23/5/2016

These Witpeer (Apodytes dimidiata) boards had a good 5 weeks to settle after all that hand milling we (yes “we”, we are a team now, I do the work and you get to read about it in the comfort of your own shop/home) did in the first part of April. They were clamped to each other to prevent even a thought of warping. It has therefore become time to glue them together to produce the first of three layers of timber that will ultimately become the trapezoid leg of this table.

In the photos below you can hopefully see my usual artwork on the face side. The boards were arranged with much deliberation on where the cracks and interesting areas of colour change should endup. Once that is done I usually draw a so-called carpenter’s triangle (sometimes referred to as a cabinetmaker’s triangle) across all of the boards to ensure that I can easily get them back in this order after planing individual edges.

I then marked out the location of the dominos I use to line the edges up during glue-up. Dominos are similar to biscuits, just better (as you would expect from Festool). I use the mark illustrated below to indicate where the slots for each domino should go. The ring around the end of the line is there to help distinguish these marks from others. I have found in the past that one can get confused with the lines of the carpenters triangle once the boards gets mixed up.

Here I am preparing the glue surfaces of the edges that go together. The idea is that you fold each board (on either side of the joint) down and away from you, much like you would do with a book were the cover is facing you and you close the book. Then you clamp them together with the two edges flush at the top. This way your error (if you go ever so slightly out of square) would cancel out for a perfectly flat joint once planed. You also want to create a very slight hollow in the length of these edges, which will result in a so-called spring joint. In other words, during assembly the ends of the joint will meet first and very gentle pressure from your clamps will close up the minute gap in the centre of the joint.

As a wannabe exclusive hand tool woodworker (AKA a hybrid woodworker) I have to admit that one power tool I really do enjoy using is my Domino. Why? I am not sure. It might be because it is relatively quiet, fairly accurate and very easy to use. Here I am preparing the small (3 mm) slots for the three dominos I decided on for each of these joints. I prepared only three edges and then glued them up one at a time. PVA glue sets so quickly in our dry environment that I simply cannot risk doing more than one at a time.

The next day the edges of those glued up panels were prepared and glued to each other.

30/5/2016

The day after that the two bigger panels were then prepared and glued. As you can see it necessitated a different strategy to clamp in my bench(for edge preparation), but the bench came to the party.

I honestly cannot remember what one calls this thing that I made to stop the leg vise from twisting (when you clamp on only one side of it), but it works like a charm in situations like this.

For the final glue-up I had to first cut 1″ galvanised pipe to appropriate lengths as all my other clamps were too short. Luckily there were a few left in the stash that came from my father’s shop.

Didi assisted me to make sure this joint ends up flat as (this is a Kiwi expression for those of you who thinks that it is just poor grammer).

30/5/2016

Once the whole panel was glued-up, I used a Festool TS55 track saw to cut out the trapezoid shape.

For the angle of the sides of the trapezoid shape my Stanley no. 18 bevel was simply set to that of the prototype/mockup pictured below.

The panel was then clamped to straight Kershout (Pterocelastrus tricuspidatus) beams to keep it honest, while I mill and shape the timber for the next layer.

The second layer will consist of three strips (top, middle and bottom) of Tasmanian Blackwood that will run at 90º to the grain of the first layer. This second layer will ensure that the trapezoid leg cannot cup or bow over the years. It will also be completely invisible once the third layer is installed. The unmilled Tasmanian Blackwood is on the left of the picture leaning against the wall. The third layer will be milled from the Witpeer board to the right of it, lying on the sawhorses.

The reason why I chose the slightly softer Tasmanian Blackwood for this layer is because it will take a nail better than Witpeer. I plan to nail the third layer to TB layer using brad/finishing nails. You will have to wait a while to see exactly what I mean. Anyway, the Tasmanian Blackwood will be unsighted so it does not matter that it is a different species.

The two TB boards were ripped on the bandsaw and then received a light planing before being clamped to settle over the next week or so.

The Witpeer board was ripped using the track saw and stored to acclimatise to the shop’s ambient humidity.

Hopefully we will be able to deal with the next two layers in part 6. I would love to get that done by the end of June, but if not that is fine too.

11/4/2016

This is the final chapter in the series on building my daughter a bed from mostly reclaimed wood using Japanese joinery.

You can find the previous chapters here (part 1) and here (part 2).

As you might remember we only have the headboard left to do. Aoife’s has been using the actual bed since mid April. The piece of Cape Holly (Ilex mitis) below was deliberately left over after harvesting the straight grained part of the board for the shelve of my  second Roubo bench. I thought it could become an interesting headboard, especially with a bed that embraces Japanese traditions. The second picture below gives you an idea where these beautiful trees tends to grow in the wild.

