Christmas Snowball

This Christmas, I received the last 3 chisels to complete my set of Narex bench chisels.  I had seven chisels (1/4", 3/8", 1/2", 5/8", 3/4", 7/8", 1"), so the three I needed to complete the set were the big ones, 1 1/4", 1 1/2", and 2".  

I was very pleased to have these new chisels, and I wanted to get them integrated into my hanging tool storage area over my bench with my other chisels as soon as possible.  I have reached a point in my shop, though, where every new tool requires additional storage space I generally don't have.  

This is the hanging tool space above my workbench.  You can see that it's quite full, and more specifically there is no additional room to make a longer chisel rack.  Suddenly what started out as just hanging up some new chisels is turning into a bigger project.

I really like having often used tools hanging on the wall for easy access, so I wanted to expand my hanging tool area.  The plywood tool hanging area is pinned on either side by the electrical panel and the drill press/clamp area respectively, so the only option for expansion was to expand vertically.  There was a shelf directly above the plywood, though, that would have to be moved.  On this shelf, I had been storing a plethora of finishes, glues, oils, and other liquid products.

Longtime readers will recall that a while back I built a sliding door shop cabinet.  At the time I just threw whatever random tools and stuff that didn't already have a place to go in the cabinet.

But my original intent was to eventually store my liquid goods in there.  Readers may also recall that the doors bowed a little bit on the cabinet and left a gap on the side that I never have gotten around to closing in.  Because of the gap, everything I took out of the cabinet was covered in a layer of fine sawdust.  So I resolved to close up this gap before I moved on.

I started by ripping a piece of poplar to fill in most of the gap.  I installed it with screws.

Then I needed something to fill the remaining curved gap. 

 

I found this vinyl door bottom at the hardware store.

I trimmed it to length, and cut notches in it so it wouldn't interfere with the shelves.

The flexible vinyl conforms to the curved gap pretty well.

I then applied the vinyl to the other side of the cabinet as well.  The gap was smaller here, so I didn't need the wood filler strip.

Here is a view of all the stuff out of the sliding door cabinet, as well as most of the stuff from the shelf I'm working on getting rid of.  At this point, one wonders if all this will fit in that cabinet.

The shelf is cleared.  It's odd to see it empty, as it has been crammed with junk seemingly as long as I can remember.

I did manage to get all the liquids, as well as my spray finishing gear, into the cabinet.

With the shelf gone...

And the tool hangers and tools removed...

The space is eerily empty.

To remedy that, I start working on making a new piece of plywood for the expanded tool hanging space.  I went to Lowes to buy a piece of 3/4" plywood.  My options were to buy cheap 3/4" sheathing which had pretty low grade surfaces for $25, or buy a piece of BC plywood for $35.  I chose the $25 piece, and bought myself a whole lot of work smoothing it in the process. 

I rip the plywood down to size with a skil saw.

You can see the printing on the surface that will have to be removed.

I do the heavy removal with a Number 81 scraper plane., then finish up sanding.  I probably spent 2 hours on this scraping and sanding. Moral of the story - pay the damn $10 extra.

On to the next problem: there is a shelf just that is in the way of the piece of plywood on the first trial fit.  It's the lower one in the picture below.  I cut a little length off the end of the shelf with my jigsaw and a handsaw.

I want the plywood to extend above the bottoms of the shelf brackets for the shelf above it, so I need dadoes in the back of the plywood to allow it to sit over the bottoms of the brackets, but still flush against the wall.  I hold the piece of plywood up in place and make marks on the top, which I then transfer to the back of the plywood.

I cut these freehand with a 3/4" straight router bit.

 

And the piece of plywood finally gets mounted to the wall with screws.

Now, finally I can make the new chisel holder.  This is simply a board with holes drilled in it and slots cut connecting the front of the board to the holes.  

Once I have this made, however, I realize that I need to give some thought to the arrangement of all my toolholders to accommodate this larger chisel rack.  I start out by making a replacement for my mallet holder.

When I made this, I had a square headed wooden mallet.  This holder works for my new round headed mallet, but I quickly think up a better design for holding the round head.  The new one is a couple of pieces with half-holes drilled in them mortised and tenoned into a mounting plate.

As I start hanging the hand planes back up, I have a new plane laying on the bench that I recently purchased with some Christmas funds.  This reminds me that I also have 2 other planes lying on a shelf waiting to be cleaned up and put into service.  I need to have all the plane holders in hand, the old ones and the 3 new ones for these new planes, in order to come up with an efficient arrangement.

In order from left to right, a Stanley #140 skewed block plane (the plane I bought with Christmas funds), a Stanley #3 bench plane, and a Stanley #62 bevel up jack plane.

