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.

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.