The Cadillac Man has left the building...

Even after spending as much time as I did on tracing a 3-d shape into 2-D patterns, and even after all the time I spent getting the mating faces and miters cut perfectly, shaping this chair base has turned a lot of things upside down. The entirety of the thing is made up of complex curves, but there are ways to lay those out, if you have precise reference surfaces to work from. But once I'd sawn rough shapes in two dimensions out of the blanks, there wasn't a lot that I could do to hold everything in place on a router table or shaper. That's not to say that I didn't try, but the harder I tried to force the process to work, the less it worked. I had roughly sawn blanks, but I couldn't get the precise reference surfaces that I wanted.

14 years ago, I worked for a company in Houston that provided Remote Operated Vehicles for offshore use in the Gulf of Mexico, and around the world. The vehicles were basically robotic submarines, connected to the ships and/or oil rigs with long tether cables, and piloted by operators on the surface. Operators 'flew' these remotely operated submarines remotely, and operated the robotic arms when required. Some of the more advanced models had various functions that are roughly analogous to cruise control, including a position holding function. Because he loved his cruise control, and the ease of use that it allowed him, one of my co-workers leisurely announced one day that "I'm a Cadillac Man, you know?"

One day, a job called for more accurate position holding than the computer could really handle, given changing currents and computer processing speeds. (This was 1998.) Cadillac Man told the boss it couldn't be done. Someone else stepped up, and said he thought he could pilot the sub well enough to do what had to be done... And so he did. Cadillac Man left the control room in shame. He'd traded aspiration to skill for reliance on machines.

I spent so much time messing around with patterns, figuring it would be easier for me if the machines could give me the reference surfaces that I wanted. I wanted identically smooth surfaces, and I didn't want to have to make them myself. This, despite my years at North Bennet, and learning how to do things by hand. And finally something snapped. So I pulled out the drawknives, and spokeshaves, and commenced to make a hell of a mess... and to shape some very attractive chair legs.

 I gave up on the notion of doing this with precision, because the truth is that even if I'd gotten precisely milled surfaces, there was only so much that this would give me,  and sometimes the only way forward, is 'blindly, with doubt and faith.' (I'm NOT the religious type, believe me.) I remember thinking to myself 'Elvis has definitely left the building on this one...' But at the end of the process, it was actually a lot easier, and a lot more controllable.

The not-quite epilogue... I spent part of today sanding down the new legs for the chair that I'm rebuilding. They look good. There are spots here and there that don't look perfect to me, but I'm a neurotic perfectionist sometimes. That's why I'd rather leave it to the machines, it's less nerve wracking. I say not quite, because there are still a few things that need to be done, including inserting dowels into the legs to re-distribute some of the interior stresses, drilling for the seat post, and notching the ends of the legs for the hardware. 

Head scratcher of the day

This week I've been making a new base for an Italian-made office chair, as the original legs are splitting. (Bad hardware design.)

The base is made of four saber legs, joined in the center with some really funky nonsense. Basically, two opposing legs butt-jointed, end to end, but at 30 degrees to horizontal, I'm presuming with dowels inside to hold everything together. (That's how I'm gonna do it, anyway...)

And then two more coming into the side, with a weird half-miter, again at 30 degrees. 

So, the drill is, mill the blanks, and cut mating surfaces while there are still reference surfaces to use, drill for joinery (dowels) and then shape.

It's taken the better part of a day and a half to get the mitered surfaces cut...

Oy.

Shaping starts next week.

Pattern tracing tool

I'm in the middle of a repair that calls for new legs, and they need to be identical, which means pattern work. But there are some compound angles and curves involved, so tracing patterns requires some trickery.

I won't go too far into the logistics, but having one of these helps. Basically, it's a straight edge that comes up at 90 degrees to the surface that it rides on, and at the bottom of the edge is a mechanical pencil. So, regardless of where the object is, above the plane that the pattern is traced onto, the projected profile will be accurately traced.

And yes, that's a Miller dowel being used to push the button on the pencil. Miller dowels! Oh, the shame!

The basic premise...

So, this is the gizmo I've been working on. It's in a mostly-done state right now, still needing to be burnished and waxed.

What you're looking at is a stoutly made, fully enclosed vise, made with a veneer press screw. The entire top surface is reference-flat, and at 90 degrees to the inside surfaces of the vise. The purpose of this device is to assist in cutting co-planar tenon shoulders, regardless of the angle that's required. The basic theory is this: clamp the part to be cut into the vise, and align the shoulder scribe lines with the top edge of the gauge stick. The saw will then be used to cut the shoulder, sliding back and forth across the top surface of the vise. This will ensure that all shoulder surfaces are 100% in the same plane. In the photo above, the part being cut is at a simple angle. I will also make a pair of pivoting pads, so that parts may be set up for compound angles.

Why did I bother with this?

The tenon shoulder is the most critical, visible part of a mortise and tenon joint. If one of them is poorly cut, there will be a gap, or the specified dimension will be changed. On a table stretcher, for example, the distance between legs is defined by the distance between tenon shoulders. If you're just bracing table legs, maybe this isn't such a big deal. But if you're making another part that will form a drawer enclosure, that dimension is more critical. If you're making a dresser, and you have many such parts, you really want them all to be the same. When you're fitting the joint, mortise walls can be pared back, tenons can be trimmed and shimmed, but cutting the shoulder is a one-shot operation. It has to be done right the first time.