Incidentally, these are all pretty neat and somewhat unusual planes.  The #140 I bought mainly to thin tenons.  It has a removable side plate, allowing one to work all the way up to the shoulder, and a skewed blade to produce a better across the grain cut.  The #62 is a somewhat unusual plane that high end manufacturers are copying frequently these days.  It's basically a #5 jack plane sized body with a block plane blade and adjustment setup on it.  The #3 is just a bench plane, but it's so small in size that it's somewhat unusual.  In practice, it's just way to similar in size to the #4 to have both, but I just ran across it and it was too good to pass up.

All the planes above are already cleaned up, sharpened, and ready for use.  The #3 in particular was pretty rusty and dirty, and the other two needed some pretty involved cleaning and de-rusting as well.  The blades were almost all ground at the wrong angle from unskilled or careless sharpening, as I often find on old planes.  I'm not going to go into great detail here, but it probably took me 6 or 8 hours to get all 3 completely ready for use.

With the planes themselves ready, I set to work making the holders.  Longtime readers will recognize these as my usual design.  I have a previous article here if you are interested in how to make one. Here are all the plane holders, both new and old.  The new ones are top left, first long one in from the left, and far right.

With the increased wall hanging space available, I also decided to finally get my combination square mounted on the wall.  I made a quick hanger for it out of some scrap.

  

Finally, with all the hangers in hand, I work out final positions for everything.

I also hung up another Christmas present that I'm very excited about: a custom made drawknife from JB's Forge!  It's just hanging on nails for now, which works great. 

You might be arriving at the end of this article wondering what exactly it was supposed to be about.  I think sometimes folks who are not hobbiests or craftspeople (or crazy or whatever else you want to call us) often wonder just what in the world it is that we do in our shops all the time.  After all, sometimes we work for weeks without any product that leaves the shop.  This article just shows how one little project can be like a snowball that rolls down a long hill, gathering more snow and growing bigger all the time.  Pretty soon what started out as just a desire to hang up 3 new chisels can end up taking a week's worth of nights and the following weekend in the shop!

Folding Room Divider (Christmas project 2013)

Now that Christmas is over, I can finally post an article on my big Christmas project for the year: a set of folding room dividers, sometimes called a privacy screen, for my brother in law.  I started out by making a sketchup model of one of the panels.  The entire set is composed of three panels hinged together, but I only drew one in sketchup just to verify my design and measurements.

Link to Sketchup Model

I started out by making grooves down the insides of all the pieces, just like you would for a frame and panel cabinet door or something joined with stub tenons.  I do this in 3 passes on the table saw.

After 2 passes...

All complete.

Then I set up the tablesaw to cut stub tenons for the middle two horizontal pieces.  I use a test piece to get the right fit.

Stub tenons complete.  Note that these pieces have a groove on both sides.  One side will contain the plywood panel, and the other will contain a wood strip to hold in the big canvas center panel.

The top and bottom rails are joined to the long stiles with through mortise and tenons for added strength.  I originally decided to use this joint because I was going to have the ends of the tenons protrude in a decorative way, but I ended up having to cut them off flush because they interfered with the hinging motion.

I cut these on the tablesaw by making a series of cuts across the tenon at the right depth, then paring away the waste.  I don't have a good setup for doing the vertical cheek cuts on my tablesaw, nor the skill (or equipment) to do those cuts by hand right now, so this is what I elected to do.

The tenons are left just a little extra thick for now until each is hand fit to its mortise.

The top rail needs to have a haunch cut into its tenon to allow it to fill the groove in the top of the stile.  Here is the shape shown in xray mode in sketchup.

I cut these using a handsaw, and cleaned and smoothed the cut with a chisel.

I got a little overzealous and forgot that the bottom rails didn't need this haunch; they could be full width tenons.  I had already cut the haunch in all of the top and bottom stiles before I noticed, but no harm was really done because I just adjusted my mortise design for the bottom accordingly.

Since the stiles already have a groove cut in them, and just because I wanted to get more experience, I decided to cut the mortises by hand using a chisel.  I begin by making layout marks.

First I mark how far down from the top to start the mortise with a marking gauge.

Then I make a mark and square across for the bottom boundary of the mortise.

Then I make marks to define the sides of the mortise using a marking gauge.

I begin cutting the mortises from the groove side.  Both sides have layout marks, and for a through tenon like this one cuts half the depth from each side, meeting in the middle.  I am no expert on this method, but I learned all I know about it from Paul Sellers.  Check it out for yourself: Paul Sellers' Blog

The mortise has reached half depth, time to flip over.

Then a tenon is fit to each particular mortise by thinning the tenon with a chisel and planes.  There are 4 through mortises for each of the three hinged panels, so 12 through mortise and tenons...whew.

