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Since my last post, I’ve done some preparations for traveling, traveling, and recovering from traveling, so I haven’t had much shop time. Last night I had an hour or two. I had been considering building my double-screw Moxon vise for the Instructables woodworking contest. Nice prizes! But I figured I’d better stay focused and try to make more progress on the bench.
Next step: mortising the legs for the short stretchers. In my last post I suggested that it’d be “easy” to just drill pilot holes at the midpoint of each wall of the mortise and then insert a hacksaw blade in the hole, and to cut from the hole towards each corner of the mortise. Well, that wouldn’t work. The hacksaw blade is just not agressive nor accurate enough to do the trick. Back to Plan B – which is Plan A for most of you: drill holes (overlapping, if possible) and then clean out the waste with a chisel.
Easier said than done.
A few things make this a tough task. First and most importantly, I don’t have the right-sized bit. Ideally, the hole will extend from one wall to the other, right? Well I have two expansive bits: one that extends to 1 1/2″ and the other which starts at 1 3/4″. Guess what width my mortise is? Yup – in between those two. So what I’ve had to do is to overextend my smaller bit, which mostly works, but after each hole I have to readjust the bit which has slipped because the screw can’t tighten the bit quite enough.
Another difficulty is boring with a large bit through 4″ of hardwood with a bit brace. Quite the workout! So last night I didn’t make too much progress. I figured out what bit to use and how far to extend it. And I got started on one side of one leg (see above). Unfortunately I wasn’t able to get very far in the center hole before the bit refused to stay in the pilot hole any longer. Next – most likely today or this evening – I’ll flip the leg over and finish the mortise – hoping my marks are lined up!
I’d pretty much run out of excuses for not starting the Big Bench Build. Every week at church I see the kind woman who arranged for me to get all that beautiful lumber for free. I always fear the question, “So have you built it yet?” Don’t ask me why it has been hard to motivate myself to do it. I think maybe it’s because I’ve been planning this workbench for years – literally – and in my head maybe it’s become this grand opus that, despite it being one of my very first projects, must somehow be my best.
I’m past that now.
This isn’t fine furniture; it’s a big rustic wooden table. Once I realized that, I was able to relax. Instead of saying to myself, “I’m building a Roubo-Moxon workbench,” I’m saying, “I’m gluing this board to that board.” And without me even really noticing, I’ve got long stretchers and two of my legs are halfway completed.
But let me back up a bit. Here’s my order of tasks for the build:
- Long stretchers: Done. These are four 1x4s glued together. The inner two are longer and will tenon through the legs.
- Legs: These will be eight 1x6s glued together, alternating two short with two long. The long ones will tenon through the top (with the outer tenons being dovetails).
- Benchtop: I’ll glue up the 1x4s from the inside of the benchtop to the outside. Once I reach the through tenons on the legs I’ll know exactly how long my short stretchers need to be. The mortises in the benchtop will be created by leaving voids in my glueup. The dovetail mortises are the only ones I’m really worried about.
- Short stretchers: I’ll already have cut the mortises in the legs so this should be pretty straightforward.
- Accessories: Leg vise, crochet, double-screw vise (Moxon).
I don’t have any pics of my long stretchers. Not very interesting. So then it was time to figure out the layout of my 32 boards for the 4 legs. Here’s what I was looking at, trying to sort it all out (the long boards are two pieces each):
Some boards are super light, I’m talking balsa light. Why? Dunno. But I have those boards as the load-bearing pieces, always paired with a normal board. I have a few sapwood boards, which will be the interior through tenons – those will be my “anvils” on the benchtop. And the prettiest boards were moved to be the outermost “show” pieces. The colors of my show pieces – the long stretcher, the legs, the benchtop – may not match, but I don’t care. They’ll look nice. 
So here are the 32 pieces, in the general shape of my legs:
I’m gluing them up from inside to outside. And while most people say that there are two ways to create a mortise – chopping and boring – I am going to see about a third way: sawing. I’m going to test it on scrap but here’s the plan: Once I have the innermost four boards glued up (3″), I will drill a hole in the midpoint of each edge of the mortise, so that the outside of the hole is the outside of the mortise. Then I’ll slide a hacksaw blade in there and saw from the hole to one corner of the mortise. Repeat until you’ve reached all the corners, and bang, instant mortise! I may clamp some metal rulers on each side to guide the saw, not sure yet. This technique would only work because of the way I’m gluing up my legs. Anyway, I’d appreciate your thoughts on this.
So for now, I’m gluing up the innermost four boards of all four legs. Then I’ll get to work on the mortises for the short stretchers, and the mortise for the nut to the leg vise. Then I can glue the rest of the leg pieces together, leaving voids for the long stretcher tenons along the way.
It is all crystal clear in my mind. What about in yours?
