woodworking. I know everyone believes it's a very hand tool centric view considering his reputation and "THE hand tool dude" but he speaks realistically about power tools and in my opinion the conversation really lists more to the side of the elusive Hybrid woodworking experience where hand and power live in harmony together. The philosophy included on buying tools, what to look for, what to avoid, and how to go about getting the things you need without drowning in a sea of worthless metal and plastic crap. (Oh no, there's that word again)

I also really appreciate the care in which the options and "rules" for building a tool chest are covered. I know that this will be one of the hot projects for this year and a couple more after the release of this book, but I was already in the market to start building my own this year so I can get the Family Heirloom chest out of my shop and into my home where it can last another generation or two. Chris's guidance will help me build a chest that will fit me for the rest of my life and hopefully beyond.

So, you now have an idea what tools are worthwhile to start with. What do you want to know next? How to use them to get results. Here's where I would hand my No-Name Apprentice a copy of The Essential Woodworker." Robert Wearing uses a couple hundred pages to break down the process of woodworking into it's fundamentals. All the basics are here, from flattening a board, to laying out and executing basic joinery. It touches on finishing, sharpening, shop made tools, and solid design basics.

The No-Name Apprentice now has exposure to good tools and solid technique. What else could you want but some thing to build. "The Joiner and Cabinet Maker" is the perfect book for that, included along with a great story about an apprentice named Tomas are three projects that build these skills one on top the other, from a simple packing box to a chest of drawers.

After working through these three books, the No-Name Apprentice should be ready to move on to bigger, better things.

It makes me wonder though, could Chris Schwarz be to woodworking what the wizard Gandalf is to the hobbits? One more question. If you were to consider these books to be woodworking's "The Lord Of The Rings," then which book would you consider to be "The Hobbit?"

Ratione et Passionis
Oldwolf

Reason and Passion

2011-07-03T23:37:00.001-05:00

"Your soul is oftentimes a battlefield, upon which your reason and your judgement wage war against your passion and your appetite. Would that I could be the peacemaker in your soul, that I might turn the discord and rivalry of your elements into oneness and melody. But how shall I, unless you yourselves be also the peacemakers, nay, the lovers of all your elements.

Your reason and your passion are the rudder and sails of your seafaring soul. If either your sails or your rudder be broken, you can toss and drift, or else be held at a standstill in mid-seas. For reason ruling alone is a force confining; and passion, unattended, is a flame that burns to its own destruction.

Therefore let your soul exalt your reason to the height of passion, that it may sing. And let it direct your passion with reason, that your passion may live through its own daily resurrection, and like the phoenix rise above its own ashes."

- Kahlil Gibran from "The Prophet"

As you can see, I've been doing some reading and thinking lately, a lot of that. It's been several years since I picked my copy of "The Prophet" off the bookshelf. Its a book of powerful poetry, masterfully written to speak to you throughout your life. Sections I found powerful years ago are not the same as the ones that strike me as I read it today. If you have never read it I feel you should. my advice is do not read it cover to cover, it is not that kind of book. read the first chapter and then let the table of contents guide you to read the sections that catch your eye. It has become my "go to gift" for a graduation present.

I know this is a woodworking blog and not a literary blog. But when I read any book I read through the eyes of a dedicated woodworker. As far as the above quote is concerned, I would argue that there is no where in the whole world where I can find the balance between Reason and Passion better than in my shop. Standing at the workbench is my "peacemaker."

And if that isn't woodworking, then nothing is.

Ratione et Passionis
Oldwolf

A Small Carved Box

2011-06-30T22:25:00.001-05:00

I needed a small box to hold my auger bits for my braces. I had a little mahogany laying about and figured, a little upscale for auger bits but what the hell it's not doing me any good over here on the cut off pile. As I was cutting the dovetail joints I started to think about how I had heard that mahogany carves like butter so I figured, hey why not, a great chance to practice some of my 17th century carving techniques I picked up from Peter Follansbee's DVD. A couple minutes on the net and I had a couple patterns I hadn't tried yet and I went to town.

