The Taylor Garage

Five weeks in and I’m only one week behind.  At this rate, I’ll be caught up and finished by late March – 2011. Not bad for a one year commitment! On to this week’s idea…

This week I come before you to present a coffee table:

The table is mostly two-toned, with the same wood used for the inner square and the trim. The inner square is lined by a herringbone inlay, which is composed of neither of the two woods found elsewhere on the table. The legs and crossbars also mimic the two-toned style, although I haven’t decided which part I want light or dark. The lighter trim is bullnosed to reduce possible sharp edges on the sides (it’s amazing what details you think of when you have a mobile child exploring the house).

I first drew this up with the center circle as just plain wood, but the more I think about it, the more I want to put some type of inlayed design in that center area.  I’ve included one possible design (bottom, right) composed of spiraling concentric squares of alternating woods.

The biggest thing I like about this design is that I had a bit of an epiphany when drawing the 3D model of it. I have realized why my perspective drawings are so top heavy (and knowing is half the battle), but I’m not sure how to work through changing that.  I also figured out how to calculate ceratin angles after I’ve draw the reference line with the skewed perspective. I even had to break out the happy dance after these realizations!

I have a couple of other designs that I’ve started flushing out, so hopefully I’ll be able to catch up over this weekend and get back on track. To see what others are designing around the web, make sure to check out the Furniture Design blog.

..or at least its a sleepable crib.

After far too much time spent cutting, gluing, remaking some parts, gluing, and shellacking – Briana now has a crib in which she can sleep. I still have to put the hinges on the cabinet door and make the drawers for underneath, but those can go in after she gets to start using it.  And she has:

Ever get the feeling that the last inch is a mile away?  I’m just about there.  I’ve got two coats of amber shellac on all of the pieces of the crib.  Shellac, sanding, shellac, and sanded with an extra fine scotch pad. For the final coat, I’ve decided to thin the shellac:

I diluted the amber shellac with an equal part denatured alcohol and rubbed it on, as opposed to brushing it on – as the previous two coats were applied.  I really like how that has turned out – here’s a shot of the base after the thinned finish was wiped on:

That should dry easily overnight, then back to the upper half for its final coat. If I don’t add a second thinned coat, Briana should sleep in the crib this Tuesday night!

… or The Closer I Get, the Further It Seems

I am to the point now on this crib where all the construction necessary for the crib to be functional (i.e. everything but the drawers) is complete.  After assembling the trim that would frame the base, I attached it with my brand new biscuit joiner:

Unfortunately, I was slightly off in my markings for the biscuits slots, so I needed to cut into the inside of the base itself. I was able to hog out most of the material with a flush trim bit, but the bit wasn’t long enough to get the whole amount. This lead me to my mallet and chisel to remove the rest of the material in two places:

While these last modifications were being cut, I was also starting to apply the finish to the cabinet and rails. I decided to go with shellac for the finish, as that was the consensus pick for being a child safe finish. This evening I put the second coat on the cabinet and rails:

I really like the color that the amber shellac has brought the red oak – it seems to fit quite well. If I can avoid any drip marks on the final coat, I think this is going to look good in the end.  Sometime within the next week or so, Briana should be sleeping in it!

Anyone have any ‘finishing the finish’ tips?

I had an idea today about a shop modification that I think would be highly useful.  I wanted people’s feedback, but couldn’t explain the idea in 140 characters, so I’m writing this post.

While I don’t have the room for it in my shop, I’m a big fan of Marc Spagnolo’s assembly table. Once (not if) I get room for a bigger shop, I plan to build one.  At various steps during the building Briana’s crib, I’ve needed not just a flat surface on which to lay pieces, but also a flat surface orthogonal to the table to line up several pieces.  This afternoon, while thinking about what to do next in the garage, I made the connection between an assembly table and a planing stop – similar to the stop on Kari’s bench.

So here is my question to the huddled masses – would you find it useful to have a planing-stop-like attachment to one (or adjacent) side(s) of an assembly table, to use for aligning the ends of several pieces during glue up or layout? Or am I overthinking too much?

I know, three weeks in and I can’t even keep up. I’ll be honest – as long as I get to 52/52 before 31 Dec 2010, I’ll consider this exercise a success. On to this week’s piece…

This is a design for a buffet, but I think you could adjust the height and make it a sofa table. Believe it or not, I got the inspiration for this piece driving by a Springhill Suites hotel at night.  The architecture featured a red brick construction with concrete columns that divided the length of the building.

