The Scary Part

In this step I will take those beautiful, wide, perfectly jointed boards I made up a while back and cut them into little pieces. (cringe). But not only will I cut them into pieces, but the pieces will have to fit together to form the octagonal-banjo shape of this clock. That means very precise angles need to be cut on these wide panels. And, I want to keep the grain flowing around each joint, so the pieces must be cut sequentially off of each board and with as little waste as possible. I start by trimming the glued-up boards to width so the long edges are parallel. I will need to flip the boards over to cut every other miter, so they need to square-up from either edge. I take a very light cut pass over the jointer to make sure the back edge is straight. To make registering the side pieces against the back plate and holding them in place during glue-up easier I will cut a shallow rabbet along the back, inside edge of the sides. So I set up the dado head for a ¾ inch wide, 1/8 inch deep cut. I really don’t like maneuvering such long boards through a cut like this all by myself, but I don’t have much choice. I install the long fence, and some fingerboards to help guide the plank, but keeping it flat on the table top so the cut is of consistent depth will be important – and difficult. When I’m done, I have a very nice, even rabbet along the edge of both boards. One end of one board lifted on me just a little as it passed over the cutter, but I caught it afterward and cleaned it up with a wide chisel. A good part of this day will be spent changing over the table saw. I remove the dado head, install a high performance blade and set it to the first of several angle settings. If the “belly” of the clock were perfectly octagonal I could use a setting of 60 degrees for all the joints, but because the sides slope in at 2 degrees, I will also have one joint on each side at 58 degrees and another at 62 degrees. These angles must be cut on the ends of both pieces coming together at that point, and I must be sure I keep track to which edge is which. Any mistakes will result in tossing the side piece out, making a new one and starting over. I install the wide cross-cut sled and set up to make my first cut. Say a little prayer and here we go… When I get to the little pieces that angle out, I remove the sled, set up the rip fence and feather board. Because I’m cutting these parts in between larger parts this change over is done several times as I go from the lower side, to a small wing, to the side piece to a small wing, to the upper side. I am, however cutting the pieces for both sides as I go. That helps. As I cut the pieces, I use clamps and tape to affix them to the back plate, building up from the bottom. At day’s end both sides are completed, nothing has been glued yet, just being held together temporarily as I fit them together. Here is what I meant about getting the grain to flow around each joint. It takes a lot more work than just cutting random pieces, or even cutting oversized blanks out of a single board and trimming them down. By wasting as little as possible in cutting the joints we get a very nice “flow” down the side of the case. Next time we’ll begin gluing the pieces together. That too will be a challenge because the odd angles are hard to clamp and I can’t use nails or screws here because I will need to be ripping these side panels lengthwise to get the 4 degree front-to-back slope before I glue the sides to the back. That too will be tricky. We’re just having all kinds of fun on this project!

Fix the Grizzly

Last Friday I started hearing an odd noise in our Grizzly surface planer – like something was loose. I pulled the belt cover off and found the hardware that is supposed to be holding the drive pulley on the drive shaft laying in the bottom of the cover. See the two rectangular notches? They’re supposed to be lines up with a rectangular key in there to lock the pulley to the shaft so it doesn’t spin. It had fallen out and the pulley was slipping. So I remove the side cover, loosen the motor mounts and swing them down out of the way. Lift the motor with a piece of scrap wood enough to get the three drive belts off and remove the drive pulley for inspection. Shaft and pulley look OK, no scoring, so the shaft was not spinning inside the pulley, tension from the drive belts kept them in enough contact to prevent that. That’s a good thing. So I put the key back into the slot on the shaft, slide the pulley back onto the shaft to make sure they fit, no burrs or bends in the key. All is good. Then I can reinstall the washer plate, lock washer and machine screw that hold the parts in place and the pulley on the shaft. I’ll have to keep an eye on this, it may loosen up again. Then the belts go back on. The motor mounts are engaged again and tightened to tension the belts. Not too tight now, just enough to keep them all pulling. I plug it in and test it to be sure it’s working right. Then re-install the covers. And put away the Grizzly tool kit. Now this tool is ready to go back to work.

