6/8/2018

Finally we have chomped our way through the formalities to arrive at the Crème brûlée of the project.

Whoa! I feel good, I knew that I would, now
I feel good, I knew that I would, now
So good, so good, I got you

Anyway let’s get back to the woodworking James Brown. The long board shaped top had the odd defect that was filled it with a mixture of beeswax and Carnauba wax. I heaped some of the wax on top of the said defects and then carefully torched it with a flame.

Once the wax was melted into the defect I removed the excess with a small block of wood used in the same manner as a scraper. I find that there is a sweet spot when it is best to remove the excess. If you wait too long the the wax is too hard and tends to rip bits out that should have stayed intact. If you jump in too early the wax in the defect continues to shrink and you end up with a slightly hollow spot.

For some unknown reason I convinced myself to rely on 21st century technology to drill out the angled holes for the leg tenons. Yes I know, I should have known better.

The first step was to drill a small pilot hole at the correct angle.

That was then followed by an attempt to drill out the rest using this absolute waste of a piece of cheap metal. Half way through my first attempt the so called bit got warped like a soft serve ice cream. On the upside it was just another reminder that I should simply stick to my old hand tools made before the Great War. Since then quality has really left the house, so to speak.

A 14″ brace paired with an appropriately sized Irwin bit made short work of what seemed like an impossible task to humanity’s more recent attempts at tool manufacturing.

Before proceeding to ream out the mortises for the legs, I had to turn a ‘testing stick’, by lack of a better term. It is a very useful aid to test that you are in fact proceeding at the correct angle while reaming. In order to finish the testing stick, I had to fashion the tenon cutter for this particular job. Both these shop made paraphernalia can be seen in the pictures below.

The testing stick in action. You simply stick the stick (mmmm?) in your partially reamed hole and check it with a bevel set to the desired angle. My shop made reamer can be seen resting next to the stick.

Just to contradict myself thoroughly, I have to mention that I might consider the Veritas metal reamer for future mortises of this size. My shop made version struggled with the load created by the large diameter and extreme hardness of the Witpeer. Veritas has a reamer bit that fits on a hand brace, which should make this exercise easier and possibly improve the tolerance of the mortise.

Once the mortises were done, I had to finish shaping the legs. I would say that the biggest surprise of the entire project was how much effort it takes to shape legs like this by hand. It took weeks of hand planing to shape the tapering octagonal design. Having said that, now that it is finished it was all worth while as the end product is absolutely spot on.

The tenons were turned to a smidgen larger than needed.

They were then taken to exact dimensions by feeding it to the tenon cutter.

First leg in it’s mortise. You might be able to discern my makeshift plumb bob testing whether my angle calculations were in fact on the money, in terms of where the leg ends up relative to the edge of the table. Turns out that by some stroke of good fortune, my geometry skills are still with me. That is for the moment anyway.

The tenons were taped off before applying oil followed by shellac.

Speaking of shellac, Mr Miyagi returned for a Karate Kid sequel to finish off the top with said substance.

This time round however I did not waste time by trying to find commercial products to add a protective layer over the secretions of the female Kerria lacca bug. No, I made my own furniture wax while applying the principles of the 1516 Bavarian Reinheitsgebot. In other words, only four ingredients all completely natural. No unknown chemical, to cut corners and ultimately cheapen the quality. The ingredients are as follows: Beeswax (from South Africa), Carnauba wax (from Brazil via Germany), Coconut oil (from Indonesia), Olive oil (from Greece). No more, no less.

In the pictures you can see how my double boiler setup on top of a fairly nasty South African made Primus stove were used to melt the components together. This particular stove is a sorry wannabe compared to the legendary brass models built in Sweden prior to the involvement of pelf peckish corporate halfwits who managed to kill another icon of nobility. Despite that, it is still better than anything you can buy new 40 years later. Sad isn’t it?

My concoction prior to setting. It smells superb …

… and functions even better. After application I left it for a few hours and then buffed off the excess. You will have to wait for the final pictures to see what that looks like.

The legs ended up seating exceptionally well in their respective mortises. I do find it particularly stressful to smash them home with my heavy dead blow mallet, but luckily nothing untoward happened. The mortises were all flared out on the exit side to allow for the introduction of two wedges each. These ensure that the joinery has both mechanical and glue strength.

I also made a special ‘screw-set’ formula using natural waxes and Ballistol mineral oil. It works really well on these old school wood screws in hard wood. It helps to make it easier to set the screw and protects against corrosion for many years to come.

