With this challenge’s focus being “Surface,” my mind immediately jumped to creating a piece that had multiple surfaces to it. I wanted each surface to also be accessible, despite the stacked orientation of each level. This led to the telescoping nature of the levels. From a materials/finish perspective, there would be a wide variety. I would want a different species of highly colored wood (paduak, purpleheart, etc) to make up the horizontal surfaces. To further highlight those woods, I would paint all the vertical surfaces black, with an exception for the drawer front. Note: this wouldn’t be permissable in this bulid challenge – no paint allowed.

There are a few design elements that I like in this piece. The middle level has a round top. To support that, the side walls beneath the circle are curved themselves, something that isn’t readily evident with my currently skills in drawing.

The arched stretcher on the lowest supports was a late addition to the design that I enjoy. Originally I drew this piece with all of the “legs” purely vertical.  When I redrew on something nicer than a napkin, I realized that the lowest supports would offer little lateral support – something that wouldn’t work on the base of a piece. This led me to cant the legs out slightly, which should support the piece side to side. To add strength to the front-to-back axis, I added the stretcher.

I’m unsure about the lowest platform. I like the curved end profile, but for what really is an end table, I don’t think you really need that board. If there was another wood species you wanted to highlight, that might be enough of an excuse - but I don’t really see it in hindsight.

Overall, I find this was an interesting exercise. It was definitely worth the time spent, as there are a couple of elements that I plan to put into my build challenge entry. Which ones? You’ll have to stay tuned to find out

It’s September 1st, which means we’ve come to the kick-off of the Build Challenge put on by Rick Waters over at The Sawdust Chronicles. I listened to the kick-off podcast twice today, trying to get a feel for this year’s theme of the challenge: Surface.

If you are unfamiliar with TSDC’s build challenges, you can check out this year’s rules. It’s also worth checking out the results of last year’s two challenges: the 30-Day and 60-Day challenges from last spring and fall, respectively.

As I was listening to the podcast this morning, I came up with a couple of possible ideas for my entry to the challenge. They are just initial, rough ideas – I can’t even fully formulate them into good sketches yet. If nothing else, they will give me fodder for my design exercise. Give today’s podcast a listen. If you have the time over the next few months, I highly recommend participating.

When putting this design together, I wanted an interesting pattern without the heavy feeling of highly ornament sleigh bed. The main frame would be of a medium-toned wood, maybe cherry or a mahogany. The lighter inside pieces are a web of boards with plenty of open/negative space, lightening the hefty feeling of the bed. They would be a lighter species of wood.

The thickness of the web of boards would also be slightly thinner than the main frame. I think the offset will add a nice shadow to the headboard and footboard. I don’t know if it would be better to center those boards on the outer frame or to have them flush with one side. I also may think about moving the vertical parts of the web slightly closer to the center; I would have to play with that more to see how that might work out.

If only blogging about it meant it was built – I’d go crash right now!

I felt that a slowly sloping curve would be a good balance between how much of the handle would need to be embedded in the tray above and the strength of the handle. To layout the handle, I went to my set of French curve templates:

With the outline of the handle, I needed to draw the cut-out to actually grab. I traced two 7/8″ diameter circles from a drawing template, then used the French curves to connect them:

I cut out the divider for the bottom tray (that doesn’t need cut-outs for a lower tray) on my band saw, then used it to layout both the upper and lower curves on the other two dividers. I rough cut both of those as well:

While I was making the curved cuts on the band saw, I had a bit of a revelation. On almost every other cutting tool, you mark the cut line then take the blade to the line.  But when cutting curves on the band saw, I find the reverse to be true. When I bent my head around the idea of taking the line to the blade, I had better results getting those curves cut, especially near the points of inflection on the curve [/math nerd].

In order to get them to the same shape, I chucked a sanding spindle into my oscillating spindle sander drill press to sneak my way up to the line. I clamped all three handles together to make sure they all took the same shape:

Which turned out nicely:

On one of the handles, I drilled through the cut-out areas to clear most of the waste away. I did the rest of the shaping with a couple of files:

Once I had the handle cut-out in the shape I wanted, I set about making the other two handles match. I clamped the formed handle back on top of the other two and put a pattern bit in my router.  Using the formed handle as my pattern, I cut through the other two pieces.

