Week Seven: Drawers and Doors

On Monday, I finally glued up the back panel.

I started thinking about making the drawers. It should have been obvious to me from the beginning that if my drawer fronts were flush with the frame of the cabinet, and the doors closed flat on the frame, there wouldn't be any room for pulls on the drawers.  Duh! I bumped heads with Aaron, and after about 5 different solutions, I decided to do what I had originally planned when I first started to think about this project. I changed the style of the doors from flat panels, similar to the back, to a box style.  This will give more room, specifically for handles on the drawers, but also a shallow space for hanging other tools on the doors.  The cabinet will now be close to 12 inches deep when closed, but will have two "wings" for additional tool storage when opened.

However, I soon realized I didn't have enough wood for this change. It will make the door panels quite a bit larger than my original plan. I changed from  Cherry door frames with Maple panels to Maple frames with Cherry panels. This should require no additional Maple, but necessitated getting more Cherry - another $70 board.  I haven't added it all up, but I reckon that I'm over $300 in the cabinet now, including the hinges and door catches.

Redoing my plans, choosing the new Cherry board, planing, jointing and thicknessing it and the other board I already had took me to the end of the day Monday.

Tuesday I started making the drawers.  I needed to get yet another board, Poplar, for the drawer sides, backs and bottoms.  I cut drawer faces to size from Cherry.  Aaron, the Instructor, told me that I'd trimmed the smaller drawer face too much.  So, I had to scrounge up another piece of Cherry to replace that one.  Too bad, because I had chosen the grain of the two drawer front pieces so that the grain seemed to flow from one to the other.  Now, while both Cherry, the grain patterns are very different. Also, that extra 11-inch piece of Cherry pretty well used up any excess waste I had, so I'll have to be really careful with what's left.

Next, I cut blind dovetails on the front of the smaller drawer.

Starting to cut blind dovetails on a drawer front.
All that wood has to be chiseled out,
although it could have been drilled out with
a brad-point bit on the drillers.
The remaining web on the bottom of the tail
hole is less than 1/8 inch thick.  I probably
should have made it thicker.

Here's the process of "chopping" out the
wood for the tail in the front panel.  It's
a repetitious process of chopping
down across the grain and then in with
the grain to chip out a little bit
at a time.

The completed blind dovetail

I was going to use a box joint on the back part of the drawers, but the instructors convinced me that would not work well.  So, now I'll just do regular through dovetails.

It is amazing to me to see how little things affect design decisions.  For example, I originally intended that the Maple board I had would be used to make door panels, by gluing up sections, much as I had for the back.  When I redesigned the doors, I initially decided to make the stiles and rails on the front doors 3 inches wide. Unfortunately, the board from which I was going to cut them is only 11-1/2 inches wide.  Allowing for saw kerf waste, etc., there's no way I could get more than 3 pieces from the board.  I next changed to 2-3/4 inch width.  Four 30-inch stiles, at 2-3/4 inch each is 11 inches. That is pushing it, leaving only 1/2 inch for waste.  They will most likely end up even narrower, recognising that a table saw kerf is 1/8 inch, and I'll have to do some edge jointing. 2-1/2 inch stiles is probably more likely.  I'll lose 1/2 inches of depth for the inset panels, so the doors will actually add only about 2 inches of new storage.  But, that will still be enough to take care of the pulls on the drawers, and will also afford storage for wrenches, spare blades, and other stuff associated with the planes.

The brass door catches I ordered from Whitechapel arrived Tuesday afternoon. It cost me almost as much in shipping as the catches themselves.

On Wednesday I continued working on the drawers.  I had started to cut dovetails on the rear of the smaller drawer when I realized that I had made no provision for the bottom of the drawer.  The bottom is meant to slip into a groove cut on the front and the sides, and the rear piece stops at the top of the bottom piece. The reason for this is to allow the bottom to move with changes in humidity. This was another design change which would necessitate a different layout for the dovetails than I had started to cut.

