Week Two: Thursday

The 1:7 book rack is slowly coming together. The photo below is one of the last pictures I took before the camera jostled off the workbench and on to the floor, knocking out the capability to focus, as I reported in my last posting.  So, this picture was taken on Monday afternoon.  I was planing one of the cherry boards flat on one side to be used in the project.  The rest of the dimensioning will be done by machine, but we were expected to prepare one side by hand for practice.  To plane a board like this, you really have to put your whole body into it.  It's a definite cardio workout.  That's why the bench rocked so much that the camera jumped off.

That's the new plane I've mentioned before.  You can see that there is a section in the center of the board which has not yet been flattened.  I'm using a toothed blade in the plane to remove stock.  The rough board was a little over an inch thick, and when I finish preparing it, it will be about 5/8 inch thick.  At this point, I still had a long way to go.  When I finished, Yuri scribbled on my work with a pencil.  One pass through the jointer machine removed 1/32 inch, and also removed all her scribbles, proving that I had made it pretty flat and smooth by hand.

The remaining photos, taken with my phone, show how far I've progressed.  The two taller side pieces were actually cut from the board I hand-planed,  and I've cut the tails of dovetails into them.  The end piece, which would be the top if I were making a stool is from another piece of cherry, and it contains the pins of the dovetails on both ends.

These two photos are actually oriented with the bottom up.  I was going to explain how part would be cut away leaving only a "foot" which will give the whole thing the necessary 1:7 tilt, but I'll wait until I can actually show it to you.

The last photo shows the the pin ends for a half blind dovetail on the back of the rack, and the board laying on the bench is one of the side pieces showing the matching tails of the dovetails.

It's taken me quite a while to get to this point.  I still have a lot of work to do.  I've laid out the mortises for the two stretchers, and I'll get to work cutting them tomorrow morning.  It might seem that I should be a lot further along by now, but we've had a lot of lectures which take up a significant amount of time.  We spent two hours this morning discussing various types of finishes, (oil, varnishes, lacquers), what each is best suited for, how to apply them.  Then we had another discussion on a woodworking technique.  All this took until noon. And, I'll admit to being pretty slow at cutting dovetails, although I've gotten a lot better over the past couple of days, once I overcame some mental blocks.

Tomorrow we expect to have most of the day available to work on the project.  To be on schedule, we should have it glued up by the end of the day.  I think I should be pretty close to that. 

I've developed a bit of a cold or allergies - runny nose and occasional sneezing bouts - so I decided to go home this afternoon rather than attending the weekly barbecue. I guess it's a good thing, because I was finally able to get through to Nikon about repairing the camera.   I have to take my camera to the UPS Store in Rockland in order to ship it off to be repaired.  So, I either have to get there before 5:30 pm tomorrow, or before noon on Saturday.  Whichever I do, it will cut into the time available for me to work on my project.  I am glad that I ended up choosing a relatively simple project.  Some of my classmates are struggling to get finished.

Finally, I hate to say this, but, unless I'm missing something in the camera adjustment, I do think the colors in the cell phone photos look closer to reality to me than the camera photo.  It looks very yellow to me.  In the last photo, you can see the color of the raw cherry wood.