With the table assembled it was time for a photo with these two scalawags.

Marking out the final length of the legs and angle to cut.

We moved it to the kitchen in two piece and reattached the top there.

There you go James Brown.

The table quickly become known as “The Long Board” in the Marx household. I hope you enjoyed this gastronomic woodworking journey. Stay tuned for our next project which will be a Japanese style bed.

8/7/2018

Here we go with the second of the mains on our bistro menu. In the previous post we looked at the final glue-ups of the top. We will now confront that virago of a task aka flattening the top by hand.

This (as you know) is the second time that I will attempt doing it. At least the Witpeer is quite a bit softer than the Kershout of the previous top, but does not even approach soft.

The curves at the ends were cut with what is most probably my least favourite tool of all time, a nasty Black & Decker jig saw. To call it rubbish would be a insult to the word rubbish. Anyway, it got the job done in a B&D type of way, which left a lot of work to smooth out the curve with hand tools. I used an Auriou rasp, Lie-Nielsen small block plane, and sanding planes of different grit to improve the curve.

The protruding Kershout strips curving around the sides were planed flush using my shop made Jack plane.

I then did a very basic cleanup of the bottom of the top. I used my Lie-Nielsen low angle Jack plane with a toothed blade. The cleanup was only aimed at getting the bottom side to sit flat on the torsion box.

Due to the very delicate thickness of the top, I wanted to first fix it to the torsion box before flattening the face side. The other challenge presented by the thin top was how to fix it to the torsion box without drilling the pilot holes all the way through. I decided to glue blocks of wood to the bottom of the top in all the appropriate spots. These blocks were seated with screws that only just enter the surface to hold down the block for the glue to set.

The setup below ensure that the middle of the top is fixed to the middle of the torsion box. The top can expand towards the sides, but remains fixed in the middle.

Here you can see how the blocks assisted to fix the top to the torsion box.

At this stage I could start the process of flattening the face side. Once again the low angle Jack plane did the bulk of the work.

Seeing that it is such a arduous task I alternated between flattening the top and tapering the octagonal shape of the four legs. In the pictures below you can see how I marked out the thin end of each leg.

The leg sits in a groove created by opening my twin screw vice to the desired amount. The strips of wood on the bench help me to do the tapering in a consistent fashion.

After about half a day’s planing.

One day’s planing.

One and a half day’s planing.

Finished after about two day’s planing.

Of course ‘finish’ means flat only, nothing else. Now we have to remove the diamond shaped patterns created by the toothed blade. For this task I used my Lie-Nielsen no.112 scraping plane and my shop made smoothing plane with an effective pitch of 70º.

Once most of the diamond shaped patterns were dealt with, I continued with an orbital sander and sanding planes. I worked through progressively finer grit sandpaper from 120 to 400. First the orbital sander followed by the sanding plane (with the same grit but worked in the same direction as the grain) before moving to the next grit.

I stuffed around a bit with this photo to try and express what it feels like to do this work. It is hard work that asks a lot of patience as any shortcut will lead to inferior results.

One last photo before the tung oil gets applied. I pressed on with the preparation of the face side so that oil has a good few weeks to polymerize while I take a break from the shop. Once we get back from our break it will be ready for shellac.

The tung oil brought it all alive. After all that work it is always a good feeling when the beautiful feral grain comes to the party.

Next time round we will finish off the legs and join them to the torsion box by means of Windsor style joints.

11/6/2018

You might wonder why such a heavy French title for this series of posts. Well the Reuleaux Table part were explained in the previous and first post. The second part referring to different courses is a way to avoid the boring part one, part two etcetera. Or so I thought, until I realised that it is quite apt seeing that this is a table destined to serve in the kitchen of a family that loves exploring the vastness of French cuisine.

Anyway, at this stage our table is coming along splendidly despite several novel challenges. In this here post we will look at the assembly (and glue-up) of the torsion box and the top.

Let’s start with the cardinal structure that will hopefully allow me to construct a very delicate looking table with surprising strength. I am of course referring to the torsion box. In the pictures below you can see how it was dry fitted to make sure it goes together without hiccups.

While assembled I took the opportunity to plane the surfaces that will mate with the bottom of the top completely flat and flush.

Once the torsion box were dismantled again, Didi used the Festool Domino to cut slots that will allow us to attach the top to the torsion box.

The heavy beams that will accept the legs were cut to final length prior to the final assembly and glue-up.