With the top of the handles cut, shaped, and matching – it was time to turn my attention to the box that I wanted to use to form the tray sides. As seen below, I clamped up all of the center handles and long tray sides together to cut the fingers on my table saw:

I chose to gang up all of the long pieces and cut them the same basically because there are more long pieces that will get box joints.  The long tray dividers get box joints that will be fit into through mortises on the short sides, to help distribute the weight when you pick up the handle.  The short tray dividers have a straight end because they will only slip into a dado. After gang cutting all of the long pieces, I custom cut each short tray side to mate with specific long pieces. After some fiddling with each mating joint, paring to make small adjustments, I got some decently fitting box joints:

After all the finger joints were cut, I turned my focus to cutting the grooves for the tray bottoms. When it comes to cutting a groove, I trust my table saw slightly more than my router table for sneaking up on a groove/dado – especially when the width is not a standard dimension. Yes, I know, I need to get plywood width router bits. They are on the Christmas list

I set the table saw blade height to 3/16″ (approximately half of the plywood’s thickness) and set the rip fence to establish the bottom edge of the groove with this first cut.  After running all 12 box sides over the blade, I moved the rip fence slightly to increase the size of the groove. After the third pass I started testing the fit of a bottom in my test piece, adjusting the rip fence subtly until I had a good fit, which you can see below:

That picture also confirms another reason I’ve been excited about this project – the plywood I’m using for these trays is reused from the crates that crated my new jointer and planer when they were delivered. As you can imagine, there was a lot of it. I’m just glad I’ve found a use for some of it.

Once I had the grooves for the tray bottoms cut, the rest of the joinery would be quite custom to each piece. I cut a long dado in each tray bottom to give me another strong glue surface for the lone center divider that is also the handle. Another dado was cut in each long tray side to hold the short dividers.  The interesting cuts that remained were the mortises for the through box joints on the handles.  I marked the fingers on each short side and drilled through the center of those squares with a slightly undersized drill bit. After the hoels were drilled, I squared the corners with a chisel and adjusted the mortises until I got a good fit for each side.  I wasn’t sure how they would finally turn out, but I’m happy with the look:

Last weekend I got the first tray glued up and into clamps. The next day, I noticed a terrible error with my assembly:

D’OH! I hadn’t allowed clearance for the lower handle in my short divider. I made the correction in the other tray before I assembled it, but I was left to determine a fix for this first tray. I don’t have a coping saw with a wide enough to use on this already glued tray, so I went rumaging through my tools. I came across the gardening equivalent of a hack saw:

I couldn’t use the the whole saw, but the blade presented an opportunity. It is large enough to hold easily, but has a thin set. I was able to saw a kerf on each side of the wood I needed to remove, using the bottom and the long divider as guides:

With the kerfs cut, I chopped out the waste with a chisel, similar to chopping out the waste of a dovetail joint. Because of how I created the lap joints that connected the dividers I wasn’t going to have much material left on the short divider, so I had to be careful once I got to the top of the waste. After a bit of fiddling with the chisel, I had the waste removed. This left me my three stacklable trays:

This was not the end of my fiddling though. Apparently I did not properly measure the height of the handle curves, so I need to perform some more paring. The depth at the top of the handles was pretty close, but futher out from the center of the handle was preventing the trays from seating firmly upon one another. A few more minutes with my chisel and I was finally able to stack them solidly:

Overall, I’m happy with how the trays came out. I only had two big mistakes. In addition to the short divider issue chronicled above, I also cut the groove for the drawer bottom on the wrong side of one of the long sides. Fortunately I had milled an extra of each side and divider, in case this had happened. After some light sanding, I’ll be ready to get back to the crate itself. I’d like to get the crate finished this week, so I can devote all my shop time to the Build Challenge put on by The Sawdust Chronicles, which starts September 1st.

First of all I want to mention that I’ve had the beginnings of this sketch for some time now and its shape in no way represents my excitement for the upcoming NFL season! I envision this ottoman being fairly long, more appropriate for a love seat than a standard stuffed chair. The criss-cross pattern in the sketch would be the stuffed and upholstered portion of the ottoman. I’m imagining a medium blue (maybe something cornflower), but not necessarily a pattern – the criss-cross is really just to indicate the area of upholstery in the pencil drawing.

As for the trim around the top, I’m torn between two similar ideas for the detail:

As you see on the right, it is a choice between actual dowels and a negative space where the dowels would be.  In either instance, I would want that are to be a contrasting wood. That might be a little difficult to do with the negative space idea (some seriously bent veneer?), but maybe doing half dowels (not drawn) could work as a middle ground.

As for the base, I’m thinking a different wood than the edge of the top. It could be the same as the dowels/negative-space or it could be a third species.  That base would also be mostly hollow, allowing for storage beneath the lid/top.  As for the feet, I decided to keep them simple – considering they are mostly hidden and not terribly contributing to a piece such as this.

This is the first tray out of the clamps and I have two others in clamps (I need more clamps) as we speak.  Once those are out, I can come close to considering the stackable trays complete. However, I noticed a huge problem with the first tray I put together that I was thankfully able to correct on the other trays before glue-up.  Here’s a photo that actually shows the problem:

Anyone see the problem? Once I figure out how to fix it without destroying the tray, I’ll put all of this into a post describing the whole tray-making process – along with a couple of mistakes I had to fix along the way.