I'd already cut the tails on all four side pieces, and had just started cutting the pins on one end of the rear of the smaller drawer.  That meant that I had to scrap the back piece for the smaller drawer, and either scrap all four side pieces, or else cut off 3/8 inch from each side to get rid of the dovetails I'd already completed.  I chose the latter.  There went almost 3 hours of work, and it means that the drawers, which were already shallow, are now 1/2 shorter than the depth of the cabinet.

I got some help from Austin, the second instructor, to first cut the grooves in the sides and the two drawer fronts, and then properly lay out the dovetails on the back.  In addition to the groove and the shortened back, I had not considered the construction should permit full travel of the drawer on the sides.  The sides should be continuous top and bottom, whereas, if ordinary dovetail layout was used, the back piece would have "half" dovetail pins on the top and bottom.  Details, details, details.

I also had to cut a new back piece for the smaller drawer.  That reduced the size of the remaining poplar that I had milled to 3/8" to the point that it no longer was big enough to make the two drawer bottoms.  Fortunately, I had a leftover scrap that was just big enough for me to get one of the drawer bottoms from it.  But, it meant wasting a lot of wood because the scrap was almost an inch thick.  My drawer bottoms are 3/8 inch thick, so I turned almost 5/8 of wood to sawdust.  I hate doing that.  Fortunately, Poplar is relatively cheap, which is why I'm using it for the secondary wood in the drawers.

Front and two sides of the larger drawer

The larger drawer with the back added

I finished cutting and fitting all the dovetails by about 6 pm, and turned to making the bottoms.  As I said, they were made of 3/8 inch stock.  The instructors may have had a procedure in mind for me to make the bottoms, but I chose to use a hand plane to taper three sides to fit into the 1/4 inch grooves.  It worked well, and I finished the two drawers by about 8 PM.  I cleaned up and went home.  I'll fit the drawers to the openings tomorrow, I think.

One good thing about all this redoing of dovetails is that I am getting a lot of practice in making dovetails, and I'm getting better and better at it.  It is obvious to me that the only way to get good at making hand cut dovetails is to make a lot of them.  I think I've justified the new dovetail saw I bought at Lie Nielsen two weeks ago - at least to me, anyway.  Not that there's anyone else to whom I have to justify it.

Thursday.

Glued up the two drawer boxes and set them aside while I began working on the two front doors.

I finally decided to make the door frames 2-5/8 inches wide since that was just about the maximum width I could get out of the long maple board that I had saved originally to make the door panels.  I next cut four stiles all to the same length, and two short rails for the smaller door, and two longer rails for the larger door.  The door frame parts are slightly oversized so that they can be planed to fit the "carcase" when they are mounted.

These frames would be different from the one I built for the back of the cabinet in that the edges face forward, and they are jointed on the ends of their widths (the depth of the doors).  Rather than just having an overlapping joint facing forward, I decided to use a miter joint on the forward facing corners, but dovetails for the actual joint.  This joint is possible, but it was difficult for me to get my mind around.  If you don't do it in the correct order, it is pretty hard to make.

I spent the remainder of the day figuring out how to make the joint, and then actually making one on two pieces of waste from the frame pieces.  The confusing part is the miter joint, which I found was best cut after the dovetail parts.  My first version went together well, but I soon found that it would be useful to have a template to guide the saw when cutting the two miters.

Preparing to cut the first miter

It's cut

The matching pieces of the joint

They fit together!

Here's how it goes together

The layout of this joint is different for each corner, so it wasn't something I could do without a certain amount of thought on each one.

Once I had made the first practice joint I set to work cutting just the tail piece on each of the stiles.  That took me the rest of the day.

Friday, I started early cleaning up the sides of the drawers to fit in their slots.

Then I got to work cutting the matching pins and then the miters on each of the eight corners of the two doors.  The first two went together well, but took me all morning to complete.  Then I had trouble getting the third joint on one end of the bottom of the smaller door to fit together.  After a lot of work, I got it to go together, but I wasn't very happy with it. When I started on the other end of the rail, I discovered that I had mis-cut the rail piece.  It would never be posssible to get it to go together.  So, I had to discard that piece and mill up another one from some maple I had left.

Of course, as time went on, and I made more of the joints, it got easier, especially after I had all four corners of the smaller door completed, because that gave me a model to check my work on the larger door.  But, it still took me to almost 7 pm to get all eight joints finished.