The cool thing about this is I got this project started and finished in just one day in the shop, it was a good long enjoyable day, but it was one day, and that makes me smile. At any rate I thought that from here on out I would stop typing and just let the pictures tell the tale of the day.

In some pictures you get a good look at the contrast in the wood between sap wood and heart wood, I oriented the stock when I was putting it together to make sure the darker band chased itself around the bottom of the box. A Danish Oil finish and I called it good. I do have to give a little shout out over to the Badger Woodworks Blog because it was his practice carving of a similar vein that inspired me to give the "S" scroll a try on the backside. I have to admit, his turned out better than mine, I ended up trying to stretch it too much for my proportion tastes.Overall a very satisfying project.

Here's a few final pictures:

I really begin to dig that heart wood, sap wood contrast. I made a good choice orienting the darker along the bottom, I think it gives this small box a little bit of gravity and weight.

Ratione et Passionis
Oldwolf

Workshop Rearrangment and Renewal

2011-06-29T19:54:00.002-05:00

After I finished the Plane Storage Shelf, I had one more big job to go. As I worked on the shelf I knew it was coming but I played it like I was two years old again and just stubbornly refused to admit reality. Like the phrase coined by Adam Savage from TV's Mythbusters, "I reject your reality and substitute my own!"

Unfortunately that fig leaf can only hold in place for so long.

Hanging the shelf meant I was going to have to rearrange the shop. Not just move a few things here and there, I mean a complete, knock it down, tear it apart and put it back together rearrangement. I had to take a deep breath for this one. If you watched the video tour I made of the shop this spring, you can pretty much disregard almost of it. In the end I am very happy with the changes and it's nice to have the shop feel this organized.

Without further ado:

Ratione et Passionis
Oldwolf

Here There Be Monsters

2011-06-26T16:58:00.003-05:00

A long time ago, before GPS on your cell phone, before Google Maps on the internet, before World Atlases in you library, even before the whole of the world was known. A lone cartographer sat at his work, carefully drawing a map of the oceans from which sailors would chart their courses. He loved his work and took great care in painstakingly applying ink to his sheet of vellum. He drew out coastlines, ports of call, places of interest, and always used a wonderfully artistic medallion to point the cardinal directions.

What was this map-maker to do when his knowledge ran out before he reached the curled edge of the calfskin. I can picture him, working at a broad oaken desk by the light of tallow candles. He carefully scribes all he understands with ink and pen. Then, a moment of clarity strikes through the fog of creativity and he realizes he's exhausted all his knowledge and there is still space on the page. Worried, he sits up straighter in his simple chair and gazes off into the far corner of the room. His eyes distant and without focus as he ponders the issue and his options. How can he explain that he has no idea what exists past that certain point of the ocean?

"No one will buy a map with a blank space." He thinks to himself, "It will appear incomplete."

There a muse finds him, stuck in doubt and bending towards the hopeless. The spirit of creativity turns her sweet lips to his old ear and whispers inspiration into his mind. Suddenly he has an answer. He raises a hand to stroke his greying whiskers as he ponders the idea, it's lithe and light in his mind and he works hard to bring it to form and substance. He reaches out to grasp his pen, raising it, freshly dipped from the ink well and moving it towards the vacant space. For a second the tip hovers above the page, then in a flourish of carefully practiced calligraphy he scrawls the words.

"Here There Be Monsters"

Picture cropped from a 16th century map called the Carta Marina, Used from Wikipedia

I have been practicing my carving skills lately, particularly my 17th Century reproduction carving skills. After being introduced to them via Peter Follansbee's great DVD (you can read my review HERE) I have been working on the techniques in between builds. Some of you may know that I do Viking Age Reenactment in as a hobby, (I guess I consider woodworking to be more than a hobby). I'm part of the group Tribe Woden Thor, we travel to area events, schools, and libraries doing demonstrations on Medieval History and I've spent a while looking for ways to integrate woodworking into my part of the presentation. Once I started working with this style of carving it just seemed natural that I'd finally found a way to accomplish that.

