Woodlooking

Downed

2012-01-21T14:56:00.000+01:00

One of the victims of the last storm here was a large poplar (populus) at the arboretum of Groenendaal. According to wikipedia the genus has a large genetic diversity, and can grow from anywhere between 15–50 m (50 to 165 ft) tall, with trunks of up to 2.5 m (8 ft) diameter. The new king of the wood is a beech with a circumference of 5.8 m where it was 6 m for this one. As no roads are involved the tree is there to stay.

The tree is the small one on the sign dwarfed by American counterparts and the Atomium. As this is a small country, there is not much big here. The Atomium (1958 Brussels) 102 m, was still bested by Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekathedraal (Antwerp) 123 m. That became the new champion when the cathédrale Notre-Dame-et-Saint-Lambert 134 m (1200-1795 Liège) went down for its 300000 pounds of by then French revolutionary lead.

But to stay with wood, beech forests are sometimes cathedrals on their own .

Image and sound

2012-01-20T19:01:00.000+01:00

Last weeks I saw some interesting videos on the web. First as Roy Underhill made his season available. It was interesting to discover Peter Follansbee live. It is maybe not so different of what is to be found in his blog but it added a new dimension, certainly as Peter Follansbee promotes a very direct approach to woodworking.

A second video presentation was that of Paul Sellers. I was unaware of Paul Sellers blog and videos until the Close Grain blog post reviewing the video. "Working Wood. The Artisan Course with Paul Sellers". Although interesting I perceive the price for the videos as high. If it is 140$ for the 7 DVD on amazon.com on amazon.co.uk the dollars become pounds and this gives an equivalent of 214$. Luckily some demo videos are to be found under http://paulsellers.com/videos/ What is most impressive in Paul Sellers demos is the apparent absence of visual control. Be it by touch or experience every step is pushed through in a rush.

Looking at the whole of the videos I get an interesting series about tenon and joints:

- With Elizabethan Joint Stool with Peter Follansbee I get a back to basic view on jointing. Peter Follansbee focuses on the front side of a joint and gets in the end tight and solid by drawborring.

- Paul Sellers shows with Mortise and Tenon in Oak most of the basics and the details of mortise and tenons.
I am nevertheless still there with a problem, when a tenon does not fit in width a mortise I know that there is an error on at least one of the four following points: front or back of the tip of the tenon and front or back of the top sides of the mortise. I can from there start paring with a chisel, but I lack any way to know what to do. An interesting aspect brought up by Robert Wearing is the possibility to make a tenon fitting with a router plane, giving me the possibility to straighten a tenon where it must.

- Roy Underhill's English Layout Square with Chris Schwarz gives an evocation of Robert Wearing (and Chris Schwarz) router plane usage on tenons.

- A last video is La fabrication d'un siège à l'école Boulle of the INA already presented in a previous post. If the fine details are absent in the movie, I still find the routine very impressive.

Meta post

2011-12-30T12:37:00.000+01:00

As I am finishing this blog second year, this is a post about the blog. I nearly stopped the blog in march but in the end continued, it's still a wonderfull world and the blog is maybe my way to take some notes about it. The excellent millcreek woodworking blogger echoes a taxonomy about wood blogs: Some .., some ..., some don’t seem to make any sense at all. That's ok, according to my grandfater the family motto was ni sous, ni sens (nor money nor sense)

After using various Bruegel pictures in recent posts, I add a missing one, having used a detail for the figure of my blog profile. I was looking for a carpenter in a Bruegel painting, found one, without his tools but quite liked the head in the shadows in accordance with my intended 'anonymity'. It's a surprising picture that could be named alone in the crowd. I see it as a Bruegel self-portrait, but I could be wrong as I don't know what specialists say. It's tempera on very old cloth so no blog fitting description: wooden panel with decorative oil finish, this time.

Happy People: A Year In The Taiga

2011-12-25T23:20:00.000+01:00

Zapping along the channels, I found Happy People: A Year In The Taiga based on a four hour documentary by Dmitry Vasyukov. Those people can be very impressive, certainly as in a different mindset the documentary could be called a year in hell. It also brings back memories of magic winter holidays I spent in the woods of the Vosges and the Jura on skis.

On a woodworking level it is also very interesting as it shows that the way of the axe is still alive ... axes and chainsaws... axes, chainsaws and thousand trees to choose from. I missed the part about wooden hut building and probably also about making boats, but for making skis and traps an axe is probably enough.

Wooden planes - a German system

2011-12-21T23:53:00.000+01:00

Second post in a series about western wooden planes

Looking for information about wooden planes I found two German companies ECE and Ulmia offering a large range of wooden planes. Both Ulmia and ECE also offer those planes in very similar (beginners) sets. The main difference is the missing frame saws in the Ulmia set as it does not produce any. Ulmia describes this as Tool assortment contains quality tools - compiled by practical experts in technical training colleges - to address every requirement of modern vocational training. So I expect that many colleges will propose their students to use a similar set. Apart from the large number of squares (150 mm, 250 mm, 350 mm) there is also a large number of same sized planes. What about these?

ECE

Kurz-Rauhbankhobel 48 mm (short jointer)

Doppelhobel 48 mm (double iron jack)
Putzhobel 48 mm (smoother)
Schlichthobel 48 mm (single iron jack)
Schropphobel 33 mm (scrub)
Doppel-Simshobel 30 mm ( rabbet)

Ulmia

Luckily my limited understanding of German is covered as Ulmia lists the planes in the set in English
- jointer plane 60 mm 600 mm ( DIN 7218)

- jack plane 48 mm 240 mm (DIN 7219)

- smoothing plane 48 mm 220 mm 49° ( DIN 7220)
- bench plane 48 mm 240 mm ( DIN 7311)
- scrub plane 33 mm 240 mm ( DIN 7310)
- rabbet plane w. dbl iron 30 mm ( DIN 7307)

And gives a description of these planes
Scrub plane Processing of very rough, uneven or contaminated surfaces in preparation for smoothing or levelling (rough planing) the surface of rough sawn or bowed boards.

Bench plane For initial processing of rough sawn or scrub planed surfaces (finishing). Particularly suitable for trimming warped, rough boards at an incline to the grain and also for shaving cross-grained wood.

Jointer plane For finishing and level planing surfaces, joints and straight edges. Particularly suitable for processing large workpieces with long surfaces and for shaving and jointing.

Jack plane For levelling and smoothing finished surfaces along and also at an incline to the grain. Application similar to the jointer plain, but on smaller workpieces.

Smoothing plane For smoothing solid wood and veneered surfaces and for smoothing and matching in work. When working with knots or alternating spiral grain, it leaves no visible planing joints.

Final remarks.
The DIN numbers show that these planes comply to manufacturing standards, searching I found these were set in the seventies, but I could not access them for free.
The narrowness of the scrub plane blade 33 mm looks unusual, but maybe in practice it is not very different from a standard plane with a strongly cambered blade.

A different approach to this multi plane set for starters is the start with a do it all #5 jack plane: Used as it is a bench plane (one), after sharpening sized halfway the jointer and the German jack (two and three), a cambered blade to be a scrub plane (four), a tight mouth and more sharpening gives a smoother (five).

Wooden planes

2011-12-18T11:01:00.002+01:00

This is a first post in what should be a series about wooden planes. A series because I have too much material in mind too write it down in one session.

After reading mainly American blogs I started by buying metal planes. But to cut costs I bought wooden jointer planes something like a #7 and a #9, with woodworms and all, cheaply on the second hand market. As an afterthought I regretted not buying also standard wooden planes. Later on I got back in wooden planes when buying a set of hollow and rounds, they are more fun to hold than say a Stanley #50.

Searching the web for technical details about modern wooden planes I found The Best Thing strongly supporting wooden planes: For fine work, the ECE 711 Primus plane will easily outperform Bailey type smoothing planes like the Lie-Nielsen. Only the best antique (or reproduction) British infill planes can match or sometines outperform these ECE Primus planes, and then only on the most difficult woods.

Jim Toplin answers in his book The New Traditional Woodworker the question: Why aren't I showing wood bodied bench planes? with There's nothing wrong with the traditional wood-bodied plane. In some (if not all) ways they are inherently superior to the metal plane ... ... but I've never learned to tune and use them ... plus, few students show up with wooden planes.

Personally I don't see major reasons why wooden planes should be superior, but they are made of wood and you can set them by hitting them with a mallet and when that goes well it's more satisfying than fusing over setting screws. So looking for a smoothing plane I dropped in the end the idea of buying a #4 bedrock or the excellent new Veritas Small Bevel-Up Bench Plane and started to look for wooden planes.

Cart fences

2011-12-16T16:39:00.015+01:00

After seeing an analogy between chisel racks and hay cart fences ... I know, let's say it was beer, I went on internet to find hay cart pictures. I found surprisingly few of them, time and mechanisation have changed the situation since I worked on them. I did find a picture of a small one on a French second hand site. Char à foin en bois, appropriately for this blog made of wood, only the two recovered small truck axles are in metal.

To fully load a cart you may need a fourche à balle allowing to deliver 20 kg (sometimes 40 kg) straw or hay bales up to 4 m (13') high. When loading a cart the safety risks are numerous, if you are unlucky you can be stabbed by a pitchfork, fall, impale yourself on the fence to finish under the wheels of the moving cart, by this tipping it over to get buried under tons of bales where what becomes your last cigarette starts a bonfire.

For the fun of it two Bruegel paintings De oogst and a detail of De hooi oogst (both 1565), with straw and hay carts.

Open toolboxes - 4

2011-12-13T00:17:00.011+01:00

This post is part of a series about open toolboxes. Popular woodworking published an article of the early (starting out in America) Frank Klausz toolbox Your First Tool Kit. Searching on-line I found it here. At first sight it had not much special, but after being made more aware through Popular Woodworking and Chris Schwarz of more standard toolboxes, I became attracted by its lay out. Where a traditional toolbox gives access through its top to a deep box and is partially filled with sliding drawers at the top level. This box sets the drawer at the bottom and gives a more easily accessible box at the top. A second aspect clearly shown by the Klausz box is that the bottom drawer does not cover the whole bottom and leaves room to place larger objects like chisels and planes at the sides.

Here follows three toolboxes, one from Frank Klausz as presented in his Your First Tool Kit article and two others I found on a second hand site, 2 .

We are now forty years and more later, I can imagine that this design further evolved and that modern metallic toolboxes represent a newer generation of the toolbox with drawers design.

Whatsthis

2011-11-20T12:31:00.006+01:00

After looking at a 50 year old tool-chest in a previous post, I was unable to situate one tool.

Not so much the wooden paring helper, it's there for paring mitered profiles, like the one on the following image. In this case the joint is tight but the profile has a gap.

It's rather what could be an angled pinch dog to be seen at the top. Maybe it's used to hold and tighten the joint while it's drawbored. For nailing it would be only usable for the first two joints. I add two pictures, one of a pinch dog, the other of a clam clamp both to hold while gluing.

As a last thing, the toolbox is missing one major tool. I expect the former owner to have a combination machine for cutting, planing, moulding, mortise. And the tenons? Maybe they are done with a handsaw. The picture does not show the more impressive pre-war cast iron machine, but it gives 4 operations in one shot. In modern variations shaper and saw both use a sliding table (solving at the same time the tenoning problem) and share a fence with the planer.

Rust

2011-11-19T09:37:00.015+01:00

Reading Chris Schwarz's blog where he is Rethinking the Traditional Tool Chest and asserting that, by birthright, chests keeps rust out. I thought, no way. Without feet the bottom will rot within a year - at least in a traditional shop in these climate. The first add, for an old tool chest with tools, will show me right and display predictably a fifty year old collection of rusted tools.

After a five seconds search I found these, without feet and spotless! And for 400€ it's yours. My guess is that modern heated cellars-garages do the trick, don't try that in my late 18th century vaulted cellar. Ok ok, Chris Schwarz is right, by birthright etc ... Anyway, it's a display of a lifetime of professional involvement.

The layout is also interesting. The drawer is set at the bottom to optimize space and for ease of access. It leaves at the sides and back enough space for the full height chisel racks.

Open toolboxes - 3

2011-11-12T12:01:00.009+01:00

Another part in a toolbox series triggered by Chris Schwarz attention for toolboxes in The anarchist Toolchest.

I found a few weeks back Roy Underhill's 1940's Carpenter's Toolbox drawing. Looking at it probably triggered it's dismissal, as the link is broken, and there is nothing left on-line about that toolbox. The carpenter toolbox is interesting as it aims for portability and it tries to do something useful with the lid. But that comes with a price, to keep access to the bottom of the box, the sides must be low and once opened the lid more than doubles the footprint of the box, unless the box is set at the edge of a table.

Luckily the concept is still alive, Homestead Heritage School Of Woodworking has a six days course to make one of these.

Looking for alternatives to the design, one possibility is to open the lid upwards. In this case the moving lid needs a recess to leave room for the handle or a clever alternative. A possible problem is that the box becomes too high once opened and falls over. A last alternative is to make a detachable lid that could be fixed at the back of the box. I have never seen this so it is probably not the right idea.

After searching the whole internet I remembered to look in FWW: #24 - A Joiner's Tool Case with interesting details like lengthened drawer runners and a smaller bottom drawer to give a better access to the bottom compartment. Also present in Jim Tolpin's Toolbox book in many variations and labelled lidded totes.

A more modern take on a finish carpenter's tool tote comes from Gary Katz. It's a fixed top model. The drawer has moved to the bottom of the box. The top is there to sit and stand and has even recesses to hold screws. The round holes are for holding cordless power drills. An external rack is there for the chisels. The whole fits into a milk crate.

Compound angle mortice and tenon joint - 2

2011-11-01T14:15:00.011+01:00

Thanks to Kari Hultman, who refers on her blog to a French Woodworking Video from 1912 of the Ina: La fabrication d'un siège à l'école Boulle, I saw a manual method for making compound angle tenons.

The video shows many interesting details in the making of a Louis XV style seat, that has by its form only angled joints. Early in the video a wooden leg vise is presented standing proud of the surface of the workbench

When it comes to cut a tenon a square frame-vise is attached to the vise. The top surface of the frame is used as a reference plane for cutting the tenon as it stands square to that surface and the shoulders are set parallel to the top surface.
The tenon shoulder height is set above the frame top to leave room for saws and sawing. Then a template is used to mark the tenon.

Sawing the shoulders is done with a plane like block saw, with a horizontal blade on it side, resting on the horizontal frame-vise. The block saw seems to have symmetrical handles to work on both sides and has most probably symmetrical teeth.
After that a frame saw is used for the vertical cut. Just straight down, and not a safer three step method with reclamping as proposed by for example Robert Wearing.

During the whole tenon cutting process the piece is attached only once and that's even before most of the markings. After seeing mainly router solutions for compound angle tenons, I was happy to find at last a hand tool method.

Oak furniture

2011-10-31T22:21:00.005+01:00

Two poor pictures of a nice piece of oak furniture described by the owners as Louis XV Liègois. This sets it somewhere around 1750

Liège is also known for other artifacts

And got a waffle named after the town

Liège waffle

Not to be confused with the

Brussels waffles

Workbench height - 2

2011-10-30T09:51:00.016+01:00

Reading Jim Tolpin's The new traditional woodworker I quite liked the part dedicated to workbench heights.

Thanks to a great variety of workbenches in his workshop and a sense of proper height for each activity or is it a more demanding back, Jim Tolpin develops a system of various heights: Knee heigh saw benches, finger tip height for the assembly table, wrist height for the planing bench and elbow height for the joinery bench.

Saw benches

Jim Tolpin proposes asymmetrical saw benches and these are interesting. Having one side with square legs allows to put two of them side by side and to saw really close the top, minimizing unbalance and vibrations. My sketch probably misses an essential characteristic of the benches, they are stackable. So the width of the top should be less than the width between the legs.

Getting interested I checked the Bahco catalog for their longest handsaw and found a Bahco Pc-24-File-U7 fcut Fileable Saw 24In at 14£. It should be closer to 26" long according to Tolpin. The fileable aspect makes it a sole survivor in the Bahco catalog, most probably due to the omnipresence of hard on teeth plywood. There is for an added cost a more up to date low friction hardpoint Bahco 2700-24-Xt7-Hp Handsaw 24In at 26£.

Is it traditional? Probably not here. The swedish Vagnmakeri på Söder video from 1932 displays what is by then the old ways of hand sawing. It's done with a frame saw at hip height (wrist height). It's maybe not the perfect example as it is about cutting curves. The ergonomy is different from a saw bench cut: he stands upright behind the blade, with two hands at the saw and pulling the saw down coming from nose height. This position is not specific to a frame saw, as I have seen on the web people using a handsaw with a high two handed hold.

With a saw bench I would need to lean forward resting on one arm, being before the blade and pushing the saw down starting close to the shoulder. The picture shows a high sawing bench, (Bernard Jones 1920). It leaves more room for the saw. Compared to Tolpin low benches, the knee is higher and is more distant from the cut. And the left shoulder is also locked higher keeping the trunk in a similar position.
If I look at the french peugeot catalogue of 1938, I see 12 regional models of frame saws (Parisienne, Bordelaise ...) and not a single handsaw. For narrow blades the standard saw (price in red) is a 26" model with a 10mm blade. For straight cuts there is a 40mm blade and numerous lengths. A last 'veneer' model has a 6mm and a 30mm blade in only one length 24".

Using saw benches is probably very interesting, but I am in a different tradition. And I see them as only good for straight cuts, keeping up the need for a second setup. As it is now, with untraditional plunge saw and jig saw at hand, I am probably more in need of a decent cutting table (at wrist height?).

To keep this post out of the pile of unpublished ones, I close it without touching the other Tolpin benches. Maybe more about bench height another time.

Wooden nails

2011-10-22T21:15:00.015+02:00

After Adam Cherubini's seminar on Nailed Furniture at WIA 2011 I got some echoes through the blogosphere.

