The Dremel as a router

I spent a lot of time inlaying butterfly joints in the slabs this past week. It's a lot of material to remove, and this project has been lagging, so I decided to go with the less traditional methods of waste removal. I drilled out holes with the cordless drill, and then proceeded to handle waste removal with a Dremel tool mounted in the router base that's made by Stewart MacDonald. The butterfly joints go pretty deep, so I went with one of the high speed spiral bits to help handle trimming, since the cutting edge is full length, and they're long enough for the job.

As a hand tool purist, I would be disgusted with myself if it didn't feel so much closer to a hand tool in use than a regular router does. It's slow and steady, pretty controllable, and because it's underpowered, (and because it was cutting through an inch of walnut) it offered more tactile feedback than a regular router would: A full-strength router might buck just enough to let you know it ruined something as it goes by, but not necessarily. So I'm pretty happy with this setup.

There's only one real problem, and it's the reason the ear muffs are in the photo. It sounds almost exactly like this:

Gratuitous wood porn.

So, I've shown pictures of the slabs already. But now that they're finished, and shiny, and the shellac is providing all of the optical benefits that I wanted, the tables look really, really good. So, I felt like showing off.

Hand plane use in a modern shop

Last week I found an example of one of those times when nothing else will do but a traditional tool.

The curly maple for these tables is very curly. But the larger piece was a little bit wound.

We don't have a functioning jointer that's large enough for this board, even if it wasn't highly figured. And I'm not dumb enough to shove the thing through my DW planer and hope for the best. We do have a drum sander. It's not great, but it works well enough. Like thickness planers, what you put in, is what you get out... only thinner. I needed to flatten one face of the board before the drum sander would make a parallel flat surface. So I turned to my hand planes, and a couple of T-track scraps to use as winding sticks.

Most of my planes are bedded at 45 degrees, and they made for a lot of tear-out in either direction. But then I pulled out my high angle smoother, which is bedded at 50 degrees, started working at an angle (as opposed to in-line with the grain) and found the wood to be a lot more cooperative.

A smoother (short-ish plane) isn't what most folks would consider to be the ideal tool for jointing. Something longer would be called for, etc. This is true, but even with that knowledge, the smoother worked well enough. I just wanted to take the wind out before going to the drum sander, without getting a lot of tear-out. And it worked just fine for that. It took me a good hour or so to get this particular slab under control... and that was just planing down two high corners, so I could take it to the drum sander.

Happy with the performance of the high angle plane, I sent a quick email to Lie-Nielsen after I was done, inquiring about the rumored 55 degree #3 smoother. I got back the following from Kirsten:

"Good morning, James.

Excellent timing!  We actually just released our 55 degree frog for the No. 3.  It should be appearing on our website within the next week or so.  The cost is $85."

So, for those of you who have been waiting/hoping... they're now available, and will be on their website this week.

Of course, that frog would only help me if I had a L-N #3, so the real cost will be a lot higher when I get there.

Wood porn

So, with a few months worth of solid work behind me, I have time to revisit the slab tables again. They're coming along nicely, too. More details soon enough, but I was impressed enough with the wood, and with the camera in my phone, that I had to share.

On a smaller scale...

So, I think that one of the worst lagging parts of the 80s for me is the notion that ideas have to be original. It's gotten into my head enough that there are times when I almost discount an idea, just because I've seen or heard of it before.

Today was a good example of that. I got into the shop and I was sketching the slabs and brainstorming, and trying to think of just what kind of base to use, etc. And then it occurred to me that I might make a scale model.

I almost didn't. I've seen other furniture builders make them, and it seems cute, but somehow not quite my thing. But as I was sketching, I realized very quickly that a 2 dimensional sketch just isn't the same thing, and it won't give me a feel for how the proportions are going to play out when I build the thing. I love the table I made for our living room, for example, but I think if I had to do it over again, I might move the legs inwards, just by an inch or two.

Anyway, I took some rough measurements of the table, and I got out the drawing for the slab table form last July to get an idea of what kind of dimensions I was dealing with. Then I divided everything by eight, ran the math, and went to make miniature parts.