Here I am working away inside our "museum" tent, where we will often set up the best and most historical reproductions of daily life, arms, and armor for smaller shows and events. I'm busy carving the red oak panel that will become the front of a bible box. Yes those are swords, axes, war hammers, and daggers on the table next to the joinery bench and spears in the hangers behind me.

I started at a little show several weekends ago where I carved the front panel of a bible box with a fleur de lis pattern. You can read about that day HERE. A couple weekends ago our group did another small show for a private group and I set up to do carving again. This time I was going to start on the sides of the box.

The finished front panel and the picture of Peter Follansbee's carving that I worked from to create it.

Now I was headed towards the edge of the map and the place where those monsters lie. Up until this point in my work I had followed patterns directly from Mr. Follansbee. But I didn't want to carry through with the same exact pattern on the shorter sides. Stylistically I wanted more of a contained feature instead of a run on pattern, but I also wanted to carry the fleur de lis and the pattern from the front into the sides. I was stuck, I wasn't sure how to accomplish all those things at once.

I went to the event, set up my break down joinery bench, opened my tool box, and laid out my tools. I positioned one of the red oak sides in the holdfasts and began to stare at it. Just like the old cartographer in the brief fiction above, I pondered my options until I had an idea. Perhaps a muse whispered sweet inspiration into my ear as well because I picked up my dividers and started marking, diving directly into those unmarked waters.

By the end of the day I had finished one side and marked the other in preparation, and after a day of swimming in mysterious waters I think I managed to circumnavigate every monster and come to rest on the shores of a new world. It is one thing to copy directly from another artist's work, It's an important part of learning. When you let those works inspire you to follow your own design instincts and make your own stamp on the style, now you've started stepping to another level.

I'm not sure how well my design decisions work in the vernacular of 17th century carving, but the dovetail joinery already shoots the "reproduction" street cred for this piece in the foot, so now I'm really only interested in making a box I like and getting more experience with the carving techniques. Most of the time when I work on a project it already has a home in mind or a buyer who commissioned it. This one I'm building for the experience and the value I get from using it for demonstration at reenactment events, so I don't know where it will end up.

Maybe this will be my first step into an online selling experience like Etsy. Hmmm. . . another uncharted area of the map.

I guess I'll have to tighten the rigging, set the sails, and see where the wind takes me on this one.

Cheers
Oldwolf

Dovetail Layout Part 6: Moving Into Variety

2011-06-25T01:36:00.001-05:00

I have been using my virtual soapbox exploring the methods I use to layout dovetails. I have two strong opinions when it comes to dovetail layouts: One, it's important they're simple and straightforward to carry out, something repeatable and consistent enough to be easily repeated. And two, there is no "Unifying Theory of The Dovetail Continuum," no "One" way to do it right. As a designer and builder of fine furniture you should be versed and flexible in using several different layouts so you can use choose the right look for the right circumstance. Don't ever make the mistake of locking yourself down into one pragmatic view of your pins and tails.

If you're just joining the conversation or want a refresher of where we've been already you can find all the dovetail layout posts collected together HERE.

I believe yet one more Dovetail Maxim: Dovetail joints are meant to be created with a hand powered saw. Remove the waste however you want, but there is no replacement for the simple, straight-forward hand saw to create the lines that define the joint. I do not care if you have a whole chest of drawers in a dovetailed carcass on your plate, do it the right way. The only time you could convince me a router is the way to go is if you have to build more than fifty or so drawers in a weekend. Short of that, a Leigh Jig or other random router dovetail template is a waste of your hard earned money.

So since we are doing the right thing and cutting our dovetails by hand, then why wouldn't you use that fact to your advantage. You are not a machine so you do not have to cut your dovetails like one either. Unless the design calls for subtle even dovetails that blend in to the background, why not add some pop with some staggered pacings and varied sizings. After all dovetails are the showoff of the joint world. They like to scream "Hey! Look at me!" So changing up the game a little can lead to some nice results that don't have to be distracting, but can instead showcase your artistry.