I have my own nailed furniture. Here an example of paint-grade furniture of the twenties, that was stripped (and survived) in the nineties to give it a second life. ... on second thought, the nails possibly date from the nineties restoration.
A seventeenth century nailed example is harder to find, to make the wood survive it would be most probably oak anyway, and oak is hard on nails.

Adam Cherubini is more specific about his nailed furniture: fasteners and a clever use of rabbets, dados and grooves. That's different, I always imagine I am here in a former panel and frame country and there is little chance to find assembled wide board

If I forget about the originals and go for the fun and fast aspect of nailed board, I hesitate as there are already alternatives with wooden fasteners: Dowels, like Krenov. Biscuits, making most of the rabbets, dados and grooves superfluous. Finger joints? And using screws: pocket hole joinery, screws, dowel screws, ... . Most of these, although easy in realisation, present maybe an excessive modern - machine made aspect.

Wooden nails? I was thinking thin dowels with a head to allow fixing thin panels without the nails slipping out. Ok here I have some ideas. I grabbed some bamboo satay sticks, measured them as being a skinny 2,5mm (0.1") and went for a transversal load test. I drilled, by lack of a 2,5mm drill, a 3mm hole in two boards and looked for the breaking point. Two attempts gave me values close to 20kg. I can probably improve that with glue and better holes to 30kg. But it's not enough, I am looking to something like 50kg and I expect to find it with a diameter between 3 and 4 mm. If that succeeds I can go further: making nail heads, gluing and testing longitudinal load.

Testing further I covered the wood before gluing to test only the transversal strength of the stick and obtained a 27kg (60lb) breaking point with glue. A second test: driving a stick in a 2mm hole with a hammer failed, that's provably why nails are from metal.

Ordered chaos

2011-10-12T20:52:00.037+02:00

Thanks to the Christopher Schwarz lostartpress blog, mentioning an upcoming book by Don Williams Virtuoso, the Studley chest is hot again.

What's interesting is not so much the tools, but the story of the man behind the chest. Luckily it's possible to learn something about him through a may 1993 article of the Fine Woodworking Magazine. I am also curious about his character, is his chest for example an expression of obsessive behaviour? Drawing a parallel with one of my favourite painters, I would say I don't know, as I see Bruegel more as an encyclopaedic mind. In my view close to Roy Underhill, encyclopaedic and sometimes chaotic because of that.

The next two paintings (thanks wikipedia) are from Bruegel the Elder. The first is Mad Meg, as it is a view from hell and the only constraint is to put Mad Meg in the picture, it is plain chaotic. The second is Proverbs, 119 or more - is it 144, of them. Even if it still looks chaotic there is a great part of composition to make all these proverbs fit, this is more an ordered chaos. Like the Studley chest, there are similar realisations made by artisans of his time, but the packed quantity is overwhelming.

[edit] Seeing both pictures side by side I discover that Bruegel used a similar structure for both: a low diagonal with moon at the right and an open house at the left with its own diagonal to the central figure.

Not all is there, this time chaos but with some line ups: here lancers, trees and the perspective of the houses - set in a curve to stay focused on the man in black. Massacre of the Innocents 1565-7

I have my favourites but there are other possible references. Looking at the finish, Studleys chest comes maybe closer to the late medieval Ghent Altarpiece from Jan Van Eyck made around 1430

Keeping the woodworking aspect in mind, these are all large wooden panels with an oil based decorative finish from the sixteenth and fifteenth century.

Beam saw

2011-09-30T22:33:00.002+02:00

Closing ranks, I spent the day working with a beam saw, for me it was a first. Compared to a table saw it is of course bigger, most values are x3. Three air flotation outfeed tables for example. There is also less to see, I didn't see the saw(s) once. As long as no mistakes are made there is nothing difficult here apart from following the instructions. Of course I didn't do that all the time. The easiest mistake being: feeding a panel in the wrong direction, and with a feed capacity of 3m by 3m (10' x 10') and a cutting speed of 1m/s such a mistake is easily done. That's probably why there is an attempt to make the steering of the machine fool proof: the work pieces are shown with their correct orientation on the screen.

Feeding the machine with a new panel is by lack of a panel lift to move 70 and more kg panels, a two man job. After the first cuts the weight and sizes are more manageable for a single operator. My estimate is that I was cutting something like 20m² an hour when everything went fine.

Book fever

2011-09-06T21:59:00.008+02:00

A short visit to the lumberjocks site, has raised my recurring book fever.

The anarchist tool chest is reviewed time and again on the site. Apart from unresolved shipping problems, I already sidestepped the need for the TATC with The complete book of woodworking by Charles Hayward. So no problem here TATC remains unread. Apart from a small table model, locked in a work in progress state, tool chests are most probably not my thing anyway. And the table model has a fixed top, that's not the best way to make a chest and the main reason the project is in extended evaluation.

But now I hear about a book The Complete Woodworker by Bernard E. Jones. Less than 2£ on amazon.co.uk Most probably it roots the tradition followed by Charles Hayward and Robert Wearing (The Essential Woodworker). And maybe even James Krenov (The Impractical Cabinetmaker)

Roubo's l'Art du Menuisier is also mentionned. If the language is dated, it is much more accessible than Foucault's writings, those left me thinking that I kept half my brain unused. Through amazon I can get it for 33€ on .fr or 29£ on .co.uk, with free shipping. For me the free shipping aspect counts as often halve the costs of foreign tools or books go to shipping, with Amazon being an exception. For this price 600 pages of in-folio format is a bargain. But will I read it. It is certainly a different track than my usual English spoken book, so I should and it's a good occasion ( panic, is a good occasion a Gallicism based on une bonne occasion? a quick Google check shows 1,020,000 results, that's OK ) to do a French workout.

And then there is Jim Tolpin's book The New Traditional Woodworker, also mentioned in one of the treads. I liked his toolbox book. I disliked his Measure Twice, Cut Once: Simple Steps to Measure, Scale, Draw and Make the Perfect Cut-Every Time as it felt too much as a Veritas catalog. After reading Leonard Lee's The complete guide to sharpening, where his own catalog is nearly absent, the difference was marked. The excerpt of his hand tool book showed a project I disliked, but a good attention for technical details. Of course there is also his upcoming design book with George Walker that seems very interesting.

Speaking of design, checking prices on Amazon I found out that Get Your House Right: Architectural Elements to Use & Avoid discovered via ThisIsCarpentry is at last out. I ordered the book with a delivery time is more than two weeks. Perfect, I filled the pipeline, other books need to wait their own turn.

Horizontal mortiser

2011-08-24T20:58:00.039+02:00

My favorite woodworking machine is the horizontal mortiser.

It is quite, with 3000 maybe 3600 rpm it is a lot slower than a router. Powerful, 3 hp for the model displayed. Due to its low speed it produces limited amounts of fine dust. Precise, the depth is set to the front of the workpiece where in a drill press the bottom is the reference. Also precise when making frames as the frame front is locked down to the table giving predictable alignment. Goes straight, where a hollow chisel keeps it (mis)direction, the drill is free to realign itself after being pushed sideway by an irregularity. ROUNDED mortises? True, these look very machine made, but ... in engineering holes must have rounded corners to avoid excessive stress.

Drilling a mortise with a horizontal mortiser can be done in a succession of: drilling the two extremities, adding free standing holes in between, drilling extra joining holes, and finishing with shallow sideway passes. Personally I prefer a two handle system, where one hand is used for positioning and the other for movement, keeping at the same time both hands away from the drill.

It is possible to make tenons with handtools (a saw) and straighten up mistakes when in excess (mainly a router plane). Where for mortises the process is mostly more brutal and it is more difficult to see and correct mistakes. So, it allows to say: give me perfect mortises, I will try to deliver appropriate tenons even using only handtools.

Do I need one? No, only if I was a regular tenon and mortise guy, or if I was looking for a possibly cheaper or beefier loose tenons alternative to a Festool Domino thing. The model on the top picture shows a doweling indexing system, the black tube under the x-y table. But it is unclear to me how to drill in panel fronts. Speed wise, based on William Thomas evaluation, I think that longer positioning time gives it half the speed of hand held free tenon alternatives, be it a biscuit joiner, the Mafell Duo-Dowel or the Festool Domino.

Its origins? I always imagine it is a logical add on to a jointer-planer. The drill head is an extension of the cutter head. And the x-y table can be directly attached to the internal planer table, or like in this example has its own raising mechanism. Of course it is a fight between space and comfort, where more comfortable is when the table stands on the back of the jointer.

I have an example of simple bed probably made by a finish carpenter around 1930. Pictured leaning against a wall during transport - hence the leaves, to catch the chiseled pairing markings. The joints show that the workshop used a horizontal mortiser.

Matthias Wandel at Woodgears, made its own horizontal mortiser using a (noisy) router, drawer slides, and some wood. Why buy one, when it is so 'easy' to make one.

gRounded

2011-08-09T22:07:00.017+02:00

Lately I encountered two projects where I needed rounded forms. And then, I got grounded. Where in woodworking flat, straight and square has numerous problems and solutions, round has its own needs.

James Krenov's coopered doors.

After reading his book The fine art of cabinetmaking, I decided to try to emulate one of his small cabinets with coopered doors (minus the choice of better woods). I agreed with him that using boards of variable width gives a more interesting curve, and used three boards to make a five piece progressive rounding.

The glue up is done two by two pieces, with rounded supports on the sides. Things got more difficult in the end glue up, where I missed a central down force to control the bulging. I solved this by clamping down only the sides and wedging the center (and stacking a number of heavy items on top), but a centrally placed edge clamp pushing downward would have been a more controlling alternative. It's now on my needed list.
Flattening (rounding) the exterior can be done with any plane. The interior is another problem. Krenov says he uses a number of rounded planes of his own made. If I have round profile planes, I have nothing close to a number 300 needed to do the job. I looked to Robert Wearing for an alternative and in his tool list I found:

- A compass (circular) plane, the right form but not the right orientation. Who knows, tomorrow Chris Schwarz finds a use for them, and we follow. The plane is also mentionned by Charles Hayward for his list together with a curved edge plough . This one is on ebay UK 50£ and four days to go. For new ones there is Anant, Kunz, ECE and Virutex (powered).

- A rounded spokeshave, the right form, but the handles are too low making it unusable. Veritas has a rounded spokeshave with a central handle and Lie-Nielsen a small convex sole plane, these could do the job, but the price is far from the low budget project I started with. While the short (rounded) sole is a weakness for this project.
- A firmer gouge, it has the rounding similar to a normal round profile plane, there is no gain here if both are available.
- Half round rasps and files, presented in his book without handle. With some creativity about handles set on the flat side, this could be a solution.
- Abrasive papers. Most probably this is closest to a solution, it is easy to make rounded form and fix sandpaper on it.

My starting idea was to follow the Krenov approach with dedicated round planes. I could take a cheap wooden plane and round it and sharpen the blade with an appropriate curve. Or as an alternative take my cheapest n°3 plane, glue a strip of hardwood on the sole and round it as well as the blade.

All this written, I think I drop the n°3 modification and give sandpaper a try. For me the Krenov project is already innovative, adding plane making to it doubles the load.

Looking at my other gRounded project is for another time. It's making a sector based on a description of Jim Tolpin in Measure twice, cut once. I thought I had 'improved' his design, and created some new problems in the process.

Vagnmakeri på Söder

2011-07-29T22:59:00.020+02:00

Lost and found again: Vagnmakeri på Söder. After seeing an old school, by 1932 standards, Swedish wheelwright, I lost track of the link to the video. Looking now at the title it is not really a surprise. Thanks to Kari Hultman link page I found it back.

Seeing the movie for a second time, I discovered many interesting details. The use of a frame saw. Also the live use of compasses to mark sixth and twelfth of the circumference. Tenon and mortise technique ....

Another video on the list showed a clog maker. A former clog shop down the street, with stylised clogs on a red and green tyles facade (30's or 60's no cue) is now getting replaced by a taller building. Described that way, way way up the street (immer gerade aus) is the House of Parliament facing the Royal Palace.

My regret here is that I never bought clogs when it still was possible. The only clogs I see have a Dutch (Swedish?) design. And I can't imagine myself wearing these. ... Saved again. Looking for a picture of clogs I found that the Gilles of Binche, clog wearing dancing straw men, living 80 km south-west, made it to the Unesco list. So not all is lost as they must have a supply line available. On the drawing details of the clog are hidden by over-clogs, but the typical leather band is visible.

And now something completely different, a song linking clogs and queens on music attributed to Orlande de Lassus who was born (1532) and raised in Mons, that's way down the road (16 km immer gerade aus) to Binche.

Ils m'ont appelée "Vilaine", avec mes sabots
Ils m'ont appelée "Vilaine", avec mes sabots
Je ne suis pas si vilaine, avec mes sabots dondaine
Oh, oh, oh ! avec mes sabots
....
S'il fleurit, je serai reine

----
They called me common with my clogs
I am not that ugly wearing clogs ...

Open toolboxes - 2

2011-07-18T22:12:00.010+02:00

This post is part of a series about toolboxes.

I was trying to solve a router problem by looking at Router Tips & Techniques by Robert Wearing, I halted on an image of his unique workshop presented in the introduction. As it looks so small and by having the walls fully covered by tools, I got the impression he is working from inside a toolbox.
The tools can be found back in his other books The essential woodworker or Hand tools for woodworkers.

Being back on the toolboxes taught train and supported by sleepless time, I can as well continue my open toolbox tinkering. A place to be for looking at toolboxes is The toolbox book by Jim Tolpin. Interesting is a picture of an old toolbox. The box is opened up through a removable front and has also a tilted lid to give a better access to the top tool racks.

To evaluate a toolbox it is best to differentiate the toolbox real estate locations. I see at the effort at grabbing a tool. On the workbench it is just grabbing, ... when the surface is clear. The toolbox top: one step followed by grabbing. The lower shelves are, depending of the health of my back, one deep step followed by grabbing, or a full taboo zone. If I deepen the box, the back of the lower shelves are nearly unreachable. That's why I mostly favor drawers over deep lower shelves. But it's a bigger effort to catch the front tools as it is now step - open - grab (probably a two handed operation). It's possible to combine both with sliding shelves, giving an open shelve in the front and more drawer like access for the back.

As for optimal packing density, shelves seem perfect for planes (deep enough shelves). For chisels, saws and the like, top racks can give a high tool density.

Implementing a toolbox adds maybe focus to the tools used . It allows to think about what tools are used and needed. My handyman toolbox is in constant evolution but when I take it along I am pretty certain I can handle most jobs without searching any further. Another evolutionary step today, as I used it and missed a saw for a straight and a rounded cut. I solved it with a 2 hp sabre saw, did I say straight? But I probably need some Japanese foldable thing.

My take today on a woodworker's workshop toolbox would be to make a narrow, wheeled column (less than 20" by 20") as high as a workbench. Narrow to keep it close without getting too much in the way. With racks at the back half of the top, the saw rack being completely at the back (right on the drawing). The front of the top a free landing zone. Under it a half deep shelve for planes and using drawers or sliding shelves for ease of access to the lower shelves.
An extra could be to make the chisel rack free standing making it possible to bring a group of chisels as a whole to the workbench.

Edge lipping planer

2011-07-14T22:06:00.016+02:00

I am not in the face frame tradition when using plywood for a cabinet. Nevertheless I need a strip as a minimal frame to hide the plywood layers. Those thin strips give two critical steps gluing and finishing. The problem with finishing is a precise finish without touching the plywood surface. Luckily there are tools for that, but they come with a price.

The most impressive (certainly in price) is the Lamello Cantex Lipping Machine

Virutex and others offer a lob sided power planer as edge lipping planer

And then the edge trimmers. Virutex again with a router that can be set from 90° to -1,5°. Festool offers something similar but with separate 90°, 0° and -1,5° bases. Others like Bosch only offer a vertical solution

Makita has an edge trimmer with a transparent base with an horizontal option. Although I can't see any fine adjustments.

Routers can also be used with a kit. I found one for a horizontal setup made by Festool. It helps that Festool has one handed plunge router, where I am stuck with a two handed router. A two handed router is possibly safer, in this case Festool makes of his router a two handed setup and is much better than my router balanced on the side of a board. Even here balance is a problem as the edge gets damaged when the pressure of the right hand is released for just one second.

Making my own kit? I got some ideas from Robert Wearing's Router Tips & Techniques. In one example he balances a two handed plunge router with a leveling foot to round an edge. It's not complete for my problem as the router sole must still be raised over the protruding strip to work as a lipping planer. But it seems a good match for my router. And now I need to find something like the Vanguard Routing Rods used in his setup.

Open toolboxes

2011-07-06T22:47:00.021+02:00

I wanted to write some introduction to the power of two concept, but as it is, it stands on its own.
Chris Schwarz offers us an authoritative work about tools and tool storage with The anarchist toolchest. I checked the availability of his book on this continent at Dictum. No book yet, so I went for a book by Charles Hayward as proposed in a language thread at Lost Art Press. I paid 0.01£ for the book (linen hard cover of course) and then an extra 40200% for transport. The book fitted its 'used' condition as upon reception I discovered one small stain on the cover. As for the Hayward's toolset it's there drawing after drawing. It's also very well presented by the Cornish Workshop, so it's possible to spare a penny plus charges.

When on the Dictum site, I found that they have a nice example of, an open toolbox for woodworkers. To clarify to people stuck in language sensibilities, this is not a personalized box, the company switched its name from Dick to Dictum in May and they have some labeling backlog. The Dick-Werkzeugträger Schreinerei/Innenausbau is a nice compact package of mainly Japanese woodworking tools, only the price keeps me from becoming even more a tool collector. I certainly need that E.C.E wooden block plane, as I don't like the feel and weight of cast iron block planes.

