Woodworking Project(s): Toolbox and Bomber Holders

Way, way, WAY back  - in the late spring of 2015 - I was taking yet another round of Woodworking Level 2 at Camosun College, and decided to try and make something a little different. I was perusing the plans in the racks at Lee Valley and came across something I thought might put my newfound skills (ha!) to the test: a traditional-style toolbox, made with dovetailed sides and a raised panel lid.

I really liked the look of the finished product, at least according to the pictures on the set of plans, and really wanted to try some real dovetails, so I bought the plans and hied myself down to the wood store to pick up some cherry. (Wow, was it expensive. Seriously.) My instructor in the course was all gung ho about me giving this a try, and helped me as best he could (while still tending to the rest of the class).

Over the 27 hours of the course, I managed (barely) to make the carcass of the thing. I spent four straight classes doing nothing but cutting the dovetails. It was bloody hard work, and I think next time I might just use a router. (Kidding! As long as I'm working with softer wood.)

Anyway, at the end of the class, I brought my work-in-progress home to finish it up... and it sat in the corner of my office for the next 18 months. I managed to drag it down to the work shop long enough to give it some cursory sanding, and again another time to mortise in the hinges for the lid, but I was finding the process of actually finishing it somewhat daunting.

Well, my goal for my work-funded life improvement initiative this year was to start actually finishing some things (in more ways than one), so I resolved to get this thing done as my December project. (I'm a little late because the garage/workshop is not only not heated, but also poorly insulated, which makes applying finishes in sub-zero weather something of an ill-advised challenge, if not just plain impossible.)

So this is what the toolbox (or at least the pieces of it) looked like when I dragged it out into the light:

Actually, I think that was after I'd already done a fair amount of sanding and prep (and some chiselling to make the lid fit properly). I had already decided to try shellac on this project, and got some very helpful advice from my father-in-law with regards to not going overboard with the whole "Let's try French polishing on my first shellac project like an idiot!"

So I mixed up some two-pound cut using some very nice shellac flakes I picked up at - surprise! - Lee Valley:

It took a few hours for the flakes to break down:

Once it did, I used a combination of a really poor-quality bristle brush (bit of a mistake there) and a foam brush (another bit of a mistake there) to put on two coats of shellac. I thinned the second one slight as it was really cold in the garage and I was finding the shellac hard to manipulate once it hit the surface of the wood. Next time, I think I will thin the first coat even more, and use a rag (also known as a rubber or a fad) to apply the shellac. Here's what it looked like:

Because I had put the shellac on a little thick, I had to do a LOT of sanding and even more work with the steel wool, but I managed to get a really nice sheen to the surface afterward.

Unfortunately, that's when the REALLY cold weather hit and I had to wait more than a week to put on a couple coats of wipe on poly. I actually had to spend the better part of the day yesterday using every portable heater I had to get the garage up to minimum temperature. It was worth it, though. the poly really puts a shine on it:

 Then, today, it was just a matter of putting on all the hardware (I got to make TWO jigs!) and - after some discussion - finding a home for the damn thing:

I cannot possible tell you how good it feels to not only cross that one off the list, but to have it turn out so well.

Okay, so the finish isn't perfect, but I learned SO much during this process that I'm pretty confident I'll be able to get pretty close the next time I use shellac.

Bonus project!

So, I wanted to actually post about this before New Year's, but couldn't for rather obvious reasons. Fortunately, the last person slated to receive one has finally taken possession, so...

For Christmas presents this year, we decided to make bomber holders for a few select friends. The growler carriers I made were a pretty big hit with some people, and so we thought a similar idea, but designed for bombers, would make a nice present for the beer afficionadoes in our lives. The War Department also thought it would be nice to include a bottle opener on the case (as we have yet to encounter a twist-off bomber), and we found some beautiful ones at, well, Lee Valley (of course). She also helped pick the beers that went into them - what, you thought we'd turn them over EMPTY? We're not savages!

Anyway, these were a lot of fun to make, aside from all the goddamn math, and despite a tiny bit of an issue when I tested the strength of the plywood veneer with an excess of carpet tape:

I had to remake those pieces, obviously, but the holders turned out really nice, and everyone that got one seemed to like theirs.

I made them out of recycled furniture, by the way, AND I got to use my spline jig! Oh, happy day!

Woodworking Project: Balafon Stand

Before I even say anything about this project, THIS is a balafon, okay? As for why I was making a stand for one, well, that may require some further explanation.

It turns out that my coworker Karla is quite the drumming enthusiast, and spends quite a bit of her free time in various drumming workshops around the city. One of her favorite things to play is the balafon, and she owns two of them. So one day at work she mentioned that the adjustable stand she used to support her balafon while playing it was starting to break. Somewhere between her showing me how it was broken and me fixing it, I offered to build her one as part of my work-funded life improvement program. I do not know how or why exactly I agreed to this - she may be a witch. Or a hypnotist. I don't know.

