Woodworking Level Two - redux

I've been reluctant to post anything from my third go at the Woodworking course for a couple of reasons, but mostly because I didn't actually finish the project. As it turns out, I really shouldn't have felt badly about it at all.

But before I get into that, some updates!

I couldn't take the Woodworking Level 3 course because, unfortunately, it only runs on Saturdays and I have far too many responsiblities at home on the weekends to be gone all day for four Saturdays in a row. Instead, I signed up for Woodworking Level 2 again with the same instructor and a promise that I would get to work on a different project instead of building another scotch cabinet. (Much to the dismay of certain friends, who desperately covet the one I already built - including the contents!) It turns out that one of the people who was in the first two courses with me had decided to do the same thing, and so I had a familiar face or two when I got back into the shop the first week of March.

This time around I would be tackling a Shaker-style table, made from alder. Traditionally, these tables are made from cherry or maple, but alder is a lot cheaper, and quite a bit softer - read, more forgiving. Sadly, I forgot to take a picture of my raw lumber, which is a shame because the entire table came from a single board (which is one of the coolest things about this hobby, I think).

Anyway, I was so engrossed in getting started and cutting and shaping the wood that I neglected to take any pictures at all until the second night. I had already cut the legs down to their square shape (they would take on the distinctive Shaker taper later), and the next step was to cut the mortises in the tops, using one of the funkiest jigs I had ever encountered:

It did a pretty good job, but like EVERYTHING I tried during this particular build, I need a LOT more practice at it.

It was during this part that I actually began to wonder about the complexity of the project. It seemed straightforward at first blush, but each of the legs needed to have the mortises cut in a slightly different way - needed a lot of concentration and triple-checking. Much, much more so than either of the first two projects.

Once the mortises were cut, I could form the tenons on the aprons; this was pretty much the only easy part, and that was because it was the same procedure as making the tenons for the rails in the last project.

Then I had to cut the pieces to go above and below the drawer on the front of the table and mark and drill for the dowel pins. (I messed this up very slightly, and I think it shows in the final product, sadly.) Once I had cut the taper on the legs (another high-concentration-required task!), I could start the first of the glue-ups. It's starting to look like a table! Or, like it might be a table some day.

I think that was five classes in at that point? Out of the nine alloted... Yeah, I was running short of time.

Anyway, I then moved on to doing the drawer. Actually, I had to spend almost and entire class making these, the runners for the drawer to ride on:

THEN I could start cutting and sizing the drawer front, sides, and back. My instructor really wanted me to try a dovetail jig he had found in a woodworking magazine, and I'm always up for being a guinea pig, er, up for an experiment. This is what that jig looks like in action:

It worked okay, but I cut a little too close to my lines (a common and repeated theme, I'm sorry to say) and it left my pins and tails a shade on the loose side. The rest of the dovetails were formed using a palm router and the old stand-by, a hammer and chisel.

And then I dry fit the drawer components and got a look at my first ever set of dovetails:

They're... okay. As I mentioned, they're a little loose, and I suppose for my first attempt, I should be happy. But more than anything, I just want to take another stab at them. I think dovetails are some of the prettiest details you can have in a woodworking project and I really, really, really want to get better at them.

And that's kind of where I ran out of time. I was frantically trying to get the bottom of the drawer cut down on the table saw at 10:00 on the last night of the class and forgot to put in a zero-clearance throat place and wowed out a big jeezley chunk of it and decided that I should probably just accept defeat and finish it at home, on my own time. Before I lost a body part in my haste or something.

Needless to say, I was disappointed that I couldn't finish the table, but as my instructor told me - AFTER THE END OF THE COURSE - that particular project is one of the ones that the Fine Woodworking class works on in their course. That lasts an entire semester. Three days a week. So yeah - not surprising I didn't get it done!

Fortunately, the generosity of certain Top Brass units, and a recent windfall in the form of getting a bonus from work, has allowed me to buy certain accessories to outfit the workshop a little more, and should help me finish the table at home.