The next steps are to cut grooves in the door frame for the panels, make the panels, assemble the doors, and then put the whole thing together and finish it.  It's all supposed to be done by the end of next week.  The following week we start the final four weeks of the course and learn about bending wood and veneering.   I think I'm pretty much on schedule, although I might not get a finish on the project by the end of the week.

Non-woodworking alert: Friday evening I installed a new 1 GB SSD (Solid State Drive) in my laptop to replace the 256 GB SSD that was in it.  It was getting pretty full and the computer was slowing down as a consequence.  It took several hours to install the new drive and transfer the operating system and programs and files back to the new drive.  So far, it seems to have been successful.

I took Saturday off from woodworking, the first break I'd taken in more than two weeks.  I had to take my camera to the UPS store to ship it to the repair place again.  Then I went to Augusta (about 30 miles away) and went to the Sam's Club there.

It's now Sunday morning and I'm off to work on the cabinet.

Sixth Week: The weekend

As I mentioned in another post, I signed up for a weekend woodcarving class at Lie-Nielsen Toolworks to be taught by woodcarver, Mary May.

I got to the classroom at about 8:45 Saturday morning, picked a bench up front, and waited for the class to begin.

Mary May is a very personable lady.  She seems happy to be teaching.

We began our first project, a couple of dogwood blossoms.  Because I had not expected to do woodcarving while in Maine, I didn't have my roll of woodcarving tools with me.  So, I had to borrow a set of tools.  There were several problems with that, most of which didn't become apparent until I actually started to carve.

After transferring the carving pattern to a piece of mahogany by tracing through carbon paper, the first thing we did was use a V-chisel to outline the image.  That was the first difficulty I encountered.  To my thinking, the V-chisel in the set of tools I was using was too big.  Mary lent me another one which was smaller, but it was a badly used chisel and every bit as hard to use as the first one.  But, I persevered and did the outlining.

Mary demonstrates some carving techniques

The next activity was to "lower" the background.  This was done with a curved gouge, and the result is in the photo:

My progress after the first few instructions. 

During the day we continued to work on different sections of the image.  Here's what it looked like at the end of the day:

I hope you can see that there's a lot of progress.  A lot of the details are becoming clearer.  The two leaves are pretty well done, and I've started working on the two blossoms.

We quit about 5 pm and several of us drove south to a restaurant in Damerascotta.  Tom Lie-Nielsen and his wife Karen joined us, as did Mary May, about a half-dozen of the students, and one of the Lie-Nielsen people who was assisting Mary.  

FYI, I had Fish and Chips, and drank Guinness.  I enjoyed myself.  

Today (Sunday) we continued working on the same carving.  I didn't quite finish by lunchtime which was when we switched to a new project.

The project as far as I got with it.
One petal on one of the blossoms still
needs to be carved.

After lunch we started a new project.  This one was totally different.  It was a fan.  Full of straight lines.  We did half of them so that the fan leaves were convex, and the other half as concave.  I had some trouble with the concave leaves, particularly where they merged at the center.  I could have done better with a smaller gouge to do this part.

The initial layout

My interpretation. 

All in all this was a fun activity.  I found that I was able to totally immerse myself in the carvings, to the point of tuning out all the noise in the room.  I'll have to get back to carving again when I get home.

Week 7: Bringing up to date

The Plane Cabinet project

My last entry showed the back panel dry assembled, ready for glue-up and installation into the cabinet.

That's pretty much as far as it went.  In preparation for glue-up I pre-finished the backs of the panels, and all the inside edges of the other parts.  I used my cabinet scraper to clean up and smooth all the surfaces.  It took me a while to "tune" the scraper, but eventually I got it working wonderfully.  In the photo you can see the scraper and one of the very thin scrapings that it can produce.