The key is to remember the eye likes symmetry and grouping. I repeat my sizing from the right side of the layout to the left side to keep that symmetry. I will also group two or three smaller pins together with wider spaces between them. Groupings of more than three tend to begin to look busy and too many varied widths can look amateurish. I rarely do more than two or three different sized spacings in a design. Well executed simplicity will be more dazzling than complexity.

Here's one way of accomplishing the type of layout I'm talking about.

As we have gone over before, you can use dividers to help size the layouts, but I often find it faster to just use my chisels as sizing blocks. With the stock in the vise I mark my half pins on either side with a 3/8" chisel.

With that done I measure to find the center of my stock and mark it.

Shifting the rule over I then mark out for a 1" wide space. If I were to expand this across a wider section of stock I have the decision between widening this center area or adding a second area and spacing the board out in thirds instead of halves. Wider stock yet? I add more of the same spacing and judge the right amount needed by eye.

Then I grab the 1/4" chisel and eyeball the placement in the center of the remaining space. What no measurement? That's right, you can measure if you want, but I think you should be able to trust your eyes to tell you what looks right. If it looks right now, why should it look wrong later? I just make a small mark on either side of the chisel.

And complete the lines with a small tri-square

I make sure to "X" out the areas to be cut away . . .

. . . and mark the angles on the face of the stock. I only bother to mark my end grain and the face of my stock. Marking the angles on the backside is unnecessary, and this way makes sure I don't get turned around and put the face of the stock away from me. I want any tear out from the saw blade to be on the backside of the stock and the inside of the joint.

Ready to start sawing with all the waste marked.

Transfer your pins, mark, and cut them. Often these days I will only mark the end grain on tails, but when I was starting to learn I would transfer my lines square down the face of the stock to help guide me.

After the joint is put together and cleaned up you can see how the paired grouping and slight variety in widths gives an interesting and appealing look.

You can play around a lot with groupings and an asymmetrical / symmetrical look. Here's a quick second take with a different result.

This time I chose to start with very wide half pins, so I used my 1" chisel as a marker.

And I repeated it on both sides. Remember, use symmetrical placement of asymmetrical sizes and you can achieve good looking results.

Everything marked out and ready to cut.

And the finished product, a similar paired grouping to the previous set but with an altogether different appearance and feel. Consider the effect you're reaching for as you head into these layouts.

And one more off the deep end just to prove a point.

With this joint I did zero layout at all beyond marking the appropriate depth of cut with a marking gauge. I didn't mark my angles or my spacing, and I actually tried to make it very random. While this is the ugly stepsister of the whole series, it does prove a couple points. One, is it proves how simple layout can be if you are practiced at cutting these joints. If I had put effort into symmetry over randomness I have no doubt I could have turned out a workable joint with no substantial layout at all. Just my eyes, my mind, and my hands working together in a practiced way.

The other point is that from a design stand point, I can actually conceive of using this random joint as a design feature. Say I was making a box based on The Mad Hatter from Alice in Wonderland, or representing a twisted ideal in some other fashion. This joint would be perfectly at home in those instances. So understand the look you're going for and don't be afraid to make mistakes getting there. After all, those aren't mistakes, they are lessons learned. The most important thing to remember is to relax, do NOT put this joint up on a pedestal, just have fun and go for it.

I'm pretty sure this should wrap up my side of this discussion. Thanks for lending me your ears while I rode the soapbox for a while.

Cheers
Oldwolf

Final Pictures: Plane Storage Shelf

2011-06-22T22:14:00.000-05:00

Just a quick punctuation on the story of the Plane Storage Shelf. If you haven't caught all of the build or you want to do some catching up, all the related articles are collected together HERE.

