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.