Best Ideas

Hi Everyone,
Picking up were we left off yesterday...

Here is the underside of the bowl, cut, sanded and polished:


You can see the foot, the tenon, and the heat and sap wood areas of the blank.

Heres a slightly different shot:

At this point the bowl is ready to flip over and hollow out. Moment of truth-once the bowl is flipped over and I begin hollowing it out, the bowl cant be flipped back if there is a problem. Here we go...


In the above photo, Ive flipped it over and placed it between centers again. Until the bowl is substantially hollowed out, Ill turn it between centers. When its been hollowed, and its lighter in weight, Ill remove the dead center and the center post in the bowl.


Above is the bowl after about an hours worth of turning. The sides are about 1 inch thick and Ive left the center post in the bowl. This will help keep the bowl in its round shape and keep it from cracking. Now Im going to cover it in paste wax and place it in a large box of wood shavings and let it dry for several weeks. In about three weeks time, Ill take it out and see hows its going so keep you fingers crossed that the bowl is ok and it dries well.

See you in a couple of weeks.

VW

I feel a little like Im wading into shark infested waters wearing a suit made of meat. I hope I come out the other side with only a few bite marks and no missing limbs. If you have been reading along I have just started a series of posts based on dovetail layouts, no cutting dovetails, just a focus on the layouts. If you want to catch up on my introduction post you can read it HERE.

I am not a fan of putting dovetail joints up on a pedestal, but I will say that the different personalities they can display in different situations can make them a telling feature on a piece of furniture, and a mark of the woodworker who cut them. I admit that when my wife and I are out antiquing and I start looking at a piece of furniture, if there are drawers, the first thing I do is pull them out and have a look at the dovetails and i they tell me a lot.

Dovetails on an antique dresser we own. machine cut half blinds.

Are they perfectly even and production machine made or have they been hand cut? Are they through tails hidden by veneer or are they true half blinds? Are they crystal clear in their lines and meant to stand out or are they subdued and workmanlike? In the end I worry less about small gaps or less than absolutely perfect execution and more about the over all feeling I get from looking at it. I feel like these things will tell me a lot about what else went into the design and production of the piece. There are other things I look for to but inevitable past my first impression of the overall design and proportions, I learn a lot from the dovetails.

To my mind that makes my dovetail layout important to me, but you have to be smart enough to know where to use the correct layouts. If I looked at a drawer that was put together with half blind, hounds-tooth dovetails, that would probably put me off of the piece, because I would think, "what a waste."  I think thats what I dislike most about router made dovetails, off the template they are the same in any situation.There is a time and place for a "Hey Look At Me" set of pins and tails and a average, evenly spaced set both. Choosing when to use what is part of your own personal design conscience.

This is where you get into the chunky tails vs. skinny tails debate. Again this is not, as I see it, an issue of structure or strength, it is instead an issue of design. Cut whichever is most pleasing to your eye. Personally when I am designing the joint for looks, I tend to use a mix of both chunkier and narrower pins and tails spread out in a symmetrical pattern.

So what about the angles of those tails? How do you determine those? In the traditional joinery books I own there are two options and two options only. They are expressed as ratios of rise and run 1:6 and 1:8. If youve ever done any roofing work youll recognize rise and run as the angle the pitch of a roof will follow. Expressed like this the angle is one inch of rise for every six or eight inches of length. You can measure and draw out this ratio every time, but if you plan to cut a lot of dovetails, I would suggest drawing the out on something a little more permanent than a scrap chunk of board.

I have chosen to draw them out on one end of my workbench, I have seen others have them drawn out on a bench hook. You can draw them on the ceiling of the ceiling of the shop if you want, but I have found it convenient to have them around so I can easily set my bevel marking gauge to them. Now the "rules" say that the 1:6 ratio is for use in soft woods, and the 1:8 ratio is for hardwoods. The thought is that dovetails in softwoods can be a little spongier and more forgiving and the more dramatic 1:6 angle gives them greater strength. I guess that thinking is sound but really there is a little bit of B.S. about it.

You should know how I feel about rules. I hate them. I have seen Roy Underhill on video talk about dovetail angles and finding them on antiques with angles of 1:3. Now thats a steep and dramatic slope. I think the "rules" are one of the things that make it difficult for dovetails to be an accessible joint for newer woodworkers. I understand the thinking behind them but seriously if we are creating different rules for angles in different woods then we are losing sight of what should be the real driving factor in the use of this joint. Strength and / or appearance.

