7/3/2016

As you can well imagine, the whole ordeal with our daughter forced us to reassess a few things. One of the less significant byproducts of this process was that I moved her bed to the top of my to-do list. We bought a typical crappy yet expensive (for what you are getting) pine bed for her room when we moved into the house in 2011. It came apart all by itself within two years due to the extremely poor construction and workmanship. It has now been propped up against the wall for months to stop it from collapsing.

I decided on a fairly common Japanese style of construction, which does not necessitated any glue-ups and processed some more of my pile of Scots Pine (Pinus sylvestrus) for the project. The beam that was destined for the side rails was so huge I had to ask my gardener Adam to help me rip it into two pieces on the bandsaw.

Here I am squaring up two sides (face side and face edge) by hand before doing the opposing sides with the help of electrons.

My version of a crochet in action.

In the picture below you can see my sliding-deadman-cum-leg-vise showing off it’s versatility. For heavy and thick beams like this it works well to have the beam sit on a dog (as pictured) while the leg vise jaw secures it up against the side of the bench.

As usual, my shop made scrub plane made short work of removing heaps of material.

Here you can see the aggressive camber on it’s Lie-Nielsen blade.

I did the fine tuning with a circa 1896 type 8 no. 8 Stanley jointer plane (not pictured).

Rail stock prepared and awaiting the next assault on it’s integrity.

In the meantime I dug out some Tasmanian Blackwood that my father used to build crates to transport all his tools to my current shop 5 years ago. I really like using and reusing wood like this. It adds value to the story of the piece of furniture. In fact, every bit of timber in this bed used to be something else in a previous life. The Scots pine comes from a crate that was used to transport a massive machine from Germany to Namibia.

The Tasmanian Blackwood were processed to become the slats of the bed.

Cutting the Scots pine for the legs.

Just have a look at how perfect it came out of this legendary Landgon Miller’s Falls no. 75 ACME Mitre saw box.

Squaring up the leg stock by hand planing.

I did the measuring out of the tenon locations by using the actual pieces as they were destined to fit together. As you can see that all transpired on my shop made assembly table.

The Langdon mitre box also came in very handy to cut the shoulders of the tenons. You can see the stop on the arms that allow one to set the exact depth of cut. The cheeks were cut on the band saw.

I usually employ my Stanley no. 10 rabbet plane to plane the cheeks down to the exact measurements.

The slots for the tenons in the top of the legs had to be as close to perfect as possible as it is very difficult to remove material after the sawing is done. Therefore I took to it with my Bad Axe Roubo Beast Master. You will notice the three short cuts in the waste which I made to warm up. Completing this many monster cuts by hand certainly saves on Gym membership.

The waste was removed with my shop made bow saw followed by chiseling.

Legs being cut to final length.

Next up, the fitting of the massive tenons into their respective slots.

Once both tenons for each leg fitted perfectly, I used a shop made marking knife to mark out the exact location for the two slots where the tenons hook into each other.

The picture below should give you an idea of what the tenons look like in the end. They hook into each other inside the slots at the top of the legs. This is a surprisingly sturdy joint, even in the absence of any adhesive. The absence of adhesives allow the wood to move freely during changes in ambient humidity and it is also easy to take apart in future to collapse the bed for easier transport.

26/10/2015

Way back at the end of October last year, I started planing the Kershout for this table. As you can see from this picture, I had first class help in the form of my wife. She helped me to feed the boards to the planer as they are far too big and heavy to manage by myself. She did all of this while sporting some or other tinfoil-toe-treatment-thingy. Heaven knows whether it is for cosmetic or functional purposes. She is training for the world famous Two Oceans Ultra Marathon (56 km) so it might be something to do with that (I do not want to know), or simply a type of African pedicure??

Anyway, the Kershout were planed bit by bit over a 4 month period. This ensures that it has enough time to settle between planing sessions, which usually results in less warping.

7/3/2016

The timber mill day.

On Saturday I took to the Witpeer for this project with a vengeance. It has been sitting in the shop to acclimatise for about 5 months now. Given the amount of processing to do, I asked my gardener (this is Africa aka TIA) Adam to help. We identified and marked out the pieces for the trapezoid shaped leg, which was first cut into shorter pieces using my Disston no. 12 crosscut handsaw

From left to right: The shorter pieces for the trapezoid leg, four long strips for the beam at the bottom of the table, with a bit more trapezoid leg pieces sitting on top of it, and the Kershout pieces for the top which received its final planing pre glue-up.