Seeing that this is a fairly complex assembly with 28 wedges to be secured, I decided to use slow set epoxy. The product I use has a open time of one hour, which helps to keep the nerves at bay.

I do not have clamps that are long enough to put pressure on the box lengthwise, so I came up with the below solution. One end of the box pressed up against two dogs and the opposite end were pulled in by two clamps hooking over two more dogs on the inside of the assembly.

As you can see here, the epoxy were only applied where long grain surfaces meet. Thus no epoxy on the outside of the wedges that sits up against end grain.

The protruding through tendons and wedges were removed with a flush saw, followed by hand planing.

Now let’s move on to the top. As I mentioned in the previous post, the top were partly assembled about one year ago. Since then these two halves were chilling in the shop while I finished my previous project. Seeing that the top is quite long given it’s width as well as the particular shape I chose, it sort of made me think of a long (surf) board. That made me think that I could use fairly minimalistic decorative lines to enhance the long board idea. Speaking of minimalistic, it occurred to me that this table (although not consciously intended) would not look out of place in an exhibition of Danish Modern furniture. I find this interesting because that was not my idea when setting out to design the table, but it is without a doubt my favourite style of furniture. Could it be that you end up designing stuff subconsciously in the style you favour? What do you think?

The picture below illustrate a fairly classic long board design.

With the above design consideration in mind I thought that two Kershout lines running down the middle of the top would be a good start. I therefore glued up two such strips to a slightly wider Witpeer strip. As you can see, the one half of the top came in handly to ensure that the end result came out perfectly straight. I taped up the edge of the top to prevent the decorative strips from accidentally sticking to it.

A quick test to see how it will look once the top gets joined.

Preparing the edges for the final major jointing.

I prepared the decorative strip so that it is slightly thicker than the rest of the top. When it came to making the Domino slots I set it up so that it would keep the bottom of the strip flush with the bottom of the top, which ensured that the strip would stand proud on the face side of the top. That helps to minimize the effort when planing the face side flat.

Here you can already see how we are chipping towards the long board look.

The next step was to mark out the curves. I really like doing this type of thing. Curves are so much more fun than the square stuff and it also brings hand tools into it’s own. The idea that I should aim to build furniture that is difficult to impossible to be built in a factory has slowly dawned on me over the past few years. There is really no point in spending this much time and effort building stuff that you can buy for next to nothing at an IKEA type store. If you make the effort to build furniture by hand you are better off designing and building it in such a way that would set it apart from that type of drägg.

As you can see it is a very gentle curve along the side. I used a strip of witpeer bent and held in place with clamps to draw the curve.

The curve at each end of the top is more pronounced, but still quite suave.

Didi helped to cut the first of the curved edges.

The top then went to the bench where I smoothed out the curve with Lie-Nielsen’s small block plane. This is exactly the type of design feature that machines struggle to deal with. Also by fashioning the curve in this manner it creates just the right amount of imperfection to tick all those organic buttons. It can never be copied by a machine.

In order to mark out the location of dominos to ensure that the strips glued to the side is flush with the bottom of the top, I clamped them to the curve as so. You will notice that the off-cut comes in handy to bend the strip onto the curved edge.

Cutting the Domino slots in a thin strip of Kershout is near impossible so I first clamped it up against another wider piece of Witpeer.

The curved off-cut was also prepared in terms of smoothening out the surface, but in this first glue-up I realised too late that I omitted to cover it with duct tape. Luckily no glue ended up in the wrong place so it worked out OK.

Here you can see how the Kershout and Witpeer strips stand proud of the face side of the top.

The next day I followed the same process with the opposite edge. You will notice that I remembered to cover the off-cut with duct tape this time round.

We will indulge in the plat principal numéro deux next. Hopefully that will take us all the way up to the désert aka the finishing of the piece.

25/5/2017

You might say, just not another table project that will drag on for three years. That would be very understandable given my most recent project that necessitated 14 posts. You will therefore be happy to hear that this project is currently almost at the halfway mark and this is the first post. The date above was when I loaded the first set of pictures. At this point it is probably also pertinent to warn the suffragettes amongst us that this post might contain sensitive material.

The Marx family needs a kitchen table able (rather like that two-step) to withstand the eternal destructive forces directed towards every wretched object in our household. The destructive forces are also known as our “offspring” or more specifically Didi and Aoife. To be fair, no piece of furniture including my Roubo workbench will last indefinitely under their perpetual onslaught, but I do not want to have to repeat the exercise within 12 months. To add to the complexity of the brief, I wanted to build something that has a (wait for it …) certain je ne sais quoi.