When we first went back to the States in September 2009 for our 4-month visit, I had three goals. They were:
- Go to the Canton First Monday Trade Days
- Attend one of Roy Underhill’s classes at the Woodwright’s School in North Carolina
- Pop in on some fellow woodworkers’ shops to see what they’re doing and to try new things
Well, two out of three ain’t bad. I did go to the Canton flea market, and blogged about my sole find there. And I did get to visit the shops of two fellow woodworkers, one of whom gifted me with a fine bevel gauge and a few lengths of wood for turning. But the class with St. Roy never panned out. His Fall class schedule never materialized, and he didn’t begin classes until the week after we left the States. Next time!
But I was able to do a little woodturning for the very first time. My buddy (and brand-new [again] father) Zac was gracious enough to show me around his mini lathe. But only until he turned it on – then he handed me a roughing gouge and said, “Alright, go for it!”
After putzin’ around on a scrap blank, I was ready to give it a shot with a “real” piece of wood. I turned a bottle stopper out of olive wood, and as you can see in the picture below, I was pretty conservative and not too adventurous. A week or two later, I turned a couple more as Christmas presents for my mom and dad. The other stopper in the picture below was a cocobolo one that I did and was pretty happy with. At the bottom is another shot of just that stopper, showing the back side of it. What a beautiful wood, and what a great experience!
I also worked on a handle for my firmer chisel I picked up at that flea market. I wish I’d brought along my grandpa’s calipers because I would have gotten closer to the finished dimensions. The galoot who gave me this wood thought it was from a sweet gum tree but then thought that maybe it could be maple. Anyone out there have a hunch? Might be too hard to tell just from this pic. Anyway, I hope to finish this up someday! I do have a brass ring for the top.
And lastly, the obligatory lathe shot:
In my short time in this great craft, I’ve many times wanted to give up on a project. Sometimes the difficulties seem too great, or the things that go wrong seem unfixable. Yet I’ve always managed to carry on and finish.
Today I had my first shop time since before we moved (on May 13). I am far from set up at our new place, and I knew it would be a while before I was, so I had left all my woodworking stuff at the old place.
So I had about 2 hours of shop time, and planned to work on the Sawdust Chronicles desk organizer build challenge. If I had a shop full of power tools, I’d probably be half done! As it is, I got just far enough to realize that there’s no way I’ll be able to finish this thing in a week.
I set up shop in our kids’ former room, so I could make use of the A/C. Hey, climate control in my shop, this was a first! My first task was to fix my planing mess from the other week. And just like some of you said, it was a simple matter of evening the blade with the lateral arm. It all went smoothly. Pun intended.
Getting most of my lumber smooth (planing and a bit of sanding), and then cutting the first four pieces I’d need, took about an hour. The next hour I worked on the dados into which the bottom two pieces would go. I was going to have two horizontal pieces to form the paper slot, and each of those would just fit into dados in the side pieces. Here you can see my initial knife lines to define the dado.
Then I used a 1/8″ chisel to hog out the waste. I tried deepening the lines with the knife, but in the end found it more effective to use my saw to try to cut to the depth of the dado. Then I had to do the same kind of thing to make the tongue for the paper slot pieces. Oh, if only I had a rabbet plane.
It doesn’t look pretty, but it doesn’t really need to because I was going to have a horizontal piece dovetailed into the front to cover it up. The piece was to look decorative but would actually be removable, revealing a secret document compartment.
Alas, I think I’m going to have to give in on this particular project. If the contest had been held in any other month but May 2009, I’d probably have been able to do it. But right now with our unpacking and everything, a desk organizer [that we don't really need] isn’t the highest priority right now.
I’m bummed, because I’m a finisher. But now I can at least start to set my mind running again on my workbench!
P.S. Yes, I’m aware that the Schwarz had just written about dados by hand. Believe it or not, I just read it this evening. I’m such a dork.
Okay, so I had 30 minutes to work on the TSDC desk organizer build challenge. I figured the first step is to prep my stock – plane, then sand if necessary. I’m hot and grumpy. It’s like 85 to 90 degrees outside, like always, and I don’t have any fan in the shop.
But my Stanley #4 seems to be doing its job pretty well. At least, until I ran my hand over the board.
So I guess I’m going to work on cambering my blade before doing anything else. Either that or go over this board with the cabinet scraper. But with more wood to prep, I may as well take the time to do this right. Right?
I swear, my shop time is so infrequent it takes me forever to complete a project. But I had a decent block of time today and was able to do quite a bit!
First was to smooth the whole thing down – planing and sanding. Then I had to create a little “slot” in the top of one of the short aprons. This will allow for easy cleanup of legos; you don’t have to worry about clearing the lip, you just sweep them off into the tub through this slot. The technique I used is almost the same as the one I used on my step stool. I used a cardboard template to be sure the curves on the ends of the slot were the same.
Then I made a series of cuts to the line. It seems tedious but this only took me a few minutes.
I then took my mallet and chisel to it, and after the first pass it looked like this:
A second pass cleaned it up even more, and then I used a spokeshave and a rounded file (I don’t yet own a rasp!) to smooth it up.
Then it was time to finally glue the top on. This is perhaps an optional step but I decided to do it. There isn’t much good gluing surface (mostly the end grain on the legs) so I flipped it over and glued in some glue blocks on the bottom for a little extra support. Here’s the underside of the table so you can see what all I’ve done there. Notice I also nailed in (crude, I know) some brackets to help hold those leg assemblies together. Maybe unnecessary, but I’m paranoid like that.