Oh, and when I was looking for example of Shaker tables, I found the one on this page: http://www.owdman.co.uk/

Looks pretty similar, eh? Given what he's asking for that, I wonder if I should start taking offers for mine... ;o)

Woodworking Level Two

As mentioned in the last post, I really enjoyed the first woodworking course I took last fall. So much so, in fact, that I immediately signed up for the next one, despite the facts that my 3P allowance was more than used up on the first course and the second course started just over a week after the first one ended. (And didn't finish until less than a week before Christmas!)

The second course, creatively titled Woodworking Level Two, promised to not only have us learn new and more technical procedures, but also to supply us with something that was NOT a blanket box. So.. different?

Let me also take this opportunity to apologize for the poor image quality of the images in this post. I couldn't exactly haul my nice camera into the shop every week, so I had to take all of these with my camera phone. To make up for the crappy images, I've made sure to include a lot of them. So yay, I guess.

Anyway, much like the first course, I had to go out and purchase the raw lumber. One major difference, though: for this project we'd be using fir instead of pine:

Make that TWO major differences if you count the price. Let's just say I'm much more reluctant to make kindling out of the leftover scrap.

The project for this course was to build an arts-and-crafts style wall cabinet. Out of the nine people taking the course, eight of us had just finished the Woodworking Level One course together and it was the same instructor, so it was really easy to just dive right back in.

It also seemed to progress much faster (fewer people waiting in line for the table saw, maybe?), and by the end of the first class, I had the sides, top, bottom, and middle shelf all planed, jointed, and cut to size:

The next step was to cut the dadoes and add the details on the uprights, and chamfer the appropriate edges on all of the front-facing sides. This is one of the details that defines the arts-and-crafts style, apparently (but what do I know? I'm still learning....):

Then we drilled the holes for the shelf supports and assembled the main carcass:

It was about here that I started to wonder why we needed all 9 classes for this course. After all, it had taken us the better part of four courses to just dry-fit the carcass in the last class and I had already finished the glue-up on the cabinet by the start of the third night!

At which point, of course, we started the hard parts.

First up was making the stiles (long uprights) and rails (shorter crosspieces) for the doors:

Cutting down the rails to form the stub tenons:

And fitting the pieces together into doors (note the extra rails for practice and mistakes):

Then cut the panels (out of plywood with a fir veneer - they're not solid wood as that would have been rather expensive and time-consuming - and a more advanced technique than we wanted to get into for this class) and glue up the doors:

Then we got to learn how to resaw lumber to make thinner boards without wasting too much material in the planer (I'll need to practice this technique - I got it done okay, but my pieces turned out slightly wonky), and made simple drawers:

It's a good thing I made extra material, because I broke two sides while trying to glue up my drawers, and had to remake them. Pro tip - the bottom of the drawer doesn't have to be quite THAT snug...

Fortunately, I recovered from the mistake, and managed to get the drawers assembled, and then sanded them down to fit into the appropriate receptacles:

Somehow, after all that, I had exactly one class left to do the hinges, just like last time. Amazing how time flies when you're having fun, eh?  I started by carefully and gradually shaving down and "bluffing" the doors until they fit into the opening with the same reveal all the way around:

Then I marked out the hinge placement and mortised the sides of the doors:

And then mounted the hinges to the sides of the cabinet. Fortunately, I had bought high-quality hinges, and thus didn't have to mortise the cabinet sides as well - I could even adjust the spancing afterwards:

And that was it! Last class of the course and I had a completed cabinet:

Well, almost. I still had to actually finish it. So I took it home and disassembled it to prepare it for staining:

I'll spare you the boring ass details of the sanding, staining, and applying shellac and instead just show you how it looks on the wall of our kitchen:

So there you have it!  A...




What?




What's that?




You want to know what we plan to keep inside it?




Well....




All right. But keep in mind that it's not very deep.




And not that big, either, once the shelves are in.




But we did find SOMETHING that fit.

Just right.


Next course start March 3, by the way. I'm already signed up.