I finished the piece with a coat of finish I end up calling Maloof Finish, because I read about it in an article he wrote. It's one part boiled linseed oil, one part wipe on polyurethane, and one part tung oil. I like the mixture, it's easy to apply and leaves a smooth feeling touch.

What I would like to be able to do with the finish mixture is add some color with some dye. I just haven't taken the opportunity to try it yet.

It was a simple project to build but sometimes the simple can be easy to screw up. I believe I did a pretty good job with this one though, The proportions are good, the spacing of the shelves works well...

... and I really like the detail of the cut out along the top. In fact the only thing I dislike is also shown in the picture above. The missing space in the far back dovetail where I had a lapse of attention and switched around where I should have cut the stopped rabbets for the back and where it was alright to cut them all the way across. I know a little glue and a small patch of end-grain would fix the error to anyone's eyes but me, but this is a project for the shop and no one will ever see it but me and there it does serve a purpose. It reminds me not to make the mistake again.

The best part is here, hanging on the wall next to the saw till it was meant to accompany. If I had enough room on my shop walls I would be sorely tempted to build another shelf to bookend on the other side of the till as well, Maybe that one would be a series of drawers instead of open shelves. It seems to me that would make a very complete shop storage arrangement. Too bad there's no real space left at this shop, it will have to wait for the next shop incarnation, and who knows when that will be. No time soon I hope.

Here is the shelf filled up just after it was hung, I was very happy to find that there was quite a bit of room left after I got all my planes up. I had a couple other things to throw up there.

Things evolve and so has what I've put on the shelf. After having the shelf up for a couple of weeks this is pretty much how things look today. It seemed like a good place to hang my larger "Schwarz Anarchy Square." The hard work was just beginning though because hanging the shelf lead to completely rearranging the whole shop, but more on that later.

Cheers
Oldwolf

Plane Storage Shelf: Shelves In - Back On

2011-06-17T22:39:00.000-05:00

Last time we discussed the Plane Storage Shelf I had just finished gluing and assembling the outer carcass. Now we finish off the main part of the build. If you're new to the discussion or need a refresher on where we're been all the related posts have been gathered together HERE.

With the dovetails glued up and dried I stood up the carcass to check it one more time for square. I also took the final measurement for the board length to cut for the shelves. A few minutes with a crosscut saw and I could call that done.

The stopped dadoes in the carcass required a notch to be cut in the end of the boards that would face out.

Then I contoured the facing edge into a bullnose profile with a spokeshave, a contoured scraper, and a touch of hand sanding.

Then I went about fitting each shelf into the tight dadoes.

The dadoes turned out slightly narrower than the stock so I took a block plane and gave the bottom edge of each shelf a bevel. narrowing the endgrain to achieve a good fit. It is better to have a narrow dado you can tune a fit to with a couple swipes of a block plane than trying to fix a dado that is too loose to start with.

It is important to keep track of which shelf you fit to which set of dadoes. I use my own brand of marks when I do this.

The shelves all fitted, I secured them all in place with a dab of hide glue in the back of the dado and a finishing nail placed through the side of the carcass and into the shelf towards the front.

I needed a cleat to hang the shelf from. I used a similar idea on the top of the saw till. The difference I was able to create on the shelf was I had picked up a nice little moulding plane that gave me a great excuse to add a little detail to the cleat.

I pre-drilled and counter sunk the holes for the future screws to hang the shelf with. A little glue and a couple pocket screws to secure it in place.

To make the back I re-sawed some pine down to 3/8" thick and gave it a quick smooth with a finely set jack plane. I chose to fix the boards in place edge to edge. This was a solution I had to use because I was running tight on stock when I was building the saw till. Since this was an accompanying piece I decided to repeat the decision.

Everything together, now I had a chance to stand it up and get a good look at it.

And even give it a test to see how everything fit.

A little sanding and a finish applied and the Plane Storage Shelf is ready to hang. The finished pictures with it hung and filled coming next time, I am very happy with the decisions I made on this piece because it does work out to be a prefect companion piece to the saw till. Exactly what I wanted.

Cheers
Oldwolf