And now the buts. - As I see it it is maybe a little too big to set it on my smallish workbench. - Like many tool racks it fits perfectly one set of tools and no other, forcing me to go for the matching tools. - The technique used to make the box seems to allow a 5 minutes cutting cycle on a nesting cnc machine followed by 30 minutes of assembly. This makes the end price of 170€ for the box + container look high, even if it is cheaper than making it myself using a cnc for free.

My interest for open toolboxes comes from my handyman toolbox. Due to the small size of the box, a 25cm x 25cm (10" by 10") footprint, I can put the box on a chair, the corner of a table or its cover. The open nature of the box allows most tools to go easily out and then back in the box keeping the workspace clean(er) and (more) structured. Lately I bought a spare box for 20€ just to be sure I don't fear losing the first one (call it the power of two).

An American (cowboy style?) alternative to open toolboxes are the larger tool belts. They offer also an open structure to put the most used tools within arms reach.

The E.C.Emmerich catalog is not only there for wooden block planes, it proposes in just one page a number of more or less classic solutions to store handtools within arms reach of a workbench.

The classical tool cabinet

Same tools different setup. When walls are not used, a tilting drawer for under the workbench

A cross between a cabinet and a small chest with those clever, going over the handle, hinges.

And for those on the move, another version of a dedicated tool tote, the PraXsys.

All of these very nice. But I was thinking of something smaller, just big enough to present and regroup the smaller basic tools, with maybe one or two smaller saws, while working . The tilted board in the small chest seems a good start.

[edit] In the end this post became the start of a series about open toolboxes

Dovetail Joinery

2011-06-14T22:15:00.011+02:00

Here again the Oldwolf blog triggered a post, this time about dovetails. My starting idea was to make 50 dovetail test joints first before talking about them. But as this is already by now a I am just looking blog - choose a blog name and it will come back to byte you - there is no reason to wait any further. The other excuse is that my cheap dovetail test boards where cut green and are by now dry and all cupped and twisted.
The Oldwolf does a thorough presentation of the Frank Klausz dovetailing layout referring to an article in Popular Woodworking of October 2005. It gave me a better understanding of what I was seeing on video. The Frank Klausz approach is interesting as it allows cutting without much marking or layout. And as I discovered, if by chance your stock is cupped or twisted, it's probably the best method of joining, even forget about a marking gauge, all you have is a pencil.

Besides being in Popular Woodworking, Frank Klausz had a dovetail interview-article in Fine Woodworking of September 1979 and made a video about it in 1985 that's still available today as a DVD. And there are also on youtube a number of demonstrations mainly famous (to my regret) for their speed.

Looking at how he works, he starts pins first and from the inside - setting by this the square lines inside and the mistakes outside. After marking the depth with a marking gauge, he cuts two half pins by eye. The next step is to set a tail, I see it as tricky as the base of the tail needs to be one fifth of the remaining width if I want a regular lay out.

Next he halves the remaining width and then halves the two halves. According to his description, he could have first split in thirds and then in halves or go for eights, depending on the width of the piece.

Following the Oldwolf blog post I see an alternative where the width of the tails is set by using the width of a chisel (chosen as wide as the board). I think it's a good idea, handmade mortise widths are also set with a chisel and it removes part of the freehand layout stress. The sequence becomes: Two symmetrical pins, one chisel wide tail, the remaining halved and two chisel wide tails.

Mastery
The bad news is when Frank Klausz says that after 15 years of practice you will be a good beginner. It's the same time scale as the 10000 hours needed to make a world champion, that's something like 7 years. Luckily someone said 10000 is for champions, but 1000 hours is OK. I agree, my Aikido expertise was over the 1000 hours mark, it's a good basis . The same can be said about 100 hours, you follow a weekly training for a year, or a full weeks here and there, for example Build a Dovetailed Tool Chest with Christopher Schwarz next week in Germany (luckily I can not go, because the end result would have been for the stove, just imagine long show off dovetail joints, there to be stared at). 10 hours can also make a difference, you decide to make 50 dovetail test joints and go as far as 20. Even 1 hour is worthwhile, you grab your saw for 60 straight cuts.

Schluss, still time to make some cuts. Next time I probably look at the layout of those cupped and twisted dovetail joints.

Modern Joinery

2011-05-28T22:42:00.023+02:00

This Is Carpentry has an article by William Thomas about the construction of a number of historic cabinets. The cabinets are all made out of solid wood, with mortise and tenon joints and tongue and groove panels.

What caught my attention was that he compares the more traditional approach to alternatives. The two and more days to make the frames with a mortise and tenon are compared to a 4 hours pocket hole job or a full day Domino job. Domino needs this extra time for clamping. A dowel job with his unused Newton double spindle borer is estimated to a day and a half.

Looking for other similar systems, Mafell has the Duo-Dowel System with a very good positioning system, I see no reason it would not perform as well as the Domino. This gives a good positioning system half a day advantage over the more traditional spindle borer . And a biscuit joiner is probably in the same time line, positioning happens here partly after cutting.

There is also the new Lamello P-System with its T profile biscuits, making clamping unnecessary. Lamello seems to say it is so fast that it can be the cheapest.

Not much new here but the article started by mentioning SenClamps (Senco small corrugated fasteners SC1), I had never heard about them, so I looked further. I found an article by Paul Allen Senclamps: The Faster Fasteners (p4) and another setting pocket holes and the Senco corrugated-fastener (SC2) side by side by Jesse Wright Fast Job-Site Joinery, with a youtube complement. Both fasteners clamp and hold the workpiece while the glue dries. The Senclamp can work in corners, and favors harder woods and when set along the grain is very clean. The corrugated fastener is probably at its best in MDF. And even if the joint can look cheap and I read somewhere that they look unprofessional compared to the workmanship of pocket holes (...), they must be faster than anything else.

What about me? With cheaper biscuit joiners, pocket-hole kits and maybe Miller dowels as an exception , most of these tools are too expensive for the occasional use and user or it should be that it fits well a style one intends to use repetitively. I also can justify the acquisition of a Festool Domino if it means that it makes the acquisition of a tablesaw, dado blade, tenoning jig, hollow mortiser, ... unnecessary.

Medieval carpentry - 4

2011-05-15T16:36:00.046+02:00

Fourth posting in a series about medieval carpentry. This is more than ever an evocation of medieval carpentry and not the real thing.

The oldwolf workshop mentioned that for a demo medieval - viking carving reenactment, he referred to Peter Follansbee techniques as Peter focuses on the 17th century with his work but in truth there was not a very significant advance in furniture or decoration of furniture from 1000 AD up to the middle to late 1600's. I agree with him not much changed over the centuries, but that does not mean that medieval carving could not be outstanding.

Two days later I took a few pictures in a medieval church (1305+). The medieval carpentry is there although hidden by a modern 17th century ceiling. (That's to keep up with the tradition of the previous posts, I have not much to show about medieval carpentry).

The church has also carvings from 1660

I went for an example I imagined was from an earlier period but, checking further, it is from the 18th century setting it in line with the oldwolf.

Ok, I need to look elsewhere for medieval carvings. I have an example from the local late medieval stone carvers (inspired by the goldsmiths), and I can imagine that the wood carvers guild still tried to outshine them.

To keep in the viking spirit of the oldwolf workshop. After the siege of Paris (885-887), this is September 891, a large viking army occupying and by then defending the town, lost ground 50 m west of the church and ended in the river maybe 200 m further. Just imagine, the dismounted cavalry facing a palisade following the small river arm where the small bridge now stands, covering boats and row upon row of mocking vikings and then ... they pushed through - a rugby with different rules. 'Nam instantibus ex altera parte ... they were forced to throw themselves into the river, and, grasping at each other in heaps by hand, neck and limbs, they sank in hundreds and thousands, so that their corpses blocked the river bed and it seemed to run dry. In that battle two of their kings were killed, that is Sigfröðr and Guðröðr, and sixteen royal standards were carried off ... tanta milia hominum ex altera parte perierunt.'
Maybe I get carried away after seeing the second episode of Lord of the Rings yesterday.

The same men seen in Paris in 1883

Saws - Reciprocating (Sabre)

2011-04-26T16:25:00.024+02:00

Today I moved three reciprocating saws in and got an armful of saws back from the repair shop. We use them for pallet repair, some chops seem to use bandsaws or mighty robots, but these are certainly good at cutting wood and nails.
The Hitachi is end of life, no one wants to use them, so it will hang around for some time. The Flex model (1200W) is good but we are moving away from it. One out of six users prefer the Dewalt DW 311 - 1200W. Four out of six users prefer the Makita JR3070CT and its 1500W (that's 2hp and if you divide W by V you get A or is it P by U to get I). Another possibility is that the Makita Active Dynamic Vibration Absorber makes the difference. "Damien get more Makitas next time", I ordered two extra.

The Anarchist Woodworker

2011-04-11T19:05:00.030+02:00

Life would be boring without Chris Schwarz. Today he presented an excerpt of the upcoming book The Anarchist’s Tool Chest: A toolchest in 13 rules. As anarchy can mean "without ruler" short of reading the book, I was looking for a meaning.

Searching the web I found a obituary for John Brown by Phil Davy, and I think this gives the context of the title of the book: ...a new practical series called The Anarchist Woodworker. Aimed at the novice, John based the features around a kit of tools he put together from the Axminster catalogue, building projects for the workshop along the way. .... His toolbox remained firmly shut most of the weekend, although he was happy to discuss its contents with anyone he deemed a genuine hand tool convert! ... http://www.getwoodworking.com/news/article.asp?a=980.
Where Schwarz book is about: Assembling a reasonable kit of tools so you can be a woodworker instead of a budding tool collector.
[edit] Chris Schwarz confirmed in a comment to a post at the Cornish workshop that his book was inspired by John Brown

Now about the chest. It looks nice and massive. Schwarz comes to Germany to give a tool chest course at Dick, most interesting, but wrong dates, so I pass, leaving it to better woodworkers than me.
The strangest part of the tool chest is the bottom. Schwarz explains that the nailed bottom allows to easily replace rotten boards. As the chest is there to protect tools from rust, a rotten bottom seems something to avoid. Maybe I expect him to add some feet to keep the bottom free from a cold and damp floor?

[edit] Looking further I got a picture of a bottom supported by two rails (battens) or is it a frame hidden by the skirt, so the bottom stands free from the floor, even if it lacks some ventilation. The bottom being cross grain to the sides (or the front and back) and possibly the battens, nailing it is a possible solution to seasonal movement.

[edit 2] In a later video Chris Schwarz shows that, for the bottom of the chest, each board is spaced (using a carpenter square) and nailed, leaving room for seasonal movement. He probably favored simpler shiplap joints over tongue and groove to keep the bottom closed.

I checked a chest - trunk I own, It is close to a century old. The sides, having handles, are most massive approximately 1/2" thick where the front is thinner maybe 1/3" with a little more at the slots. The bottom thickness is more difficult to check. The whole is covered with linen and painted. By circling the chest with reinforced wooden bands the wet bottom problem is answered. At the same time all the joints are protected by the bands.

I see the chest concept is continued in todays flight cases. The sides are still made of treated plywood, but if the structure is closest to the late medieval chests like those I have seen at Beaune, for the rest it is all metal and rivets.

Where Schwarz's tool chest is still close to a traditional dovetailed tool box as could for example be found in old Egypt. The book Egyptian woodworking and furniture shows an example of a 12th dynasty (1991 – 1803 BC) dovetailed tool box but without giving much joinery details.

Kung Fu Masters

2011-04-06T23:37:00.030+02:00

Reading Robert Wearing's book The essential woodworker (1988) I thought about the Kung Fu masters. Or was it, seeing another master planing I checked Wearing and thought about the masters?

Why Kung Fu? I checked the internet to verify what an old Chinese said to me long ago about Kung Fu.
Definition 1: In Chinese, kung fu can also be used ...to any ... skill cultivated through long and hard work.
Definition 2: Kung Fu – an art, skill, mastery achieved in one’s free time.
Definition 2 is close to what she said, Kung Fu, being free time, refers to a hobby and not only to Bruce Lee. The essential woodworker of Robert Wearing is aimed at amateurs and as it is often the case, the master is a professional. One's profession is another man's kung fu.

I studied Aikido and the masters thought sometimes about Ki and also about stance, tension, balance, hold your sword like a bird, loose those shoulders, straight upper body, knees and toes in the same line, start moving from the hip, less tension in the arms, keep the arms close, .... , forget the books go practicing. I also studied fencing and the master said: loose those shoulders, body straight, ... Went to a Tai Chi lesson and I heard: loose those shoulders, body .... . ...? Are you saying I have a cramped style?

What does a master say about planing. "Feel for the catch ... push forward steadily, ... do not ...swing." "Strong downward pressure..." (so much for holding a bird) When needed he keeps the elbow tucked pushing only with the body trying to avoid arm's length pushes. (good Aikido).
Seeing his leg position he probably shuffles (right foot first?) along the bench without crossing his legs. For wider boards the situation is unclear to me, does he take short strokes to minimize walking or does he keep his full length strokes? (forget the books, go practicing)

Where pushing is good Aikido, Japanese planes are mainly pulled, presenting us with another school. I think both are applicable, to start pulling in a pushing exercise often gives good Aikido. For short strokes pulling a plane feels correct, although a hornless wooden plane feels more appropriate than a Stanley. Or maybe not as Frank Klausz moves his wooden horned smoothing plane in all four directions when finishing a drawer.

Other masters display even different styles, most handtool workers are amateurs and we can keep up the more powerful Kung Fu styles for a few hours. It may look like a session at the gym where we go for the heavier N°5 1/2 and swing it fast at full arms length. There is nothing wrong to favor push ups.

I know, I mentioned Aikido. Come on, that's showcase fighting. It's like looking at the shavings, not the board.

Sharpening - Leonard Lee

2011-04-01T09:23:00.053+02:00

This is the fourth of a number of posts about sharpening literature.

Leonard Lee (from Veritas Tools) published The complete guide to sharpening in 1995.

Flattening geometry
But first the origin of this post, being as often a Christoper Schwarz post. In a recent post he favors diamond based over stone-based flattening systems for flattening his waterstones and oilstones. The problem with flattening stones being the near impossibility to keep them flat.
Before I even heard about Japanese waterstones or Belgian slate I took some interest in stargazing. This interest is too recent to have seen the numerous workshops about telescopic mirror grinding. Today mirror grinding lost most of its interest as it is easy to find large finished mirrors and telescopes for the price of the material, where 30 years ago it was possible to first grind a decent 6" mirror and while learning continue with a 8" or 10" .... 40" in search of the 'big enough telescope'.

What's interesting in mirror grinding is that by randomly sliding two pieces of glass over each other it is possible to get a spherical mirror, and then by adapting the technique achieve a parabolic, micrometrically or rather interferrometrically precise, end form, where a mirror finish does not mean finished mirror.

All this to say, the stone-based technique used to flatten waterstones is very close to the one used to grind hollow mirrors. So it is not a surprise that flattening is rarely a success.

Flattening stones

Now Schwarz uses in his post a hammer to 'flatten' his Norton flattening stone and, looking at the technical evolution of amateur telescopic mirror grinding, that's a good idea (this is the april 1st part of the post). Why is this a good approach? To keep prices low when grinding telescope mirrors, the second piece of mirror quality glass used as grinding tool can be replaced by a cheaper ceramic tool. A cheap way to make this tool is to use some small 1" ceramic tiles from Home Depot, to ensure they are beveled, to lay them flat on the future mirror (the flat surface) and to embed them in dental stone or something equivalent. Using small tiles and laying them on a flat surface, avoids any important flatness errors to be found in larger tiles.

The book at last
In his book Leonard Lee covers this flattening problem, he favors diamond plate but addressing the 'poor and parsimonious' comes up with a solution for stone-based flattening systems “These surfaces will always be flat if you are using three stones in rotation” A good idea, but how can I implement it? The only reference to a three stones flattening system I found is documented by ERic In Nova Scotia. He uses three waterstones 1000, 4000/1000 and 8000/1000. The flattening is done cautiously between three 1000 surfaces. As I am not in high precision sharpening (yet) it is not for me, but it offers a good solution where you invest only in primary sharpening stones and not in stones to keep your stones flat. Back to Leonard Lee, he offers other flattening alternatives: sandpaper or plate glass and silicon carbide adding eventually a hard platic sheet like Mylar to bed the particles.

Unusual in the book is a stand against quenching. "As a general principle, quenching ... is a substitute for good technique. ... the cracks may become invisible but they will be there." So every time someone mentions quenching, I think now, yes but ... . Also undercutting hollow bevels by using small <=6" grinding wheels is covered.

The complete guide to sharpening is impressive and reflects a lifelong involvement in woodworking tools and all things sharpening. It also offers by its variety a lot of coverage for real world technical problems. For example, I have an old wet grinder, but it is not a Tormek that offers a smooth and straight operation out of the box. Truing of a grinder stone is covered. In Leonard Lee's book I sometimes miss detailed enough instruction. When sharpening a back saw, I looked elsewhere for the final details.
As a conclusion I would say that the book will really prove its value if I stop buying any other sharpening books, it's time to be more parsimonious on the book front.

Cabinet maker's apprentice

2011-03-20T21:34:00.000+01:00

This month I started 20 hours/week job in a small cabinet maker shop. Consisting of the owner, a journeyman, an apprentice and me. Having no prior experience in the trade, I can consider myself as an apprentice. This in some way sets me on the same level as the apprentice Thomas of the The Joiner and Cabinet Maker. Of course things are never the same, my first job is not making a packing box, but digital paperwork. The first two weeks I moved the existing orders spreadsheet to a database, linked it to an order time registration system, and extended it with invoicing. Next step is to set up the materials ordering system, important in our case as we work with a limited stock. Bob Rozaieski shows in a recent post that attention for the administrative is not new, by referring to The 1772 Philadelphia Furniture Price Book, that documents the cost and time related to the manufacturing of standard furniture. My next activities are close to the development of a Furniture Price Book as I need to extend our CAD catalog for quotes and to lighten the pre-production burden.
Who knows, three months from now I may have created my first own CNCed furniture.

