The Taylor Garage

After creating a place to put my newly acquired router bits, I have some left over parts:

I have two of these cases; one housed a three piece straight bit set and the other housed a three piece flush-trim bit set. They are nice cases, with some intesting parts inside:

Those are sliding dovetail “joints” to hold things in place inside each case.  I don’t imagine that there is a shop jig of any sort that I could fashion, but these days – who knows? I know there’s got to be something interesting I can make out of these, but it hasn’t hit me just yet. I’m sure Bre Pettis or Kip Kay could think of ten this off the top of their heads, but I think I’m going to have to head over to MAKE Magazine to fill through back issues. Maybe Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories will have some ideas…

The Taylor Garage is happy to announce the newest addition to the tool family, a brand new (to me) Craftsman 15 1/2″ drill press:

I found this drill press for sale on Craigslist up near Olney, MD.  That’s a bit of a haul, especially in the gas guzzling truck I use to haul large tools and wood about town.  But it was sooooo worth it. For only $125 used, I got what would have cost me over $400 new.  Sure it doesn’t have laser sighting or lighting that was made this century, but from my first tests it seems to work just fine.

To put it to the test, I decided to drill some holes in a block of birch I had sitting around.  A recent purchase from Rockler’s clearance section landed me some router bits that needed a home of sorts.  Added bonus: I got to put to use my set of forstner bits:

The drill press performed well and it was nice to put it to immediate use, even if “shop furniture” was the use.  I’m also thrilled that this press will help immensely with drilling holes for the wooden dowel joinery on the crib I’m putting together.

Anyone have any good tips for my newest sawdust maker?

If you looked close enough at my router table setup from my last post, you might a see a “mistake” I made while constructing my bookcase:

A closer looks reveals this was quite the gouge through the surface of my router table:

You might look at the location of the gouge and wonder “How on Earth did that gash end up there, given where the router is attached to the table?”
- Yes, this was made with a router bit.
- No, it wasn’t from the router mounted to the table.

I had decided to route the dados to hold the shelves in the sides of the bookcase because the sides were large (about six feet tall) and I don’t own a dado blade set for my table saw – so it was easier to take the tool to the workpieces than vice versa. I had a 3/4″ straight bit in my plunge router and had clamped a piece of scrap wood to my router table to test the depth I had set on the router.  I started to work the router through the scrap piece and things didn’t feel right at all (Signal #1).  As I kept pulling the router towards me (Mistake #2), I started to see sawdust that looked nothing like the plywood I was cutting (Signal #2) and everything was shaking more than it should have (Signal #3). After all this I switched the router off, but then lifted the router off the work piece to see what was wrong (Mistake #3).  I was instantly greeted by a loose router bit flying past me, as it came completely detached from the router. As it turned out, Mistake #1 was not properly tightening the collet.

You can see from the picture above I routed a pretty deep gouge almost all the way through the table surface.  I managed to knick the mitre gauge slot in the process, which in turn chipped one of the blades on the straight bit.  I’ve keep the broken bit as a safety reminder to myself and I’ll post a picture of it once I find it in the mess I call a garage shop. Thankfully through all of this, no one was hurt. But you bet I triple check the collet each time I use my router…

The first bold step I’ve taken in this new hobby of mine was to declare that I wanted to build our first child’s crib myself, rather than buying something prefabricated; even Ikea “building” wasn’t good enough for me.  Like most projects (from what I gather) of a part-time garage woodworker, my timeline for completing the crib has slipped a little bit.  Our little bundle of joy:

is now a little over two months old and still sleeping in her pack’n'play – a situation that Mrs. ShopOwner is none too pleased about.  I figure if we aren’t “almost done” by the time the child is three months, I should have no trouble finishing the crib because I’ll likely be sleeping in the garage.

Back to the crib.  When we were searching around for ideas plans, we found a few that struck our fancy and finally decided on this U-Bild set of plans that we ordered from Rockler:

Right now I’m just focusing on the crib itself, and not the hutch that is also spelled out in the plans. Over several weekends, I’ve methodically been cutting all of the pieces to size, out of I don’t know how many board feet of 1″ red oak and three different thicknesses of plywood.  In fact, I’ve cut all but one of the necessary pieces I need for the project.  I would have all of them cut, but I made a few mistakes this past Sunday which will require me to go buy more 3/4″ oak plywood.  In the meantime, I decided to start shaping what will be the rails on the sides of the crib.