Not completely evident in the perspective drawing is that the width of all of the legs taper 2:1. The pattern on the front legs would be routed with a small cove bit. On the side legs, I’m not sure if I want the pattern to be recessed or proud of the leg. I really don’t know what drove me to create the recess in the center of the table, so I could see the table without it. If I kept it, I would blacken that area – probably with a flat paint.

As for materials, I could go two ways.  Originally I thought the table top would be a darker wood, with a medium hued wood for the legs.  Thinking about it again, I could see the table being all knotty pine with wrought iron hardware and straps across the top – like a steamer trunk.

Your thoughts?

A couple of nights ago I was out in the garage to work on the trim that would top the rails and footboard of Briana’s crib. One of the lessons (out of many) I’ve learned during the process of building this crib is not to cut everything ahead of time. The pieces I had cut a while ago were a few sixteenths of an inch short – all three pieces. So I ripped two new pieces for the long pieces and used one of the old long pieces to shorten for the cross piece.

Once I had the pieces ripped and cut to proper length, I realized that these would be pieces that Briana would be grabbing eventually.  I decided to I wanted to round over the edges, but had no desire to setup my router table. As seen before, my router table is one of those 15″x30″ prefab tables from Craftsman. When not it use, it gets piled up in a corner in the garage; this is especially the case when I have a huge project (such as this crib) taking up space.  I really didn’t feel like getting it out, clamping it to my bench table saw, and setting up the roundover bit.  As it turns out, I’m not the only one who feels this way. Instead I clamped each piece of trim in my quad screw vise and grabbed my block plane:

This isn’t one of the pieces from my recent purchase, but a block plane I’ve had for some time. I just wanted a simple roundover, nothing too dramatic or deep, something to keep a sharp edge away from the baby.  I ran several passes across each edge, varying my angle slightly to keep a smooth surface. Even though it was stringy shavings, instead of wispy ones:

…there was still a simple peace in working the wood this way. A little sanding and this trim was ready for glue-up. With pieces that were covering such a long and wide space, I setup my clamps before applying any glue:

Turns out that was a great idea, because I would have been scrmabling quite a bit to get all these clamps in place:

Here’s a couple of close ups of the corner of these assemblies:

You can almost see the roundover detail on the trim in those shots.  Next step, I have similar trim pieces that wrap around the cabinet, rails, and footboard – holding those pieces to the base.  After that all that is left to make the crib habitable is a couple of coats of shellac. I should probably get back into the garage right now…

On a pretty regular basis (while my wife isn’t watching) I comb through my local Craigslist ads looking for various things for the garage, tools and wood mostly.  In fact my drill press and the southern yellow pine that will end up as a workbench were both found on Craigslist. It doesn’t hurt that I’m willing to drive quite a ways for a good deal; each of those purchases was ~40 miles each way. Monday night I was doing my trolling through the Craigslist search engine and came across an ad for a set of hand planes – mostly Stanley Baileys, from #3 to #6, 30 planes and some extra parts – $300!

Upon seeing the pictures and the price, I proceeded to run (don’t walk) to my nearest e-mail client and send the seller a note asking if the lot was still available and if so, when could we arrange to meet for the transaction.  A half-dozen e-mails later, we had settled on Tuesday evening.  The kicker was the seller lived on Kent Island in the Chesapeake Bay. I live and work near Dulles International Airport.  For those of you not familiar with the Washington, DC metro area, here’s my driving path for the trip:

An almost complete circle around the DC Beltway in the late afternoon/early evening would be enough of a deterrent for most people, but I decided to duck out of work a little early to see if I could beat the beltway. I left right around 3 PM and started my trek east.  Other than a couple of cars stopped on the inside shoulder near Bethesda, I seemed to have beat the beginning of the evening rush and the drive was smooth.  Knowing I was plenty early (the seller wouldn’t be home until after 5:30), I stopped at the Barnes & Noble to pick up a couple of books to read to pass the time.

I started reading Ron Hock’s The Perfect Edge:

I also picked up (too be read later) Tom Fidgen’s Made By Hand:

Once I was able to meet up with the buyer, I had no problem paying the asking price.  The lot of hand planes contained these planes in good condition:

Stanley Bailey #6 (2):

Stanley #5 1/4:

Stanley #5 (4):

Stanley #4 (3):

Stanley #3:

Defiance by Stanley #4, Millers Fall #8, Fulton #4C (2):

Stanley Handyman H1204 (2):

Stanley #378 w/ most of the fence:

Stanley #78 (3):

Sargent #198:

Unknown #78:

Stanley #110:

Stanley #118 (2)

Stanley #220 (3):

The purchase also contained these planes in not so good condition:

Stanley Bailey #6:

Unknown #5 – one and a half of them:

Stanley Bailey #4, Shelton Standard #4, Unknown #4:

Stanley Bailey #3

All in all, I’m ecstatic with the find.  The next step will be to start tuning them up. Other than sharpening the blade, I’ve never attempted any major tuning or repair of a plane.  I found these instructions documenting one person’s steps.  Does anyone have any other tips and/or links?