Hollow and round planes - 4

2011-02-27T23:54:00.010+01:00

Contrary to my expectations and 40 days late (or later) the second package with the six planes finally arrived. The package was battered but the planes were all in good condition.

The set completed, 3 pairs and 4 singles, the bottom row before cleanup.

The blades still in their original "The irons all need cleaning as there is some rust. A worthwhile project." state

The round 6, shortened, the only damaged part of the set. Seen after a first cleanup on my cheap oil-stone (I think it is made of concrete), that I keep dry. The tip shows some dip, so I could have used the ruler trick, but I finished it by lightly polishing it on a hard felt wheel with some Veritas green rouge.

This morning I spotted on ebay four planes of unspecified size, I thought it was a pair of 8 and a round 12 and 14, three of the four I am missing to have matched pairs. Made a half hearted attempt with a 21 £ bid and lost from a late(r) sniper. Anyway for now, more important is to use them.

Hollow and round planes - 3

2011-02-26T23:06:00.007+01:00

Working with Sketchup I look further how to sharpen with sandpaper or rouge set on a profile cut with an hollow plane. Due to the relief angle the bevel of a hollow does not fit its cutted profile, as setting the bevel in contact with the profile covered with an abrasive creates a deeper profile. To solve this I look at the effect of two variations with the help of sketchup drawings: the ruler trick and sharpening on a different profile.

Using the ruler trick is unorthodox as it is a not done with profiled planes and once used there is no easy way back. On the other hand the used plane blades I have the top is worn out at the edge and are good candidates for using th trick.

To test the effect of the ruler trick set on an angle of 5°. That's more than the 1 to 3° I expect in real life. So I drew a blade with a relief angle of 15° and cut of the top on 5° and looked at the end profile compared to the original. Well there is a shadow of a change, but most probably it would be difficult to measure the difference in real life.

The drawing shows that even after the ruler trick the original profile is unchanged. I changed the end result from hollow to round, and when I join the two I get a near perfect fit, ... my word.

Another idea is to use a larger profile (covered with an abrasive) to sharpen the bevel to compensate for the difference in profile. So I looked in Sketchup what profile fits a 10 bevel and found that a 14 is close.

The drawing shows from right to left the plane and its profile. The profile change when it is set flat to the bevel when the relief is 15°. And as first the nearly perfect fit of a 10 bevel on a 14 profile.

Hollow and round planes - 2

2011-02-12T15:45:00.007+01:00

Still nothing about my 6 missing hollow and round planes. This more or less ends my current perspectives to experiment with profile planes. Let's go virtual.
I finally did what I intended, trying Sketchup out as a way to look at problems when sharpening a blade on sandpaper on a profile set with the plane.

- I drew an arc 10 wide with radius 10. I discovered I could do that by entering 10 and 10R to set the arc. I already downloaded a arc: center and 2 points plugin to emulate compass work. That's the frustrating part of Sketchup, it is good but far away of descriptive geometry techniques. Where is my Sketchup divider compass?
- Made a surface of it and extruded it to volume and made it again a surface by deleting the bottom surface.
- Intersected it with two planes at 45° and 30°. Checking literature I found that a relief angle must be between 10 (11) and 15°. Seeing that the edge of the blade shows depressions and cracks in the corner for hollows, a low relief angle is better for the edge. But with an extreme relief of say 0°, the blade would not dig into the wood and shavings caught between blade and workpiece could slide along unharmed.
- By selecting the two surfaces I could let Sketchup create the intersection line. After that I grabbed the two intersected planes and flipped them on top of each other.
The result are two different ellipses. Ellipses? I should have remembered my trigonometry and put, at last, my sin() and cos() functions to good use.

The result shows there is a difference, and for hollows it is a problem as the sides of the plane will dig in. A first solution is to sharpen on a bigger profile, a 10 on a 12 profile etc. The next idea that comes to my mind is the ruler trick. Applying the ruler trick to a hollow would thin out the sides and make them less deep. So it would weaken the sides of the blade (that's bad), but also make the curve shallower (that's good if you already messed up the depth).

I need to model the ruler trick with a profiled blade. Another aspect I need to look at is sandpaper thickness. Certainly for smaller planes the thickness of the sandpaper influences the geometry.

Hollow and round planes

2011-01-22T22:35:00.013+01:00

Hollow and round planes are hot thanks to the massive efforts set into the Musings from Big Pink blog. Hollow and rounds complete the possibilities offered by my Stanley 13-050 Combination Plane, so it is interesting to look further into the possibilities of these planes.

Matt Bickford not only talks about profile planes the Musings from Big Pink blog, he also makes and sells all these planes. His standard starter set includes 5 pairs of hollows and rounds (even sizes 2-10), a pair of snipes bill planes and a 7/8” rabbet.

With my Stanley 13-050 I have already a (skated) rabbet plane, and besides that I also have unfenced wooden rabbets.

So I went hunting for a small set of hollow and rounds on ebay UK and found an old set: 2 hollow, 4 pair, 6 pair, 8 round, 10 pair, 12 hollow, 14 hollow described by one picture and as 'in need of cleaning as there is some rust'. To minimize postage costs the planes were sent in two packages. Alas only one package made it (due to a poorly glued label?), I got the 10 pair and the 12 (14/16") and 14 (18/16") hollows, the four planes on the right. Two smaller pairs would have been better to start making profiles, where now I am stuck.

The next step is cleaning and sharpening. Matt Bickford demonstrates handheld sharpening with flat oilstones, two slipstones for hollows and some leather. A more thorough approach would be viewing the Sharpening Profiled Hand Tools DVD by long time expert Larry Williams.

For now, I settled to removing most of the rust, flattening the back, partially as the edge seems to stand lower than the rest, probably due to the wear and tear of planing. I am in a too early stage, if ever, for drastic sharpening. Where is the profile planes ruler trick when you need one? I heard that Japanese plane blades are sometimes hammered back. For the round I followed Matt Brickford and sharpened them through a controlled movement on a flat stone. To sharpen the hollows, I mounted the plane and planed a short profile and covered it with sandpaper. This is not the perfect profile as a lowered blade has a deeper elliptical profile. Maybe I need a 8, to profile the inside of a hollow 10 etc. (it is clear that I need a full set :). For the wood, I cleaned them up with some (danish) wood soap. And oiled the blades to compensate for the temporary increase of humidity.

To finish my set I need, besides a missing package, snipes bill planes (that's a 90° plane covering a full left or right round) to make deep profiles and these are a different animal. I found them on ebay, but never as a pair. And apparently making deep profiles hurts as the edges of the blade break. An alternative is maybe to use a short piece of a heavy saw, setting one side flush and a steep angle to the bottom.

And planing? Using wooden profile planes is fun, more than a skated Stanley 050 or a router. Being precise with them is probably a different story.

Complexity

2011-01-15T12:26:00.002+01:00

Last months three wood related subjects caught my attention, Compound angle mortice and tenon joints, hurdy-gurdies (wheel fiddles) and hollow and round planes. All three are rather complex, so they passed by undocumented and my blog grinded to a halt. I think it is time to start to catch up.

Compound angle mortice and tenon joints are interesting, my last project included them, are there setups for mere mortals that allows us to make them easily. Looking around on the internet I found some answers, long enough to fill some pages.

I saw some Hurdy gurdies as a teenager. And now I got interested again, just after I claimed that "lutherie", that's stringed instrument making-repairing, was nothing for me as it asks for precision, attention, experience and musical qualities. Maybe I have all of these, but then in very limited quantities. Nevertheless the internet offers a whole world of makers, plans, workshops. And as wheel fiddles are, unlike basic violins, expensive instruments, it is tempting to attempt to make one, just for holding such an instrument once. Of course as the wheel fiddle is a cross between a bagpipe and a violin, the result will probably combine the worst of both instruments. Destroying the instrument afterwards will probably be an act of mercy.

Hollow and round planes are hot thanks to the massive efforts set into the Musings from Big Pink blog. Hollow and rounds complete the possibilities offered by my Stanley 13-050 Combination Plane, so it is interesting to look further into the possibilities of these planes.

That's it for today, I must see if I catch up.

Medieval carpentry - 3

2010-11-28T12:39:00.006+01:00

Third posting in a series about medieval carpentry. This time Hôtel-Dieu de Beaune , it opened its doors in 1452, and with 1453 a possible closing year for the middle ages it could qualify as medieval. They have a collection of old chests on display, post medieval in date if not in style, the oldest pieces are from the the second half of the fifteenth century. I was surprised to see that even those old chests are mature examples of frame and panel carpentry, giving the impression that already in the middle ages carpentry had solid joinery foundations. Only the carving improves and the sixteenth century chests have a more advanced decoration.
This time again I ran into some illustration problems, it took months to set my hands on the pictures and the poor shaken quality made me throw half of them away.

Woodworking course - 9

2010-11-09T20:30:00.004+01:00

Project
My project is started, discovered that I am better of bringing something to measure widths when buying wood. Used a Excel sheet to get most things sorted out. As I go for small, tapered mortise and tenon joinery, I am in for a maximum of problems. Before long I will claim it is a basic prototype of a single unit series, time will tell.
I started with jointer planer and panel saw and then made a panels with biscuits. The biscuit jointer is some abused Elu (now Dewalt) model.

Holdfasts
As Steve Branam remembered us to Just Say No To Cast Iron Holdfasts, I checked two older holdfasts still hanging in the clamps rack. These are part industrial product, part hand forged. It is hard to date them but they are certainly not new, the current workbenches don't have any holes for a holdfast. The bottom is also mushroomed from releasing the holdfast and would not fit a tight hole.

Sharpening - Frank Klausz

2010-11-07T14:38:00.013+01:00

This is the third of a number of posts about sharpening.

Via Taunton press Frank Klausz produced a DVD Hand Tools, tuning and using chisels planes and saws.

Off the shelve
Chris Schwarz talked about high end chisels in a recent post Yuppie Tools: A True Accounting. He makes a case for a new Lie-Nielsen, $55 chisel that is built to last several lifetimes. For this he relates the cost of a used high-quality (possibly also built to last several lifetimes) Douglass chisel he bought on ebay. Counting the buying cost, materials and adding the hours spent flattening the flawed back to a 'semi usable' state, the new Lie-Nielson is cheaper.
Of course there are good and poor alternatives to high end tools. If I look at the Lee Valley catalogue I find more mid range Lee Valley, Hirsch (Kirschen) and Narex bevel edge chisels.
Frank Klausz looks at off the shelve chisels. In his DVD he starts by presenting mid range gents saw, a chisel and a used Stanley plane. For the chisel the choice is open, he goes for a Marples blue handled chisel, similar to his wooden handled chisels.

Chisel
The chisel is cleaned, (hollow bevel) grinded on a large diameter white wheeled grinder. And then flattened and sharpened freehand on two waterstones 800-6000. The waterstones holder is made of wood, so he goes on to show how to make a holder with wooden watertight joints. How else, he is a woodworker. The waterstones are flattened on a wooden base as glass plates are not necessarily flatter.

Plane
The plane is a used Stanley #4. After cleaning up, the blade is processed the same way as the chisel, with more time and attention to the back of the blade. To finish the sole is flattened on 400 grit sandpaper.

Saw
After a test cut with his saw he flattens the teeth and sharpens the teeth in a, what else, wooden saw holder. After that the saw gives a very decent test cut. To complete he goes on to show how to set saw teeth with a flat screwdriver.

The Story
All in all a good DVD, contrary to a book I can't quickly check details before going to action, but Frank Klausz walked me trough every step of the sharpening process. It is a good start and the expense is limited, this is if I had made the right choices when buying my sharpening material.

Lutz wasserschleifbock

Knowing that Frank Klausz has an European background, I had hoped that I would get a oilstone explanation or something about a more traditional wet grinder or maybe a word about Belgian slate. But no, it is all waterstones and grinders.
I bought a more traditional German made waterwheel with a seventies design on the flea market. Times have changed, as this is definitely not a Tormek. I can't read the stone specifications as the description is gone from the stone, but the stone was very wobbly and this is probably from factory, the previous owner didn't bother to true the stone and probably did get disappointed as the stone is nearly unused. I did solve it with a cheap truing stone, nearly doubling by this my costs. A more important problem is that by today's standard the stone is a slow cutter. This probably explains the success of high speed grinders. I could replace the stone with an expensive modern stone, but that would not solve the tool holder problem. So I have to look around until I find a better idea.

Woodworking course - 8

2010-10-31T20:29:00.004+01:00

One more
A last joint, where we combined a profile in the front and for the back a groove at the bottom and a rabbet at the top. On retrospect it was intended as an exercise about manual feeding the profiler but I just made a heavier use of my tenon saw. I even avoided the tenon machine as the two machines where in use by using my saw. Of course hand sawing tenons gives problems on straightness. It is probably better to finish with a router plane or a router to get correct alignment. Apart from that I left a large gap in the mitered profile. Before I try this on a real project, I need to exercise my skills on a number of test joints.

The joint with only tenon and mortise. To avoid any confusion about side and the like, I now draw every joint detail before cutting.:

The joint with all the grooves and cutouts:

Project
I looked for a first project and found one. I intend to make a small frame and panel chest based on the dimension of a rectangular stool. Dimensions 45cm-45cm-30cm (18"-18"-12"). If I stick to the stool model the chest is tapered. Of course this strongly reduces my chances to produce tight joints. As material I probably go for the cheapest pine, even if the traditional material here are oak and beech.

Seeing - Rococo

2010-10-21T12:02:00.006+02:00

I made a short visit today to an administrative building. Build in 1760 as an university college, it became an institute in cellular biology (microscopy) in 1890 and is used now by the administration after a renovation in 2000(?).

After the context some woodworks. For the last renovation they apparently removed the plaster and the low ceilings in the roof. The rust spots of the nails holding the old plasterwork on the oak beams can be seen. Surrounded by flat white walls only the woodwork shows some baroque curves.

Woodworking course - 7

2010-10-18T23:08:00.003+02:00

I started with a succession of mistakes, confusing left, right, top and bottom. I ended drawing all the cuts on the piece before cutting and even then I messed up by cutting the tenon to deep. I also discovered that the tenon should not overlap with the rabbet.

room for improvement

too long that cut

lay out problem

Next a tenon joint with a profile on the front and an extended shoulders. Even with the help of a copper plated parring jig, I came 10 minutes short to finish it (or to mess it up).

That's it for today, I hope that we start some real project pretty soon. After today I feel confident that I will mess up just any project I will undertake. Therefore I plan to mill 30% extra profiles to be able to correct mistakes without bothering about precise shaper setup.

In another galaxy, Steve Branam of the Close Grain blog shows how in just a weekend he mastered Ball And Claw Carving, impressive.

Woodworking course - 6

2010-10-14T09:36:00.006+02:00

This session we discovered the last main machine of the workshop, a shaper.

With this we were able to make a groove and a small profile (rabbet) in the face of our joint. As the picture shows there is room for improvement. I did improve it a little afterwards by paring the back shoulder and cutting the style to length.

After doing (messing up) this joint I looked online for a shoulder plane. Axminster had a cheap copy of the Record 311 to sell until last week . But now there is only the more expensive Clifton 3110 (3 in 1) in the catalogue and the much cheaper Axminster No. 19 (Stanley 92) Shoulder Plane. But alas, Derek Cohen is not very happy with the Stanley 92, as remove for honing means "undo the main screw… undo the small screw… remove the lever cap… wiggle out the blade. All settings are lost."

The better mouse trap
That's it for machines, we have seen all the major machines of the workshop. There are some more like a bandsaw and large sanding machines. But the main activity is centred on the classic five that are also present on combination machines: tablesaw, jointer, planer, horizontal morticer and shaper. Where the tenon machine is more specialised.
On the long run it is a mouse trap as I become dependent of professional workshop machines. One solution is to look out for a used combination machine, most are tri phased and that is an extra problem. The feeder on the profiler is a safety must and is certainly complex and expensive. The other solution is to focus on routers, the woodrat for example goes a long way to cover most problem operations if the limited mortice depth (< 5cm 2") is not seen as a problem.

Still standing on the side line, bandsaw and sander.

About the blog

2010-10-06T13:10:00.012+02:00

I decided to structure my internet wood related stuff, by setting the more interesting sites into Google Reader. When inserting a site I got the number of Reader inscriptions to a blog. There is probably a better way to see this, but I have not found it yet. Not counting magazines and the like, many have 20+ subscribers, some get 100+ and the champions go over 500. With Matthias Wandel from woodgears.ca and The Village Carpenter in the champion category.

As out of the common blogs I see: Chris Hall, the kitchen carpenter, with his 34 irregular joints sawhorse; Mathias Wandel, the engineer woodworker and Anxo Mosquera (yes Google translate please) a all capital woodworker.

Me, I pass the 9 months, 52 posts mark, have 0 subscribers and my presence is only to give others a good feeling about their achievements. Visits are mainly Google directed for the st_nley thirteen fifty (no Google, nothing to index here) pl_ne. Besides that, my notes about the cellulose based vacuum powered engines from Mathias and my poor attempts to document medieval wooden artefacts.

Woodworking course - 5

2010-10-06T12:08:00.002+02:00

We went through haunched tenon and then a mitered haunched tenon. The gap at the front is due to a bad alignment of the cutter heads.

haunched tenon

mitered haunched tenon

Then we went for something new, a tenon joint with a groove and a profile in the front. The profile will be mitered where the back stays normal, this give a tenon of unequal length. We started with the mortise, then the tenon, then most probably the profile and to finish cutting everything in place with handsaw and chisel.

For reference Sean Hughto and Charles Stanford documents the creation of the same joint, much more elegantly, using handtools on Derek Cohens site

It was a fast start, and I got the length of the tenon wrong (I think). The cut is made with the front against the table to get a good fit at the front. Next week we probably discover profiles.