It's a lot of work to use this device, but, properly used, it produces a really fine surface.  The alternative is to sand the surfaces with multiple grits of sandpaper.  You start out with something like 80 grit, followed in sequence with progressively higher numbers: 100, 120, 150, 180, 220.   Each grit is used to remove the scratches produced by the previous grit.  It then produces a finer set of scratches that must be removed with the next higher, and finer, grit number sandpaper.  Using the cabinet scraper, you can jump all of the grits up to and beyond 180.  In fact, the scraped surface is so fine that you need to roughen it up with 220-grit sandpaper in order put a finish on it.

Note, many people incorrectly call a card scraper a cabinet scraper.  The card scraper is a simple piece of steel that is also very effective at preparing a fine surface, but it is much more difficult to use.  I can't use one for very long because the arthritis in my hands makes it a painful task. But, if you are reasonably fit, the cabinet scraper is not hard to use. I did note that my abdomen was a bit sore the next day after several hours of pushing the cabinet scraper.  So, it's good for you!

After scraping, I put up to 6 coats of Shellac on each surface.  Then I went back to glue up.  The instructors noted that I should glue up my cabinet first, and so I worked on getting it ready.  I had made all of the components of the cabinet with the exception of a small block in the bottom section to guide the drawers.  After much discussion with the Instructors, I made two blocks: One is a small divider which matches the large vertical divider.  The other is a small strip which will keep the draws in alignment.

In order to place these two blocks, I had to cut mortises in the underside of the horizontal divider and the top surface of the bottom piece of the cabinet.  I also had to cut a shallow dado (slot) for the guide block in the top surface of the bottom.  The next photo shows the layout of those things.

Following that layout, I routed the mortises and the dado, and then cut pieces to fit.

Then, I got the boards ready for pre-finishing.  In case I didn't mention it before, pre-finishing is done to those boards and pieces that will become difficult or impossible to get to once the structure is glued up.  For example, the place where the drawers will be installed will be only four inches high and so will be pretty difficult to finish once assembled.  

Anyway, back to the cabinet scraper.  About 4 hours of work to prepare all the boards; then about 45 minutes to sand all the surfaces with a random orbit sander using 220-grit sandpaper.  All in all, I don't think it took any longer than if I had gone through the entire sequence of sandpapers.  And, although it entails a lot of muscle work, there's almost no dust created by scraping.  Just the little shavings you saw above in the photo.

After masking off all the places I didn't want to finish (tenons, dovetails, etc., ) I applied several coats of shellac on all of the internal parts of the box.  Several hours of work there: applying the shellac, waiting for it to dry (since shellac is cut with alcohol, it dries fairly quickly), rough sanding the dried coat, and then reapplying.

At last, ready for glue-up.  I grabbed Austin, and we planned the strategy for the glue up.  This entailed a dry run to make sure we knew the sequence of operations, had the clamps we needed, had cauls to apply pressure appropriately, and had all the necessary materials.  Two of the next few photos show the clamp-up for glueing, and the other one was taken just after I removed all the clamps, about an hour after the box had been glued.  The "ears" on the box are glue blocks/cauls which were stuck to the box by double-sided tape to aid in the clamping. 

By this time it was early Friday evening.  I removed the glue blocks and cauls from the cabinet, and left for home for the evening.

The vertical divider hasn't been installed yet.  That has to wait for the glue on the rest of the cabinet to dry.  That's the piece that will slide into the two tapered sliding dovetails.  You can see one of the slots in the photo.  Installing the vertical divider is a one-shot deal.  Once it is driven home, however it ends up is the way it will stay.  Hope I have it made properly. 

The other project

Whenever I've had a few moments to spare, when I was waiting for something or just didn't feel like working on my primary project, I've been working on this secondary or "back" project.  What you can see here is my progress so far.  You can see that it is four pieces of walnut.  The four pieces are connected by dovetail joints.  That was one reason for making the project: to get some more practice cutting dovetails.  Walnut is a much nicer wood to use for that sort of practice than is either poplar (which compresses too easily) and maple (which is really hard, although it works well).  

Also, and you can't see this unless you blow up the picture and look carefully at the lower side of the far end, there is a 3/16 inch groove all the way around the four pieces.  I cut that using my plough plane, rather than resorting to a power tool such as a table saw.  The goal of this project for me is to do the whole thing without resorting to power tools (except for the initial wood preparation.  The boards were created by resawing a thick piece of walnut into 3 thinner pieces on a band saw.  While that could have been done by hand, I don't have my frame saw with me, and it would have taken a long time.)

