Week Four: Wednesday - a New Month.

The case project

As planned, I started reducing that pile of rough lumber to sized pieces today.   I ran five of the boards through the 12-inch jointer to flatten one face.  That required 4 or 5 passes across the jointer for each board, removing about 1/32 inch on each pass. Then they went through the thickness planer to make the opposite face parallel to the jointed face.  This also required multiple passes through the machine for each of the five boards, with the ultimate result of making the faces parallel, and all of them 0.75 inches thick.

The third step in the process is to pass one edge of each board repeatedly through an 8-inch jointer ( I could have returned to the 12-inch jointer for this step, but there are other people flattening their stock.) until the edge was clean and perpendicular to the two planed surfaces.

The final step was to go to the table saw to cut four of the boards to their final width for the outer case top, bottom and two sides, and the fifth board to a narrower width for a divider on the interior of the case.  This last operation is called ripping.

When you go to Lowes or Home Depot to buy your lumber, it has already had all this done to it.  It's already 3/4 inch thick, the faces are planed flat and parallel, and you just have to make a decision about what kind of wood you want and how long you want it to be.  The difference is that you probably can't buy hard maple in either store, and you have to accept the widths they stock.  Also, in the case of hardwoods, they would probably charge you a whole lot more for the wood if it was pre-planed.  I could have chosen to make my thicknesses something else, such as 5/8 inch, but, 3/4 inch gives me some advantages a narrower thickness wouldn't have, and I'm used to working with that thickness.

The next step was to cut the boards to length.  For obvious reasons, this is called cross-cutting.  Because the boards were originally cut casually with a hand circular saw to rough lengths, the first thing to do on each board was to make a cut removing the minimum wood from one end to square up that end.  Then, each board was measured for length.  Actually, the process I used was to use the shortest board and to make successive very fine cuts until I got it to exactly 30 inches.  This is the length of one side.  I then set up a "stop block" on the saw table so that I could just set three other boards to be cut without having to do any measuring.  I assure you that if you were to measure and cut four boards to the same length, they would end up all varying slightly.  Using the method I described, I could stand all four boards on end and their opposite ends would match exactly.

The whole process I described, making the boards flat, faces parallel, edges perpendicular to the faces, and squaring up the ends is known as making the boards "6-square."

Just for curiosity, I checked my Fitbit before and after.  Even though I was only walking a couple of feet with each pass of a board through a machine, I walked well over 2000 steps in the process!  Just thought you'd like to know.

I didn't cut the fifth board to length yet.  I'm not quite ready to use it, but when I am, it's already exactly the same thickness as the other parts..

The four boards I cut to length form the outer case that I'm building.  Tomorrow I'll start to mark out the dovetails to join them, and then begin cutting the pins and tails.

The saw horse project

Today we made the last two pieces, the top cross pieces, and cut the half-lap joints on them and the four uprights.   Now that we had all the pieces, it was time to start fitting them together.

The first thing I had to do was to plane the uprights and the top pieces because the half-lap cuts were slightly undersized.  Remember I said that I sharpened my new chisels and a plane iron on Saturday.  The plane made very short work of fitting the half-lap joints.  It is a real pleasure to work with very sharp tools, even if it is a lot of work to get them that way.  I'm not bragging when I tell you that I measured the thickness of one of the shavings made by the plane to be 0.002 inches ( 2 thousandths or 2/1000 of an inch) thick.  I'm impressed, even if you aren't.

The next thing I had to do was square up mortises in the uprights and the foot pieces.  These had all been drilled out with 1/2" round bits, so they had round corners.  I had to make a decision to either make the tenons round to fit the round slots or square up the mortises.  I chose the latter.  I made a series of photos showing the squaring of the drilled mortise in one of the feet, and fitting of the tenon into the mortise.

The mortise drilled in one of the feet.  It is 1/2"
wide as defined by the drill bit used to make
it.  The length is about 2 inches.

The mortise after squaring the corners with a
chisel

Here's the tenon. The long "cheeks" were cut
on a table saw to match the mortise's 1/2" width.
The short cheeks are marked for cutting
and fitting into the mortise.

The first trial. Almost fits, but still needs
a little bit of trimming

A "whisker" about to be
removed with one of
my very sharp chisels.

And another whisker

This time it fits!

This is what one saw horse will look like when completed.
No glue yet, the feet need some shaping,
and there are through mortises on the legs that
need some touch-up with a plane.

I apologize if the photos are out of order. I'm not always able to get them to go where I want them to in this program. It requires some 'dicking around' with the HTML and that's more work than I want at this time.

The Book Rack project

The book rack got a coat of finish on it first thing this morning, and another one before I left to come home this evening.