Back Panel Assembly

My first activity this morning was to remove the clamps from the three panel blanks I glued up yesterday evening and scrape the glue squeeze-out off. Then I ran them through the surface planer a few times to remove any ridges that appeared where the pieces got glued together. I was careful to get the face surface as well lined up as possible, but because the pieces were not all exactly the same thickness, the back sides were not all even. I was going to have to plane the assembly anyway… Once the panels were smoothed out I used the wide drum sanded to do bring them down to finished thickness. The drum sander works much more slowly (can’t remove as much material in one pass) than the planer, but the planer also have more tendency to chip out the wood, especially where the wood is highly figured. By sanding them for that last 1/16” I can remove the chips and get a nice smooth surface. Then I remove the splitter from the table saw, install a fine tooth blade and the big cross-cut sled for squaring up the blanks. Next I get out my lay-out tools and take very careful measurements from the clamped up back frame and transfer them onto the back panel parts. These panels will be trapezoidal shaped – narrower at the top than at the bottom – so I have to find the center at the top and bottom edges and measure out from the center points to find the edges. That means finding the needed width (including the part buried in the grooves) divide that in half and measure that distance out from the center point. I cut the panels on the cross-cut sled by using the slot in the bottom of the sled to line up with the pencil lines on the panels, then press down hard and hope it doesn’t slip while I cut. I do use a stop block clamped to the front rail to keep the base of the panel in position – and on the longest panel another block clamped to the back rail helps a lot. Here’s a neat trick. In frame and panel work, the panels must be allowed to float in the slots, not be glued in or when the panel contracts in dry weather it will crack. To make sure the corners of the panel do not get glued in place accidentally by squeeze-out from the mortise and tenon joint, I dog-ear the panel corners. That way there is no wood right where the glue would squeeze out and the panel can’t accidentally get pinned by the corners. I DO have to be careful not to cut away so much that the dog-ear pokes out of the groove – we want a nice solid look to the panel. I test fit everything, adjust if necessary, then take it all apart again and do the finish sanding of the panels and the inside faces of the rails and stiles (the narrow faces adjacent to the panels). It’s much easier to sand these now than after everything is glued together. When that’s done I assemble it again, putting glue in the joints and clamping the parts snugly together. The final step is to use a rule to measure across the diagonals to be sure they are the same length. If not, and these were off by 3/32nds inch, I can pull the frame into alignment with a clamp across the long diagonal.

I’ll let this assembly sit overnight, so I’m done for the day. See you tomorrow.

Back Panel Parts

I’ll start actual construction of the clock by surface planning the side blanks I glued up last time. I won’t do much with these just yet, jut get them ready. I joint and plane the pieces I’ll need for the long back stiles (vertical parts) a pair of “wings” that will form the octagonal belly of the clock and the four rails that will run between the stiles. Before joining them together, I cut the 2° slope on the wings so the sides will be perpendicular to the floor even though the side of the clock slant inward. I use a taper jig to hold the pieces as they are cut – this one is a generic Chinese made unit that is not great, but does the job. It is very difficult; to set an exact angle using the built-in rule, so I use my electronic angle gauge: zero it out on the table, set it on the gauge, raise the gauge until the proper angle is achieved and tighten the screw to lock it in place. Much faster and easier. Then I lay-out the location of the wings, apply glue and clamp them in place. When the glue is dry I remove the clamps, scrape off any glue squeeze-out and position the stiles so I can get measurements for the rails. These need to be cut to length with a 2° degree slope toward the top on each end. When those parts all fit properly, I set up the dado head and cut a 3/8” deep groove along the inner edges of the stiles, and all edges of the rails, except for the very top and very bottom edges. These grooves will house the three filler panels. Normally, when I make rails and stiles for frame and panel construction like this, I cut the rails long enough to mill tenons on the ends that will fit into the panel groove. But because of the angled ends, I decided to take a more expedient route this time, and cut grooves all around, then milled loose tenons that got glued into the end grooves of the rails to form the tenons. Then I test fit the frame and make sure all the joints draw up tight – no gaps. It looks great! So I resaw the pieces I milled up for use as filler panels, joint and plane the halves and lay them out to check the patterns. This panel is made up of four, book-matched pieces, and they have NOT been glued together yet, just laying on the planer. All the panel parts go into the assembly room where I lay out clamps and glue them up. It’s pretty close to quitting time, so I’ll just leave these in the clamps overnight and finish making the panels tomorrow. See you then!