Trapezoid leg pieces.

I usually try to clamp the pieces as shown below after each of the planing/cutting steps. With each of these steps you release tension, which tends to make these feral boards move like Michael Jackson.

Now I often refer to the timber as being feral and I do not think most people realise exactly what I mean. Here are a few pictures to illustrate what I mean. For every bit of stock I want to use I usually have to laminate carefully chosen bits of timber together. In order to make up the necessary dimensions of the beam for this table I had to liberate four strips of Witpeer from wild boards such as the one pictured. You can appreciate the cracks, changes in grain direction, and changes in colour.

Therefore I have to whittle out relatively defect free timber to laminate into stock of larger dimensions. This takes a lot of time and effort as you can imagine. All this happens prior to being able to start really shaping pieces of furniture, hence my very pedestrian progress most of the time.

Here I am hand planing a straight edge on one of the pieces to use as a reference surface for the table saw to cut the opposite edge parallel to the aforementioned. This wood is so hard that you really do need power tools for same of the steps.

Resting in clamps overnight.

The next day saw the strips being prepared a bit more with a final planing and sanding to create the best possible glue surface. Then the glue-up.

Now we have a piece of timber of appropriate dimensions to start shaping into a beam for the table.

I removed the excess dried glue with my shop made flush plane.

On wards and upwards, they say.

8/2/2016

Previous posts in this series can be found here and here.

Seeing that this table will be one of the major projects for the year and the first significant piece of furniture to emerge from my current shop, I decided to first build a prototype. I have never done this before, but can already see that it is a vital step in the right direction. Just to remind you of the background, this is a table for friends of ours the Burmeister-Nel family. I am building the table as payment for a whole stack of excellent Scott’s Pine beams.

The design of this table has evolved significantly over the past 7 months. So far the evolution took place in the realm of my personal cerebral SketchUp. The prototype is the first tangible manifestation of the mentioned neurophysiological exercise. At this stage it is primarily inspired by George Nakashima and Japanese joinery ideas. The feral nature of the African hard woods we chose for this project really lends itself to the Nakashima design ideology.

A second prominent influence in this design effort would be the ideas and techniques used by pre-industrialisation artisans as explored by George R. Walker and Jim Tolpin in their seminal work “By Hand & Eye”. I tried to use those techniques to strike the sweet spot in terms of proportion between various parts and their relation to one another. What I found was that working with simple whole number ratios makes it very easy to shrink and expand the design for the purpose of the prototype.

The starting point was the size of the top, which ended up being a 1:2 rectangle. The hight of the table that worked well was 2/3 of the width, which meant that the whole piece would fit in a 2:3:6 cuboid.

Here you can see my initial sketches to work out appropriate proportions. The side view were divided into 5 equal parts and I placed the leg structures on a 1:3:1  rhythm. The angle of the leg structures were also derived using a similar approach.

I used some of the mentioned Scott’s Pine to build the prototype as it is easy to work with.

15/2/2016

I made the effort to plane down the top to the exact thickness relative to the size of the model.

The solid trapezoid shaped leg piece is twice as thick as the top and all the other parts are related to the thickness of the top.

The heavy beam at the bottom that connects the leg pieces will be attached to the trapezoid shaped piece with a through tenon, which will receive a wedge similar to the one pictured.

The opposite leg piece will consist of four spindles ascending at the same angle as the sides of the trapezoid piece. These are not the correct size as it was impossible to produced such small spindles, so the wire had to do. The actual spindles will be slightly thicker and have the bamboo type appearance similar to spindles used in some Windsor chairs.

Here are a couple of photos illustrating the type of design I have in mind for the spindles. I refer to the spindles in the back of the Windsor chair rather than the legs. I add these pictures in response to Stefan’s valid feedback.

I would like to invite everyone to give input on the design. Please feel free to rip into it, if I feel too aggrieved by the criticism I can simply ignore it. Hopefully though we can fine tune it to be better. At this stage I am fairly happy with it, but am quite sure it can be improved a bit.