More catch up! Sixth Week of Furniture Making School - July 15- 21 This was a tough week. Sadly, family was leaving Tuesday, I had no time in the shop over the weekend or at night last week, but beginning with Tuesday evening I would cram in a lot of extra time in the shop. More company was coming, but they wouldn’t be here until Sunday evening, so there would be lots of time to work this week - time to get things done. The pattern of the previous week - more work time and fewer gatherings for discussion or demonstrations - was accelerated somewhat this week. All around me boards are taking shape and becoming things. In some places I see good steady work; in some places I don’t see what I think I ought to be seeing. Of course, I don’t have a lot to show myself except boards! In spite of a neat stack of many boards, there is a rhyme and a reason to it all. There is a lot of progress disguised in the stack and inexorably, it is moving toward a piece of furniture. I’m beginning to do some dry fitting and clamp-up just to make sure everything is coming together properly. Those stiles that were added to the project last week will have to be slotted along with the rails, but then very carefully trimmed (we’re talking thousands of an inch to get them perfect) and matched to a particular leg and set of rails and they will have to be glued in place before anything else can be glued. It seems a strange process, but it is the only way to get it right. Once everything was perfect, it was time to build a tapering jig so that the outer two faces of each leg could be tapered from narrow at the top to wide at the base. The influence for the taper is the windmills of West Texas. The taper is not as bold as that of a Aeromotor windmill tower, but this piece, even though it is out of cherry and accents of African blackwood, has a real West Texas feel for me. It is part of what I call my Greene & Gruene collection - fine furniture with a Texas accent - a style I’ll talk about at a later time. The conversation with Aaron developed a very simple tapering jig he had discussed in an earlier presentation to the class. I bought some MDF (medium density fiberboard), found another board or two, borrowed some screw down hold down clamps from the school and set about to put it together. Austin came by my bench as I was assembling it and asked a few pointed questions about how it was to work. As I walked him through it, his famous “I want to see...” flowed. In essence, he was not comfortable the jig was substantial enough for what I wanted to do. He had reliability and safety concerns. And even though he and Aaron had different approaches and thoughts on the matter, I knew I had no choice but to follow the more conservative approach Austin was expecting. By late Tuesday I was ready to taper the legs once we reached the end of the day. I have neglected to mention a major feat accomplished before I could taper the legs. On the two sides and across the back, the night stand legs are connected via rails which go from leg to leg, three at the top of the piece and three down near the bottom. Captured within that frame will be panels, one on each side and one at the back. Because the front has both a drawer and a door, and because of the design, a rail is not possible across the front at the top, though one is required at the bottom. Across the top, a board is turned flat to simultaneously connect the two front legs and the two side rails. That board is called a blade. There are several ways to connect the blade, but the most universally accepted way, the format most structurally sound, and the way demonstrating the highest level of craftsmanship involves the use of two side by side half-blind dovetails on each end of the blade. The dovetail at the front fits into the leg and the dovetail just behind it fits into the side rail. Essentially, this joint holds the sides together and prevents racking. Of course, this rail has dovetails at each end so as to capture the two front legs and the two side rails on each side. I had never done anything like this, but I laid it out, took my time, carefully cut it and ended up with a joint that was really good. The sense of accomplishment was great. The consequences of failure would have been significant, possibly requiring new matching boards and a lot of work just to get the project back on track. Though I was aware of the issue, there was no nervousness as I tackled the project. What I did to pull it off was to continually picture Aaron working with a chisel on a dovetail or mortise and tenon, then emulate his approach. It wasn’t quick and it wasn’t easy, but the work was good! And when everything was put together one more time and dry clamped, everything came together properly and snugly. Everything was square! It was time to taper the legs. Once the shop had cleared, I set up at the table saw with the tapering jig and carefully positioned the legs. I began to first taper one side, then the other and move on to the next leg. When I finished I had three perfect legs and one tapered from bottom to top. My heart sank. Simply writing about it brings back that horrible feeling. Racing through my mind were thoughts about “How could I have done that? What caused the mistake? What would have avoided the problem? What did I have to do to build a matching leg? Did the scrap wood from the board out of which I had taken the legs still have enough wood left with matching grain and coloration so that I could build another leg? I did a few other things that night, but found it rather difficult to get that failed procedure out of my mind. I must have slept on it all night, because the next morning in the shop I built a new leg. I suppose I had worked it all out in my dreams, as is my habit. Showing Austin the failure and the new leg was not what I looked forward to doing, but I had heard enough stories from Aaron and Austin about failures to help me understand no one is immune from bone head mistakes. Ultimately, and this transitions to the philosophical, it is not the failure that defines us; what defines us is how we respond to challenges. Another thing that came to me during the process of licking my wounds was an image of Aaron going through the process of cutting the tapers on the leg. I watched him carefully check and double check each leg and each procedure, then lay the leg in the jig. In this imaginary scenario, every leg was perfect. What I learned from that was to think about how either Aaron or Austin would have done what I had messed up. That was rather powerful. The challenge during the week, once I got back on track, was to fine fit the panels and get ready to begin gluing up. To do that, I had to first glue into place the stiles we had added to the design. Without going into a lot of really boring, technical detail I basically had to