I rather liked the sort of pagan simplicity of a table design advanced in The Anarchist’s Design Book. Herr Schwarz describes a table that has two thick beams (running diagonally with regards to the grain of the top) under the top into which Windsor-style legs are savagely inserted. This, I am sure, will work exceptionally well if you have a top of reasonable thickness as there are no aprons in his design if I remember correctly. Seeing that I wanted something that would appear more diaphanous, I had to develop the design a wee bit. The other challenge with the peasant design (meant as a compliment rather than derogatory) in Herr Schwarz’ book lie in the lack of inherent stability of my preferred feral African hardwood . Some of the boards I work with will make a late luteal phase female look stable (listen, I warned you, OK!)

The panacea for the stated conundrum seemed quite obvious to me. I needed to incorporate two heavy(ish) beams into a torsion box that would support a light top adequately and resist all other forces such as twist, warping, etcetera. The idea is that the brute strength of the torsion box will be almost invisible to the casual observer while being well hidden underneath the top. All that is supposed to meet the eye is a thin floaty top with four understated yet sophisticated legs protruding (at a barely discernible angle) from it’s belly.

In order to test my ideas on shape and size, I built a very basic model. In terms of proportions, the top is 900 x 2100 mm which makes it a 3:7 ratio. This was dictated somewhat by the space the table is destined for. Seeing that the height is around 770 mm it means that the height is about 1/3 of the length, which seemed like a good ratio. I then added very slight curves to all four sides.

I cannot, for the life of me, find a proper name for this shape. It is basically a rectangle with four convexly curved sides and sharp corners. I will therefore call it a ‘reuleaux rectangle’ (simply because of the enticing alliteration of course), although that is certainly not a formally recognized term. Be that as it may, it is one of the most pleasing shapes in the eye of this humble observer. You might recall a chopping board I have built with the same basic shape.

The lines on the top represent my experiments to find the best rake and splay angles for the legs.

I decided to build the table using Witpeer predominantly and Kershout in very limited amounts to add accent to cardinal curves only.

The legs will have a very slightly tampering (from top to bottom) octagonal shape. The shaping was done by hand planing, in the first place with my shop made scrub plane followed by a no. 606 Bedrock Fore plane. The stock for these legs were made up of two laminated strips of Witpeer. In order to hide the lamination, I marked out the octagon in such a way that the lamination lines run exactly on two of the edges.

19/6/2017 (second set of pictures loaded)

At present (5/2018) the top is in two pieces of the below size …

… and three of the legs are roughly shaped.

I used Tasmanian Blackwood (intruding pest as it is in this part of the world) for that part of the torsion box that will be completely unsighted and Witpeer for the rest. It might sound as if I do not like Tasmanian Black (TB after this), but to the contrary I have a lot of respect for it. My African hardwoods are obviously close to my heart, but the TB did grow on this continent so it is very much local.

Come to think of it, it is very much like my distant German relatives from pre-1710 and I. Not that your average populist majority politician in this part of the world has the intellectual capacity to get this.

Anyway although I find the TB rather difficult to work with (the former being another similarity to my ancestors and I) it has a tenacity second to none. It reminds me of an Australian sports team, although it does not tend to tamper with the ball quite as much (sorry just had to through that in there). The only problem is that I do not have the top end stuff, but rather crappy warped light coloured boards for the most past. The top end stuff can be absolutely spectacular, but mine not so much. Hence why I use it for the unsighted structural parts.

In the picture below you can appreciate one such board. Once you liberate appropriately sized chunks it tends to move, twist, warp etcetera all over the place. I then re-saw these, flip one of the two pieces and laminate them back together so that the apposing forces cancel each other out.

Here I used a Witpeer beam from another project to ensure that the two aprons gets glued absolutely straight. I added a thinner strip of TB to the inside of each apron for strength.

21/5/2018

My torsion box will have two heavy beams at it’s ends. These beams will accept the legs as joined in the same fashion as Windsor chair legs. They are clamp together in the pictures below to mark out the joinery.

Torsion box has four components running longitudinally and five (including the two heavy beams) running diagonal to the aforementioned. The longitudinal components are joined to the beams with through tenons, which will be wedged. The shoulders sit in a rabbet (pictured) to prevent twisting.

This is what the longitudinal components look like. The outside pair (left one in the picture below) is slightly heavier and has a Witpeer face side. The inside (right) pair is made up completely of TB.

Here you can see how the tenons extend through the Witpeer beam and how their shoulders are located in the respective rabbets.