The weekend

This weekend I took a sort of a Busman's Holiday.  I made another blog entry for my weekend's activities.

Week Six: Monday and Tuesday

Last week I started working on the back of the cabinet.  I mentioned that a standard frame and panel construction usually consists of 5 boards - two stiles, two rails, and a panel captured in the framework of the other boards.

When I first began designing the plane cabinet, I decided that the back of the cabinet would reflect the two doors to be constructed for the front of the cabinet.  So my design would have two rails (upper and lower), two outer stiles (left and right), a center stile which would sort of reflect the inner stiles on the closed doors, and two panels.  Because the cabinet has a larger section on the right, and a smaller section on the left, the sections of the back, like the doors, would  have a smaller section on the left, and a larger section on the right.

This design went through several iterations, and, as I mentioned earlier, I had to redraw the whole thing just to get my thoughts straight.

Last week I made the two door panels, hopefully oversized, and got ready to make the rest of the assembly.

On Monday I started milling the stile and rail parts more or less to size.  Then I cut the grooves in the frame parts to accept the edges of the panels.  I cut the grooves on the boards on the table saw, taking advantage of the fact that the rip blade is 1/8 inch thick.  By offsetting the blade a quarter inch from the table saw fence, I could run each part through the saw blade, and then reverse the piece and run it through the blade again, giving me a centered 1/4 inch gap, exactly what I wanted. That was one reason why I chose to mill my wood to the standard 3/4 inch thickness.

After milling the grooves, the next step was to mark out the mortises which would hold the whole thing together.  These I cut into the existing framework grooves on the router table with a 1/4 inch bit.  They are all hidden in the panel grooves which are also 1/4 inch.  Using the router table for this was appropriate because it allowed me to make mortises that are an inch deeper than the panel grooves.

The next job was to cut the tenons on some of the pieces so that I could construct the framework.  There are mortises on the top and bottom of the left and right stiles which take tenons on the ends of the top and bottom rails.  The bottom rail is very wide - over 8 inches;  it will be hidden behind the drawers.  Because it's so wide, it has two tenons on each end.  There were also mortises in the top and bottom rails which would accept tenons on the ends of the center stile.

I hope you could follow all that.  I admit to having forgotten what went where at one point.  I had the mortises routed and chiseled square and most of the tenons cut to size and fitted into the mortises by the end of the day Monday.  However, I decided it was time to go home for the day when I realized that I had centered the mortises for the center stile in the top and bottom rails.  They should have been offset because of the different sizes of the panels.  I left frustrated, and worried about how to fix it for a good part of the evening.

When I came in this morning and re-examined the situation, I realized that the solution was fairly easy.  I hadn't trimmed the tenons on the center stile yet, so I just set up the router table again and cut two more mortise slots.  Since the mortise slots are hidden in the panel grooves, the un-used  mortises would be invisible. I had the new mortise slots completed before our morning meeting and lecture/training session at 9.

After the training, I returned to the framework and cleaned up all the mortise slots and tenons, and fitted the whole thing together.   The center stile refused to go into its associated mortises in the bottom rail. It required some detective work, a little bit of re-sawing, and some chisel work, but I got it all together by lunchtime, as you see here.

The back side of the back of the cabinet after first "dry" assembly on the workbench.

All those marks on the wood are notes from me to me so I can keep everything straight.  It is amazing how much alike all the pieces of white wood look when piled up on the workbench.

The next task was to fit the two panels.  

Initially, I measured the panel dimensions directly on the dry assembly of the framework. It was gratifying to find that the measured dimension were pretty close to my calculations.  Don't you love it when an assembly comes together?

I next ripped the panels to the appropriate widths and them trimmed them to length to fit in the grooves in the framework.  

Do you remember that I had glued up the larger panel with a strip cut from the smaller one?  I am one lucky "somnabitch".  Based solely on my calculations, I had created a panel that was 1/16 inch wider than it actually needed to be!   I actually could have cut more from the narrower panel to add to the glued strip, but didn't need it. 