I had originally drawn this where the cabinet top was even with the top of the A-fram legs, but this made the piece feel too bulky, in my opinion. As drawn, the ends of the cabinet base are essentially giany through-tenons, even if I doubt it would be constructed that way. I’ve given some thought to making that “tenon” shorter, so there is a small reveal inside the A. I’m afraid that would require the legs to be too thick for what is already a heavy design. I’ve called it a hall table, but given the depth of the legs, this may fair better as a console behind a sofa or a love seat.

I came up with a couple of possible designs for the drawers pulls:

Well to be fair, it is the same basic design, just rotated 90 degrees in the lower photo. I think I like the lower orientation in general, whereas the upper design is almost a mini-echo of the table as a whole – which is appealing.

Thoughts on the table? Which do you prefer?

Addendum

Here are a couple of new ideas for the pulls, as suggested by Ken and Adam:

Most of today was spent working on these thru-box joints that connect the handle/middle-divider to the tray sides:

On a completely unrelated note, I also broke the seal (so to speak) on a can of AnchorSeal to cap the cherry logs I picked up last weekend:

Tomorrow I hope to get the last few details finished and get the trays into clamps, so I can write up a full post on this step of the project.

This table arose from a simple idea that got refined with every iteration.  Originally, it was a simple cross:

But it eventually made its way through several small changes before arriving at the first picture.

I felt like the original drawing was too bulky, so I added the inner cross to the center of the piece – as seen in sketch 1. After drawing it, it looked flimsy and would be a huge P.I.T.A. to build, because those inner squares are separate from the outer wings.  With those two thoughts in mind, I came up with sketch 2 – where I clipped the inner corners and widened the inner cross. I really like how that design balanced the piece, so much that it is the direction I went with the SketchUp drawing atop this post.  I drew sketch 3 to make sure that I hadn’t made a mistake making the inner cross wider. I just needed the visual confirmation to confirm my choice. Sketch 4 contains the same cross as sketch 2, but rather than straight edged wings, I’ve made them curved. My wife definitely likes that version best and I might as well. I thought about drawing #4 in SketchUp, but I felt that the straight edge piece would be easier (and quicker).  If nothing else, sketch 4 gives me some closure to the round table series.

When my wife was pregnant with our first child, I joked that if it was a girl, I would get to buy a gun (behind, the door, her daddy kept a shotgun).  This past Father’s Day, my wife made good on that joke, buying me a Mossberg 500 12-gauge shotgun:

So I decided I needed to build this project to accompany the shotgun – an ammo crate. I bought ~10 board feet of white ash for this crate, but it was rough cut, so I needed to get my planer and jointer setup to prep the stock:

Despite having the tools set up, I still had a big problem – no 220V outlets in my garage. This lead to my first major upgrade to the garage – a subpanel:

After paying an electrician to install the subpanel, I felt confident enough in my DIY ability to run the branch circuit myself:

Now with somewhere to plug the machine, I could get to prepping the stock. for this project. The plan for the crate calls for it to be almost 14 inches tall. That 10 board feet of ash I bought came in the form of two ~7.5 inch wide boards, because I couldn’t find any extremely wide boards at my lumber supplier. This will require me to edge join the two boards in order get box sides of the proper height. 

I crosscut the boards for the crate sides on my miter saw, slightly oversized, making sure to keep the pieces in order so the grain will wrap around the box continuously. Cutting the boards to rough length will also help in dimensioning the stock, as it should be easier to flatten 8 shorter board than 2 very long boards. The next step was to go throught the process of prepping the four sides of the stock: 1) Joint the edge, 2) Joint an adjacent face, 3) Plane to thickness, and 4) Rip to width. After 8 boards going through that process, I was left with two things – 1) Several nice, smooth panels:

And 2) a whole lot of shavings/chips/dust:

The next step in prepping the sides of the crate was to edge glue the matching boards. As I previously alluded to, I wanted to try several new techniques with this project. The first new idea is to use Gorilla Glue for gluing these panels:

I have never used a moisture cured glue before, so the process was quite foreign to me.  With my standard Titebond glues, you just apply the glue to both surfaces and clamp up the piece as soon as possible.  With this type of glue, you apply the glue to one surface and let it sit for 5-10 minutes. You then dampen the mating surface, and then apply the clamps. I might need to get a clock or timer in the Garage, because I had to resort to singing to myself to approximate the open time for the glue. So after 20 minutes of “Losing My Religion” and “Flagpole Sitta” left me with a break in the action:

After giving those glue joints 24 hours to dry, I squared up one of the ends with an auxilliary fence on the miter gauge of my table saw:

Because of the height of the fence, I can’t pass it completely through the table with the blade gaurd and splitter still attached.  I decided to deal with that and keep the safety devices attached:

I used this setup to take just a schosh off of one end of each board and ensure the two glued board have that common, square edge.  This was one of the reasons I intentionally cut the boards long, so I could make these fine adjustments.

That’s all I’ve worked on the crate sides  to this point. I don’t want to cut them to final length just yet, because I want to wrap them tightly around the trays that will rest inside the crate. Tune in next time for the beginning of the construction of those trays!