The results are pretty cool. It's a neat design. But I also noticed a few other things. I like the idea of using these proportions, but for a larger project, like a trestle table for the dining room. I like using the trestles with the stretcher on top. But I also like it with the stretcher on the bottom. And while the idea was to make a slab table for a live edge piece of wood, the proportions look good with a squared off plank, too.

Since the point, for me, was to play with proportions, and not to execute the joinery in miniature, I made the base so that the trestles could slide along the stretcher. It was a huge help, and I noticed pretty quickly that too close to the ends and too close to each other are pretty easily spotted. The perfect spacing is going to be less obvious, but I can take pictures and compare.

I had other ideas once the proportions were out of my head. I worked out the joinery a year and a half ago, but I had a few new ideas for usage this afternoon, to make a larger table, with 4 legs, instead of 2 trestles, but that's another plan for another project, and I still have to get through these ones.

When the new ideas come out, I know I'm in a good place.

More soon.

New Slab Tables

I've had these two slabs for around 4 years now. They're both curly maple, I'm pretty sure they're from the same tree, and I'm pretty sure that the tree had an ant problem, which would be the reason for the holes, and the coloring of the wood.

When I bought them, I really had no idea what I should do with them to really make the most of them. I'm still not sure. But I do know that there's always more wood, and gorgeous wood that I can't figure out how to use is less useful to me than gorgeous wood that I can build with. And leaving them up on the rack just isn't really appropriate for my operation right now. These tables are speculative pieces, and they will be available for sale.

I'm still trying to figure out what each table is going to look like. I imagine it will be related to this table that I built a year and a half ago. But I still need to figure out how I'm going to trim the ends, etc. And the slab with the more severe taper will be a little more challenging when it comes to design.

I pulled these off the rack a month or two ago, and eventually put them back when I started messing with benches. Tonight I took them back out, and took time to start picking out the dirt and grass and debris from the ants' nest in the larger slab, and to pry out the bark inclusions. I was surprised at how much of a difference it made to have the bark removed: suddenly, there was more surface variation than just the ants' nest in the end.

Surprisingly, most of the holes do not go clear through the board. But at least one does. : )

I also took the time to dig away at a punky section on the larger board, first with a small chisel, then with a bigger chisel, and finally with a small hatchet.

Done.

Last Wednesday and Thursday I got going on finishing this table. last Friday I brought it home. I got lucky, it turned out to be as cool as I'd hoped when I set out, and the black finish on the legs worked the way I thought it would. It was one of those cases where I knew it had the possibility of going either way, and still went with my gut instinct. So it's reassuring to know my instinct worked out on this one.

Almost there.

Coffee table base

The crazy joint that holds everything together was a real head scratcher, as I said before. Getting it all laid out and cut was an adventure, too, but it turned out pretty well. When the cross pieces supporting the top slide into place, it locks everything up nicely, which made for a pretty simple assembly in the end.

I hand-planed the pieces for the base this morning, so they're ready for staining, and got the last of the joinery fitted and glued up this afternoon. All things considered, it went really smoothly.

Next step is to work out the points where the top will be attached to the base, and then I can start staining and finishing. I'm not 100% sold on the proportions as it is, but I still have yet to stain the base, and put the finish on everything, and that can really change the way something looks... So I have hope that things will unfold well.

Coffee table day 3, serious head scratching.

So, the top of the table got glued up on Friday, and while it still needs to be sanded, it looks good, and I'm pretty happy about that.

Later Friday and most of yesterday, I spent my time trying to figure out what sort of base to put under the table, so it would look good, and proportionally... nice. And once I figured that out, I had to figure out how to put it together... which was today's task.

The base itself is relatively simple in appearance, but there's a lot of joinery issues, since I don't want to just screw everything together. So, today I spent my time trying to do an accurate drawing in an isometric view... which is a fancy way of saying "quasi-3-D." It's what draftspersons used before we had computer rendering.