More router table work followed, this time to make a rabbet around all four sides of each of the two panels, so that they would have tongues which would fit into the grooves in the framework, would have a raised panel that would be flush with the inside faces of the framework, and would have an eighth-inch reveal ( a decorative groove) all the way around.  The reveal also serves to permit the panel to expand  into the groove when the wood expands due to humidity, and contracts in the dryer months.  All this has to be figured in to the construction.

I'd pretty much finished the panel construction and fitting by the end of the day, and below is what the dry assembly looked like on my workbench.  You might think that the glued on strip on the larger panel is the lighter colored wood to the right, but it's actually on the left.  I'm very please with the way it blends, even though the panel will probably not be a visible feature when the cabinet is completed and in use.

First dry assembly of back frame and panels.  This view is what will be
seen from inside the cabinet.

End of Week Five

Tomorrow I start on the sixth week of the course.  I can't believe that I've come to the half-way point. I've been pretty busy, and so haven't been making regular entries here, although I have been taking notes along the way.   I knew I wasn't going to be able to keep up writing every day or even every other day.  It quite often happens that I am so tired when I get home, that I don't feel like writing at all.

Anyway, here's a recap of what's been going on since last Monday.

7 July 2015
Planed, jointed, cut to width piece for the long vertical divider for the cabinet.

I needed some wood for testing machine set-ups.  Selected a piece of poplar 62" by 7-1/2" by 4/4 @ $2.40 per BF = $7.75  Cut off a piece of that about 1-1/2 feet long to use for test cuts for the sliding dovetails I describe below.

8-9 July 2015
I learned how to cut tapered sliding dovetail slots in the top and the horizontal divider pieces.  The instructors spent most of the day Wednesday describing how to do this, and created a template to make it possible.  In my case, the sliding dovetail slot goes from the front to the back of the top and center horizontal divider in order to take the vertical divider.  Ordinarily, if I were making a cabinet for myself, I probably would only have cut a straight dado ( a plain slot) of the thickness of the a vertical divider, and then just glued it in place and be done with it.  However, I am here to learn how to make fine furniture, and so a stronger and more permanent joint is called for.

A rough drawing of what we are trying to
achieve with the tapered sliding
dovetal

An example of the tapered sliding dovetail,
with the key part partially inserted. The slot
is "stopped" and a little notch is cut
in the key piece, so that when it's inserted
all the into the slot, it looks as if
it was two board butted together.  Tricky!

Here's the example dovetail slot, and
the associated dovetail key that
fits in the slot.

A long dovetail could be substituted for the dado I mentioned above, in order to make the joint stronger, but then a problem arises when you try to glue it up.  That would work ok if the joint was short, say four inches or less, but it will be 8-1/2 inches long on my cabinet.  The problem comes when you try to slide the vertical piece into the two slots. Even if it didn't have glue on the edges, it would most likely seize before you got it all the way into the two slots.

So, the tapered sliding dovetail is the answer.  Because it is tapered, the piece being inserted doesn't actually meet the sides of the slot until it is almost "home."

Anyway, it took me about 4 hours to cut the slots with a hand-held router and a template, and the dovetail keys on the ends of the vertical divider.

The cabinet with the newly made vertical
divider, complete with sliding dovetails,
inserted. 

The next job was equally time-consuming.  The instructors and I had decided that the back of my case piece should be a frame and panel construction fitted into a rabbet cut into the back inside edges of the cabinet.

After a lot of fiddling with the table router, trials and errors using another poplar test piece, I routed a 3/4" rabbet all the way around the inside of the top, bottom and side boards.  It is 3/8" deep on the inside of the cabinet.  It's a stopped rabbet so that it will not show through the dovetailed corners.  That required some care and some delicate chisel work to not break off the end of a dovetail pin

One of my dovetail pins after
routing the rabbet in the back of the
cabinet

Until I figured out how to do this, actually did it, and then verified the measurements, I could not completely design the case back.  The original plan called for a groove to be cut in the sides, top, and bottom and a matching tenon to be cut on the back frame.  This would have required different dimensions for the back pieces.  But, having done it, I was ready to start building the back panel

So, I picked out another maple board 4/4 X 11" X 120".  That is 9.2 BF @ $6.00 per board foot, totalling $55.20.  The cost of this thing has just gone over $200 for wood, and not counting hardware such as hinges (Just bought 2 pair for about $46)

I cut the board into 3 pieces about 25 inches long each for the back panels, and dedicated the remainder of the board, about 40 inches,  for the other parts of the back, mostly the rails, as I already had some leftover material for two of the stiles.