glue the stiles in place as everything else was clamped up dry. On the assembly table, it looked like a whole lot of effort to do so little; once all the clamps came off and the pieces were separated, there was very little to show other than a stile awkwardly glued to one face or other of each leg. Each rail has a profile - the lower edge of each rail emulates the plateaus and caprocks which are so predominate in West Texas, Far West Texas as well as the South and High Plains. I built templates for each of those profiles and cut that profile onto the rails at a router table using a pattern cutting bit with a guide bearing. I was also then able to round over the outer edge on the router table, but unfortunately I had to stop the procedure on each rail near where the rail and stile would meet. That meant that later on a significant amount of handwork would be required to blend the rounded over edges together. At this stage, I wasn’t really sure how I would do that, but I knew there would be a way. I also had to cut a slot into the edge of each rail and stile to receive the panel. Though we had started out to have panels about 1/2” or so thick, and plans to field them on the inside, Austin and I decided at this stage that the size of the panels was so small that 1/4” would be fine and the panels would not be so thin in relationship to their overall dimensions that they sounded “tinny.” Besides, eliminating the bulge of the field on the inside of the night stand made for a much cleaner looking interior. That also meant that the slots could be cut 1/4” wide and so they were. Each panel was a few thousandths over 1/4” thick, so each was lightly fielded (edge tapered) on the inside using a hand plane so as to fit snuggly into the slot. Part of the challenge was to make sure the panel was long enough on the vertical dimension to fit snugly as there is no seasonal expansion along the length of the grain. Additionally, the cross grain dimension had to be long enough to not allow an edge to be exposed when the wood shrank across the grain at dry times, but still not so long as to cause problems when the grain expanded during the wet times of the year. Having worked so long with mesquite, where cross-grain expansion is a negligible issue, working with a more traditional hardwood like cherry forces me to take into consideration something typically ignored. To make another very painful mistake simple, Austin did not like the slop in the vertical measurement of the panels and insisted I redo them. I had a very simple work around, which I thought was entirely acceptable, but Austin was having none of it. I had to replace the two side panels. Matching the wood on the back panel and the door panel was impossible, but I was able to build two side panels which fit perfectly and matched rather well. What Austin never knew was that the back panel itself was a bit short and I solved that matter with two very simple tiny and slim spacers slipped into the upper and lower slots and glued in place. I crafted them with a hand plane over a grove cut in a long board and was very pleased with the result. I could have done the same thing for the side panels, but I didn’t. I do know, however, how i can solve this similar issue if it should rear its ugly head in the future. By the way, Austin calls these “chicken strips,” always with a grin on his face. He told me that when we attached the hinges and the door we would use a chicken strip, but in this case, I used one without him knowing anything about it. By the end of the week and over the weekend, I began to glue the sides together, then the back section to the side sections to get ready for gluing the blade and lower front rail into place. To get to that point, I had to cut the dados for the drawer slides and the lower shelf or bottom of the night stand. They had to be spot on; fortunately, they were. I also had to make a lower shelf or bottom before the back could be glued to the sides. One of the concepts that has been emphasized over and over is the value of full sized drawings and over-sized, rough dimensioning of pieces beforehand, but as the project develops, empering the reliance on the dimensions of the drawing with reality. Reality is what exists and what we have to connect to, not the drawing. Dimensions can slightly or significantly change depending on a variety of circumstances and we have to adjust to what is in place, i.e. reality. As I got to the board for the bottom, I knew the pieces I had on hand were marginal at best. Measured against reality, they were too small. I built another shelf and carefully began to cut out a square in each of the two back corners where the bottom, as it expanded and contracted with seasonal changes, could wrap around each of the two back legs right at the spot where the dados in the lower rails met the leg. It was a tiny cut out, but it had to be done right. I had it just about right, and needed to take away another 3/16 of an inch at the corner along the front to back measurement. One was cut perfectly, while the other on the opposite corner was cut the wrong way. I flipped the board the wrong way after examining the first cut. I looked at it and headed back to the bench, then called Aaron over, told him what I had done and how I planned to fix it. He nodded approval, we talked it through and I got it done during lunch. By the time Austin got back from lunch I showed Austin the mistake and how well I had fixed it. He looked at me and smiled, saying “That is the sign of a good furniture maker.” Yes, I was miffed at the error, but really proud of the fix and his compliment. I can run a long time on that kind of fuel! This fix, by the way, is virtually invisible and so hidden away that it would be hard to find even if you knew where to look for it. There were a couple of other minor challenges before the glue up began in earnest. One was the proper placement of a rare earth magnet in the bottom to serve as part of a door catch; the other was the gluing into place of a board to the bottom of the shelf so that when everything was glued in place, the front edge of the bottom could be glued to the front rail. This would effectively force all expansion and contraction to the rear of the case, never showing anything along the front edge. Everything in place, the pieces were gradually glued together so that as the next week began, there was a night stand standing. We had a few demos during the week, but essentially work time was continuing to increase. All over the shop, projects are evolving. As different as their projects are from mine, I must admit I get a lot of inspiration from their work on their projects. I’m really enjoying this school, especially my classmates. This is so good.
Posted on: Thu, 05 Sep 2013 14:56:58 +0000
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