Lumber Prep - phase 1

A couple of weeks ago I brought in a whole mess of rough sawn walnut from our lumber piles outside and stood it against a wall inside the shop. I let it stand there for a while to acclimate to the different conditions inside the shop. If a board is going to want to twist, warp or cup as it changes moisture levels I want to know it before I cut it into parts. I can still use such a board for smaller parts, but the longer pieces need to come from the flattest, straightest boards I can find. I move the surface planer around beside the workbench where I have enough room on the in-feed and out-feed sides to maneuver 8 to 10 foot long boards. I feed them in from where they are standing and take them off over by the band saw, where I can then slide them onto the workbench next to the planer, stacking them up as they come through. What I’m doing here is to remove the rough layer of wood making it easier to see the coloring and grain pattern of the wood. I’m removing as little wood as possible right now to achieve this clarity. When I’m done I have a pile of various sized planks stacked on the bench. Now I move the planer out of the way (it weighs almost 600 pounds so it’s a good think it has wheels!) and sort through the planks looking for the pieces I want for the first parts to be made. I stack the rejected candidates in this first round on the floor. I always start parts-making by selecting wood for the largest parts first, then working down toward the smallest. Often I can make the smallest parts from cut-offs produced in making the larger parts, but more importantly is that business about needing the flattest, straightest pieces for the largest parts. It would be heart-breaking to find that I’d cut up a nice flat piece into small parts then find that the rest are not as well suited for a large part. Once I have found the pieces I want, I match them up for color and grain pattern. The idea here is to minimize the variance where one piece of wood joins another. I’ll be making 2 panels 13-15 inches wide and almost 7 feet long. Each will require 3 pieces of wood to attain that width, and I want to hide those edge joints as much as possible. After the panel is glued up it will be planed to finished thickness and teh ugly spots will be removed. When I have achieved the best matches I can – for perfection is difficult on parts as long as these. That would require boards that show perfectly straight grain for their entire length and width. Something you don’t see much anymore because all the old growth timber has been cut and the smaller trees they’re cutting now rarely yield such perfect boards – I mark them with a big 'V' across the back face of all three boards to keep them properly oriented during the next step, which is to joint them. Jointing is done on a Jointer. (Duh!) It is called this because one of its primary functions is making very straight, square edges that can be glued together to join multiple small boards into wide ones. When we bought this machine we got one with a bed that is 8” wide and a little over 6 feet long because we sometimes need to joint long boards like these. A smaller model with a shorter bed would make it difficult to straighten a long board because a long, sweeping curve would just ride on the bed, making the board narrower with each pass, but no straighter. There are larger models too, some industrial models look like aircraft carriers, but this was the largest tool we had room for in this shop. And because when you move into the industrial grade, prices quadruple! As the boards are jointed they are laid back on the work bench so I can check to see that the joints between boards mate up well with no gaps. If I find gaps, I joint those two surfaces again. When I’m happy with them they go into the assembly room where I have two tables set up and a battery of clamps at hand, the edges get a coat of Type III polyurethane glue, I feel to make sure the jointed faces, which are down against the clamps, are mated up well to reduce ridges that will have to be removed later. I use poly glue for panelizing because this is not a joint that will need to be taken apart someday for maintenance, as most joinery will. Hopefully not for a hundred years or so, but eventually wood movement and stresses will cause the piece to need re-gluing. Where that is a possibility I use standard (aliphatic) wood glue so these joints will be repairable when the time comes. I used to use hide glue for all my joinery, but this requires mixing glue crystals with water and keeping it at 170° all the time it’s being used. And left-over glue in the pot tends to stink like something dead – because it’s made from animal hide. The extra hassles make it unsuitable for new furniture construction where traditionalism is not required and time is money. It’s still the best choice for antique restoration though. I’ll let this assembly sit in clamps overnight so the glue can develop a good hold. Poly glue takes 5 days to develop its maximum holding power as it cures but will provide a good “grip” in a few hours, especially if the joints do not have stress in them from forcing poorly fitted boards together under clamping pressure to close up gaps. The rest of the afternoon will be spent jointing the other set of boards for the second side panel so I can glue it up first thing in the morning. Then I’ll move onto making rail and stile stock. Why didn’t I make the sides in frame and panel construction? Oh, well, that’s because of that hexagonal “belly” the clock has. The pieces that will slope out from the sides will be too small to make as frame and panel, so I’d have had to switch from frame and panel to solid wood then back to frame and panel. That, I think, would look weird so I elected to make the sides of solid wood. The back, the front doors, and the base front will be frame & panel using a fancy fluted stock with a rope trim insert. That ought to be fun!

