A Sight for Sore Eyes

There hasn't been a post on this blog for something like 4 months.  Perhaps there's someone out there wondering why.  The answer is that we've been moving.  Between fixing up the old house to sell, and fixing up the new house to move into, there just hasn't been much time for anything else.

As anyone who has moved a shop before will tell you, it is just an absolute disaster.  It's just like moving a house, except if you are moving houses at the same time then everything to do with the shop ends up taking a back seat to getting the house set up.  So the shop just turns into a dumping ground, boxes seem to never get unpacked, you can't start anything because you can't find your hammer or the right box of screws, the whole thing just destroys any initiative to get anything done.  Add to this the heat of an Arkansas summer, and you may never get your shop back going!

But, today I would like to report a success.  I got to the bottom of the pile of stuff on top of and around my workbench!  I am happy to say that tiny slice of the shop, at least, is ready for duty.

And now, here are some shots of the rest of the mess:

We have already spent a fair amount of time putting up shelving to help get stuff off the floor.

 

Believe it or not I moved this sheet of plywood with all the toolhangers and tools intact.

You may recognize this set of under shelf drawers from a LONG time ago.

The tablesaw top is relatively clear, but lots of the other machines are too bunched up to even use.

You can see there are lots of yard tools in here as well.  We don't have any kind of outbuilding to store that sort of stuff in yet, and boy do we need one!

 

I will continue to work through setting up the shop.  Look for a real woodworking article in the next month or so.

Turning

I have been doing a lot of practice turning pieces on my new lathe.  Here are 3 little end-grain bowls I made out of some douglas fir.

 

 I made this small jewelry box out of the same wood.

  

 I also made this bowl out of poplar.  It's not end-grain, but I'm not sure what the terminology for this type of bowl is.  Maybe you would call it a side-grain bowl?

 

I made a few tool holders for the end of my lathe stand.

 

I turned these two little coat-hook type knobs to hang various things on the lathe stand.

 

I have a long ways to go on improving my lathe skills, but I'm enjoying practicing.  Up next I am going to be building a set of cabinets, and I'll be doing some articles on that process.

January: Shop Improvement Month!

For the second year running, I decided to take January as a kind of shop improvement month.  I typically make a lot of Christmas presents, and January is a good time to clean up the shop, integrate new tools, and complete shop tasks that were put off the previous year.  To start, I integrated a couple of new tools (mentioned in the previous post).  An air compressor:

And a lathe, for which I built a stand.  Then I added these tool holders made of pvc and wood:

I used the new lathe to make some file handles that I had needed for quite some time.  I made these out of some scavenged maple from some old broken chairs I got at a yard sale a year or two ago.  These were the turned pieces from the chairs which weren't reusable for much else.

 

I built this little dust collector manifold.  Previously I had a 4" drop in this same location with a "Y" to connect my planer and tablesaw.  This manifold is supplied by an upgraded 6" drop and also includes connections for the tablesaw, planer, and jointer as well as a dust sweep which is the large door facing the camera.

Each connection is controlled by an integrated blast gate.

 

For the blast gates, I made these little wing nuts to lock the doors open or closed.  They consist of a regular hex head bolt with a large wing I made from some scrap steel welded on.

 

I added an outfeed extension and a left hand size extension to my tablesaw.  I have wanted to make an outfeed table extension like this for so long, and just kept putting it off.

 

And lastly, I made a new table for my sanders to sit on.  The old arrangement in this corner of the shop was such a rigged up mess I won't even attempt to describe it here.  This table is based on Matthias Wandel's simple workbench design.  It is a great way to build a table of nearly any size for your workshop, and I highly recommend it.

I had two barrels stored under the sanders in my old setup.  The space under the new table was just a little too narrow, so I replaced the right barrel, which served as a trashcan, with this quickly knocked together plywood trashcan.

 

And last but certainly not least, I upgraded my dust collector.  My brother bought my old 1.5hp model, and I upgraded to this 3hp one.  It's pretty tight space wise, but it has certainly been an upgrade performance wise.

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Christmas!

Most hobby woodworkers make some of their Christmas gifts, and I'm no exception!  Here is what I made this year:

A pair of planters for one grandmother with her last name and street number.

A spoon, a guitar pick holder, and a hamburger patty shaper for my friend Bill.

 

An end grain cutting board for my sister:

A trivet for my Mom, made in the forge:

A wooden beer caddy for my nearly brother in law: 

The wood is really gorgeous on this - home milled from a pear tree.

 I made the two spoons on the left for my lovely wife.  The one on the right, I bought from Peter Follansbee.  I have been a longtime follower of his blog and admirer of his work, and it's really cool that I could buy a spoon from him right over the internet!

And, the Pièce de résistance for the year I think, a little end table for a grandmother.  The main body is just a dovetailed box of cedar.  The "K" is the same cedar just stained, and the stand is steel I forged and welded myself.  She already had the marble piece that sits on top. 

 

 

As for myself, I put my Christmas money towards a sorely needed upgrade in the air compressor department:

 

I also got my late Grandfather's lathe, and I built this stand for it.  I'm really happy with how it turned out so far.

