Panel Trimming

 A good part of the morning was spent stacking lumber; I still have some of the cherry and all of the walnut on the ground.  Sort of.  I have boards under the piles so the lumber is not actually in the mud and wet, But it's out in the open and piled in just a loose stack.  Not good.

It needs to be sticker-stacked on a drying rack with spacer sticks between layers so the air will flow through the stack and let the boards dry evenly.  This is as far as I got last time.  The pile is about chest high on me here so the going gets a little rougher from here on out.  Thank goodness for Aleve!

By about 1:00 I had all the fresh-cut cherry stacked and I was starting to move the dry cherry on top of the fresh cherry.  This consolidates the species, and the dry adds weight to help keep the fresh boards flat as they dry.

I got about 1/3 of the way through the dry cherry stack when it started to rain again so I had to put the covers back on and go work inside.  By the way, the really long boards sticking out will get cut off with a chainsaw later on.

 Today I need to trim and sand the tray panels.  I'll use my big cut-off sled to trim the ragged ends of the panels smooth and to finished length. I do enough of these that I've made a permanent mark on the sled to make this as easy as possible.

Here the panels are trimmed and rabbeted and I'm ready to start sanding.  That will take the rest of the day at least.

A New Direction
When we started this blog back in 2005 the main purpose was to allow our custom furniture clients to watch over our shoulders as we built their furniture.  This was a wildly popular feature and we got lots of comments from our clients about how much fun it was to see their furniture taking shape. It also instilled a new awareness of how much thought and work goes into custom furniture.  You'd be surprised how many people think we just knock this stuff out in a few hours.

A fellow once tried to get me to display in a street festival.  It was a week away and I told him I had nothing made up to show or sell.  He said, "You have a week, whip up a half dozen pieces, put them on display and take orders."  He had NO clue!

However, we're not doing custom work anymore, so this blog will degrade into doing the same old thing over and over most of the time.  Rather than allow that to happen I've decided that I'll change the format.  I will no longer be posting daily progress reports, but will instead do a weekly post and each post will discuss a woodworking technique.  Each post will be longer and will cover a complete process.  I'll try to include more video.  We think this will be more useful to my readers that watching me build tray tables over and over.  If we do something unusual; a special project, I may toss that in for you to watch as an example of putting the techniques I've been teaching into play.

Comments are welcome.