The top and bottom panels are made from 1/4 inch plywood, cut to size on the table saw.

With the joints made and the panels ready, I last set to work to fill the groove in the bottom of the legs below the bottom panel before glue up.  I ripped down some filler pieces on the table saw.

I included this next picture just to show the surface straight from the tablesaw.  You can really see how a nicely flat and square piece of wood and a well set up tablesaw produces something that hardly even needs planing.

Next I rip the thin planks down to strips to fill the grooves.

Then some final planing to get just the right fit for each spot

And gluing them in.  I have the bottom rail just put into its mortise without glue to be sure this strip doesn't go too far up and interfere with the mortise and tenon.  It is left sticking up just a bit to be planed flush later.

Then the glue up...which I failed to capture in a picture.  Glue up time on a project this large is so hectic, and I just plain forgot.

Moving on - time to install the hinges.  I start by laying the first two panels together and clamping them in place.  Then I mark the start locations of the hinges across both pieces at the same time with a marking knife and square.

Then I lay out the size of the hinge using the hinge itself and a marking knife.

I deepen these cross grain marks with a chisel and mallet.

Then I set my little router plane to the thickness of the hinges and run it along the side to mark the depth.

 With the layout done, I remove most of the material with a chisel.

Then fine tune the depth with the router plane.

Here's the first finished hinge mortise...7 more to go.

I mark the locations to drill pilot holes for the mounting screws with a self centering punch.

Then I set up my egg beater hand drill with a small bit and stop collar to control the depth.  I often like to use my egg beater drill for small holes in place of my power drill.  It's not much slower and I feel like I have less chance of breaking those small drill bits.

Here I am laying out for the hinge joint between the second and third panel.  You can see that the stack is 3 panels wide.  I have a spacer shim cut to the size of the gap needed between the two pieces that you can see between the top panel and the second.

Next, I remove the hinges and stain each panel assembly.  I used Minwax Dark Walnut stain, and got some of the best results I've ever had staining pine.

After the stain had cured for 24 hours I began applying water bourne polyurethane.  It was too cold to do this in the shop, so I had to do it in the house, which meant I could not spray the finish.  This made the finishing very time intensive, but in the end I did achieve really nice looking results.

Last up before final assembly was installing the canvas center panels.   I start by ripping some strips the right thickness to allow both the strip and the canvas to sit in the grooves.

I cut the canvas oversized to start with.

Each strip is cut to length, planed if necessary to fit right, then tapped in with a mallet, trapping the canvas in the process.

The corners proved tricky because the canvas doubles up there 

I install the opposing top and bottom strips first.

 Then the side strips.  The strips are held in place by friction and also some 23 gauge pins driven into the groove through the strip.

Near the end of the project I was really coming down to the wire on time.  I rushed to install the strips and on one of the panel assemblies my nailgun angle wasn't right and the pins poked out the front of the wood.  I didn't have any time to take pictures at this point, but I was able to remove the offending pins.  This, of course, left some dots of exposed light colored pine that didn't match the stained area around them.  I touched these up by putting drops of stain on them with a toothpick, and then had the incredible misfortune of dripping some stain on the canvas.  At this point I just literally laughed out loud, knowing nothing else to do.  I attempted to remove the stain from the canvas using mineral spirits.  This did lighten the spots but not entirely remove them.  Feeling absolutely defeated and past out of time, I had to take the dividers on to a family gathering as these were a Christmas present.  By the time we arrived, the mineral spirits had completely dried out and left the spots less noticeable, but still present.  In the end, my brother in law elected to take the dividers in their current condition rather than have me replace the canvas panel.  He was really pleased with them I think, but I won't deny I still feel bad about letting them leave my shop in that condition.

You might be asking yourself, "Why did he include that depressing story at the end?"  I included it for two reasons.  The first is that I really should have just declared that I couldn't get them done in time at the last minute before I installed the canvas panels and gotten them delivered after Christmas.  The main reason I had the problems with the pins coming through and spilling the stain is because I was in a hurry.  The second lesson is that all woodworkers or craftspeople need the support of knowing things go terribly wrong in everyone's shop.  Something goes pretty badly wrong on nearly every project of sufficient complexity or size that ever goes through my shop - like they probably do in yours.  But all that really matters is how you repair or work around the problems.  We all have to remember that what we make, be it a gift or something for a client, is all that the end user will ever see.  They'll never know about the struggles you had making it, if you do your job right, they'll just see a beautiful finished product and assume you are a perfect craftsman in your shop doing everything right the first time!

Here's the finished product loaded into my brother-in-law's car for transport.

And here it is set up in its final home.  The stain spot is hidden nicely by his couch.