Rails and Stiles.  What are they?  They are parts of frame and panel construction, such as I'll be using for the back and for the doors.  I mentioned the frame and panel construction in a posting a couple of weeks ago.  A good picture is available at Wikipedia

Anyway a frame and panel door comprises five parts.  The top and bottom board are called the rails, and the side pieces are the stiles.  They are usually grooved to accept the panel.  The panel is the problem.  Because it can be fairly large, it will move.  So it is cut smaller than the depth of the groove around the inside of the frame.  On top of all that, you need to account for the humidity of the atmosphere at the time of the year it was built, and the location.  Maine's humidity changes at a seasonally different rate than North Carolina's, so strictly speaking, I have to consider both when cutting the panel to size.  Who knew?

I planed all of the pieces of this new board to 3/4", even though the panels will eventually be 1/2" thick.  Better to leave the wood too thick at this point, rather than coming up too short later.

Then, I did some recalculations for the piece requirements for the rear panel.  After a lot of scribbling on my original drawings and my part spreadsheet, I decided that I needed to completely redraw the back panel.

10 July 2015
I redrew the back panel, making some significant changes, after I recognized that many of the things I had originally designed in to the back would not be visible once the cabinet was mounted on a wall, and the drawers were installed.  This meant that some of the things I had planned for when cutting up the board were not going to happen the way I had imagined.  Fortunately, I was able to piece out the new requirements from the boards I already had cut and planed.  Thank goodness I didn't plane them any further than 3/4"

Next I spent some time looking at the three boards I had designated as the panel boards.  I laid them out on my bench and rearranged them until I found two pieces that I liked in a particular grain orientation.  I planed the two  boards to 1/2" thickness.  Then I ripped (I think I explained earlier that "ripping" a board means cutting it with the grain, and cross cutting means across the grain)  a 2 inch piece from the side of one of the boards, and glued it on to the side of the other board. Like the doors on the front of the cabinet, the back is designed to have two different sized panels and a center stile piece.  By ripping a piece off of one panel board and gluing it to the other, I ended up with two panels that are both somewhat wider than their final size.  My original plan had been to glue up the wider panel from two 25" boards, and use the third panel for the other panel.  By doing a glue-up like this, I end up with two panels from two boards, and because I took some care with grain matching, the glue-up of the wider panel should not be obvious.  And, I have another 25 inch wide 3/4 inch thick available for some other part.

11 July 2015
No workshop work done today.

After breakfast and a quick tidy of the apartment, I went to the Lie Nielsen Toolworks open house in the morning, took a tour of their facility, talked with the vendors who were displaying their wares, bought a new dovetail saw from Lie Nielsen, and signed up for a relief woodcarving course to be taught next weekend at Lie Nielsen by Mary May.  That's kind of interesting that I had to go to Maine to get into her woodcarving class.  She lives in South Carolina.

I returned to the apartment in the afternoon.  Silvia and Scott, who are house-sitting for Margo, my landlady, were having a bunch of friends and family over for a barbecue and invited me to join them.  I had a good time, met a lot of very friendly folks, several of whom attend the church I've been going to while I'm here.

Later in the afternoon I left the barbecue and returned to Lie Nielsen for the evening Lobster Bake.  As usual, eating lobster is a very messy undertaking.  It was aided by beer on tap, and dinner included corn, boiled potatoes, coleslaw, watermelon, and clams.  After dinner we were entertained by Roy Underhill, the "Woodwright" from North Carolina.  What a hoot!  Anyway, I ate too much, but I enjoyed myself.

Here are some pictures from the day.

