The Taylor Garage

As I’m dressing up the last few boards before assembling the crib, I decided to try planing off a few burn marks, rather than scraping them off. Holding the workpieces is my big problem. I don’t have a workbench (its on the list of projects) and honestly, I don’t have room for one right now. So when I want to do work that involves taking a hand tool to the work piece, I have to get creative. That’s how I came up with this “quad screw vise”

Just a couple of wooden handscrew clamps that I clamped to my workbench table saw.  Actually, I set the workpiece in both handscrew clamps, then clamped those the table top. With such a thin edge to work on (the side of a piece of 3/4″ oak) I had to be careful not to run my plane into the head of the bar clamp, but otherwise it held the piece well.

The downside of this exercise is that I discovered I need to work on my hand plane skills, specifically setting one up. The shavings I took were a little too thick for what I was trying to accomplish. So now I get to cut a new piece from stock and try again!

I spent several hours in the garage this evening, attending to a few different aspects of Briana’s crib. I built my first frame and panel door, which will front the vertical cabinet on the right side of the crib:

I ended up routing the groove through the entire length of each rail and stile, mostly because I’m not nearly comfortable enough to attempt to drop the workpiece onto a spinning router bit.  That, coupled with the laziness that prevented me from build a jig to properly support a router to plunge into the workpiece have left me with four small holes I need to fill. I have plenty of scrap pieces of the oak I’m using for this project, so I’ll rip some 1/4″ strips (the width of the groove) to wedge in there and trim flush.

I also got the sides of that cabinet assembled and dry fit (if you can call standing them on end “dry fit”) on the crib’s base:

The last thing I did tonight was to sand the rails to 120 grit.  I had previously sanded them with 60-grit sand paper, just enough to remove a few burn marks left by the round-over router bit. I had done that sanding by holding the rail in one hand and a sanding block in the other.  That was quite the effort, not to mention stressful on both my hands, so I was determined to find a better way for this round of sanding. I decided to treat the rails like a blade to sharpen.  I set the sandpaper on my table saw:

held in place with two of the rails I’m working.  I held the sandpaper down with my left hand (via the rail) and worked the rail across the paper in my right hand:

I got into a good rhythm and I think I this was a decent method to ease the amount of work during this round of sanding. Does anyone out there know of a better way to sand these mostly round pieces, short of buy a spokeshave and building a shaving horse?  I figure I’ve got one more round of sanding for the rails (likely at 220 grit) and anything that reduces the time I spend sanding is worth investigating!

Saturday afternoon brought an odd visitor.  I was downstairs watching football when I heard my dog bark, something he never does.  I ran upstairs to find a delivery on my doorstep that I had completely forgotten about:

Woodcraft had a clearance on these 3.5″ F-style clamps this past week and I had ordered 10. I was able to put them to immediate use, holding together some butt-joined shelf supports:

While we’re on the subject of clamps, I have once again run into a time that I needed more clamps, putting together the crib cabinet sides:

I had enough large parallel clamps to hold each side together end-to-end, but not enough F-style clamps to hold more than one panel together top-to-bottom. This one panel used all eight large F-style clamps I own, which means I had to wait for the glue to set on this panel before I could assemble the second.

The moral of the story?
I need more clamps!

Many woodworkers consider hand-cut dovetails to be the end-all, be-all, holy grail of joinery.  It is easy to understand why; they are simply beautiful, while being highly functional and strong. Matt Kenney of Fine Woodworking shared a fine example earlier today.

I’ve  never cut a dovetail joint before.  The closest I’ve come was a plan to use sliding dovetails for this bookshelf, but that ended up not coming to fruition. I haven’t put a whole lot of time into the study of the art of this joint (yet), but I’ve read several forum posts/blog entries and I’ve watched this video a couple of times. So here was my first shot:

Not the prettiest joint in the world, but to get anything beyond “Yep, it looks like dovetail” would be a coup in my book. Here you can see a nice gouge I created trying to clean up the tail:

Thankfully it looks a lot better from the “interesting” side of the joint:

Overall I’m happy with how things went.  You can’t get better without practice and you can’t be practicing without the first practice.  I know there are places for me to improve in my technique and tonight was the first step towards being able to actually use this joint in a real piece.

After extending my “challenge” an extra month in an effort to catch up, I”m calling an end of sorts to the effort. Some thoughts:

1) There are a lot of good blogs out there, churning out a lot of interesting content. I wouldn’t say there is too much good stuff out there, but keeping up with the small number of folks I follow definitely took a concerted effort.

2) Finding something worthwhile to say is hard!  I don’t know if I went through all of the stages of grief, but I definitely went through one (Bargaining) before getting to this point (Acceptance). Originally I wanted to comment on everything I read.  Then as I slipped behind, I rationalized “I’ll only comment on real posts, not podcast episodes or “I won’t be posting for a while” posts. Then I eventually decided if I couldn’t think of a relevent comment within two minutes of reading, I just wouldn’t comment.

3) I found the best way to keep comments useful was to ask questions.  It kept me from posting “Wow, that’s nice” type comments.  It also has the nice side-effect of engaging the blog writer and commenter in a conversation, rather than just the blogger writing and hoping someone will read.

I ended up making ~70 comments at over 20 different blogs.  If anyone is interested, I can add the list of links to those comments. As I look at the list, I notice that my type-A personality came out a bit in the results.  The blogs that came first alphabetically (and thus appear atop my favorites list) had more comments than those near the bottom.  This is likely due to me trying to “catch up” on my list and starting from the top – hardly ever getting to those blogs named near the end of the alphabet.  Please don’t take offense, Kari or Tom!

Hopefully I’ve left some interesting questions, ideas, or observations throughout the online woodworking community. I want to thank the other bloggers who have taken their time not only to produce great content, but to take my “bait” and engage with your readers.

Postscript – I don’t intend for this to signal and end to my commenting, but rather an end to my attempt at commenting on everything.