Marking

2010-10-03T16:04:00.007+02:00

Moving a pair of old beds (1930?) with my car, I was surprised to see a succession of 3 chisel marks on the wood. A pneumatic chisel gone wild? Looking further I could see that the 8 joints were paired with roman numerals from I to VIII, a nice idea.

Looking at the joints I see nails with a X section used to pin the joint. I see two advantages to these pin-nails: On soft wood there is no need to drill a hole, and the lengthened section of the nail avoids that it can be pulled through the wood or easily bent.

Woodworking course - 4

2010-09-29T14:30:00.005+02:00

We finished our lap joints, T-lap and end lap and tried out a slip joint

After that we made a first try to make a machined haunched tenon joint
Lay out: We work with fifth for the haunch height and the depth of the mortise, where the tenon is made a tenth short to allow some room for glue. The tenon gets over one third of the thickness of the wood. In this case 10mm for 25mm thickness (3/8" and 1" ).
This is different from for example Rodale's Illustrated Cabinetmaking where a tenon goes probably half the stile width and uses half the thickness. It allows for 1/16" clearance. The shoulder gets 1/3 to 1/4 of the tenon thickness and a cosmetic shoulder 1/8". The difference can be due to the machines used, with a horizontal mortiser it is easier to go deep and once you go deep you need more thickness to support the sides. And I guess that the ideal tenon becomes narrower in depth giving a good section at the shoulder without cutting the whole stile away.
Maybe deep tenons are more appropriate for flat frames like doors and windows, where stiffness is important and half deep tenons for furniture where a tenon is mostly limited to half the depth.

First the horizontal mortiser

And then the tenon machine. To see this machine working I have to refer to Roy Underhill as he shows a more advanced version of a tenon machine on his shows episode Old woodworking machines.

To finish the tenon saw to cut the haunch and probably a rasp or a chisel to round the tenon.

Woodworking course - 3

2010-09-23T12:43:00.007+02:00

woodworking exercise 1

Done, we finished our first exercise, leaving some room for improvement. What I missed was a 6 mm chisel (1/4") I found one in the classroom grinded on both sides and I kept it that way as I don't see how to grind it down without investing much time or see the chisel burn.

Then some theory: markings.

marking stiles


marking rails

marking a frame

To end we started a second exercise: make a lap joint (L or T) with a 60x25mm piece of wood. We went through the whole cycle again: Arm saw - Table saw - Jointer - Planer and the tenon saw and chisels.

Workshop - Cabinetmaker

2010-09-15T10:17:00.008+02:00

I made a short visit to a cabinetmaker (European style) on a quite day. He offers 30+ standard models of cabinets with no set dimensions in 30+ finishes through the use of finished panels and edge banding. Stock management and grouping is important here as only few finishes are in stock. Assembling cabinets is not a problem, he offers the same price for the panels with hardware as for assembled cabinets.

There are only four 'machines' visible on the workfloor:

1 The tablesaw (panelsaw) does not see much use any more and is only there as a spare.

table saw

2 The panel beam saw. Here again in a more recent setup the machine is not really necessary as todays CNC machines can cut down the panels.

Panel beam saw

3 The CNC machine. On front you can see the safety mat, the machine stops when there is someone on it.

CNC

4 Edge banding

Woodworking course - 2

2010-09-14T13:52:00.005+02:00

Second evening of my woodworking course. We spend the whole session sawing cut after cut, sharpening our chisels and cutting out wood. Slow as we are our first exercise piece is still unfinished. Grinding is a classic hollow bevel on a (hot) powered stone, finished freehand on an oil-stone.

Woodworking exercise 1

When I asked about which chisel size to use, I was said that using the widest possible was correct.

Woodworking course - tools

2010-09-12T17:31:00.005+02:00

I started looking for a tenon saw and some chisels for my woodworking course.

stanley backsaw

The tenon saw was not a problem as I have an older 14" stanley backsaw that I probably bought to serve as mitre saw (in the eighties?). Over the decenia it has accumulated some rust, so I did a first attempt to sharpen a saw on this one using a triangular file. To keep the operation simple I did file at 90°, with those small teeth and the rust there is not much to see about the original setting. By lack of saw vise, setting the back in a vise and holding the blade with my hand. After that I made a comparative test with the usable saws of my shop, it's a winner and my new frame saw clearly needs to be sharpened, only the Veritas dovetail saw cuts 20%? better. The only potential problem I see is that I am not sure it cuts as straight as before sharpening. There are alternatives, in the Axminster catalogue a more modern hard poited 12" Stanley the FatMax Tenon Saw goes 10€.

bahco 414

For the chisels I decided to buy a Bahco 3 chisel (12, 18 and 25mm) promotion, delivered free of cost. And to probably complete it with a 8mm mortise chisel later on, MHG probably as they can be cheaper than others.

After that I repaired my marking gauge replacing the small nail that serves as pin with a steel nail. And added a folding rule to the whole.

Having found my tools I went on internet for a search about woodworking courses related hand tools lists. I only found two of them the one of David Savage and another from the Errington School. The list of David Savage is interesting as it was probably build up by a person with opinions faced with an endless stream of advanced students trying out various tools and makers.

The David Savage list
David Savage starts his list strongly when he favors Lie Neilson planes, as it is aimed to full time students and professionals it is understandable that he can go for high cost planes and besides he limits his choice to a set of three bench planes. The saws section is also limited to three saws: After binning his Disston he goes for a cheap hard pointed Stanley panel saw. Next a rip cut carcass saw with a 14 tpi blade (Lie Neilson) and to finish a small back saw. And maybe a coping saw as a number four.

Measurement is done with a number of steel rules (1000, 600, 300mm) of similar scale. Here I agree that a steel rule is better than a folding rule and I am likely to add a 300mm steel rule, as it fits in my folding rule pocket, and a small combination square to my set. For marking gauges he says: .... .... three simple gauges will do it.

Chisels get more attention, Lie Neilson for example offers (heavy) fully bevelled bevel edge chisels, where my Bahco bevelled chisels have very high straight edges, and this can give a problem for example when dovetailing, as would a mortise chisel. Here I have to wait and see if any problem arises.

Woodworking course

2010-09-10T08:08:00.002+02:00

Seeing my monday evening is free, I made a last week decision to try to follow a woodworking class. I found two of them, one 10' from home but fully booked (that's the nature of last day decisions) and one at 30'. The course is the basic professional woodworker course and that's nearly all I know. It can be followed by specialisation classe: massive furniture making, panel furniture making, restoration, ....
The class is given in an industrial hall filled with pairs of large machines (two tablesaws, two planers, two jointers, two horizontal mortisers, ...) and rows of workbenches.

First exercice is to cut down and size a piece of wood to 30x150x450mm (1.2'x6'x18'). Using in sequence, a radial arm saw (length to 470mm), a jointer (2 square faces), a planer (thickness set to 30mm), a tablesaw (size set to 450 and 152mm) , a planer (width set to 150mm).

radial arm saw

jointer

table saw

The radial arm saw is there to unload the tablesaws for rough cross cutting. The jointer is huge. The tablesaw has a 3m (10') long table sliding along the blade, no problems to cut down panels here. The planer is wide with a digital setup to the tenth of mm and takes wood down to 15mm (5.8") wide, although it is better to set first the width and then the thickness to avoid tilting while planing.

folding rule

The exercise was continued with the manual oriented techniques: layout with a folding rule, a naked square, a marking gauge and a pencil. To finish we started a large number of shallow cuts with a 12' tenon saw. The hand tools used are refreshingly basic. For deeper cuts we have tenon saws without backs.
The workbenches are traditional, with tooltray and diagonal backleg, and a (missing) planing stop. But no hole for a bench holddown. The surface showing it's years of use, but no racking.
To end the tools were discussed. No need to buy tools, but we are free to bring in our own 12" tenon saw (hard pointed) and some chisels if we are in for more, and less beaten down, tools.

Arriving home I discovered that I had left the folding rule in the folding rule pocket of my trouser, oops.

Shooting board

2010-08-13T16:55:00.005+02:00

Wandering through the internet I found the part time woodworker discussing shooting board and promising plans for the ultimate shooting board soon. Meanwhile I thought that I could give shooting boards a try.

I fixed a stop to a piece of plywood scrap and added two screws to make an adjustable fence. After the back of the fence started to splinter, I rounded it like Derek Cohen did. Seeing the price of acrylic plastic, the plastic runway is delayed and for now it is a piece of hardboard scrap, that I need to wax before it is too late.

Fine, now a plane. My Anant #3 and #5 are not square, no luck there, although I could square the sides by gluing up and squaring thin pieces of wood. My even cheaper block plane is better. I even brought in my pre-war wooden planes, they are both square and heavy.
Shooting is another story, even if I can sharpen my plane blades sharp enough to do some shaving on my arm, something is lacking when going cross grain, as it is more hacking than slicing. Looking for ways to improve my shooting board I see two tracks: - I can shorten the bench hook avoiding to work with more stretched arms and gain more control. - I also inspected the block plane blade with a 100x magnification and there is clearly room for some improvement. But for now shooting boards are not usable for me. A possible alternative to planes is to put sandpaper on a square wooden block

My wooden plane blades are still nearly untouched. The original owner bought them as a student in the thirties and kept them without using them much once he was a professional. The top of the blades is laminated like a Japanese blade, although thinner. The blades top is also chrome plated with a better chrome layer quality on the harder laminate. This gives them a mirror finish even after 70 years of inattention. Chrome plating also makes the surface probably very hard. Looking at the environmental cost of chrome plating this is probably overkill as softer low chromium blades like A2 (with its mere 5% of chrome :-) or HSS are good enough for me.

Classical Joinery

2010-08-12T11:18:00.010+02:00

armoire de béguine

This is a post about joinery I had in mind that was triggered by Christopher Schwarz, when he mentioned his Classical Joinery course in Germany next September. But it all started when I saw Norm Abram making a shaker washstand, I saw the analogy in design with an 'armoire de béguine' I know, as both use small heavily framed doors.

As a side note: Beguines are religious women, who among other thing translated the scriptures in French around 1250 and disappeared as a religious movement last century. I can't relate any furniture to the beguines apart from this example whose name I know by hearsay. It is a one man (womens) eating cupboard as a plank can be drawn from under the middle door to serve as a table, where the door gives access to the food stock and utensils. The small door opening leaves room for a U shaped internal shelve with copper hooks.

shaker washstand (Norm Abram)

Both have points in common but are also different in build up. In the shaker style massive wooden panels are used joined together with rabbets and dados with the door as an exception. Where the beguines cupboard solely uses frame and panels for the whole construction. The panels are plain and thin and well made. I see it as the product of specialized shops with one specialized in cutting timber for thin panels but also the frames as both are made out of similar oak.

shaker cabinet (Chris Schwarz)

Back to Christopher Schwarz. His Classical Joinery course works on a small Shaker cabinet and covers "Joinery planes, including rabbeting planes, fillisters, router planes and shoulders. Cutting joints using handsaws and handplanes, including rabbets, dados, tenons and half-laps."
But what is classical joinery? For shakers, etc. it can be panel assembly with dados and rabbets where for others it is more a frame and panel situation.

Wooden air engine - 3

2010-08-06T18:09:00.011+02:00

This is a third post in a series exploring wooden air engines possibilities, all this inspired by Matthias Wandel models. This time I go for higher complexity.

When searching details about the oscillating cylinder steam engine I came along a Chebyshev steam engine concept to transform a linear movement in a circular movement in a compact way. It is tempting to include it to make a more attractive systems in a model, but I am not sure about the quality of the movement and have no view of the geometry of his implementation.

Looking into Mechanical Movements Powers and Devices by Gardner Hiscox I found many systems converting linear to circular and stopped at 'a curiosity of old-time engineering'. Searching further I found more information like a date and a name 1666, De La Hire and even a working model of: "Murray's 1802 Hypocycloidal Steam Engine"

Thanks to Matthias Wandel it is even possible to easily implement a plywood air engine using this mechanism as he has two template generators for wooden gears. Although cutting convex forms from the inside is probably not that easy It is probably a good idea to follow Cotswold Heritage design by making the tooth containing the shaft hole oversized by grouping for example two teeth, certainly because this tooth is at the end of the stroke and does not take up much force. The template here has 20 (for the generator it is -20) and 10 teeth. It could be less as Matthias experimented with sparse toothed gears and says that even then the movement stays very smooth.

gears for a hypocycloidal movement

Wooden air engine - 2

2010-08-05T17:49:00.006+02:00

This post is part of a series inspired by Matthias Wandel air engine.

Matthias Wandel air engine is square, as it is made out of plywood. Looking in older books, in this case Mechanical Movements Powers and Devices by Gardner Hiscox, I found two examples of a square piston steam engine.

For Root's square piston engine, no details are shown for the valves, but it is possible to imagine rotating valves linked to the crank shaft. When implementing this in wood as a low pressure model, a possibility to minimise friction torque is to give the valve a small diameter. At the same time leaks between in and out stream must be minimal. I see two possible solutions here, one is to put one valve at each side of the engine, the other is to use a hollow shaft and use it as the exit port.
An alternative is to try to implement a solution close to the oscillating cylinder steam engine as both engines have points in common, in this case a translating (sideways moving) 'cylinder' for the vertical one and ... something even more clever for the horizontal 'cylinder' as it contains a piston with sideways moving parts. It is probably a though problem as the valves for the horizontal and vertical cylinders must stay separated.
The drawing is strange as the crank shaft (b) seems to hit the top of piston C when rotating. To avoid this the shaft could be made of a rotating disc embedded in the sides.

The Dake square piston engine, in this case I found more information as thousands of them where made between 1887 and 1950. The engine is impressive as it offers a 4 piston continuous torque engine with only four major moving parts. As a model it would be less impressive as even a flywheel is superfluous. It is more a pizza box with a shaft in its middle.
Looking at the drawing from the patent, there is apparently a rotating valve embedded in the cover feeding the 'cylinders' through the piston.

To finish a quick sketch of the rotating valve I had in mind for Root's square engine as I am certain I will have forgotten all about it within a week. The air comes from a feeding ring directly through the valve and leaves via a covered opening towards the shaft. The opening angles of the valve must probably be more than on the sketch, is it 90°?

Wooden air engine

2010-08-04T23:43:00.005+02:00

Looking for a self made horizontal mortising machine I found one (multi slot mortising machine) on Matthias Wandel website and also many other technical projects. The wooden air engine based on a standard steam engine (here an animated presentation) looked very interesting and I am not the first to find it, as he got already over 500.000 views on YouTube.

As a ten year old it was on my wish list, so it could be time to realise that wish. To make it more probable to implement it I can best keep the engine as simple as possible. Searching my memories and the internet I found the oscillating cylinder steam engine (animated version here), reducing the engine to 3 moving parts. I should get some wood and try to implement it as an alternative to the wooden air engine.

The workmare - 3

2010-08-03T12:51:00.011+02:00

pencil test

The workmare still needs to be finished, but it is usable?

- The twin vise seems good, I like it. It is made of two oak left over glued together. I should have glued an extra board (softwood) in between to leave room for drilling dog holes. As it is now 3/4 inch holes are to big, I need to find a thinner solution. Anyway I need a solution to compensate the lack of tail vice and be able to clamp sideways.

- I roughed up the hardboard to make it less slippery, but I think that using 1/2" MDF would have been better, as I already damaged the top with my circular saw and hardboard does not leave much depth for error.

- The stability, seems good. I tried out my pencil test, putting a carpenters pencil upright and keeping it so when hammering in all three directions. With a mass proportion close to 50 to 1, over 60 pounds for the top and 1,2 pound for my mallet there is not much moving.

- The stability is less when planing, as I can put a larger mass behind it. I even have the impression that weighting the top down did not change much as adding the gravel did change the oscillation frequency of the top from maybe 30 hz to something like 10 hz without changing much to the amplitude. It can be improved by making the legs and joints stiffer. Increasing the L shaped legs from 4" (by 4") to 5" (by 5") more than doubles the stiffness of the legs (the formula is bh³/12) but not necessarily the stiffness of the joints. Adding diagonals to the legs is probably more effective

adding toes to the legs

- When planing towards the vice the workbench tended to tilt over as most weight is at the front not in the tool tray. A solution is to add toes to the front legs. No one wants to be crushed under the weighted top. All in all if I have to redo it I would add cheap concrete slabs, from the garden center, to the lower tray, to weight the workbench down and avoid the potential danger of a weighted top solution.

leg clamp

- Holes for attaching stuff is a work in progress, I will add them in the top and the legs depending off my needs.

The Workmare - 2

2010-07-29T13:39:00.005+02:00

Making the workbench was a top down activity set upside down, I was able to build the whole bench by adding one layer on top of the other without moving everything around.
- I started by setting the top on a workmate.
- I glued on top of that 40 x 60 mm left overs for a frame. The wood I intended to use was closer to 2" by 3" but warped. The left overs where set to the same thickness with a plane
- Added attachment and boxes for the vise screws.
- Did a first test with the gravel. My starting idea was to use sand, but if gravel is maybe less dense, it will not seep through every crack and opening. The gravel is there to set the weight to the same level of a massive wooden workbench, that's around 60-80 kg, without the cost, hoping it will increase the stability of the workbench. Many woodworking demo's show wobbly workbenches and I want to avoid that.

a massive top

- I did a cut out for the front legs. One front leg can be seen in the background, two pieces of plywood are glued together to form a 4" by 4" L shape. The cut out is my first mistake. The starting idea was to recess the front beam one plywood thickness to allow the legs to stand flush with the top and to fill the gap between the legs with plywood as it is the front of the twin vises. Making the legs first and gluing them afterwards on a cut out is a challenge for flush and squareness.
- I removed the gravel and glued the bottom plate. This plate is narrower with the sides flush with the frame. This leaves room for the legs and gives the top a border for clamps. The theory is that is better to clamp on a limited thickness as it gives better racking resistance.

workmare build up

- I drilled a hole in the bottom to allow filling the bench after finishing and whenever needed for transport.
- The bottom plate is longer than the top creating a tool tray.
- The back legs are open to better support the top, giving the workbench its traditional look with diagonal back legs. I first created a U frame, made of the tool tray back and the legs. After fixing the U, I added and glued the diagonals to finish the legs, setting everything square (lesson learned). Another mistake here, the legs of the tool tray are level with the top, and of course I cut them to stay under the top. An error easy to repair when adding the reinforcement blocks, but it gives more saw work.
- I added two shelves to compensate for the small size of the top and to reinforce the legs by making everything stiffer. The shelves are from hardboard so there is no problem bending them in place afterwards through the gaps.

standing

- Ok it is standing, I need to fill it with gravel and cover it with hardboard. You can see the open tool tray, it is there to cut easily with a jigsaw or circular saw ... and maybe a handsaw, I think. My intention is to keep the workbench free standing. This is not really a problem as I have no table saw or combination machine taking the centre of my workshop.

combination machine - this example combines only 3 machines

Now I think about it a combination machine would have helped to straighten those warped beams.