I made a bow using a strip of Assegaai and string. It enables you to experiment with different curves, which I did.

I ended up with the below shape.

The edges were smoothed off using hand planes.

One of the issues (that I constantly complain of) in using such untamed stock is the amount of twist, bowing and cupping. In this particular case it was mostly twist. As you can imagine it is impossible to plane something like this either by hand or machine without destroying it. Yet it is of utmost importance to create two surface in the same plane where the posts of the headboard can be attached. My solution was this. I marked out two strips parallel to each other of exactly the same width as my Stanley no. 78 rabbet plane. Then removed the bulk of the waste by sawing and chiselling.

The area was then flattened using the no. 78 to allow an accurate reading with my long winding sticks.

As you can see in the second picture below the winding sticks revealed quite obvious twist, which was then removed with the help of the no. 78.

My father was visiting at the time and he had the idea to burn the inside surfaces of the naturally shaped hole in the board to create an attractive colour contrast.

I decided to stabilise the cracks using the famous Nakashima dovetail keys. I used a handsaw to produce these Kershout keys.

As you can see below, the biggest of the keys looked a smidgen clunky so it was trimmed down a wee bit.

After a quick readjustment of my sliding tool trays (you can read all about it here) the stock was secured to my bench’s chopping area by means of two holdfasts and a F-style clamp. This enabled me to fit the keys.

Marking out it’s location.

Removing waste.

Chopping and detailed fitting.

The depth was dialed in using this Stanley no. 271 router plane.

Because it is literally impossible to plane this board I had to resort to a belt sander to create at least a few polished areas.

As you can see in the picture below, a small piece of timber broke away (filled in with epoxy) from the side of the “mortise” as a result of the schizophrenogenic grain direction in this part of the board. Certainly not as a result of inferior skill levels, no. Seriously though, what I did learn from it was that this size of key (5 cm long and about 6 mm at it’s widest) is too small and thus difficult to produce an accurate mortise for in inebriated grain.

A coat of Tung oil and turps brought out the the stunning side of the grain inebriation. The dull areas are those that were left unpolished. I thought these areas would come up much darker as it does with some of the other species I work with. The idea was that it would create more areas of visual interest, but then it only ended up dull. Another lesson for this woodworker.

27/5/2016

That was followed by three coats of Woodoc. The photos below illustrate the attractive (I thought) colour contrast created by the burnt areas.

30/5/2016

For the posts I milled stock from my stash of Scots pine to fit exactly in the dados at the back of the headboard.

The posts were designed with curves to give the headboard an bit of a floating appearance. You can be the judge whether it worked or not.

Aoife kept a close eye on proceedings.

In order to strengthen the area of contorted timber floating inside the irregular hole I added two supports. This looks pretty sloppy although it is admittedly in an area were it should not be seen. However the nature of the grain and fragile connection to the main part of the headboard did not leave me with too many other options. Please let me know it someone has a better idea for future reference.

I assembled the three components in the shop and then took it down to the house to fit to the bed.

Here we go! The first proper piece of furniture for the house from my current shop.

Aoife seemed fairly impressed.

31/3/2016

This past weekend I finally mustered enough courage to take on the Witpeer stock for the trapezoid leg of this table. You might remember the picture below, which is were I got to with these boards some weeks ago. The Witpeer (meaning white pear) is the light coloured wood at the top of the pile.

On Friday afternoon I fed them to my electric planer, just to get rid of some of the nasty stuff. Of course the problem is that the planer does not get rid of any wist, bowing or cupping (length wise any).

They then sat clamped to each other overnight, awaiting the major assault by hand plane the next day.

Like most of these African wild timbers I mess around with, Witpeer is freaking hard. Therefore, if you have a serious amount of work to do like this, it is best to go into battle with razor sharp cutting edges. Now can you imagine anything better to do with your first cup of coffee on a Saturday morning than sharpening a couple of plane blades.

First flattening the water stones.

Then touch up the cutting edges.

Two planes ready to rock.

The first board was not too bad as you can see from the reading on my winding sticks.

The next board unfortunately had at least 5 times more twist, which made me realise that I was a tad optimistic with the two planes I prepared. Clearly I needed to call upon the savage beast that is my shop made scrub plane.

In the pictures below you can see the telltale scalloped appearance left by it’s heavily cambered blade.

The extent of the wist in some of the boards necessitated the use of a wedge to stop it from wobbling all over the bench.