Woodworking Level One

So my company has this thing called the 3P Program (it stands for Personal Progression Program, which should make it the 2P Program, but whatevs, right?) where employees can choose some sort of personal improvement or goal, and the company will give them some money towards achieving that goal. Weight loss and quitting smoking are popular choices, but we've had people use the money to improve their home brewing set-up, learn karate, take guitar lessons, and even adopt a kid. Really. No, not all at once - different people, dummy.

Anyway, last time I applied for the 3P grant, I used it to get our bikes fixed up so we could spend more time biking around the peninsula (mostly heading to or from the pub, of course). I'm already paying my own way at the gym and I haven't smoked in years now, so I was somewhat at a loss for what to apply for this year. I've been toying with the idea of taking some continuing education courses for a while, but I wasn't really sure what I wanted to take.

And then I noticed that they had some interesting courses for woodworking. The War Department had actually taken a couple of woodworking courses a few years back (the results of which are still scattered about the house in various stages of completion) and really enjoyed it, and it sounded like something I would not only enjoy, but probably find useful in our ongoing renovation efforts as well. You know, to help reduce the chances of something really serious showing up in the Injury Report.

So I signed up for Woodworking Level One, which started at the beginning of October. The first thing I had to do was go buy the lumber:

(Well, technically, the first thing I had to do was figure out the difference between lineal feet and board feet, but whatevs.)

(I'll stop saying whatevs now. Even I hate myself when I say it.)

Two three-hour classes in and I had managed to make not only a whole lot of sawdust, but the three panels that would form the front, back, and sides:

The pieces on the left there would eventually become the lid, but I didn't get to that because there was a bit of a line-up at the planer. (Heh, out of the twelve people in the course, eight of them worked in IT. Go figure.)

Some more planing and sanding got me a bottom panel as well, and then I cut the dadoes and rabbits to fit the whole carcass together:

That's not actually assembled - it's just a dry fit to make sure the pieces went together properly. To actually assemble it, I used a judicious application of glue - and lots of clamps!

There followed a bunch of classes that involved cutting and fitting the trim (and the only semi-serious mistake that I made throughout the construction and won't describe here), and then assembling the lid:

It took almost the entire last class just to fit the hinges as they required lots of router work and delicate mortises. I used a piece of scrap wood here to prop the lid open to show the hinges and construction - it's not part of the actual box:

Of course, as I was moving the box off the workbench to make room to mortise the hinges out, I gave the bottom of it a great big jeezley whack on the bench vise, leaving a big dent right in the bottom trim near the front left corner. Sigh.

I'm not a huge fan of the shiny brass hinges (they were the only ones I could find at Home Despot on short notice), but I really like the handles. The instructor was also impressed - I was the only one in the class to finish both the hinges and the handles - and said that IF he actually gave out grades, I'd get an A+. (Curse you for not providing letter-based validation, adult continuing education!)

Anyway, it took a fair bit more sanding and filling and whatnot, but I rubbed it down with several coats of tung oil and then waxed and buffed it to a dull shine:

So now I have to figure out what to actually DO with the final product. Maybe I'll make some smaller boxes to store in the bigger box. Or maybe I'll give it away to a deserving orphan or something. Maybe I'll keep one of the cats in it until they SHUT UP AND LET ME SLEEP IN FOR ONCE.

As far as the course itself went, I have to say that I was really impressed. I learned a lot more than I honestly thought I would, and picked up many hints and tricks that will help in the future - and not just with woodworking but with other renovation projects as well. So even though a three-hour course in the evening made for some very long days, I was still really looking forward to the next one... which started less than two weeks later.

Bathroom bits, pieces, and ... finishes? Really?

Well, with the windowsill finally finished and most of the other trim installed, patched, and painted, it was time to get Bob the Plumber back out to install the bathtub, toilet, and vanity that had been taking up valuable real estate in the garage for the past six months.

(Closer to eight months, but who's counting? By the way, this is yet another overdue completion of a post that's been sitting in the draft folder for oh... six? eight weeks?)

So, obviously, if it had been us doing this by ourselves, it would have taken at least three weeks and involved a minimum of six trips to Home Despot, at least one to the ER, and several dozen cases of beer. Bob, being the professional that he is, managed to install all three fixtures in one day. Of course, I had to help him (and another guy) get the tub up the stairs, and then help again when the vanity went up, but he got it done.