And here she is after one coat of BLO/varnish/mineral spirits (in the midst of drying, thus the uneven look on the plywood). In the morning I’ll buff it out and add another coat, and then tomorrow night one more. That might be it!
Yesterday I had just a little bit of shop time. Enough to make sure the tops of the legs are all level so that there is no wobble when the plywood top goes on. I had to glue on a few shims, but otherwise it’s all good to go.
Before I glue the top on, I thought it would be a good idea to have the kids go to town on the underside. Here you can see them in action: our son (and my wife) had one half, and our daughter (and I) had the other. P.S. Notice the mess of legos at the top of the picture – we need this table done soon!
I made sure that when I left my mark, I left a reminder of what hoops I had to jump through to get this project done. No wonder the average project takes me 10 times longer than it would take you! :^)
When it was all done, the kids had a ball checking out their handiwork. And I’m guessing that when my wife shows houseguests the lego table (she’s kinda proud of me), the kids will be dragging them under it to show them what they did as well!
My wife sent me into the shop yesterday, saying, “It’s been forever since your last post, you need some shop time!” Yes, ma’am.
My shop was still a mess, because the last time I had shop time I expected to get right back to it the next day…or the next week…and you know how it goes. So it took me a little bit to get my bearings and find the motivation to pick up the tools and pick up where I left off.
The tricky thing with what I did yesterday was drilling the screw holes for the legs. It wouldn’t be so tricky if I just countersunk bolts in from the outside and plugged the holes with dowels. I wanted to put the screws in from the back, so they are totally unseen and with no plugs.
Maybe there’s an easier way to do this. I’m all ears. But what I had to do was assemble the dovetailed aprons, mark the leg holes (already drilled) onto the aprons, and then take it all apart and drill the holes into the aprons (going in about 1/2″). It mostly went well, but there was one leg that was way off base (about 1/8″, which you know is a lot!). Because of that, the dovetail wouldn’t join properly, so I had to either a) drill new holes or b) plane about 1/8″ off the edge of the board. Since I’m less incompetent with my bit brace than I am with the hand plane, I just went with new holes.
So here’s a pic of what I was left with yesterday (dry fit only). The back left is the one missing a leg component because of my screwup. Also you might notice the leg components on the right long apron look funky. I had originally intended to have semicircles cut into the leg bottoms (made with an expansive bit drilling into two leg bottoms), but it was so very difficult to do, and my clamps couldn’t hold the boards no matter how tight, that I just bagged it and inverted those two parts. Anyway, here’s yesterday’s pic:
Can you tell I’m hurting for assembly space?
Today was a much better day. I fixed the off-kilter leg component, and then I glued all the leg components on to their respective apron (so there are two components on each apron which will be glued together when assembled). I took a couple hours off for lunch and then came back to it and glued the whole thing together – the dovetails, the leg components to each other, and the wedged tenons for the center cross piece (which look like they turned out pretty well).
Starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel! Next steps: glue the plywood table base down onto the cross piece and legs, cut a 6″(ish) notch in the lip of one of the short aprons for easy sweeping of the legos off the table, glue some blocks up under the plywood for a little more support, and then do some final sanding/planing before finishing! Hmm, that seems like a lot now.
Today I had a decent amount of shop time for a guy with two kids and an infant – a whopping four hours! I was able to put it to good use, and I made some progress on the Lego Table. So here are a couple pics:
First, here is the dovetailed frame with the center support piece. Those tenons will be double-wedged, and trimmed flush of course.
And then, after cutting the 1/2″ plywood to fit, here’s an idea of how it will look:
It’s no chisel box, but I guess it’ll do. :^)
Today is a national holiday (it’s Eid ul-Adha, the big Muslim holiday celebrating Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son) and I was able to get in a little shop time today! But first, define shop. I needed to work on my dovetails for the aprons on my Lego Table, but had no place to do any vertical clamping. So out to the balcony I went. And voila!
I had to use one of the little metal vertical bars (you can see one on the far right of the above picture) to support the back side of the clamp, and bunches of scrap wood to support everything and keep my piece straight up and down. Here’s a closeup:
I used the balcony wall as a tool rest, which is a little scary being on the fifth floor and all! But I didn’t drop anything. I also tried to get a shot of the mosque in the background of the picture above, you know, cuz of the holiday and all. :^)
Now I had to get ultra super creative when it came time to mark the tails (I did two pins-first joints and two tails-first joints – I think I liked tails-first better). Here I used the clothes drying rack (slash secondary tool rest) with a plastic stool resting on blocks to get the right height for marking the mating piece.
I had to do a little paring on one of my tails, so I resorted to my bone clamp with ratcheting double-femur action. I was too lazy to go get my mallet so I grabbed a scrap of wood to help my dull chisel along.
At the end of the day (only a couple hours of “shop” time), I managed to finish two of the four corners. I’ve done all the marking on the other two, so next time I’ll be able to jump right into it.
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