Workbench: The Workmare

2010-07-28T15:50:00.013+02:00

After reading Scott Landis book and Chris Schwarz blog, I had to make a workbench. I used three components to design it:

The workmate. It is light, unstable and small, but it is something I know and own. Make it bigger and it would probably pass Chris Schwarz Kitchen Test for Workbenches, that's fixing 3 pieces: ¾" x 18" x 24", 4" x 18" x 18"and ¾" x 6" x 48" on all their sides. Seeing those dimensions the workmate-workbench must be 50" long and have 25" between its twin screws.
The material needs to be as cheap as it gets. I went for one sheet of cheap ¾" plywood, some 2" by 3" left overs and one sheet of hardboard (mansonite). Add to that glue and screws, two 16" vice screws and 50 pound of gravel. The gravel is to pass the pencil test for workbenches (more on this later).
The design concept is based on a traditional workbench, Roy Underhill calls it a French Work Bench. For joining I drop the dovetails to use lap joints. And as I use plywood, glue ups are never cross grain and I can make 4" by 4" glued lap joints hold. The design has a tool tray and I think I need an open tool well for my jigsaw and circular saw cutting.

workhorses

After referring to Scott Landis, Chris Schwarz and Roy Underhill, I go for a plywood, gravel, lap joints, tool tray, jigsaw; my workmate-workbench becomes some orthodox woodworkers nightmare. So workmare is maybe the appropriate name for this workbench, where a workhorse is a different kind animal

Some examples of traditional workbenches with tray and diagonal leg, found today on a second hand sales list. The last one has lengthened feet. In my case the leg vise becomes a twin vise to follow the workmate concept and to make the construction more simple. I also don't keep the overhang as the bench is shorter and contrary to a leg vise, the twin vise covers the whole length.

Treadle Lathe

2010-07-27T20:44:00.002+02:00

Visiting Bokrijk I had the chance to see the treadle lathes of the permanent exposition. But also a model from visiting woodturners association.

This one seemed to work without effort, although wheel and treadle touched the grass.

I tried these two out (only turning, not cutting), it is heavy work.

We received also some artifacts from a socializing woodturner. Maybe socializing by necessity, as he had just broken his toolrest. But no magic here, these where made on an electric lathe.

Sharpening - James Krenov

2010-06-19T22:40:00.003+02:00

This is the second of a number of posts about sharpening.

In his book The fine art of cabinetmaking (1972, 1992) James Krenov discusses (p 109-115) sharpening tools.

Hand-type bench grinder
He goes for a 5-6' fine grit wheel combined with a sturdy wooden toolrest that allows one handed operation. The hand type is for low speed. The small diameter is for a good hollow grind. Krenov proposes to hesitate in the middle of each swing to keep the grinding balanced.
That was 1992, today it is even harder to find hand-type bench grinders, apart from ebay USA at 5$. But low speed grinders are less a problem even if they can be expensive.

Oilstones
After his fine grit wheel he uses fine oilstones with fine cutting oil or even better kerosene. He favors a one handed grip and short strokes. Small chisels and scrapers get there own stone to minimize damage.

Irons
The irons of his planes are impressively thick. He proposes to have spare plane irons and extra chisels, to avoid interrupting the flow of other work

The story
James Krenov has his own writing style. Technically I don't have the hand grinder and the thick plane blades, making it difficult to follow his method.

Sharpening - John Juranitch

2010-06-17T19:04:00.005+02:00

This is the first of a number of posts about sharpening.

First on the list is John Juranitch a sharpening consultant since 1951 and published a book about sharpening in 1985 The Razor Edge Book of Sharpening. His main expertise is knife sharpening although he is also specialised in a dull axe sharp and shave within 15'. His book covers knives as well as axes, plane blades and scissors.

No oil
Given his time frame Juranitch sticks to traditional oil-stones. He does not use oil on them for two reasons:
- He stopped using oil to avoid the mess on his stones and discovered as an unexpected bonus that the stones did not degrade faster.
- Oil does not improve the sharpening as once loaded with debris it dulls the top of the edge when sharpening. Juranitch compares it to pushing an edge through sand and refers to electron microscope imaging to make his point.

Coarse and Fine
Juranitch uses two stones only. A 100# for shaping and somewhere around 600# for finishing. For shaping he also uses a self made low speed grinder, a must for hollow grinding . And fine honing is completed with a sharpening steel.

Sharpening steel
Juranitch worked hard to use and understand the sharpening steel. He uses thin rods and favours a light touch on a constant angle with alternating strokes. He expects that a knife blade that would have lasted half an hour of usage could stay sharp for four hours if steeled regularly.
I suppose the sharpening steel is close to a burnisher and that the light alternating strokes shapes the edge to a straight hardened bur. Something like cold hammering or rolling the edge on a microscopic level.
A sharpening steel is probably not appropriate for short blades like chisels as it could easily dent the corners. The asymmetrical edge will also need extra attention. A simple maybe more appropriate alternative could be stropping.

Testing
Testing is important and apart from shaving arms and faces a specific tester is used. A 10x magnifier is also often used to look for problems (and a 1000x electron microscope :).

Guiding
Like he favours thin, small (<6") knives over more manly cutting equipment, he also claims that a sharpening guide is better than free hand expertise. I suppose that after shaving with an axe there is not much left to prove and he can focus on technical practicalities.

The story
John Juranitch gives a good story full of anecdotes but sticks to a basic sharpening method and applies it to different tools. He repeats that to get results you need attention, slow movements and a light touch for finishing. His attention for testing was innovative for me but I lacked details about the possibilities.

Toolset
Back to my basic toolset with its twin oilstone. Based on what I learned from Juranitch I can now remove the sharpening oil and look for a cheap sharpening guide.
I could experiment a little with the burnisher to see if it can take the role of a sharpening steel.
A 10x magnifier can be a good start to get some feedback on sharpening quality.

French woodworks

2010-06-01T01:49:00.011+02:00

I did a short trip to Paris. Setting foot on the French soil, by stepping out of my car, I was confronted with a Roubo like pick-nick table. On one side there is the massiveness, on the other the legs are not in line with the top nor jointed through the top. But that's ok, what makes a good workbench, makes a poor pick-nick table. For one moment I thought that Chris Schwarz had come over to contaminate the whole country. But no, this was a one of a kind bench, all the other tables around me made a more modest use of wood, half of them even had a concrete base (now concrete, that's an idea for a workbench).

In Paris there is not that much visible woodwork. An interesting place is the musée des arts et metiers, as you can for example hope to see some Roubo carpentry models there. But after parking at the Eiffel tower and taking the boat to Notre Dame we did not get further than Beaubourg two blocks short of Arts et Metiers (arts and crafts, although Arts and Crafts translates to Arts et Artisanats). Another time maybe.

Parking place close to the Eiffel tower (that's the breadcrumb picture to get my car back)

Waiting for the boat to Notre Dame, while the fire brigade is training its recruits.

Some doors facing Notre Dame

The town hall

High standing (this is art) carpentry at Beaubourg

All this under the watchful eye of (Lucian) Freud

Stanley 13-050 vs Veritas Small Plow Plane

2010-05-26T20:47:00.012+02:00

After saying in a first post that: the Stanley 13-050, being a last generation model combination plane, has nearly everything covered and is well thought over, I want to make the comparison with a recent plow plane the Veritas Small Plow Plane (VSPP). To compensate the fact that I don't have access to a Veritas plow plane, I look at the excellent article from Derek Cohen staging a comparative test between Veritas and Record #043 and #044. What I miss in this line up is the Record 050C which has the same rounded body as the Veritas plane.

Weight
The 13-050 is nearly two times heavier than the VSPP, this is due in part to the second skate and part to the heavy, square construction. Derek Cohen says that the VSPP has the perfect weight being in between the #043 and #044. Adam Cherubini favours even lighter planes, saying that the lighter wooden planes have a distinct advantage over their heavier metal counterparts.
To counter this, I look at traditional irons. The two I have weight as much or more than a 13-050, respectively nearly 3 and 4 pounds, even if they where used intensively by the 'weaker sex' of those days. I think that, as long as I am not planing balsa, weight does not matter that much.

Left - Right
The VSPP has a left and a right hand model. This can be important, as Peter Follansbee remarks in his plow plane, up one side & down the other post, having only one sided plow plane is sometimes a problem. The 13-050 is nearly fully symmetrical, as the fence and depth gauge can be set left or right. The 13-050 gets asymmetrical when using small blades as only one skate is used, allowing for only one spur when cutting cross grain

Blades
The 13-050 comes with 18 blades, including beading profiles. The VSPP comes with one blade, but extra metric and imperial blades are available which depending of the model used are set left or right. Better than the 13-050, the VSPP narrow blades won't fall out of the plane when setting the depth as they have an enlarged body.
Both the 13-050 and the VSPP align the blades with the skate, where the #043 and #044 have no blade alignment. This can be important when after setting the fence to a certain value, adjusting the blade will not change this value.

Fence and grip
Derek Cohen likes the 4" long curved fence of the VSPP and the warmth and solid feel of the Veritas grip. The 13-050 has also a 4" fence, but square. The grip is big, bigger than my stanley-like #5, and it is not in metal :).
The VSPP claims a better fence stability than the #043 - #044. For the 13-050 I did not see problems here, the body, fence and screws are big and sturdy, all that extra weight is buying me something.

Dados
Nothing stops Derek Cohen, after cutting grooves and rabbets, he even cuts dados with the VSPP to show it is possible, preferring in the end his router plane. The 13-050, has spurs and skates to cut dados and fillisters.

Setup
At first sight the VSPP and the 13-050 have good setup possibilities. With small differences, the VSPP has maybe better fence arm clamping screws and the 13-050 has a two screws depth gauge.

Cutting
In the end it does not matter what plane you use: All the planes performed at an equally satisfactory level says Derek Cohen talking about the VSPP and the #043 - #044
And yes the 13-050 has also a little extra, there is always a depth gauge hole left open where a straw will fit to indicate if the plane stands plumb

Cabinet making - 6

2010-05-20T21:12:00.003+02:00

This is part of a series of posts, inspired by the New Yankee Workshop (NYW) presentation Oak Bathroom Vanity - Program #106, about alternative cabinet design and tools use.

This week it is the NYW presents Chair Table - Item #207 Interesting as in this project the feet, armrests and the battens are set cross-grain to the sides of the chair. In this case no glue is used and the pieces are attached with slotted screws or tenon and dowels. A sliding dovetail is also used, but surprisingly to attach the seat to the sides and not to solve a structural problems, for example to fix the batten cross-grain to the tabletop.

Rodale's Illustrated Cabinetmaking presents also the same project (giving American Country Furniture, 1990 as reference) and shows the batten with a sliding dovetail. Of course making a 40" long sliding dovetail is not easy and I would probably go for slotted screws like the NYW did. Anyway the sliding dovetail weakens the top with two grooves and asks for a thicker and heavier tabletop.

Back to the Oak Bathroom Vanity - Program #106, looking at the top. The NYW dovetails the apron. This is impressive as it requires a good knowledge of the dovetail jig to ensure a perfect fit with the top. I would go for mitered joints and fix the apron with pocket holes in the top to keep everything within my toolset (and keep it easy). Fine tuning the miter can be done with a good powered miter saw if available (I am already regretting I dropped it out of the toolset). An alternative is to use a miter shooting board, but to make this work I would probably need a very good plane.

With this I finish the Cabinet Making series. Discovering the NYW series was fun. It offers good images and sound about mechanized wood workshop activities, fluid transitions between concept and realization and packs a project in less than 25 minutes.
The few cross grain structures that caught my attention in #106, are probably limited to the first season of the NYW, later episodes seem to always solve those problems.
Analysing a few projects from the NYW allowed me to put the 'minimal' toolset to a test. It appears that no drastic changes where needed to make the projects doable. I could do it with the I can do that toolset and some more. And this came as a surprise to me as the NYW has a name of heavy power tool (ab)use.

Cabinet making - 5

2010-05-18T20:33:00.041+02:00

This is part of a series of posts, inspired by the New Yankee Workshop (NYW) presentation Oak Bathroom Vanity - Program #106, about alternative cabinet design and tools use.

After replacing mortise & tenon with biscuits previous post, I look how to improve the strength of a biscuited frame. Biscuits are interesting but are often discredited as being to weak. The fine woodworking magazine (FWW) did a joinery shoot-out in January 2009. It gave values in the following ranges :

half lap: 1600
splined and standard miter: 1500 - 1400
mortise & tenon: 1450 - 700 (depending of the thickness)
stub: 500
dowels - pocket screw - biscuit - stub tenon: 700 - 200 (shallow joints where the style splits along the grain)

Shallow joints
For a dowel joint it is easy to increase the depth of the dowels. I buy dowels by the meter, so no problem there. The people of dowelmax showed (in reaction to the FWW article) that 2 inch deep dowels avoid that the style splits along the grain and allow for strong joints. I am not sure if all the dowels need to be lengthened as the exterior dowels are the most critical .

I implemented the same idea but for biscuits this time. I added a half dowel (a dowel drilled cross-grain, flush with the surface, only there to avoid splitting) close to the end of the stiles. The next step is to make a standard biscuit joint, cutting through the top of the half dowel. With this I made a number of test pieces with a normal biscuited joint (nr 0) on one side and a biscuited joint combined with a half dowel at the other. When hitting the test piece with a mallet, the normal biscuited joint failed easily. When I tried to break the reinforced joint I had to take a bigger hammer to make it break.

The pictures show
- the tested joints with the wood splitting at the depth of the biscuit of the reference joint, where the strengthened joint does not break
- a cross-cut of the biscuit and the dowel
- same with also a half dowel before cutting the biscuit groove

For pocket holes the half dowel can be replaced by a narrow headed screw, making it a screw (and glue) only solution. But I did not test it yet.
For stub tenons half dowels are probably a drastic improvement.

Miter joints
Miter joints show in the test a very decent score. Although my guess is that they are asymmetrical in resistance, being at their best when closing the joint, what was tested by FWW. And shallow joints are probably at there best when opening the joint.
Where a simple miter joint showed a score similar to a splined miter joint, at the JLC forum I saw examples where in adverse condition (high moisture) there is a clear differences between both methods after a few months.
Biscuiting miter joints has an added advantage as the diagonal offers more room for large size biscuits.

Using miter joints for door frames

I have an example where a mitered (drawbored mortise and tenon) joint was used for a door frame. The main reason is probably the use of profiles. Apart from the top with its curved profiles, everything is made with continuous profiles.
This makes it possible to build the door in three distinct steps (possibly different carpenters or workshops):
1. Cut the wood and make the panels
2. Make the profiles
3. Cut the joints and assemble the door

To clarify the style: This oak bonnetière was assembled in the fifties, it is unclear to me how much older the door is or what the style of the original door was.

That's it, next time I look at the top in a last episode.

Cabinet making - 4

2010-05-07T21:32:00.004+02:00

This is part of a series of posts, inspired by the New Yankee Workshop (NYW) presentation Oak Bathroom Vanity - Program #106, about alternative cabinet design and tools use.

This week the NYW presents Hearthside Settle - Program #205. Most of the curved cuts can be done with a jigsaw. I am a little surprised that biscuits are used to attach crossbeams for a bench, but OK.
Looking at the toolset it seems to cover it all but the back and front, witch are made of beaded boards joined with tongue and groove. No glue here as it is a large cross-grain structure and wood movement is near impossible to stop.

If I keep the design:
- Tongue and groove profiles are made on a router table with three passes, one for the groove and two for the tongue.
- The beading is done with a specialised blade on the table saw. Finding an alternative is not easy as it is more a job for a fixed table router, and that's advanced equipment. In my case I could use my Stanley #50 plane (13-050) with its beading profile, it is maybe 50 meters (150 foot) of pine profiles that must be cut and that's doable.

There are alternatives to beading and to tongue and groove :
- Chamfering the boards to replace beading.
- By just putting the boards side by side and maybe using biscuits without glue. If the board shrink it is possible to see light through the joints, but functionally it is not much of a problem.
- Using shiplap joints is also an alternative to tongue and groove and it is more simple to make as I only need rabbets.

A last interesting detail is that where at the front the boards nearly touch the floor, at the back there is a rail supporting the boards (not visible on the picture). A possible explanation is that when the bench is moved (tilted and dragged) the convex front makes it impossible that the board-ends slide over the floor, as only the sides can touch the floor. Where at the back the concave boards need a sled to protect the ends from splintering.

When used in exterior doors beading can be a problem. On the left a correctly executed (south facing) door where the bottom rail allows the rain to drip out of the open joints and beads. Right is my workshop door. It was at its 3rd repair, before it was used there. The rain sipped through the beads behind the panel, making each repair higher than the previous.

