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On Saturday (the day after our baby was due, and he’s still not here!), my wonderful wife said, “Why don’t you go do some woodworking?” Since I was actually in the mood to tackle the next task on my Lego Table, I went for it!
So the task of the day was to prep the table pieces for assembly. That meant planing and (some) sanding. The boards are in decent shape, being pretty much flat and square, so I only had to smooth them a little and take off the top layer to remove some staining and marring on the surface. (By the way, I went out and bought a replacement board for the cupped one, so I didn’t have to deal with that.) But still, that’s quite a chore when doing it all by hand with no workbench.
My makeshift bench involved placing two 2″x6″ boards side by side on my sawing trestles, with the boards butting up against the wall. I used a couple narrower boards (1″x3″) laid parallel to the wall as a planing stop. This mostly worked when planing the shorter boards (the leg pieces). For the aprons, I had to plane one half, then flip it around and plane the other half (while sitting on one end of the board). Oh – I have to mention that the grain on this kapur is so funky, there didn’t really seem to be a “with” or “against” the grain! Kinda nice, wouldn’t you say? I had no tear-out, no matter which way I went.
After all that planing, I went over everything with 100# sandpaper. Good enough for now. Here you can see my setup – my wife took this pic while I was sanding:
And after it was all said and done – what was that, like 2 or 3 hours? – here is what I ended up with: a bunch of pieces that look pretty much exactly like they did when I started:
And here’s a closer look at what the kapur sapwood looks like compared with the heartwood. Very interesting – I’m curious to see how it turns out in the end! These are the leg pieces – I’m matching up one of these heartwood/sapwood pieces with one pure heartwood piece. Still trying to think of where that strip of sapwood should be in my leg assembly (see the Sketchup drawing). Oh, incidentally, in the pic below you can see that one of the 2″x6″ boards also has some sapwood mixed, but it’s much more of a pukey dark greyish yellow (can something be a pukey dark greyish yellow?).
On a side note: I really need to fettle my Stanley #4. It would work fine, and then every 10 minutes or so my chipbreaker would jam up with shavings. Aargh!
In my video for Woodworking Safety Week 2008, I repeatedly reminded my viewers to keep fingers out of the path or potential path of the blade. Hmm, this gets tricky with a ryoba and two sides of the blade – thus two potential paths. For some reason, this weekend my saw bit me three times.
In all three instances, I was holding a board with my left hand and cutting it with my right. When the saw finished its cut, the saw sprung upwards, and the top part of the saw (the rip blade) dug into my index finger.
My wife told me I should put a band-aid on that finger, so at least the saw wouldn’t break the skin. I said, “Yeah, but even better is that I work safely enough that I won’t even do it in the first place!” She looked skeptical, and with raised eyebrows glanced at my finger.
My reply: “What? I haven’t done it even once after those first three times!”
So yesterday I went to the lumber yard and bought all the wood I expected to need for the lego table. I was pleasantly surprised at the price. I bought 12.5 board feet of kapur (30′ of 1″x4″ and 10′ of 1″x3″) for $18.25 and a 4′x8′ sheet of 1/2″ plywood for $13.75. I tried to pick boards that were straight and not warped, and at least in that respect, I succeeded.
Today I had some good dedicated shop time. My first task was to cut the boards down to the individual components of the table. As I was doing that, I realized that I had neglected to look for one thing when at the lumber yard – cupping. One board was cupped the entire length.
Since I don’t have a thickness planer, an electric planer nor a belt sander, I dragged my knuckles over to the “workbench” (a 2″x6″ resting across my japanese sawing trestles) and tried to “knock off the high spots” as I hear people like The Schwarz say. Easier said than done. To the extent that I feel skilled in sawing, I feel that same amount of ineptitude in planing. I guess it doesn’t help that I don’t have a workbench. It also doesn’t help that my irons haven’t been honed in a while.
So I got frustrated. Frustrated that my blades are dull. Frustrated that I don’t know how to flatten a board. Frustrated that flattening a board is kind of important sometimes. Okay, often. Frustrated that this quick-and-dirty build of a lego table might take months.
But then I chilled out and decided to take a long view of my progress in the craft. Hand plane skills don’t come overnight. I need to think of this as part of the journey. I am considering whether or not to go buy another board to save me time in building this project. That would, however, still leave me needing to learn how to flatten a board. So maybe I’ll stick it out.
In the meantime, I now know how I’m going to spend the last of my Tool Fund money: I’m going to get a replacement plane iron/chipbreaker set. I think it will really help me be less anxious about planing. My #4 and #5 planes both use the same size irons, so I’ll be able to interchange them as needed. And I’ll be able to turn my existing irons into specialty blades. Maybe one will be slightly cambered (as will probably the Hock be), and the other I’ll turn into a scrub plane iron. I think I heard one of Matt’s podcasts talking about that.
Kind of a rambly post today, but that’s how I feel. A bit discouraged, but at the same time determined to get through it.
P.S. Oh – here’s a pic of the parts. Notice the yellow sapwood on what will be the legs. I chose that board partly because it was so straight, but also because, what the hey, let’s see how this ends up looking!
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