Planning

Today I will start chronicling our latest project – a Grandfather Clock for Harold in Chattanooga TN. But first I will mention that I have FINALLY gotten one of the Steamer Trunks completed and ready to post as available on the web site. This one is the oak with walnut trim: the all walnut trunk is still in progress. In this photo the box and lid have just come out of the finishing room after receiving three coats of semi-gloss lacquer and are about to have the hardware reinstalled. Harold’s clock started with an image he cut out of a magazine. He has an antique grandfather clock that is made to hang on a wall, with just the clock works in a fancy metal case and the pendulum and weights hanging in the open below. He wants a case for that clock to make it more traditional. Harold liked the looks of the clock in the photo, but a discussion of the cold-molding process that would be required to make the “belly” of that clock, and the time and expense involved, led him to go with the octagonal swelling instead. The joinery will still be tricky, but no mold needs to be built first. So the first step is to create a template of a regular hexagon in the size I think we will need. My high school geometry class comes in handy once again as I construct the hexagon and lay out the side walls. This is a starting point, from here I tweak it as needed to keep the “belly” in proportion to the rest of the clock. My little pencil sketch (above) was not to scale, and attempting to create a scale drawing in Sketch-up led me to believe I’d be better off (time-wise) to just work it out as I build the mock-up. It took me two days to build the mock-up out of ½” crate board (triple wall corrugated cardboard). I will not build the entire clock, just those elements that will be necessary to give Harold a look at the design and proportion and to see if his clock works fit inside as they should. I took detailed measurements while at his home, but there were a couple of things I wasn’t able to properly quantify – like what the actual swing of the pendulum would be while it is in operation, which it was not at the time. Now that I have the mock-up done I need to get it to Harold. He’s a busy fellow so that may take some time. While we work on getting that arranged, I will begin the lumber prep steps.

Packaging

The final step in producing a set of TV Tray Tables is to package them so they will arrive at their new home in the same pristine condition as when they left here. This is not as small a matter as you may think. I often get supplies that were simply tossed in a box, some air pillows tossed in to fill the empty space and they send it off… and they usually arrive just fine. But these tables are a little more delicate. So, I start my wrapping padding the frame of the stand with Styrofoam and bubble wrap. Then I line the bottom and ends of a box with Styrofoam sheet. We have these boxes made up for us specifically for shipping these table sets. They are sized so they just BARELY fit into the Tier 2 UPS shipping schedule. Any bigger and the fees go way up. Then I begin bundling the tables into pairs. In this set we have only one pair, in a full set we would have 4 tables, two pairs. I use blocks of Styrofoam to space the tables so they don’t rub on one another during shipment. I’ll lay the other table on top of this one and use cellophane stretch wrap to bind them tightly together. Then set the bound pair of tables on the stand and bind them together. Laying that bundle into the box, I fill the voids along the sides with shredded paper and Styrofoam spacer blocks to hold them in position. Once I’ve sealed up the box, weighed it and processed a shipping label this one is ready to go out on the dock to await the FedEx truck. Time to clean up the mess and get ready for our next project.