It took the best part of 5 hours of hand planing to work my way through 7 boards on the Saturday morning. By the time I was finished all seven were marked as illustrated in the picture below. The flat (or face) side were marked as usual (bottom in picture) and the opposite side had scribble all over it to help identify when it is completely flat during the process of lazy planing (aka planing with an electric planer).

Once the lazy planer did it’s damage, the boards looked like this. As you can see, the Witpeer has quite a few areas of visual interest. The cracks will eventually receive Nakashimaesque butterfly keys.

Just to remind you of were this stock fit into the project I include two pictures of the prototype model. The stock that I am preparing will form one of three layers of timber that will ultimately make up the big solid trapezoid leg. The leg will have an overall thickness of 44 mm (therefore exactly double the thickness of the top of this table) of which this layer will make up 20 mm. It will be the timber you see when looking at the table from the end seen in the second picture.

At this stage I had to quickly work out the exact measurements of the trapezoid leg using the prototype as my guide. It came to these numbers (in mm of course).

Once I knew what to aim for I straightened one edge of each board by hand planing and used that as a reference surface to rip the other edge with the help of the table saw.

After nearly two days I ended up with boards looking like this. This means that I am now just about at the stage were most woodworkers start their project. In other words with straight, square and wind free timber. The only difference is that apart from well prepared stock, I received some blisters and muscles on the house.

 

31/3/2016

Part one in this thrilling series can be found here.

The rabbet/rebate where the slats will be fastened to the long rails were cut on the table saw and cleaned up using my no. 78 Stanley rabbet plane. As you can probably deduct, I found this particular plane in a dilapidated state without a lever cap and lots of surface rust. It therefore received a complete rehab, which included the challenge of producing a custom lever cap fashioned out of brass (ala Lie-Nielsen) and a idiosyncratic lever cap screw. You can read the whole story here.

Bed parts resting to fight another day.

The future owner helped me to assemble the bed for the first time and it fitted together like a charm, first up.

She clearly did not realise that we need to add a few more essential parts.

Checking whether I have enough slats, before processing them further. As I mentioned before, this is Tasmanian Blackwood (born and raised in Africa) that was reclaimed from crates my father built several years ago to transport all his tools to me. Therefore it is clearly not the pristine stuff you would use for other parts, but will be doing the dirty work while hiding under a mattress anyway.

I pulled out my shop made Jack plane (with it’s blade bedded at 50º) to square the slat stock up. The 50º bedding angle made planing the TB much easier as it tends to have schizophrenogenic grain direction.

The Scots pine received a treatment of turps mixed with tung oil, followed by two coats of shellac, followed by three coats of Woodoc 5. The photos below were taken at some stage during the finishing process.

Didi and Aoife helped to rub the surfaces down with 0000 steel wool between each coat.

12/4/2016

I bought a 1969 MGB in Cape Town during the Easter weekend. It necessitated my father to help drive the other vehicle back to Windhoek as my wife ran the 56 km Two Oceans Ultra-marathon the day before we headed back. That pretty much took her out of the equation as a driver. We completed the 1600 km drive over two days as I did not want to push this grand old Lady too hard.

Anyway, that meant that my father who got me interested in woodworking in the first place, had his first visit to my shop. Quite a few of the tools I am still using on a weekly basis used to serve him over many years in his shop. It was a wonderful privilege to work with him in my shop and show him what I have been up to over the past few years.

Here we are drilling the pilot holes for the screws to fasten the slats into position in the rabbet mentioned earlier. We decided to drill the pilot holes at approximately 60º to ensure that the screws would pull the slat into the corner of the rabbet, while at the same time holding it down. I am not sure whether that is explained well, but it is the best I can do with my English.

Wax on, wax off. One day the student becomes the master.

Ready to screw the slats into place. If you have 12 slats you need 11 gaps between them. Therefore one way to work out what the size of the gap should be is to slide the slats to one side and divide the remaining space into 11 using your dividers. Once you know the size of the gap it is easy to cut two scrap blocks of wood to that measurement to use as spacers while screwing the slats into place.

In the picture below you can see the two custom made spacers in action. I am working from left to right in the picture. The toolset for this particular job included a Millers Falls no. 2  hand drill (ca1938), Stanley Yankee no. 131 spiral ratchet screwdriver, some oil to lubricate the classic type wood screws, and the screws of course.

One more coat of Woodoc by the Master himself and Bob Demers’ your Uncle.

We will look at he process of making the headboard in the next instalment. Just to tickle your fancy, this is the piece of timber I chose for the headboard. It is a piece of Without (aka Cape Holly or Ilex mitis). The Afrikaans name is spelt the same as the English word without (obviously), but actually means white (wit) wood (hout).