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Mammoth Workbench Project

 

 Justin from JB's Forge approached me last year about a pile of salvaged red oak he had from demolishing an old barn.  He wanted to see if we could build a workbench for him out of this lumber.  We worked out a labour trade - woodworking for blacksmithing and I went to pick up the wood.  It was a solid truckload in my 8 foot bed pickup truck.  I wish I had taken a picture of the truck loaded, but unfortunately I didn't.  The first picture I could find when I set out to write this article was after I had started cleaning up the lumber.  You can see the lumber I have already worked out in front, and the raw stuff in back.

This wood had basically every kind of defect you'd expect in wood from such a situation - termite damage, dry rot, nails, knots, warping, bowing, cupping, and some pretty serious saw marks from whatever mill it was rough sawn on.  I removed nails and cut and planed lumber straight as I went along rather than doing it all in one giant operation to sort of spread the pain.  Once I had enough lumber milled up to make the leg assemblies, I started work on them.  We chose the Paul Sellers workbench design, and the leg assemblies on this are mortise and tenoned H-frames.  The first step was to glue up some stock for the legs.

My little glue roller from Rockler got a lot of use on this project!

Here are all four legs glued up.

Here I am planing the end of one of the legs flush and square.  Lots of people out there will tell you you need a specialized plane for this.  Paul Sellers says otherwise, and he's right.  A sharp, properly set up #4 smoother works great on end grain.

I cut some of the through mortises in the legs old-school style - with a mortise chisel.

 

Test assembling a joint.

On one of the leg assemblies, the top mortises receive a shouldered tenon.  Here is one in progress.  You can see the gradual deepening from where I started the first pass with the chisel to where I ended the pass at the end of the piece.

Here I am cutting off the waste to form the shouldered tenon.

Some of the mortises I cut by drilling out most of the waste at the drill press and then pairing the sides with a chisel.  Here is one after the drilling.

Here is a tenon all marked up for cutting by hand.

I sawed the cheeks to rough size...

and then used the poor man's router plane to take them to final thickness.

The leg frames dry assembled.

 

With those complete, it was back to milling lumber for the top.  I included this picture just to illustrate some of the challenges I encountered with this reclaimed lumber.  You can see I've popped a red chalk line down this piece to show just how far away from straight the edge is.  This is way beyond jointer territory.  I cut this chalk line with a skill saw as a start - you can see the line is nearly an inch from the side at the ends but almost touching the side in the middle.  All this lumber was just too big to safely put on my jointer.  This was more a limitation imposed by the size of my shop than by my jointer, although a fair amount of it would have exceeded the 6 inch capacity of my jointer for face jointing anyway.  So all the lumber is edge jointed with hand planes.

 

All the boards went through the thickness planer to clean up the faces, but I had to face joint many of them by hand in order to have a flat face to reference.

And I pulled SO many nails.  Incidentally some of them were quite large by modern standards - 7/32 in diameter (nearly 1/4") and just under 4 inches long.  For comparison, a modern framing 16p nail is about 3 1/2 inches long and between 5 and 6 32nds in diameter.

Here is the first of the two top panels getting glued up.

You can see in the picture above that the top surface of the panel is relatively smooth and flat, but due to various issues with my milling of the lumber, the bottom of this panel needed some serious flattening.  Luckily it's well above the target thickness!

 

With so much material to remove, I started this in an unconventional manner - I hewed it with hatchets!

Here are the two I used - a Kent pattern on the right and my Bahco carving hatchet on the left.

After both tops were glued up and planed straight and flat, it was time to make the apron boards.  These are made by edge glueing boards rather than face glueing, mainly because the target thickness is much less than the tops.  Here is one being glued up.  I am using 2x4s as cauls here to help keep everything flat.

Here are the aprons waiting to be trimmed to final length.

With the tops and aprons made, the last big glue up was the well board.  By this point I was scraping the bottom of the barrel lumber wise, so I used lots of pieces I trimmed off during earlier milling.

Fast forward a bit, and here is everything but the well board just clamped together for a test assembly.

 

Once the test showed everything was going to go together, I finally glued up the leg assemblies.

And installed the bearer board on top of both assemblies.

I really wanted the tops to have a smooth surface despite all the insect and knot holes in the lumber, so I filled all the holes with epoxy.

Once the epoxy cured I removed the excess with my trusty #4 as well as scrapers.  This worked ok, although not always perfectly, but it sure beat sanding it all!

Here I am finally glueing the tops to the aprons.  It is too cold to do this in the unheated shop this time of year so I had to do it in the living room.

The last step in the construction was to fit the well board.  This is a plane-to-fit, trial-and-error kind of operation.

Two coats of water bourne polyurethane - a mammoth undertaking in itself just due to sheer square footage - and this thing was done!

 

This is obviously not a how-to article.  It would be way too long for this format, not to mention I couldn't hope to do better than the original Paul Seller's video tutorials.  I estimate I probably spent somewhere in the neighbourhood of 100 hours total on this project, but I think the results are just beautiful.  Plus if taken reasonable care of, there is no reason this bench shouldn't outlive me.