In these two pictures you can hopefully appreciate another cardinal aspect of the way I designed the joinery. Seeing that the legs will be joined to the heavy beams by means of a tapering round tenon fitted in a round mortise reamed to the same angle of taper, it is likely to exert force that might split the beam. A leg mortise will be located between the 1st and the 2nd through tenon on the near side and the 3rd and 4th on the far side. The two wedged through tenons on each side of the leg joinery should (to my mind at least) go a long way towards resisting a potential split.

Next up are the diagonal members of the torsion box. They are joined in exactly the same wedged through tenon fashion to the outside (apron) longitudinal components. Where they cross the two inside components I prepared a type of half lap bridal joint aided by two rabbits to resist twisting.

Chopping out the mortises in the apron components.

This is where we are at for now. Two of the three cross members fitted with one more to be done between them. The two in the picture slide in from the top and the one to follow will slide in from the bottom, which creates a nice mechanical lock once the aprons slide in to place.

I hope you enjoyed the entrée that took us half way through the meal.

24/4/2018

I am sure that every JNSQ reader must be bored mindless by  now with this tedious series of posts. There is good news for the mentioned brethren though. This is the final nail in your metaphorical coffin.

Speaking of coffins, I almost led the way in ‘taking the ferry’ recently. As you might well know, we progressed to a fairly advanced stage in finishing the top. There were only 2 steps left i.e. laying down a couple of layers of varnish followed by some or other protective wax layer. A walk in the park you would think, hey.

Enter the first product bought in Namibia for this particular project. Yes, yes, I should have known better. Please do not judge me for my naïveté in expecting that something as basic as varnish and the snake oil merchants pushing it, can be trusted. Massive mistake non the less!! (and almost became my oneway ferry ticket).

Actually, one of these merchants really tried to be useful, but I guess it is simply beyond what is possible in the Third World. The so called experts recommended a particular type of varnish, that even the uber-expert in Cape Town (who were phoned for cutting edge advice) confirmed to be the bee’s knees on top of shellac. To cut a long story short, it was a kak recommendation.

The picture below reminds of where we were before I indulged the fallacy that a local product will do as it claims.

This is a picture of the product in question. My guess is that it possibly arrived here several centuries prior to the dinosaur. It is probably a well matured (by now) amoeboid excrement of some description.

One coat of the amoeboid excrement and the top looked like this!! The patchy appearance is due to some of my early efforts to remove the scheiße.

The whole top looked like this after one coat. The varnish basically did not set, it simply formed a soft opaque layer.  What to do …, what to do??

E-mail Don Williams. That is what you do. Being from a civilized part of the world though, he could not work out why this happened, but advise me to try and remove the layer with acetone. Thank you Don, you are a legend.

Another 4 hours of elbow grease and I got most of the stuff off. It necessitated some vigorous scrubbing with an acetone drenched piece of 0000 steel wool.

I then ( neologism warning!!) Mr. Miyagi’ed on another 5 coats of shellac and rubbed the surface down with 0000 steel wool afterwards.

I simply did not have enough balls (so to speak) to try another amoeboid excrement, so decided to rather apply a few layers of wax. Unfortunately, it was also a product I bought locally, but it seemed to work okay. The pictures below show the result.

PS – If anyone out there can point me towards a supplier that sell solid carnauba wax (and ship internationally) I would really appreciate it. I would rather make my own concoctions with the help of Don Williams’ recipes.

As I have mentioned some time ago, I wanted to use a novel system (to me anyway as I have not come across it) to attach the under carriage to the top. The objectives of my system are to allow for wood movement (surprise surprise) and to be easily adjustable in terms of avoiding natural defects such as cracks in the top. It is important to have such a system when working in the Nakashima style where aesthetically pleasing imperfections tend to always end up in locations where they are not particularly helpful from a joinery perspective.  Seeing that 99% of the wood in my collection is of a Nakashimian (if you like) persuasion, I pretty much need a longterm solution.  With this in mind I made ten pairs of the blocks pictured below.

I then found suitable strips of Assegaai (Curtisia dendata) to produce shop made dowels with my no. 77 Stanley dowel maker. Assegaai lends itself perfectly to this job given it’s characteristics of being fine grained, flexible, and stable. My son and I took turns to yank (yes that is yank not …) the lever while the other (individual) guided the blank. It is very difficult to do both these tasks at the same time in dense hardwood such as Assegaai.