Anyway, it turns out that there aren't exactly a lot of plans online for how to build one of these things. Probably because you can buy a brand new metal one for $40. But I had an idea in my head for how I wanted to make it, and I thought I could do a pretty good job, and that it wouldn't take that long.

I was, as you no doubt already guessed, half right.

I worked on this thing for six solid weeks - to the point that the War Department felt compelled to remind me  that I wasn't exactly getting paid for this (Karla had agreed to pay for the materials) and that it really needed to get out of the damn garage now. Some highlights of the build process:

• I got to make five separate jigs for this project. Well, four different jigs, but I made one of them twice after changing my mind about the size off the central spacers.
• I had to stop and rethink almost every single piece of the design at one point or another.
• I knew that I wanted to make it out of baltic birch plywood, and have copper accents. Actually HAVING copper accents required four separate trips to Home Despot where I stood in the plumbing aisle for twenty minutes, staring at the various connectors and bits and muttering to myself before leaving - empty-handed.
• It was actually Amy who came up with the one piece of design that had eluded me. Once she figured that out, the rest of it all fell into place. (She suggested epoxying the nuts into the copper end caps, which worked like a charm.)
• Seriously, every single part of building this was brand new territory for me. It's also the first project I did entirely with metric measurement. (I liked it!)
• Total cost of materials: about $100.
• Total cost of labor (at a bargain-basement rate of $25/hour): $2500. At least.

So here are some pictures.

My first design challenge was that the legs needed a hole precisely in the center. After some thought, I figured it would be easiest to drill the hole first, and then use the hole to register the position of the leg on the saw. So I built a jig:

My first attempt at central spacers (and another jig, this one to sand them all down to size/closer to actually round):

I knew I wanted to round over the edges of these, though, and did not want my fingers anywhere near that close to a router bit. So remade the jig, recut the rounds, and made better ones:

Took me three or four tries before I found a technique that worked for sanding up and polishing the copper:

I had an idea to have a special piece serve as both the adjustable lock to hold the stand open at specific heights, and to serve as the handle. I went through several iterations before finding one that worked. These are the first three attempts - I actually sanded and completely prepped the one on the right for finishing, but that was before I found out that I'd messed up the design slightly and had to remake it from scratch:

Two coats of Danish oil, two coats of wipe-on poly, and here's everything ready for assembly:

Clamping up the last piece (couldn't glue that last foot on until everything eas put together):

And it's done!

Folded up for transport (lift up the handle in the center and the whole thing picks right up):

Adjusted to random heights:

And here it is, proving that it works for its intended purpose, with Karla's balafon resting comfortably atop:

Overall, I have to say that it looks almost exactly how I pictured it. I just did not envision the way I'd have to get there...

Woodworking Project(s): My second commission

So my first commission was pretty much a smash hit. My neighbour liked the doors so much that she wound up putting them in the hallway at the top of her stairs (where guests could properly appreciate them) rather than hide them in her ensuite bathroom as originally intended.

She liked them so much, in fact, that she asked me to make her another set for the closet in her front hall. Same materials, same finish, slightly bigger doors. Of course, I jumped at the chance to actually repeat a project and see if I had learned anything from the first attempt. As it turns out... well, kind of.

I had a feeling this project would turn out pretty good when the guy who sold me the rough-cut cedar turned out to be as bad at math as I am: I got 32 boardfeet of western red cedar for the price of 24. (Cause he had a brain fart and thought 4x8 is 24, not 32. And I didn't realize until I got home because I always make the same msitake. Shut up.)

Anyway, the doors were pretty straightforward (the most exciting part was the new raised panel jig I made and detailed in my last post), and aside from SLIGHTLY miscalculating the amount of lumber I needed (stupid 8-times table), I successfully built two slightly-larger-than-last-time doors:

So one of the things I learned last time is that spar varnish (my chosen finish) is a little thick, and tends to pool in the corners of the raised panels, and along the edges if you're not careful (or just rushing a little, because how many goddamn coats is this going to take, anyway?). I did a little bit of research, and found a couple of solutions that I decided I would try.

First, I finished the raised panels BEFORE assembling the doors in the hope that it would be easier to finish them completely without quite so many corners and whatnot in the way. While the idea was solid, in practice it suffered from a couple of shortcomings: one, the panels were really, really soft, and trying to support them on my little plastic painting risers left dimples in the backs. The only way around this was to finish one side at a time, which prolonged the entire experiment and made me question its value. And two, once the panels were done and fitted into the doors, there was really no way to avoid refinishing them anyway, given all the tight corners and other parts that also needed to be finished.