I took this when he went out for lunch (and to grab a couple of feeder hoses because the ones that came with the tub were shit):

Aside from the three-ring circus of trying to get the tub up the stairs, the most exciting part of the day was when we got the part where we needed to install the vanity. We had managed, between Bob and I, to get the damn thing up to the upstairs landing, where we left it while he installed the taps and other bits (easier than trying to do them in place). But moving the vanity into the bathroom itself was, well... trickier.

As I may have mentioned, the bathroom itself is exactly five feet wide. That's sixty inches for you metric users out there. The vanity is JUST under 60 inches. And when I say JUST, I mean it's really 59 and 63/64ths. Complicating the matter is the location of the water feed for the toilet, and its position relative to the door of the bathroom. See, to get the vanity into place, we have to slide it straight through the door, and then straight back to the wall. The toilet is slightly to the right when looking in through the door, but the water pipe that provides the water to the toilet is, of course, almost directly in front of the door and in line with where we needed to slide the vanity.

Marvel at my skills of an artist!

Oh, and did I mention that if we broke that pipe, there'd be no fixing it without opening up that wall again? Yeah.

Anyway, we managed to get the vanity through the door and into the bathroom without smashing the pipe, but when we went to slide it back into place, well, that's when we encountered another small problem. It turns out that the walls on either side of the vanity were very slightly bowed, either from Tony the mudder feathering out around the electrical boxes, or because, I dunno, I suck at drywalling. Whatever the case, getting the vanity past the edge of the door required first a little surgery to the vanity itself:

And then some serious gouging and scraping of our nice drywall/paint job. Which I did not take a picture of because, quite frankly, it hurt.

The next step in the process (or somewhere in there at least) was to order and install the blinds. Owing to the shape of the window (as shown in detail in the last post), we had to order custom-made horizontal blinds. Also owing to the direction the window was facing, i.e., south, we had to order real wood blinds to prevent any warping or shrinking from the sunlight. Needless to say, they weren't exactly cheap, but our options were a little limited so we ponied up, measured the windows carefully, and ordered them from Rona.

Within a couple of weeks or so, we got the call that they were ready to be picked up, so the War Department drove all the way out there on a Thursday night while I was at my woodworking course (more on that in a later post) to pick them up. Of course, they couldn't find them. They were somewhere in the store, at least according to the computer, but not anywhere the employees could actually see. So she had to drive home empty handed and I had to drive all the way out there the next night to pick them up. I did manage to raise enough of a stink that they gave me a gift card to make up for our trouble, but it was still annoying.

What was even more annoying than THAT, thought, was that the damn things didn't actually fit. See, we had made our careful measurements against the edge of the windows themselves. But the blinds were two inches thick, which meant that the inside corners overlapped each other.

Of course, I wasn't exactly welcome at Rona at that point, so we had to perform some surgery on our new, very expensive blinds. I had to disassemble each one, cut off a little bit of the metal spacer at the top (some from each side, of course, because why would anything be EASY?), trim the wooden slats CAREFULLY in the chop saw, and then turn them over to Amy, who stained the fresh cut ends the same color as the rest of the blinds (and did an amazing job, too). Only then could I actually hang the things.

And I'm not even going to talk about hooking up the damn shower pipe and curtain ring. Let's just say Bob needed to come back and show me a few things, and leave it at that.

Anyway, to cut a loooooooong story short (can you tell this is the point I finally sat down to try to write the rest of this post), like, a couple or three months, the Ba'ath Bath is no more. We now have a master bathroom befitting the name, and I will shut up and let you enjoy the pictures, much as the War Department enjoys the fruits of our labours:

(Here's one without the flash so you can get a better idea of the actual colors:)

There's one TEENY little job left, and that's to fashion a brace for the shower head and hang the curtain, but given that we won't need the shower any time soon, and the War Department has already been enjoying the tub, I think we can safely call this project done.


Next time: Raw pine! Woo!