Plane castings

More plane castings

Bronze castings

Plane parts

One of the vendors showing
his technique for cutting dovetails

Vendor demonstrating his very expensive
but very effective shooting board

I'm not the only one with a plane cabinet

Mary May demonstrating woodcarving

The dinner line

Fresh cooked lobster and clams

Some more

Roy Underhill telling one of his tall tails.

12 July
No woodworking today.

I went to church in the AM, then to the Hannaford store (local supermarket) in Rockland  to stock up with groceries.  The rest of the day has been spent reading, paying bills, working on my drawings, etc.

As I'm sitting here working on this blog entry, I heard what sounded like a calliope playing.  I looked out the window and a Good Humor truck went by.  It must be nearly a half century since I've seen one.  Maine is different.

Week Five begins

Today I brought the book rack project home and put it to use doing what I intended it to do.

It clears a lot of mess off my desk, so I declare the project to be a success.  

You may remember that I was getting ready to glue up the saw horses.  Last Thursday, I did glue them up,

The saw horses glued and clamped Thursday evening.

and then Friday morning I immediately put them to use to get my wood off the floor.  The downside is that I didn't actually finish the saw horses: I didn't sand them, trim off the through tenons,cut an angle on the top cross pieces, or put any kind of finish on them.  As soon as they were glued up, I put them to use so that I could get on with the rest of my work.

The case project

Also, Thursday evening, I finished cleaning up the dovetail Tails on the two side pieces for the plane cabinet.

Dovetail Tails on the ends of the two side pieces.

I celebrated the Fourth of July by cleaning my apartment, doing my laundry, and working on my project.  On Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, I cut and fit the matching dovetail pins on the top and bottom pieces.

A view of one of the joints

The top, bottom, and two sides fitted
together.

Today I spent most of the day fitting the shelf in the bottom of the cabinet which serves as a horizontal divider, and also forms the top of the drawer boxes at the bottom of the cabinet.

After a bunch of measurements and layout lines, and setting up a router with a 1/2-inch bit, I plunge routed three holes about 1/2 inch deep into the side board, and then connected the three holes with the router set to cut a dado (a groove across the grain) across the three holes.  The plan here is to cut three stub tenons into the sides, and then use the dado to strengthen the connection with the cross shelf.

Each of the round holes had to be squared up on both side boards, as you can see in the second photo.

This was the easier part.  The other task was to cut the board that would span between the two sides to length with the addition of material to form the tenons.  The board is 3/4 inch thick, so, it took a while to set up and use a table mounted router to cut a rabbit on each end of the shelf board to fit the 1/2 inch dado slot in the side pieces.  Then, each end was trimmed to form the tenon pins.  Then came the usual fitting and trying and fitting and trying until I got everything to go together.

Marking for the tenons

Rough cutting of the tenons

They fit

And, here's the two pieces

Yet another project

I acquired a cut-off piece of walnut.  It was about 2 feet long, 9 inches wide and about 2 inches thick. Because it had a long check (a crack in the end of a board) in one end, nobody wanted it.  I have a project in mind and started working on it at lunch time.  

First, I flattened one side using the wide jointer.  Then, I flattened one edge, so that I had an edge perpendicular  to the flattened side.  Then, I used the school's large bandsaw to resaw the board into three boards.  This involved running the stock through the bandsaw once, and then reflattening on the jointer, and then running the stock through the bandsaw again.

Then I took each of the boards I'd created and ran them through the thickness planer as I described in on of my earlier postings.  The original board was thick enough that I should have been able to get three 1/2 inch thick boards, but I miscalculated, and so only got two 1/2 inch boards.  The third board is a little less, 7/16 inch.  

So why do all this?  Well, the walnut turns out to have some pretty grain.  The project that I'll be using it in should look very nice when it is finished, and the fact that one board is 1/16 inch thinner shouldn't make too much difference.

Right now, the three boards are "stickered" on my saw horses to get acclimated.  I've already noticed some cupping, but, because I'm going to cut the boards into narrower pieces, that shouldn't be a problem.

I won't tell you at this time what I'm making.  It's a spare time project for when I'm waiting for a machine to become available or for an instructor's ear.