The plan is to tune them all up, keep some of them to round out my collection, then sell the remaining hand planes to help recoup some of my initial investment.  I’ll make sure to document the steps I follow here in the blog.

Here’s to some whispy shavings!

One of the biggest hurdles remaining in building this crib was figuring out how to construct it outside of Briana’s room and then get it into Briana’s room. Constructed as per the directions, the crib is too wide, too long, and too tall to fit through her bedroom door. I could do the final assembly in her bedroom, but then the crib would be stuck there.

My solution? T-bolts!

There was just enough play in the crib’s plan that I was able to add an extra bar of wood between the rails and the cabinet/header of the crib. That will serve as caul, holding the rail assembly to the cabinet.  The first step was to sink the t-bolts into the side of the cabinet:

A shallow hole drilled with a forstner bit (to keep the face flush) followed by a concentric hole drilled to hold the full bolt. After some glue and a couple of small nails, the t-bolt is anchored in the cabinet side:

Next, I drilled another compound hole, to allow the hex screw through the caul while catching the head – creating my locking system. A couple of test fits and all looks good:

So now I have a crib that is sturdy when assmebled, but can be broken down into three parts for moving in and out of a room:

Three big tasks remain for the crib:

1) Trim – there are trim pieces that top the rails and top the base, holding the rail/ and cabinet assmeblies in place.  I’ve begun shaping the pieces to complete this, but there will be a lot of adjusting for a perfect fit – especially for the trim wrapping the base.
2) Finishing – There will be a lot of shellac, followed by sanding, followed by more shellac.
3) Drawers – The base will have two large drawers in the bottom.  They are last on the list, because the baby can sleep in a crib without drawers, and Michelle is eager to get the baby sleeping in the crib ASAP!

My wife and I live in the Washington DC area, which contains a lot of people transplanted from all across the rest of the country. Because of this, we were able to have a lot of friends over for Thanksgiving a few years ago, on account of not many people with family in the area.  As we were prepping the feast for that day, it came time to make the mashed potatos, but Michelle couldn’t find the potato masher, which I swore we had.

Despite my best effort scouring the cupboards and drawers, I conceded that we did not have a potato masher. As penance for being wrong, I offered to buy my wife a potato masher for Christmas.  Each time a gift giving event would come around (Christmas, birthday, anniversary), I would repeat the now-running joke of buying her a potato masher. This Christmas, I turned the joke into reality.

I first got the inspiration for this utensil reading a post on Larry Marshall’s blog, Wood’n Bits Workshop, where he took a cheap, dollar store strainer and made it into a beautiful kitchen utensil. He chose three layers of redheart formed around the metal handle of the strainer; I went with two layers of purpleheart for this potato masher:

After gluing two pieces of purpleheart together for my blank, I squared the ends before taking it over to the bandsaw:

Here I have to apologize to the reader. I was working on this at the same time as the dominos and their box, during the rush to finish these Christmas presents. As a result, I don’t have nearly as many pictures as I would like and missed a few key steps in the process.

One of those steps was my work at the bandsaw.  I drew up a paper template in the shape of a perfecto cigar, then transferred that shape to one face of the blank. After trimming the two sides on the bandsaw, I used the template on one of the freshly cut sides and repeated the cuts – leaving me with the blank shaped on all four sides:

From the bandsaw, I move on to hand tool work to ease and round what were still some pretty sharp edges:

I don’t have a spokeshave (yet), but I do have a simple 4-in-1 rasp I used to work those edges. Between the four “grits” on the rasp and a few grits of sandpaper, I worked the handle into a smooth piece of wood begging to be held. Next was on to the finishing.  I decided to go with General Finishes’ Salad Bowl finish, wiping it on.

The nice thing about the potato masher is that it provided a perfect stand to hold the handle while the finish was drying:

After several coats (with some light sanding between each), I had to affix the masher to its handle. It was an irregular shape, but my strap clamp was ready for the job.  A nice slathering of glue in the hole drilled in the end, some pressure, and we’re almost finished:

All that was left was a simple bow to create that happy-wife effect:

Merry Christmas, sweetheart!