Back to the Oak Bathroom Vanity - Program #106, looking at the doors and the front frame
The front frame is made of half lap joints, no problem here if I use a handsaw (and router or rasp and file for fitting). A good idea is to add a handsaw 10-12 tpi to the basic toolset, I can't be a carpenter without a saw.
The door frame is made with mortise and tenons. That's good, but as it is a small door frame and not a chair, strength is not very critical, I can use biscuits.
The door panel is raised (inside) and with a shoulder. Due to the shoulder, it is not possible to simply use a plane. But I can first route a groove to set the depth and then plane the edge away with a Jack plane and some attention. Or I can use some angled router jig.

Next time I finish the Cabinet Making series looking at the top. Or I just try to improve the strength of a biscuited frame.

Cross-grain construction - 2

2010-05-03T21:24:00.009+02:00

A short time after being critical to cross-grain glue ups, I did a simple repair to replace broken drawer sliders (drawer pulls are best set in the centre). By lack of replacement sliders, thin enough to fit, I glued wooden rails to support the drawer. The side panel is 14 mm (1/2"+) thin and the bottom of the drawer is already grooved, leaving no room for cut outs to fit a standard drawer slider.

It is only when placing the drawers back that I became aware I had made a cross grain glue up with the new drawer rails. What was I thinking when glueing?
The drawers are not very deep, so probably the side panels will not crack, but nevertheless.
Thinking of possible alternatives, one solution is to use four screws and to use glue only between the first two screws, that's on third of the rail length, where the highest strain is; as the drawer rests fully on the front part when it is opened. The two back screws are then best set in slotted holes.

I also found an excellent book discussing, among other things, all these cross grain aware solutions when building furniture Rodale's Illustrated Cabinetmaking by Bill Hylton.

Parallel to this, I see that at Logan Cabinet Shoppe Bob Rozaieski is documenting the making of a new Moxolson Workbench. The base is made by now, the top and massive sides will be fixed cross to most of the base structure. Looking further (or is it back) at his documentation I see he split up the top to two parts, keeping the widths limited to 11" (28 cm). I will have to wait and see how the top is attached: glue or slotted pocket holes, buttons, sliding dovetails, ... . (edit: it became slotted holes in additional cleats and partial glue up, a nice workbench)

Cabinet making - 3

2010-04-27T20:09:00.003+02:00

This is part of a series of posts, inspired by the New Yankee Workshop (NYW) presentation Oak Bathroom Vanity - Program #106, about alternative cabinet design and tools use.

This week it is the NYW presents Kitchen Dresser - Program #204. It is cabinet making, but nothing complex here, glued panels put together with dados, glue and brad nails. No need to redesign for missing tools or to avoid laborious techniques. To cut the curves a jigsaw is used and the predefined toolset can be used for all the operations unless I missed some details.

Back to the Oak Bathroom Vanity - Program #106. I look at internal frame used to assemble the top. If the bottom used a case frame the top uses a flat frame attached to a rabbet on the sides. The frame is made with full length grooves and stub tenons. As the frame is to thick for outgoing screws it is screwed from atop to the rabbet. Part of the frame is cross grain to the panels, what can be a problem.

If I look at the Ikea solution the frame is reduced to two spacers (the top is shown left) between the sides to keep them parallel and to be used to mount the top and the back. There goes the need for grooves and stub tenon. The easiest way is to replace the dowels and hidden screws with pocket holes and maybe some gluing.

That's it, next time I look at the doors and the front frame of the #106 project project . As for the ~~drawing~~ sketch, it's handtools only, no slick powertools like sketchup.

Trees

2010-04-25T22:43:00.017+02:00

Visiting friends, I had the chance to see the blossoming pear orchards. Even if pear trees can go up to 30 years, there is not much wood to it. They don't make them like in the good old days any more

The old days are sometimes still there, here a picture of a full size pear tree taken last week (also conference type). According to a very old neighbour, that tree was already old when he was young. If true, that sets the tree in the 19th century. The trunk is straight but twisted, so there is not much valuable here.

I also looked at the church tower from 1720. I came for the timber work of the roof of the main building, but that was much too dark to see anything. So I got some pictures of the internal frame holding the clocks.

Some pictures of furniture made in the local workshop one or two generations ago.The reddish tint of the wood is attributed to ox blood.

Another example, with much nailing here. I didn't check how the drawers where made, my guess is simply rabbeted and nailed without any dovetailing. The sculpting is added on top and probably does not originate from the shop. The side panel's are not framed but no cracks here.

To finish, a factory (?) made oak washing table.

Cabinet making - 2

2010-04-22T20:14:00.010+02:00

This is part of a series of posts, inspired by the New Yankee Workshop (NYW) presentation Oak Bathroom Vanity - Program #106, about alternative cabinet design and tools use.

After one week program #106 is gone from the website replaced by program #203 Butler's Table. Interesting is that in #203 the biscuit joiner is introduced to help glue up wooden panels. After some research I discovered a site (normstools.com) fully documenting the tool usage at the NYW.
#111 introduction Pocket holes
#203 introduction Biscuit joiner
#301 introduction Bessey K-body Clamp
The sequence shows that techniques that I proposed as alternative (biscuits and pocket holes) are not available yet for #106. The Bessey K-body Clamp reference is to remember that gluing panels without a full set of those clamps is a (two seasons) possibility.

Gluing up panels.
I already discussed Step 1 Fixing the bottom to the side panels, now I go one step backwards, I look at the panel. My first reaction is to use veneered plywood. But, it is not a certainty that it is cheaper to find the right amount and colour of plywood. If I want to make panels, I will probably need to straighten the boards as I will have bought cheap wood and will have to pay the price afterwards.

Jointer
I probably need a jointer to straighten boards before gluing them, but it is not in my toolset. Thinking about it I see some possible alternatives:

Re-cut the joint with a (guided) saw. For example fix the two boards and run the circular saw over the joint. Or even use a hand saw, the joint must not be straight but just parallel. (The NYW proposes the table saw as an alternative to a jointer in #204)
Use the router completed with a long stiff fence as a narrow 20 mm (<1") jointer
Hunt the internet for a jointer-less solution ....

Biscuits
As I miss good clamps, using biscuits to glue up boards seems a good idea. And maybe it even helps when warped boards are used.

Planing the panels
The NYW uses a belt sander in episode #203 when planing boards, but it can be done with a random orbital sander, and that is in the toolset. Or after seeing the fww Surface prep: power sanders against handplanes where power tools where not at their best, I am tempted to add as an alternative a #5 handplane and a scraper (with burnisher) to the block plane of the toolset.

Gueuze Cantillon

2010-04-20T09:55:00.010+02:00

Gueuze is for beer what spalted wood is for timber. Gueuze brewers age their beer in long alignments of oak barrels (mostly old wine barrels) in dusty old buildings. When brewers went from wooden crates to plastic to transport bottles, the wooden crates became available at a low price. This is one of those survivors used to store wood scraps in my workshop.

The Gueuze Cantillon is one of those spontaneous fermentation beers of the Brussels regio. Apart from their beer stock, the biggest asset of Gueuze breweries is supposed to be the accumulated 'dust' in their old buildings and cellars containing the local natural ferments.

Geuze is a type of lambic, a Belgian beer. It is made by blending young (1-year-old) and old (2–3-year-old) lambics into a new beer, which is then bottled for a second fermentation. Because the young lambic is not fully fermented, it contains fermentable sugars, which allow the second fermentation to occur. Lambic that undergoes a second fermentation in the presence of sour cherries before bottling results in kriek, a beer closely related to Geuze. (Wikipedia)

Lambic: Unlike conventional ales and lagers, which are fermented by carefully cultivated strains of brewer's yeasts, lambic beer is instead produced by spontaneous fermentation: it is exposed to the wild yeasts and bacteria that are said to be native to the Senne valley, in which Brussels lies. It is this unusual process which gives the beer its distinctive flavour: dry, vinous, and cidery, with a slightly sour aftertaste. (Wikipedia)

Cabinet making

2010-04-16T22:56:00.008+02:00

After looking at the New Yankee presentation about cabinet making Oak Bathroom Vanity - Program #106 I looked if it can be done with a 'minimal' toolset, in this case the I Can Do That toolset and some more (a router). And considering that I have access to a wide array of technical solutions, even within the minimal toolset; what alternatives can be used on the proposed construction.

Step 1 Fixing the bottom to the side panels. After cutting the two massive oak side panels two frames are added to the bottom and the top. The bottom frame is butt joined with screws and glue and fixed the same way to the side. Technically there is nothing difficult to the proposed solution. On a different note, I would prefer that everything is of the same material (massive oak or plywood) and orientation.
The bottom frame is not really necessary as the side panels are very sturdy and can support the cabinet, but:

It helps to fix bottom plate to the side panel. The panels are held together without any screws visible from the outside.
It holds the side panel in position while the other sides are added to the cabinet.

Alternative 1: Dado
The side board is thick enough, I can dado the side over the full length. Once the bottom glued, the sides are held together and the bottom is supported over its full length. As a router is available it is not really a problem. Making a dado of the same width of the as the bottom thickness is probably not easy.

Alternative 2: Dowels
Glued dowels or unglued with hidden screws like Ikea. Here again no frame. Also a limited support for the bottom as only the dowels are supporting it, apparently that's OK. Technically I don't have the precise machines used by Ikea. I can make a hardwood template like Krenov. But I need a way to drill perfectly square holes. This probably means I need a drill holder or a drill press.

Alternative 3: Pocket holes
Line up pocket holes from under the bottom. Used with glue it is gluing without clamping. I would probably favour this solution.

Alternative 4: Biscuits
Close to a dowelled solution but with more room for error. And it'savailable through the toolset.

Medieval carpentry - 2

2010-04-12T20:44:00.019+02:00

Second posting in a series about medieval carpentry.

By chance a second visit to a medieval looking castle, after Bouillon I made a fast, closing time, visit to the Gravensteen of Ghent, where late 19th century romantics decided to rebuild a factory back to its medieval castle origin.

Ceilings

Doors

Windows

Specialised cutting equipment and even one of those modern skewed blades.

Cross-grain construction

2010-04-10T18:11:00.024+02:00

On a French (mad woodworkers) website someone mentioned that the US Norm Abram website airs older programs. Great, as I had never seen any of his videos. The program of this week is: Oak Bathroom Vanity - Program #106. The program is fast paced and handles the whole project in half an hour. To do that it doesn't show any machine setup and dry fitting and it is great on fluent transitions where from looking to a detail on the model the camera transits to the table saw where the piece is directly cut, or from cutting over to gluing.

When it comes to assemble the massive (unframed) side panels to the bottom frame he uses a cross-grain construction. Maybe pine moves lengthwise as much as oak in width. If not, the oak panels could crack. It is unclear if the original piece of furniture he uses as inspiration has the same approach. The original top is more free standing and as it forms a basin, crack problems are probably resolved. The bottom frame gets not much attention, making it unclear if it is similar to the model build.
[edit] Later on I found out that after the first season it is hard to catch any of his projects on a perceived cross-grain problem.

I have seen older furniture with a fully framed construction, while others have unframed sides with cross grain constructions and sometimes large cracks.
Finding a way to avoid cross-grain structures is a recurring problem, unless particle board or plywood is used.

Example of cracked side panel, the side panels are directly fixed to the bottom frame.

Loft bed

2010-04-05T19:56:00.020+02:00

My daughter has been asking for a loft bed for years. I was as far as planning one when I got a second hand model (made by a well-known Swedish furniture maker) at less than the price of the screws.

To make things worse my daughter proposed to do all the assembly by herself, so after the initial puzzle phase, I sat there as a third hand.

It is back to square one as thirteen years ago I removed a loft bed in the same room, without posts then as it was hanging from the ceiling. The ceiling height in the room is 3m (nearly 10'), what makes it nearly appropriate for high beds.
To my surprise Ikea loft beds are even available on the USA market with not much more than a 'Recommended for ages 7 years and older.' and beware of the hooks.

Workshop shelves

2010-04-03T13:36:00.011+02:00

At last, I did a little more clean-up in my workshop (spring is in the air?), this time I set up new shelves. The end result is certainly not up to average web publishing standards. I added a large number of shelves within hand reach in the hope it helps to keep the work surface free of clutter. I plan to add a free standing workbench and or mounting-cutting table to replace the two wobbly Workmates as a next step.

I made two shelves of hardboard sandwiching a light wooden frame. But the result is not convincing as it is less sturdy and costs as much as cheap 18 mm ( 0,7") plywood. Clamping was a problem as I can only easily clamp one side of the shelve when gluing. Finishing on the other hand was a pleasure as it was the first chance to set my (Anant) #5 jack plane at work.

The ultimate smoothing plane

2010-04-01T09:41:00.010+02:00

Setting my recently acquired Stanley 13-050 combination plane to its first tests I discovered a few wood marring problems with the plane on soft woods.

The two skates will leave a track in the botton of the groove on the wood. This is of no great importance as the bottom of the groove is seldom visible. But this can be a problem for decorative cuttings.
The depth gauge has sharp edges, and this will show on the visible surface. To avoid this I can file the edges, but this will damage the surface treatment of the gauge. An alternative is to glue a thin wooden or plastic slider on top of the gauge.
Waxing the surface of the wooden fence greatly reduces friction, but it leaves a waxed surface on the work piece.

That's the 13-050 part of the post. One more thing, as I did not find a way to host a pdf of the manual through Blogger, a copy of the Stanley 13-050 manual is gracefully hosted by the Cornish Workshop in its combination planes section.

The ultimate smoothing plane
Writing this section I thought it was more appropriate to pre-date this post to the first day of this month.:-)

The wax transfer problem with the 13-050 gave me the idea for an improved smoothing plane. I my workshop there is an old clothes iron (marked with a number 4). I used it once or twice to glue edge banding. And for the rest is there because it is a pity to throw it away and after 60 and more years of inactivity it can maybe claim to be antique.
But I can give it a new usage, if I generously wax the sole of my iron I can then probably smooth the surface of freshly planed piece of wood without even the need of a sharp blade. To test the effectiveness of this ultimate smoothing plane I can compare the friction an a smoothed and un-smoothed surface of planed wood. To measure this friction difference, I set an object on top of the surface and look under which angle the object starts to slide.

Friction test with un-smoothed surface

Waxing the 'plane'

Friction test after the surface has been smoothed with a waxed 'plane'

Stanley 13-050 Combination Plane

2010-03-22T14:05:00.073+01:00

I was hunting for the Record 043 plough plane based on the description of the Cornish Workshop "The #043 is one of those planes that everyone who tries it loves immediately". But after seeing the #043 come and go through my ceiling on ebay UK, I finally got a bottom price hit on my parallel track: a Stanley 13-050 Combination Plane.
For the Stanley 13-050 the description is "A modern abomination ... , but apparently can work rather well.", but no complaints, compared to a plough plane, it has more blades and can do more.

As I expected, the Stanley 13-050, being a last generation model combination plane, has nearly everything covered and is well thought over.

The handle of the plane is in plastic (that's the abomination part of the plane): lighter and warmer than metal, more resilient than wood and allows for a better price on ebay
Symmetrical: the depth gauge and the fence can be placed on both sides and the spur is also on both sides
The spurs are just depth adjustable knives, in my case rounded (for safety?)
Depth gauge and fence are held with two rods, increasing the stability of the setup.
The extra beading fence (I first thought it was a faulty depth gauge, as it can't pass the skate, being too large) allows to make a clean beading on a tongue side of a tongue and groove
...

To make it more complete, a picture of beaded tongue and groove joints used in a front door. In this case the door was made with a standard router.

Fitting plough cutters under 6 mm seemed impossible, but after (reading the manual and) removing the sliding section the smallest plough cutters ( 1/8", 4mm and 3/16") can be set on a single skate.
I have also found my next challenge: clamping, as I need to clamp a workpiece with 2 full length surfaces standing free to accept the skates and the fence.

Receiving my 13-050 I was surprised to see it was made of cast iron. Most probably I had seen pictures of the 12-050 model sold on some second hand list, and that model looked like made of plate iron, but maybe it is the combination of square lines and a fully finished surface. I tried to confirm this by checking on internet, but no luck yet the internet seems empty regarding that model. If confirmed, you can't call that model a boat anchor as it must be much lighter.

What I did find, was an example of a Stanley 13-030 plough plane on ebay that looks as if the body and the fence of the plane is made with light metal profiles.

I also found a different model packaged in the same 13-050 box with a light brown handle on the cover. This was an unused model, looking like it was produced a few months ago, with a dark brown handle, still in plastic but with a more natural touch.

Finish Carpenter Toolset

2010-03-18T09:01:00.018+01:00

On the JLC forum Kreg McMahon shows his (fes)tool set used to build a bookcase on site. As I had already listed (under Minimal Toolset - 2) a finish carpenter toolset of the fifties, it is nice to have a more updated version.

cordless drill(s)
two sanders
two routers
Festool Domino
two jigsaws
a miter saw on table
a plunge saw
two mft 3 workbenches with guide rail set square
clamps
a Kreg pocket hole machine
a vacuum cleaner
a leaf blower
two tape measures + folding ruler
combination square
pin hole jig (off-site)
...

the toolset

the bookcases

Surprisingly or not, this toolset is very similar to the popular woodworking I Can Do That basic tools I documented earlier. The major difference is the presence of a router. The Festool Domino used here is also different but it is close to a biscuit joiner, although some dowelling equipment could cover the need for sturdier joints.

Dowels

2010-03-14T20:56:00.018+01:00

Looking at the latest video of the Woodwhisperer where Marc demonstrates the DowelMax, I thought about all the dowelling possibilities and jigs.

Dowelmax is interesting as it brings dowelling to heavy frame constructions where tenon and mortices are normally used. Dowelmax helps with high density dowelling with there (multiple) allingnments of closely placed holes. The only problems are the price and dowelling on larger length as the jig needs to be repositioned and the appearance of cumulative alignment errors .