Cutting square tenon shoulders is a snap with a table saw, and it's not much harder with a hand saw. Cutting simple angled tenon shoulders is pretty easy, too, though grain direction on porous wood can throw the saw off track if you're not careful.

Cutting tenon shoulders at a compound angle is possible on a table saw, but it's a hassle, and it took some interesting jiggery to make it work when I was learning to make chippendale style chairs in school. Cutting a compound angle joint with a hand saw is probably easier with a hand saw in that regard, but even still, there's a lot of care required. I suppose in a production environment, and given reference faces, I should just use a Domino machine and have done with it. But in a home shop environment, how do you set up for compound angle joinery and make it easy? Well, the gizmo at the top of this post is the answer.

This isn't my design. This is something that was shown to me when I was in school, that was brought over by a french chair maker. There's a companion jig that provides a way to clamp a piece and plane a reference flat surface, which will then be mortised into.  That'll possibly come next, but for now, this seemed like it would provide more capability.

Department of Redundancy Department

This is a detail shot of the tenon shoulder cutting fixture. To make doubly sure that the thing is strong, not only did I use drawbore pins, but I also wedged the tenons. I took my time double checking things before the glue up, because nothing's gonna loosen this thing up now. Was everything 100% perfect when the glue up began? I'll leave that to you to ponder, I admit to nothing.

I'm leaving details on the operation hazy until the whole project is together and done, but I'm pretty happy with how it's gone so far.

Bringing the lessons home.

One of the topics that's been in the back of my head for a while is how to be more efficient in the shop, and part of that is figuring out how to be more space-efficient. I don't plan to be in the huge shop forever, and I'm in the middle of brainstorming some space-efficient ways to do most of the same work I do now, in a smaller space. (This isn't really such a feat: 3500 sq ft is a LOT of space.) One part of the grand plan is to build most of the fixtures in a movable way, so that setting up shop next time around won't take so long.

Investing some time in the home shop is another part of the grand plan. In short, I want to take the lessons I've learned from working in a 3500 sq ft space, and see just how much I can do with 35 sq ft. Long-term, (in a year or three) I'll move the rest of the big shop into a smaller space. But the point of the home shop is that even if the work I do by day isn't always exciting, I want to be able to do stimulating work at home. After writing the Space and Mind entries, I tore apart my work area at the shop (again) and it's been flowing a LOT more smoothly since then. The home shop is next.

My work space at home has been languishing. I set it up while Ariel was in the middle of nursing school, which proved to be a bad idea. Ripping drawer parts by hand while she's trying to study for a test? Yeah, not a great plan. But she's been out for a year now. In the meantime, the space has been collecting crap: Bike parts, unfinished projects, and a box of stuff that has yet to go to Goodwill. And the placement of the bench by the front door made it a de facto crap catcher.

Yeah. Not pretty. Since those photos, I've cleared it out, and I'm the process of making it into a more productive area.

One part of building up the home shop is to start making a few hand tool jigs that I got to see first hand when I was at school. We had a chair maker visit the school from France, and he showed us some of the jigs they used there to make certain tasks easier. The first of these will be a clamp that's used to help saw tenon shoulders. We were always taught at school that the easiest way to cut clean, square shoulders was to use the table saw. So when the Frenchman came by to show off his stuff, I was very impressed. And I think it's going to prove to be a good project for use at home.

Step one will be to break this big hunk of 12/4 hard maple into 3"x3" billet stock...

We now return you to your regularly scheduled...

...whatever?



I've been plenty busy in the shop this month. Not too busy to write, but busy.

I spent the past month and some watching the virtual world go by. Safety week came and went. Chris Schwartz is building campaign furniture, which I've been interested in for years. (Just not interested enough to buy the $500 coffee table book.) And a stink was raised over FWW daring to suggest that bloggers were scum who should require a stamp of approval.

I agree with FWW. Information overload on the web continues, and anyone with a web cam or an iPhone can document their path to novice-dom with ease, and upload it instantly. And so much of it is redundant. I've read entries defending the online woodworking community, and some of them make valid points about crowd-sourcing and so on, and that's nice. But so much of it is exhaustive coverage of old ground that it kills me. I agree that there should be a registry of recommended bloggers or podcasters, because the Internet is only a useful tool if you have a way to discriminate, and weed out the useless or pointless crap.

I think it's ironic that FWW would be the ones to try to sound the call for Quality Control of some sort, given that their own publication isn't what it used to be, and that it's becoming redundant, too.

Meanwhile, I still wasn't writing. At some point in April I hit a wall, and it felt like the only reason I was writing was to maintain a presence in a community that I didn't feel connected to anymore. And I'd be damned if I was going to add more virtual drool to the puddle.

I like to read about techniques and projects that are above and beyond what I know, which is why I like the OLD FWW issues. I like this sort of content, because I believe that you have to get out of your comfort zone to get better. Practicing the same novice skill set ad nauseum will only make you a really well-practiced novice. And I have no interest in that.

I'll be writing again soon, but I'm going to start making a point to seek out more interesting objects and techniques to talk about, predicated on the notion that you have a bench, and a box full of basic tools and skills to work with. I'm sure that means I'll be writing less often than twice per week, but hopefully the results will justify the extra time.