Second, I found quite a few sources that recommended thinning the varnish with mineral spirits, up to a 50-50 mix, and then applying it like a polish (via a soft rag) as opposed to using a foam brush. You wind up having to put on more coats (like, 6, instead of 3), but you only have to wait about 3 hours between coats instead of 6 or more. I liked the idea of not having to use up a half-dozen foam brushes, and figured I would give it a shot.

Well, it was kind of a mixed bag - though some of that was my fault. I won't go into too much detail, but let's just say that a) you really don't want to mix up a big batch of this stuff ahead of time, and b) I wound up having to put one last finishing coat of pure varnish on at the end to get the depth and sheen I needed.

Anyway, the doors are done, and look fabulous (check out those raised panels - ooh la la!:

Once again, my neighbour is super happy, and that's the main thing.

Bonus project!

I was determined to get these doors all done and installed before the end of September, and finished with more than a week to spare. So I got to spend a very pleasant Sunday afternoon in the garage making a project just for fun.

Some friends of ours had come over for dinner and, like any GOOD friends, had brought along a couple growlers of the finest local craft beer in a handy little carrier. Well, sort of handy. I had a few minor issues with aspects of the design, but really liked the overall idea, and decided to try to build my own - with a couple of enhancements of my own devising.

So I scrabbled about in my pile of plywood scraps and scrounged a length of old rope from a buddy to produce these:

My design improvements included a handle that lets me carry the whole thing in one hand, and a partition to keep the growlers from knocking into each other during transport.  I'm pretty pleased with the outcome, and didn't have to spend any money whatsoever on materials. Well, actually, I did buy a can of spray varnish to finish them off. But even on that I saved money by not using anything GOOD...

Shop Project: Raised panel cutting jig

So, I've been commissioned to make another bi-fold closet door for my neighbour. She wants the same design, materials, and finish as the last one, just sized to fit a much larger doorway. Seeing as that was one of my favorite projects ever (and she agreed to the same price), I jumped at the chance to make another.

But first, I needed to make a raised panel cutting jig. Which, if you'll allow me to descend into full-on woodworking nerd for a minute, I shall explain...

Okay, so my kick-ass table saw has two unrelated, but contributory flaws:

• First, it has a right-tilting arbor. This means that when I'm making an angle cut, the blade tilts to the right - towards the fence. This is fine, provided I'm working on a piece that's large enough to keep my hand (or push stick) well away from the blade, and the angle required is no more than 45-degrees, which is the maximum the saw will tilt. 
• Second, I have a router table built into the wing on the left side of my saw, and it has its own fence system. This means that I can't move the table saw fence very far to the left side of the blade. The fence needs a certain amount of rail to clamp onto, and with the fence for the router table in the way, the most I can get on the left side of the blade is about an inch - maybe. (You can see the whole set up - router wing, fence system, blade position - in this picture from an old post.)

When I made the last door, I managed to get the fence set up with just enough room to spare that I could cut the angles on the panels, but it was dicey, and felt decidedly unsafe. Given that a larger door meant I'd be dealing with larger panels, I decided that I had to come up with some way to cut panels the met some rather stringent criteria:

• It had to be safe. I really don't like getting my fingers any closer to the spinning blade of a table saw than I absolutely have to. I already stuck the tip of my right index finger into a table saw once (many, many, many moons ago), and I have no desire whatsoever to do it again. That meant that there had to be some way to hold the panel steady or guide it through the blade without me needing to brace it with my hands.
• It had to be adjustable. I was okay if the angle of the saw was set to the exact same angle for every panel, but I wanted to be able to cut thicker panels if I ever had the need.
• It needed to fit on the left side of the blade. This meant that it had to either use the fence for the router table as a brace, or fit into the miter slot.

After some research and more than a little planning and revising, I finally figured out something that I thought might work. I had to incorporate design elements from maybe a half-dozen different sources, but got the bones of the jig from this article, which - ironically enough - is designed for a left-tiling arbor.

Anyway, it took me the better part of a day to build it, but in the end, I made myself a raised panel cutting jig:

It sits in the left miter slot, and is secured using a couple of miter locks (borrowed from a Kreg featherboard system). The tall fence can be moved away from the blade to a maximum distance of an inch and a quarter, or nudged up to within a few thousandths of an inch. I had originally thought to build a carriage that would guide the panel through the blade, but discarded that plan in favor of using the same featherboard set-up that worked so well the last time. The saw blade must be positioned at 11-degrees, but that gives a nice wide bevel on a 3/4" panel.

Here it is all ready to cut some rasied panels:

With the featherboard holding the panel tight to the extra-tall fence, all I have to do is guide the material straight through the blade. Works like a charm, and feels way, way, way safer than the last time.

I suppose now you want to know what a raised panel is, eh?

Fine. These are panels:

And after being passed safely through the table saw using my raised panel cutting jig, these are raised panels:

And there was much rejoicing and drinking of the beers.