I use the more dramatic 1:6 for dovetails that are going to be on the stage and super visible, like on the corners of a blanket chest. I use the slightly more relaxed 1:8 for dovetails that are blue collar and there to do a job, like on a drawer. I have found that 1:8 slope seems to make fitting easier when I cut half blind dovetails.
In the end there "rules" are more like guidelines. I never spend more than a few seconds setting up my bevel marking gauge, I never worry anymore about getting the angle "perfect" in fact thats why I continue to use a bevel marking gauge set by hand instead of a static dovetail marker. There is a little bit of irregularity, a little bit of humanity that gets introduced when I set the angle myself using the edge of my workbench and my hand drawn lines. When I cut my pins or tails (whichever I decide to start with) I cut one board first, then I use those cuts to mark the other board, this way I transfer any entropy Ive picked up in the process and any off angle, miss cut, millimeter of intolerance, is transferred as well and doesnt stick out in the finished product.

I dont want to overload a post with too much information and lose anyone so I am going to call it there for the evening, Next time youll hear a little more about paying attention to the big picture when it comes to laying out dovetails and Ill go over the tools I put to use. After that well get started going over the actual layouts themselves.

Cheers
Oldwolf

There was once a master thief whose skill was renown across the land. One day the thiefs eldest son came to him and begged his father to teach him the secrets of his success. The father relented to the sons pressure and agreed to take him that evening. As night fell they approached a large house and together and made their way inside. The son dutifully studied his fathers every move, shadowing his steps and mimicking his hands.

Under the ears of the sleeping family the pair moved through the house, Father directing son as they collected specific items of value. Quietly they opened the door into a bedroom and found it empty except for a large closet packed so full of the well-to-do families clothes that the door sat ajar. The father told the son to go and pick through the clothes for something of value and he would return in a moment.

As the son stepped towards the closet, the father shoved him inside and locked the door. Then he made his way outside and loudly knocked on the front door, shouting and ringing the bell to wake up the family inside. When he saw lights start to appear inside the house he quickly slipped away before anyone saw him, and went home.

Hours later he was relaxing in his favorite chair when the front door banged open. In came his son, hs clothes torn in places, dirt smeared across his forehead, and dark circles under his eyes. He was still catching his ragged breath as he started to raise his voice at his father and master.

"Why did you lock me in that closet?" he hollered, "I was scared to death and I was sure Id be caught!. It took all of my imagination and abilities to get out!"

The old master sat up in his chair and smiled, "My boy, youve just had your first lesson in the trade of thievery."

***

Trying to spend more time with my daughters in the shop. My woodworking resolution for this year.

Ratione et Passionis
Oldwolf

Here are some pictures of the sanding process before staining and finishing. I have a total of a day and a half wrapped up in just sanding. This is an important step to get the look and feel of the door just right, and alot of the finish look depends on how well the sanding is done. The first picture is a "before" picture, and then there are two "after" pictures (one of each side).
An easy way to determine if you are sanding everything to one level, is to make light pencil marks on the surface, and continue to sand them out until they come off evenly. It is a good and simple technique, although it takes longer with white oak because it is such a hard wood. I prefer Norton sandpaper over 3M - just seems to last a little longer...

This morning, I saw the finished room that we have been working on, (and here), counting the design process, since the first of the year. It looked great. The architecture was by Liz Calabrese of Calabrese Architects and the interior design, fabrics, wall and floor coverings, colors, and some furniture was by Mary Jo Gourd of Ramsay Gourd Architects. While I kind of had a vision of it in my head as we were working, it had even a better warmth and depth as a completed project than as a visualization in my minds eye ... The light coming in from the windows made it a little tough to photograph, but I think you can get the idea. Were going to put a folding, black speaker cloth door over the stereo equipment under the Claro walnut desk (bottom photo) and build a bar (we worked up an interesting concept to pursue this morning) for the longer wall opposite the fireplace. There are still personal touches to add, but, on the whole, I could move right in .... Click the pictures to enlarge them ...

Beautiful, bright, screened in porch on the south side

A game table area

The bar will go against the longer wall

Back to the beginning ... the door will go on the now open equipment cabinet under the desk