I still need to get around to learning how to render things on a computer, but I can say that I think that drawing everything out on paper is inordinately helpful, especially on things like this. It's helpful because it forces me to basically build the object on paper, and deconstruct it... and it highlights the areas where I don't entirely understand what's going on immediately. And it's much better to have that happen on paper than once I start cutting wood.

So, here's the photo summarizing the past day or two. Sketches on yellow paper, followed by more drawing on a large piece of 'real' paper. The isometric drawings are the dark lines. There's more on the rest of the page, but it doesn't show up as clearly, it's not as dark, or as dense.

And, there's a seagull feather. We've been finding a few of them in the shop lately... I guess Harvey's been busy. :)

Coffee table, day one.

So, I'm still waiting to hear back from a client about choosing a final design for a project, so I took this afternoon to work on a coffee table for my house.

The slab is a piece of English brown oak I bought a couple of years ago in Pennsylvania, shortly after I left school. It's gorgeous, and perfectly quarter-sawn, but the problem is that it's the exact center of the tree, dead center.

For those that don't know much about wood, I'll explain a few things.

Quarter-sawn means the board is cut radially from the center of the tree, so that the growth rings are running perpendicular to the board. This minimizes wood movement, so warping isn't as much of an issue. It also reveals the medullary rays of the tree, which are cells running radially out from the center of the tree. In the picture at left, they appear on the sides of the photo. For the tree, they transport water and other things between rings, moving minerals and other things into the inner layers. For furniture, well, they look pretty cool. Oak in particular has some spectacular medullary rays, which is one of the reasons that quarter-sawn oak figured so prominently in furniture from the arts and crafts period. Stickley furniture in particular used a lot of quarter-sawn oak.

The pith of the tree is the exact center of the trunk. Typically, it's very unstable, and prone to splitting. And, sure enough, as you can see in the picture, it did. When I bought the board, this had already happened, but the rest of the board promised to be really, really gorgeous, so I bought it anyway. And sure enough, when I splashed it with some water, the real colors came out. But so did some of the issues.

The rest of the pictures show me going thorough the process of figuring out where I wanted to put in wooden dovetailed "butterfly" joints to hold the slab together as a table top, cutting mortises, and inserting the butterfies. At that point, it was time to go home. But this is just the start of what will clearly be a pretty cool looking table, so I'm sure there will be more to come about this in the future.

Apologies about all the text squished into the sides. Next time I'll do a better job of organizing this.

Luckily for me, the split down the middle was pretty straight- forward. It was more or less continuous for the length of the board, and it was pretty clear that the two halves would come apart pretty easily.

The wood is still wet in this photo, but this is a good approximation of what the final color will look like... this table is going to look really good.

There were a few parts I had to saw through to separate the two halves, but they came apart pretty cleanly.

I used a jigsaw to make the cuts. But I had to loosen the base to let the saw tilt back and forth, because the orientation of the crack changed along the length of the board.

Inside the crack, things were a little gross. Some of the wood had either rotted, or gotten some kind of fungus. I'm not sure which.

I was able to scrape out the gunk and softer spots with a small drawknife and a couple of card scrapers.

Once everything had been cleaned up, the resulting gap is a little wider, anda little uneven, but very organic looking. Honestly, I wasn't sure how it would look, but it looks pretty cool.

It's funny... sometimes working with the wood, and allowing it to dictate some of the form makes the work easier, and helps make the final product look a little more interesting.

I used colored paper (actually, pink post-its) to cut different sized and shaped butterflies. these are the ones I settled on.

The butterflies have to be pretty thick, since they're going to provide some rigidity across the gap. The top will also be supported from underneath, but this ensures that the top itself still acts as a solid piece.

Originally, I tried cutting them out of the scraps left over from trimming the board down, but those scraps were full of cracks, and they didn't look like they'd hold up very well. So these ones are cut from quarter-sawn white oak.

Butterflies mortised into place. I haven't glued anything up yet, because I want to fine tune one of the butterflies. It's easy to lay things out and get them to fit in tightly as individuals. But one of them doesn't fit quite right when everything is together, so I may have to cut a new one to make it fit.

One more shot. This one gives a better idea of what the gap looks like.