Here you can see the first dowel, the Assegaai excrement (never thought I would get the opportunity to use the E-word so often in a single post) emanating from the dowel machine, and some of the pairs of Kershout blocks.

While all that was going  on, the other major parts (of the table) received a few coats of shellac. I cannot tell you how much I enjoy working with shellac. It is absolute magic. I will never ever use anything else. Especially not commercial junk (thought of throwing the E-word in there but you might be getting tired of it by now) made by big companies.

The next step was to drill the holes for the dowels in the aprons.

One of my all time favourite tool companies is L. & I.J. White Co (Buffalo, N.Y.), even though I do not own a single tool with that name on it. I do however have an electronic version of their 1909 catalogue (and an imagination) and that is enough (for now). It helps having an imagination (and a tool catalogue) when you do not have certain things you would like to have. You learn this particular skill on the wrong side of town while growing up.

Anyway when I though of what to put on the copper plate in order to identify the artisan who made the table and date it, I came up with “G. & J.G. Marx 2016-2018”. It is the initials of my late father and I. The dates (I realised too late) should have read 2015-2018, but that is not a major drama. Even though my father never worked on this table, I would never have been able to produce anything close to this if it was not for what he taught me.

I prepared the lion’s share of the joinery of this table during the driest season on the ambient humidity calendar and took great care to ensure that the joints fit quite snug. The reason being that all of the cardinal joints will not be glued. Sort of in the Japanese tradition, I guess. Only problem is, on the 20th of April when the undercarriage were to be assembled it was not the driest time of year.

In fact the ambient humidity was sitting at around 50% for two weeks prior to assembly, whereas the joinery was done at around 20%. What to do …, what to do …. It was not an option to refit the joinery as that would lead to a sloppy fit during the dry season, so I applied wax to the mating surfaces of the joints and reached for the heavy dead blow mallet. I have to admit that it caused one hell of a lot of anxiety.

Imagine pounding away at parts of a project that took you 3 years to complete and as luck would have it, the bridal joints at the top of the Windsor leg resisted matrimonial union the most. Beating the proverbial snot out of the joints with a 1kg shop made dead blow mallet on top of those delicate Kershout spindles felt like sparring with Liv Tyler. Actually, I might be more partial to the latter, but that might represent  an unfortunate deviation from the topic at hand. What I realized though, was that those spindles acting in unison are tremendously robust. After all the violence the undercarriage was assembled without any major disasters. I had no intention of dismantling it (which was the original plan) for the move to it’s new home the next day, even if that meant that the new owners had to demolish half their house to get it in there.

This reminds me of Koos Kombuis who once said “After the riot, peace and quiet!” as a Southern  African take on the the well known fag (as in cigarette) slogan “After action, satisfaction”.

The tool models in the pictures below are (in no specific order) the trusty Nafta and (the ever-so-slightly-less trusty) Aoife.

The use of a single screw to secure each bridal joint for centuries to come, probably fall into the overkill department, but I cannot help myself.

By the way you can also appreciate the Peter Galbertian wedges at the top of the spindles in the picture below.

The gaps in the bridal joint you can see here, allow for wood movement.

I listened to ‘Roadie’ as performed by my favourite Kiwi band ‘Fat Freddy’s Drop’ while attaching the undercarriage to the top. I never knew what the word ‘Roadie’ meant so though I should have a look while writing this post. Turns out it was quite an apt anthem for this particular task/project.

Speaking of ‘trusty’ and ‘overkill’, here you can appreciate an activity that would represent an overkill with a tool that can be described as trusty. Cutting the dowels with a Langdon Mitre Box with a makeshift stop to ensure uniformity in length, could possibly represent the early stages of losing one’s mind, but at least it implies some form of insight on behave of the sufferer.

I hope the pictures below will do an efficient job of explaining how my system of attaching the undercarriage to the top allows for wood movement and provides flexibility in term of avoiding imperfections in the top. In the first example we do not need to avoid anything so this is the standard setup. Both the dowels and the holes through the apron are ½” in diameter. The holes in the block that fit over the dowels are around the 9/16″ mark, which should ensure friction free movement.

I used spacers to ensure consistent and parallel gaps between the blocks and the apron while marking out the exact location of the pilot holes for the screws.

Here we have the standard setup.

The example below illustrates how this system allows some flexibility in positioning of the blocks. As you can see, the dowels were cut slightly longer to reach across the Fish River Canyon (so to speak) to ensure that the screw through the block hits solid wood on the far side.

In order to hold the top down as close to the edge as the design of the undercarriage would allow, I came up with the this idea. The block of wood to the right of the protruding dowel slides over it and gets locked down with two screws.