THE 2010 OLYMPIC WINTER GAMES

So what is the relevance of the games to the woodworking scene in Vancouver? Well a few years ago I received an email from I don’t know where suggesting I sign up for invitations to bid on Olympics related products and services. I filled out a form in which I checked off some boxes for the type of work I do. Although there were no boxes directly related to my business, I checked a few that I thought might include my work. I don’t think their system worked because I started getting “opportunities “to bid on everything from catering to toilets. I stopped accepting the emails.
I was also contacted with respect to producing a conceptual model of an Olympic venue to be presented as corporate gifts. I attended a meeting at a large design firm to “discuss” the project. This turned out to be a kind of job interview. As I was leaving the meeting room I noticed another guy sitting outside with what looked like his portfolio beside him. I never heard back from the design firm but later got an email forwarded from a woodworking group by a guy looking for someone to do some cnc work for a project related to the Olympics, a conceptual model of an Olympic venue. This gives you an idea of how small the woodworking community is here and how everybody is pretty closely connected.
I know I said this blog is not about the construction industry, but if I am going to find something about the Olympics relevant to woodworking I am going to have to go there. There has been a lot of hoopla about the fantastic engineering innovations involved in the wood structure of the Richmond Olympic Oval. Maybe I’m a moron but it just looks like a variation on the old Safeway stores we used to see all over BC.
The general sentiment around the Olympics at this time seems to be one of trepidation and dread. I don’t know anyone who has a ticket to an event or is renting their home out for a windfall, and I am including everyone I talk to, not just family and friends. Personally, I think that the Olympics are representative of a kind of social madness like the big heads on Easter Island, and I think a lot of people here instinctually feel this, even if they don’t consciously think it.
I think that the extraordinary decadence and wastefulness of the games has given people a feeling of dread and trepidation in the sense expressed by Margaret Atwood in her lecture “payback”.
As far as the weather is concerned, I am glad it is mild. I hope it gets even warmer. This is not to spite the games but simply because the shop I rent is so poorly insulated that to heat it is very expensive. The last year of recession has been tough and I need a break somewhere. Which makes me wonder, how much would it cost to upgrade all these energy sucking, green house gas producing old buildings in BC? Probably a drop in the bucket of the Olympic budget.
A very popular sport here, maybe not an Olympic sport but popular none the less is thinking of all the things that the money spent on the Olympics could have bought. Here are a few of my most recent contributions.
1. I understand that the Olympics (a 2 week party) cost 6 billion dollars. To rebuild the totally destroyed country of Haiti is estimated to cost 10 billion.
2. To bring all of the public schools in the province up to acceptable structural and health standards would cost 500 million. The cost of the security alone for the games is close to 1 billion.
3. And so on, and so on…………

I just cut and pasted the info from the previous post below rather than rewrite the whole introduction ... Click the pictures to enlarge them ...
Well, so far, for a refreshing change, its been a pretty busy month ... Last week, we finished what I thought at the time was a pretty big claro walnut slab table, 3 x 10. Turns out, its not so big. Well be able to put four of them, with chairs, on one of the tables we are designing and building with my neighbor, Steve Holman of Holman Studios ... The first of two tables in this commission is getting under way below and will be 26 x 9. Then we have another slightly smaller one to build that will be only 8 x 20. Steves shop is just down the road from ours and we often collaborate on projects like these tables and like this project we did last year.

Heres the cad drawing ... The top is divided into seven sections with a 2" cherry border on the outside edges, around a 24" band of black granite, with veneered curly maple center sections. There will be a bunch of flip up power and data ports in the center sections. As you can see from the drawing, there will be some engineering involved to support the cantilevered stone. The base will break down into about 10 separate boxes for shipping and assembly on site. Weve opted to use 1.5" x 2.5" rectangular steel tubing with 1/4" walls to support the granite. Wed probably prefer to use something taller, like 4", but than we get into a bump your knees issue. We wouldnt want that, for sure. Anyway, weve done a couple of tests and we think it will be ok. Well know more when we get the actual steel from Melansons next week. We cant cut the steep angles easily with either of our saws.
The steel has to be cut on a 67.5 degree angle like the timberstrand in the temporary working base above that we set up in the driveway ... Its hard to see, but the lengths of the steel pieces follow the curve of the table top. Thats the base for half of the table you see above ...
Trevor and Sam sitting at the end section ... you can see about half of the 44.5" wide second section in this photo too ... Its seven feet across the narrow end where they are sitting and curves out to 9 in the middle ...
Here weve assembled two of the middle sections on the table saws to check Trevors routing for the Norse connectors and some plywood butterflies well use to level the surfaces of the table where they butt together ...
There are a lot of operations to get this thing into shape ... Plus, only one section is less then 8 so we have to index the pieces, cut one end, and then shift them 18" to cut the other end on the cnc. That, actually, worked really slick.
Heres the view of the boys from the halfway point ... The raised sections are templates for the granite cutter ...
This is the drawing for the second table in the commission, a somewhat smaller 8 x 20, 5 piece table ... same deal, different dimensions ...

Ma ... on the new porchette ....

Still working on it ... My firewood arrived Saturday, and construction will have to take a break until thats stacked in the shed. Fortunately, we were able to get the little bit of inside framing work done this past weekend and were good to go ... Well finish the outside over the course of the summer, with the work sprinkled in at a little more leisurely (if thats possible considering I started back in April) pace ... All work, (even if its fun work), and no play makes Jack a dull boy .... Click the photos to enlarge them ...