The plan doesn’t call for any edge rounding, chamferring, or other rounding of any of the surfaces, but I dedided I wanted something a little smoother – something with a little more character to give the impression that I didn’t just follow a set of instructions from start to finish.  Originally, I had planned on using my new Porter-Cable bullnose router bit to do the shaping, so I would only need to make two passes on each piece of wood.  Unfortunately, I couldn’t find the 1/2″ collet for my router, so I ended up using a roundover bit with a 1/4″ shaft.  The bit worked great, I just needed to make twice as many cuts. I set up my router table:

using a featherboard I fashioned out of a scrap of plywood:

This was quite handy, as I didn’t have to worry nearly as much about keeping the workpieces against the fence as I would have needed to without the featherboard. Another nice thing about this setup is that there are two switches, one on the router itself and one on the router table. It gives me a lot of peace of mind knowing I have to turn it on in two places before the bit starts spinning.  I got everything in place, safety goggles on, my shop vac dust collector running, and began making sawdust.  108 passes over the roundover bit later I had a nice set of rails ready for sanding:

I’ll spend a good deal of time on each rail with various grits of sandpaper, smoothing out the edges and taking care of a few burn marks along the way.  Thankfully these pieces don’t need to be identical (length aside), so a few dissimilarities should add character to the piece.  At least, that’s what I’m telling myself.  The marks on the end grain are centering marks for this plan’s favorite joinery method - wooden dowels.  Drilling each of those holes is a pleasure I’m trying to put off for as long as possible.

From the few things I’ve read, it almost seems like a right of passage to build a set of bookshelves as one of, if not the, first project as a woodworker.  The cliche wasn’t enough to dissuade me. It didn’t hurt that we had boxes and piles of books strewn across the house, either.  I was feeling creative, so I came up with this design:

Five shelves, angled side profile, and an interesting lattice work to keep books from falling out the back:

Being this was my first attempt at building, let alone designing, a piece of furniture – I ended up keeping things simple.  The whole bookcase (four feet wide, about 6 feet tall) was constructed from two 4′ x 8′ sheets of 3/4″ oak plywood. The shelves rest in 3/8″ deep dados on each side.  The back lattice work is joined with half-lap joints, assembled separately, and then added to shelf/side assembly.

Although this piece is not something I could sell to anyone, I’m proud of how things turned out and what I learned from it all. I’ve picked up tips on tear-out, on the true width of 3/4″ plywood, on how my collection of clamps is woefully insufficient, etc.  My favorite lesson has become my motto in my garage – “It doesn’t help to measure twice, if you only think once.”

Update:  Here’s a picture of the bookcase in use:

I decided to put together this little blog to keep track of and share the wood related projects that I’m throwing myself into these days. I make no promises with respect to frequency or quality, given I expect few people to be reading this with any regularity.  I imagine most hits will be coming from me pulling up the site on other people’s computers to talk about some picture I took.

Despite having the domain name purchased and WordPress installed, it has been a few weeks and I haven’t done anything besides leave up the “Hello, World” post.  I finally tripped across a sufficiently interesting idea for how to kick off this blog.  Tom Iovino posted a question (both on his blog and on the WoodWhisperer forums) – “Who have been the three most influential woodworkers who got you started woodworking?”

I’m not sure I have a good answer to that question. At least, I don’t have three names to list. Until most recently, I really hadn’t done much with wood. I had a few pinewood derby cars and I’m pretty sure I also built a birdhouse in Cub Scouts.  I’ve felled and split wood destined for a fire pit.  One spring break in college I helped start building cabins at a summer camp, although we didn’t get much past the framing, given the weather in March in the foothils of Colorado.  I guess that all adds up to a lot more than I thought before I started writing this paragraph…

I’ve always had a can-do attitude about most things. The recent popularity of HGTV and DIY Network have certainly boosted this consumer’s D-I-Y genes. Wood just seemed like another things I could do myself.  Maybe its the combination of the creative and the technical. Maybe its the smell of sawdust. Maybe I can’t describe it in words. But  I do know that I love wood and wood furniture.  With the execption of some bar stools that belly up to a high kitchen counter, every piece of furniture in our house is wood.  It’s warm, colorful, and inviting. I probably have my mother to thank for those sentiments.  I know she shares the same feelings about furniture. Growing up I always used to give her a hard time about which $300 piece of wood she was going to buy next, as if it was some sort of vice.

I guess that now I’m addicted too…