Week Three: Tuesday

The Book Rack

This morning I unclamped the tiny repair, and sanded it.  It's pretty hard to see, although once sanded, the repair wasn't as invisible as I'd hoped it would be.

The repair after gluing

The repair after sanding

I next masked off the places that I didn't want to be touched by the finish, so as not to ruin gluing surfaces.  Then, at lunchtime, I put the first coat of finish on the inside surfaces of the book rack.  The finish is a clear tung oil product called Waterlox.  In the late afternoon, I scuff sanded the surfaces with 400 grade sandpaper, and applied another coat.  Of course, the finish really brings out the character and color of the wood.

One coat of Waterlox tung oil finish.
Compare the color to the sanded  piece above

Finish on the repaired piece.

The six-week project

The morning was spent in discussions about our 6-week project.  For the first hour or so, we learned about various aspects of building a case piece.  For example, since we will be using solid wood, and not man-made materials such as plywood, we need to be concerned more with wood movement.  The two common construction methods are "slab" sided, which means full width of a board, or even edge glued boards.  The other method is to use so-called "Frame and Panel" construction.  This method does a better job of accommodating wood movement with changes in the atmosphere.  The frame is relatively stable, and the panel floats in the frame.  A solid wood door is always built with frame and panel.  It would not be possible to build a slab door for the entry to your house, for example, because the expansion and contraction of the wood wood could make it impossible to open during part of the year and impossible to latch during another part.

Aaron then showed us an extensive series of slides covering the history of furniture through the ages. This is probably the first time I have sat through such a presentation and stayed interested all the way though.

He then showed some slides about the furniture of James Krenov and the Krenov School - College of the Redwoods.

Aaron finished with pictures of projects by students in previous 12-week classes.  All of this was to give us ideas and inspirations.  In my case, it all caused me to decide to scale my project down.  The more I thought about it, the more I realized that although 6 weeks seems to be a long time, it really isn't.  Given the project requirements, sharing of machines and setups, lecture time, other "time killers," and my own ability, I need to think in terms of something a little less grandiose.  And, I need to be able to get it home in my Tacoma pickup truck!

This afternoon, I decided that instead of a large tool cabinet, I would focus on my collection of wood planes.  My cabinet should display them prominently, give me easy access to them, and also store not only the planes, but also spare blades, any special associated tools, and perhaps spare parts.  My cabinet will still be some 9 inches deep, about 36 inches high, and about 24 inches wide.  This can accommodate all of the planes I now own with enough room for some future acquisitions.  And, it will meet the project requirements by having one door (although it might have two when I finish designing it) and two drawers.

In order to get an idea of how large it would have to be, I gathered together the planes that I have with me, plus several from the school's collection that duplicate planes I left at home, and laid them out on a table so I could find the best arrangement.  Now that I have rough dimensions, I'll figure out how I'll construct the cabinet.