Stut: 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.)