Dowelmax makes strength tests and came out as a winner out of its own tests. So yes, five 5/8" dowels are much stronger than a single 1/6" number 20 biscuit Of course things can be different once the tests are made by a third party (in this case FWW). I think that the main difference between both tests is that standard routed mortice and tenon joints are deeper (2") than the standard 1" (25,4mm) dowel depths. With limited depth the Dowelmax falls for FWW in the same category as biscuits, festool dominos and pocket joints where the wood of a L joint will easily split at the shallow depth of the holding element. At Dowelmax they redid the tests with 2" dowel depth greatly improving the results. I agree with them, my first impression of the FWW results for dowelling, biscuits and pocket holes is that strength can be improved by working on depth. More on this another time, as I already made a few joint tests with my own set up.

As Marc correctly mentions James Krenov was a dowelling adept. His jig, as decribed in 'The fine art of cabinetmaking' and probably FWW isues, is a long piece of hardwood with predrilled holes. "The whole secret of doweling, and it is somewhat of a secret because of lack of common knowledge, is accuracy. You must be absolutely accurate. J.K." This indicates one advantage of biscuits and dominos over dowels, the alignment is less strict. In the case of long pieces the advantage of this jig is that it is only positioned one time. Krenov uses his horizontal mortiser for drilling, improving with this the alignment of the drill.

Wolfcraft offers different dowelling jigs.

The first is a cheap self centring hand-held device for the classic 6-8-10 mm dowels. This gives you one hand for the jig and one for the drill as not much is foreseen to fix the jig (there goes my insight gained by reading James Krenov). As I bought a cheap copy of this one, I should maybe add a water-level to my drill to achieve the necessary accuracy. Added to that the centring part does not work at the border of the wood, and of course multiple rows are impossible. The second hole is done aligning the jig on a a dowel in the first hole.

The second works with (6-8-10 mm) drilling bushes and has predefined drilling heights. The holes are directly set on both sides, avoiding realignment problems. Works for I, L, and T panel joints

The last jig is more for shelving with a standard 32 mm spacing between dowels and 5-6-8-10 mm drilling bushes

Medieval carpentry

2010-03-07T19:38:00.012+01:00

Visiting Bouillon I was curious for any trace of medieval carpentry. The castle-citadel was build from the 11th century on and demilitarized at the end of the 19th century, as newer and better forts became available. By this it is now in an undamaged state, what can't be said of the newer forts (Loncin 1914, now a cemetery, Big Bertha did it).

Missing 1: The original early medieval wooden castle stood higher on the hill. But of course it is long gone

Missing 2: The water mill, originally constructed in the 11th century it must have been a piece of medieval high tech. Only the dam feeding the mill is still there.

A tread mill, standing on top of the 57 meter deep well. As the region had miners long before the castle was there, the original tread mill can be as old as the original castle. My first reaction to the mill was to look how it was made, to avoid it fell apart when used. As the picture shows it is a problem when you simply nail the planks at the outside as they fall to easily out.

Missing 3: The only piece of medieval carpentry I saw. The remnants of a large wooden cross (looks like the real cross to me, but then it would be Roman) originally hidden, and now displayed in a glass casing, in the floor of the main medieval hall and discovered 50 years ago. As the castle is strongly linked to the first crusade it is a mystery what it represents. Missing, as my wife cleaned out the pictures before I could save the more 'interesting' ones

This is the first posting in what became a series about medieval carpentry.

Kitchen

2010-02-22T13:06:00.012+01:00

This time a sizable project, but not much woodworking. Doing some home renovation, I assembled a kitchen made by a famous Swedish cabinetmaker.

Circular saw
As my older Bosch circular saw has problems to cut a straight line, even with a guide, I got frustrated enough to buy a, cheaper than Festool, Makita plunge saw with rail. I got it at destocking price from Netherland, but nevertheless it was was time to regret I did not jump on the cheap second-hand Festool plunge saw I spotted back in September. The plunge saw worked very well, certainly for the cut outs. I could have done them with a jigsaw, but not without any stress, as the lowest point of the blade tend to wander left or right when I cut. As an afterthought, it is probably the cheapish blade I bought for the Bosch circular saw, to replace my old original 10 tooth blade, that gave the problem .

Tram renovation

2010-02-17T22:19:00.018+01:00

Visiting Han and using the old (1905 & 1968) 4 km track that is still in service (300 000 passengers/year). I could see that the old wooden open carriages have been completely rebuild. This carriage is from 1994 and made in the local repair workshop. Apparently they know how to curve wood in this shop.

An interesting detail is the floor cut around the post supports. My guess is that in the original (? <1950) version the supports were set on top of the floor, as the design is to rounded and irregular for an easy cut out. But that after years of use the floor started to rot. The only way to repair it would have been to cut out all the, by then rusted, bolts and to lift the roof as a whole. In this version, the floor can be replaced without touching the roof. And the roof posts will not start to move down or tilt when the floor is weakening.

Minimal project

2010-02-15T19:14:00.016+01:00

While I was trying to clean up my workshop, my son wanted a piece of scrap-wood to make a 'real' sword, even if I had already allowed him to wield my bokken (a Japanese wooden sword or is it sabre). So two half lap joints and some glue later, he has his sword. As a single joint project, it is a minimum in woodworking.
Although when I bought the bokken it became a zero joints project. I removed every sharp edge with sandpaper and shortened the point with a file to make it blunt. After that I scraped the remaining varnish and oiled the wood. I was quite happy with the quality of the wood as it supported every (ab)use and never splintered or broke over the years. The crack in the handle is what made it cheap, and will probably give a blister if you wield it the whole day. The bokken is shown here without tsuba (guard). I only used the tsuba on provincial-national meetings where you never know witch kind of sparring tradition your training partner has in mind.

Crooked hat

2010-02-14T21:16:00.014+01:00

Looking for some pictures about workbenches, I found a different set made last (rainy) summer. A .... low six sided pyramidal roof with copper crooked hat top. I should take a picture of the more traditional pyramidal roof with onion top next time.

Workbench height

2010-02-14T20:59:00.017+01:00

Christopher Schwarz 'raises' (96cm or 38inch) the question of workbench height when making dovetails, through his blog.

After reading his older proposals (palm height = 80 cm) I went out to check a few workbenches. I found an old bench set at 86 cm, measured the tables of a cnc cabinet shop as high as 100 cm.
In my chop I have a metalworkers vise fixed on a table. The vise is hard for wood but is comfortable to saw, so I was happy to find a proposal to set the height of a workbench to elbow minus 10 cm = 100 cm.

Looking for vises on the second hand list, I found a few examples of older metal vises. I guess that some wooden vises were also made, standing proud on the workbench, but it is less likely they survived
[edit] There is an example of such a vice in one of the blog entries of Christopher Schwarz, and in old movies. In later posts he looked for a solution by promoting the Moxon Double-screw Vise, offering the advantage of a removable seup.

Minimal toolset - 3

2010-02-14T17:39:00.027+01:00

Checking the I Can Do That toollist, I see that it is completely covered, mainly through my existing tool set . I added a 'cheap as chips' biscuit joiner and miter saw. Found a pocket hole kit from Wolfcraft through amazon.de . The Wolfcraft kit is based on the Pozidriv #1 bit and and as such different to the Kreg square bits although the same shouldered 9,5mm drill is used.

I tried to go kit less, but the use of a shouldered drill is a necessity to make a pocket hole. The Philips and the square screwdrivers are also replaced by a Pozidriv as this is the main standard here.

combination square
tape measure
jigsaw
coping saw
miter saw
circular saw
drill (corded or cordless)
rasp and file
random orbit sander + #100 #150 #200
block plane
two sided oilstone + oil
biscuit joiner or pocket hole kit
hammer and nail set
bit screwdriver with bits: small, medium and large slotted, #1 and #2 Pozidriv
workmate
clamps

Edits
Addition 1: Guiding rail for the circular saw. I lost patience and got one

Addition 2: Router After looking at a finish carpenter toolset, the main difference was the router.

Addition 3: Jack plane and scraper (and burnisher). After seeing the FWW Surface prep: power sanders against handplanes, as handtools are sometimes more fun

Addition 4: A standard (back)saw or even an eastern model, to make (half lap) joints. No carpenter without a saw. And chisels, a few chisels and a mallet, please.

Remove 1: Honing oil as John Juranitch agrees with a coarse-fine method, but claims that oil is worse than useless. Adding a sharpening guide as "There is just no comparison between the results you get when using our guide and sharpening free-handed"

Minimal toolset - 2

2010-02-06T12:18:00.019+01:00

Finding minimal and not so minimal handtool sets on the web is not a problem. This time I take three of them side by side.
- I already had Dan's minimal lists (from his full - smaller - smallest list)
- Christopher Schwarz proposes and used a minimal handtool set based on "The Joiner and Cabinet Maker".
- Mitchell (The Part-Time Woodworker) lists a carpenter toolbox started in the fourties, not minimal but certainly not excessive.

Marking & Measuring Tools
CS: try square - chalk line - 2' Folding rule - marking gauge - panel gauge - wooden straightedge - marking knife
Dan: 6” square - framing square with Veritas Square Fence - awl - pencils - marking knife - 6’ folding rule - marking gauge (cutting)
PTW: Sand’s craft rafter square 24” - Stanley #21 combination try and miter square - Stanley #20 try squares (6” and 10”) - Stanley #94 boxwood folding rule (two) - Stanley bevels (3 different sizes) - Stanley #94 butt gauge - Stanley #77 Mortising Gauge - Stanley #373-3 ½” Butt Marker - Stanley #6 Awl (two)

Saws
CS: handsaw - sash saw - dovetail saw - bowsaw
Dan: 20” cross-cut panel saw (12 tpi) - 26” rip saw (5 ½ tpi) - cross-cut back saw (12 tpi)
PTW: Disston 28” straight-back rip - Disston 26” skewback cross - Disston 20” skewback cross panel - Disston 14” back

Cutters
CS: tack plane - trying plane - smoothing plane - rabbet plane - plow plane - (router plane) - bench chisels - 1/4" mortising chisel
Dan: Stanley # 5 jack plane - Stanley #18 block plane - drawknife - card scraper - 1/4" & 3/4" chisel
PTW: Stanley #9 ½ plane - Stanley #4 plane - Stanley #7 plane - Stanley #78 plane - Stanley #28 & #29 cornering tools - Stanley #82 scraper - Stanley #720 Chisels (a set of five)

Other Tools
CS: mallet - hammer - nailset - bradawl - brace and bits - turnscrew - file - Steel plate (for clinching and straightening nails)
Dan: half-round single cut file - 8” brace - auger bits - twist bit - claw hammer - nail set - Phillips head and flat screwdrivers
PTW: Stanley #150 Open Front Miter. Box - Stanley #40 Screwdrivers (a set of five) - Millers Falls #610A Spiral Screwdriver - Stanley Ratchet Bit Brace (2) - Irwin Bits (a complete set in a canvas roll) - Stanley #232 Aluminum Level - Stanley #87 Line Level - Hammers (2; one framing and one for trim) - Nail Sets (many) - Wrecking Bar - Nail Pull - Sharpening Stones (two)

Shopmade Appliances
CS: sawbenches - shooting board - bench hook
Dan: workbench - sawbench
PTW: toolbox

Paring chisel

2010-02-01T08:06:00.011+01:00

I discoverd Roy Underhill's site and broadcasts this weekend. I am impressed by his sometimes encyclopaedic presentations, in some ways he's Pieter Bruegel's younger brother. A good example is the presentation about dovetails. ( Later on I discovered he did a similar presentation also with Frank Klausz , as shown on the video excerpt on Sandal Woods)

One of the techniques presented is the use of a paring chisel. Described as a thin long chisel, that should not be abused by a mallet. Holes for example are squared by using a narrow paring chisel pushed downward. Looking the way Roy uses the chisel there is a reason for the length. When paring the arm is completely bend with the elbow close to the body, and the chisel is rather pulled downward and not pushed with stretched arm. Resting the shoulder on the chisel could be used for extra strength, but I doubt he does it, as it does not seem very precise. The extra advantage of bend arms is that the eyes are closer to the working surface.

Paring chisels are not in all catalogues, although I did find a reference on the Axminster (UK) site. The price seems two times that of a standard chisel. Luckily Lie Nielsen paves the way to a cheap alternative (...?). Their version of paring chisels are very sturdy long handled models. So following this road, a possibility is to replace the handle of a standard chisel with a longer one to make a paring chisel. The remaining problem would be the need for high quality sharpening, but that's another story.

Combination Square

2010-01-29T23:10:00.010+01:00

The Dan's Shop minimal toolset description of measurement equipment is as follow: Framing square w/ Veritas square fence (I like this fence, but wish it was thin on both sides, so I could use it on 3/4 stock in left and right orientation ), 6” square, 6” combination square ... Worth drawknife; ... marking gauge (cutting)

Dan's framing square w/ Veritas square fence is functionnaly similar, but bigger and from different origin than my only square, a Sandvik (now Bahco) 250 mm (10'') square. The Sandvik square is a fully metric as the fence is exactly 10 mm wide, making it easy to switch from internal to external measurements. The fence only protrudes 4 mm (<1/4''), in that aspect it is an improvement on the Veritas fence.
Thinking about it, having a bigger square could be more comfortable when marking panels and Bahco squares come in four sizes. On the other side of the spectrum, a small (combination) square is also an improvement when drawing out cut outs and hole positions, or checking depths.

I looked on ebay and found the Bahco 400mm squares in the UK, but also Bahco combination 6'' squares. Those are possibly end of series, as they are unmentioned in the catalogue. So I went for a, now cheaper, Bahco combination square and added a Wolfcraft 500 mm fenced square found in a DIY shop

Minimal toolset

2010-01-27T18:32:00.004+01:00

Where to start with woodworking? When looking at high profile woodworking blogs it is more probable (according to Paretto) to find a page discussing the 7th plane in a personal collection, than a page discussing the first plane. So in some ways blogs knowingly present a distorted view of necessities. A first step is to hunt down blogs and sites for the needed tools. With needed tools I mean, that there is no excuse to start a project once those are bought.

Modern Woodworking
Popular Woodworking implemented the idea of a 'minimal' toolset thoroughly with the I Can Do That projects and toolset.

(combination) square
tape measure
jigsaw
coping saw
miter saw
(circular saw)
drill (corded or cordless)
rasp and file
random orbit sander + #120 #150 #200
block plane
two sided oilstone + oil
biscuit joiner or pocket hole kit
hammer and nail set
bit screwdriver with bits: small, medium and large slotted, #1 and #2 square drive and Phillips
workmate
clamps

Minimal Hand Tool Sets
For hand tool sets there is some choice although 'minimal' is mostly a problem. Dan from Dan's Shop works out the toolset problem by proposing (1.) the toolset used to make a shaker cupboard, (2.)cleans up doubles to have a minimum toolset and finally (3.) the tooolset that could build a similar cupboard less some more advanced tools or techniques.

workbench
sawbench
8” brace
auger bits
twist bit
claw hammer
nail set
Phillips head and flat screwdrivers
6” square
framing square with Veritas Square Fence
awl
pencils
marking knife
6’ folding rule
marking gauge (cutting)
Stanley # 5 jack plane
Stanley #18 block plane
drawknife
card scraper
half-round single cut file
1/4" - 3/4" chisel
20” cross-cut panel saw (12 tpi)
26” rip saw (5 ½ tpi),
cross-cut back saw (12 tpi)

Tenon shootout

2010-01-24T14:40:00.002+01:00

I looked at the Fine Woodworking Tenon Shootout: Hand vs. Power Tools to get a few ideas about tenon and mortise technique.
I pass for the power tools part as it was done with a dado blade on a table saw. For now the only item that is not on my buying list, is a table saw, as it looks scary, although it has a great sound compared to handheld power tools. Unless I put the dado blade on a radial arm saw? No, no no I .... have not enough room.

The hand made tenons where made slowly. I had expected some Rob Cosman speed and focus on the task, to match the power tools cutting speed, but no. Much time was refining the tenon with a shoulder plane. And possibly most of it pushing and pulling the tenon in and out the mortise as the tenon was fitted deeper and deeper.
I looked for older texts to get a better overview of handmade tenons and found some. Frank Klausz probably summarises it best, in a more recent text, by saying that no finishing is needed on a tenon as rough wood presents a better gluing surface. So the saw marks can stay, as they improve the gluing process. The fitting should be between feather light and mallet fit-able. Fitting, when needed (as it is beginner stuff), is done with a rasp. The good news is that I can cross those expensive shoulder planes of my buying list, and just use my rasps.

The next question is it possible to simplify fitting? The tenon shootout used machine made mortises, what means they are already similar and straight. This means that something with the same dimensions as the mortise profile can be used.
- A first tool to help fitting could be using a profile gauge. This allows to control the profile of the tenon. A lockable calliper can be used as a profile gauge.
- A second tool should be able to control the alignment of the tenon. Here a combination square can show if he tenon is in line with the rest of the piece.

Assembly table

2010-01-22T14:23:00.010+01:00

Looking for working surfaces in my chop, I found the assembly table of Garry Katz. It is based on the Smart Table I think it can be interesting as it offers something like an assembly table combined with a cutting table. By lack of a table saw, a cutting table that is extendible to the full size of a piece of mdf or plywood is interesting.

Shopnotes proposes a lightweight wooden folding worktable. That could be a good starting point for the base of an assembly table. I want to conceive one that is build with a single sheet of 12 mm plywood and a few extra's, like the base of the legs for example can best be made of hardwood. With 12 mm plywood I think it is just possible to use a biscuit joiner. The most difficult part seems now to make the folding legs working correctly.

For the top rails I think that inversed T's cut as a french cleat system can deliver a cheap solution, without the need of a large amount of hardware.