The transport to the table’s new home went surprisingly smooth. Once there I reattached the top and Bob’s your Uncle. The new owner did enquire why I had such a pronounced tremor on me and despite drinking far too much over many years it was most definitely predominantly due to the anxiety associated with ensuring that this labour of love reach it’s destination safely.

I hope you will allow me the excessive number of photos that follow.

Christy and Connor having dinner on top of the new member of the family.

Finally, all that is left to say is, thank you Jan Gerhardus Marx. Thank you.

19/6/2017

Let’s start with a confession. I did stuff around with some of the photos in this post. It is the first time that any of JNSQ’s photos have been altered, as far as I can remember anyway.

The previous posts in this series can be found here.

In this edition we will take a look at some of the joinery and the first phase of preparation of the top for finishing.

The first bit of joinery I attempted was to fit a small block to the top of each leg construction. It will be the point that fix the centre of the leg to the centre of the top. All the other connection points will allow for wood movement, but these two will not. This means that the top will be able to move freely with changes in humidity, but the centre will remain fix to the centre of the legs. I think this is called a T-bridle joint. One feature of my Langdon mitre box and saw that came in handy here was it’s ability to set the depth of cut. Obviously you can simply do this by hand, which would also be much quicker. Where the mitre box might have an advantage is when you need to do heaps of these joints with the same dimensions. In this case it was an opportunity to work out how to set the mitre box for a job like this. That way it will be easier next time.

A router plane works well for the cheeks of the bridal section. It was a bit of a challenge to hold such a small piece while cutting the cheeks to depth. The solution was two dogs and a Veritas gadget. That could be a good name for a progressive rock band or a retrogressive gin mill (Two dogs and a Veritas gadget), come to think of it.

Next up were the slots in the top of the legs.

The two aprons are also jointed to the legs by means of T-bridal joints. Here I am marking the exact location of the shoulders using the leg.

That was followed by the same sequence involving the mitre box, router plane and careful chisel work to perfect the shoulders.

7/7/2017

So then on a crisp and bright winter’s Friday morning I started to flatten the bottom side of the top. Seeing that it is the first table top of this size in Kershout that I am doing by hand I thought that the bottom side would provide an ideal opportunity to work out which method works best. The major challenges posed by this top are the schizophrenogenic nature of grain and the extreme hardness of the wood. As every self-respecting JNSQ Woodworking reader should know by now, we deal almost exclusively with feral boards from the ancient Knysna forest. Each of the trees that the boards for this top were sawn from would have been over 500 years old.

If you deal with wood like that it is my opinion that one has a real responsibility to do the best possible job of allowing the story of the tree to be told. In my estimation that means a delicate balance between careful surface preparation and leaving certain imperfections that relates to the history of the piece of wood. George Nakashima’s immortal oeuvre of work (which inspired this design) lends itself perfectly to getting the most out of feral hardwood such as what I chose for this top. How much and which imperfections are left to tell the story is of course in the eye of the beholder.

Anyway, I started experimenting with various different tools to see what might work best in flattening such a challenging top. The techniques I tried included a belt sander, a low angle jack plane with a toothed blade, a standard no.3 smoothing plane (45° frog) with a back bevel of 25° creating an effective pitch of 70° and a shop made fore plane with a blade pitched at 50° (aka York pitch).

The belt sander has always been one of my least favourite tools. It makes noise, it is all over the place and seems to be the best possible tool to turn a flat surface into the famous Valley of a Thousand Hills. What I found was that it is less harmful in such hard wood, but still not an option if you are aiming for a superior surface. The low angle Jack plane (12° bedding angle + 38° micro bevel for an effective pitch of 50° and a tight throat) worked diagonally to the grain clearly had the measure of the wonky grain, but would have taken too long for what would suffice for the bottom side of the top. I did not aim for a perfectly flat bottom side.

Next up was the back-bevelled smoothing plane. It worked even better (in terms of finish) than the low angle plane, but was difficult to push due to the high effective pitch and therefore even slower at removing material. It is also important to mention that this strategie seize to be effective in difficult grain when you try to take a fat shaving.

So I rolled the dice and tried the shop made fore plane (50° effective pitch) diagonal across the grain. It wreaked havoc in a semi controlled sort of way. This particular blade has a fairly substantial camber and it took no prisoners in the process of removing the necessary material in a timely fashion. In the pictures below you can see the characteristic scalloped appearance of a surface smarting from such treatment.