The photo above is from my big Matisse book and it shows 16 of the 22 photos sent by Matisse to Etta Cone, showing states in the development of Large Reclining Nude, 1935. I wish I had photographed the various stages in the finishing of this table. I wouldnt have 22 photos, but Id have a bunch....

For the first 10 years of my career as a furniture maker, I worked mostly in natural woods, cherry, walnut and figured maple, finishing them with clear oil finishes, sometimes with accents of milk paint, slowly developing what I came to think of as my studio style. Most of my customers either lived in Vermont full time or had second homes here and were content with the sort of contemporary or Shaker look that my style evoked. For the next 20 years, some of those clients and others who came my way asked me to make more formal pieces, often designed to blend in with antiques or family pieces they already owned. I found I enjoyed the new design challenge, making pieces fit with an existing environment. Its never been easy though, this coloring of wood, And, even now that Ive been doing it for a long time, its still a challenge. Just this last week, we struggled somewhat with a table for a Boston client, who, from the start, requested a formal, somewhat shiny finish for his table ...Not too shiny, but just the right shiny.... Shinys tough. If its too perfect, it can look just like an off-the-rack piece from a local furniture store, but with the right shiny combined with our method of handscraping the big flat surfaces, you can get that wonderful, waterlike surface you find most often on really fine antiques .... It takes patience, a willingness to experiment, and sometimes a certain fearlessness that you just know you have to just have at it and things will be fine. Ive stripped a few and thats never fun, but when you get one just right, well, thats really fun ... I tried to write down the process both before I started and after I finished this one, but no matter how hard you try, it wont be exactly the same next time. Make samples, in this case, include the inlays in the samples. For this table we used several coats of diluted Lockwood water based aniline dyes, occasional masking tape on the inlays, some shellac, and after many samples two coats of Minwax brush on fast dry poly, gloss under, semi gloss over, sanded lightly with 1200 and top coated with an oil poly mix. It took, off and on,most of a week. You feel like Matisse, a little ....

Click the photos to enlarge them

The photos below were all taken with the florescent lights on. We werent totally happy until we turned them off and turned on the chandeliers that Jim cleaned and are still hanging in the finish room ... Nobody has florescents lights in their dining room anyway...

Two of our many varnish samples .. same color on the left, natural cherry on the right

The underside is finished just like the top ... Watertown runners from Moin hardware.

Will, burning in the mark and date

Leg and apron and inlay

The shine under the regular lights

The leaves
Winston Churchill said once Success is the ability to move from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm ... Just have at it ...

Yesterday I finished painting the dresser for the guest room - I used a custom mix of Annie Sloan chalk paint - Barcelona Orange and Emperors Silk to make a coral. I used about 3/4 of a quart of Barcelona Orange to a tester size of Emperors Silk. Id recommend starting with less orange, since you can always mix more in :)


This little dresser has come a LONG way ...


I started with this $25 craigslist find - good construction with solid wood dove tailed drawers but a formica top ?? No clue why that was decided ... but I thought this would be a good test for the Annie Sloan chalk paint which says that it can be painted on anything without priming.

Back to loading it in the car ... once it was in the car I realized that it had some water damage on the bottom (I really need to look more carefully from now on...) I wouldnt of bought it if I had seen that, but figured that I could come up with a creative solution ...

After realizing that I couldnt sand it down I took the hammer to the front and cut off the sides with the jigsaw


With both sides off - we built a frame out of 1 x 3s to attach the new legs to



Drilled holes for the threaded anchor


Inserted the threaded anchor in the hole


and attached the legs (purchased from Lowes)

The whole piece was sanded minimally and took three coats of the chalk paint ...

I decided to keep the original hardware since the top drawer had so much hardware, which = lots of $$ - and I wanted to try refinishing them anyways

I gave them a coat of Rustoleum oil rubbed bronze 

 and re attached once dry


What a difference! So far I have been incredibly happy with the chalk paint - it was easy to apply, adhered well, dries quickly, has low VOCs and seems to be very durable. Also, clean up a breeze - a brush can rinse clean with just water!




I love the fun pop of color that this adds to the space!

and one last before and after



I love how it is now lifted off of the ground - it makes is look less heavy!

I was ambivalent about using coral, but now that I see it with the lamp shade and next to the other fabrics in the room I am loving the direction that it is taking!

The lampshade was covered in this fabric - look for a tutorial soon!

We are buying the wood for the headboard tomorrow ... wish me luck that I can finish it by the weekend (when our vip guests arrive!)

-- 
Make sure to enter for a chance to win a copy of Flea Market Finds with Matthew Mead. It is a must read for any DIYer!