This is one of my attempts at manipulating the photos to highlight the pattern left by the plane.

The wooden plane in the picture below enforced the above damage. Of note in the picture is the bottles of water I consumed during this arduous labour of bellicosity.

Here we have an example of a part of the history of the tree that is often neglected to be told. Yes I know some of you will think I have lost the plot. Probably something along the lines of: “The #%$@&* hippy has been smoking too much pot.” The reality for me is however that the wood I in my collection have all sorts of imperfections and it would be impossible to create anything of reasonable size without these imperfections exposing themselves. I have therefore made peace with having to incorporate imperfections and try to design in such a way that the eccentricity of the stock enhance the aesthetics of the piece I am building.

Here are a few more tweaked pics with an array of tools that were used to tidy up the bottom side of the top.

Then finally it became time to employ some of the lessons learnt on the bottom side to the face side of the top. It took me three full days of planing at 45° to the grain with a toothed blade in a low angle jack plane to get the top as flat as I wanted it. The two pictures below were taken after the first day.

The dogs on my assembly table came in quite handy during this brutal process.

The toothed blade created these beautiful patterns in the areas that were approaching flatness.

This was the end of day two.

14/8/2017

Once the entire (well almost) face side were in the same plane I removed the bulk of the rhombi left by the toothed blade using a no. 112 scraping plane. It was the first time I used this particular tool for a huge job like this. I prepared the blade the way that is recommended by my woodworking icon David Charlesworth. In my case a 45° main bevel, 50° polished micro bevel with a 75° burr set up in the plane with the blade leaning forward at 20°. The plane is an absolute joy to use when set up like this. You have to make sure you take very thin shavings of course. Some sanding with my shop made sanding planes took care of the rest of the rhombi.

While grappling with the rhombi I took short breaks to tidy up the cracks in the top. They all had lots of loose splinters of wood and other ancient bits of debris inhabiting their depths. This task was mainly accomplished by using a very old pocket knife that used to belong to my grandparents.

At this stage I shaped the curved ends of the top. As you can see I marked out two lines using my fingers as a fence. These lines guided the removal of waste to create a very gentle yet quite wide bevel. Once the bevel were established, the end grain area were rounded off ever so slightly using the same technique. My no. 9½ Stanley block plane did most of the donkey work and was then followed by a low angle smaller block plane, which was in turn followed by gentle sanding.

When I got a bit tired of the top I continued to chip away at the last bits of joinery.

Once the two aprons were fitted to the legs with very precise bridal joints, I started working on the massive beam that connects the legs at floor level. The Witpeer beam was laminated and squared up more than a year ago. It gave the wood a very generous time frame within which it could settle all possible disputes the fibres might care to raise (so to speak). It turns out that a very dense laminated beam like this stayed pretty much dead straight in all it’s  dimensions, but managed to go out of square by what appeared to be a full mm. That was fixed by hand planing a face side and face edge perfectly square with each other and using those reference surfaces to square up the others with my electric planer.

I transferred the inside measurements of the joinery from the aprons to the beam.

Using the above reference point I took the beam to the Windsor leg to mark out the exact location of the other side of the fairly complex stopped bridal joint (my own name not necessarily correct terminology) which will marry these two structures.

This is how far I got with this joint at present.

It was now time to break in my precious polissior that one of my favourite woodworking personalities and über craftsmen Don Williams (of The Barn on Whiterun fame) sent me earlier this year. That entailed rubbing the heads of the grass/straw on a rough piece of scrap wood and tidying up the appearance on a spindle sander.

I can thoroughly recommend reading Don’s article on this epic tool from the past.

Before.

After.

I used the Polissior to burnish the top after perfecting the finish with gradually increasing grid sander paper on a orbital sander. I went all the way to 600 grid and did two rounds of wiping the surface with a damp cloth to raise the grain before sanding it back down with the 600 grid. You can see the effect of the burnishing in the pictures below.

Aoife helped me to apply a tung oil/turpentine mixture. We kept the surface quite wet for 30 minutes by reapplying the mixture where the wood absorbed it and then wiped it down with a clean and dry cloth.

As you can see it was one of those unbelievably satisfying moments in woodworking where the wood rewards you for months of painstaking elbow grease. Kershout is simply one of the most beautiful species of wood on the planet. I want to reiterate that there were no pigment added what so ever. This is what it looks like after tung oil mixed with turps were applied!!

The top will now rest for two weeks before we will apply beeswax with the polissior. Stay tuned my brethren!!