Santa's Workshop 2009 - Writing Desks

Ever since Sarah and I were married, we have exchanged hand-made gifts on Christmas Eve, a tradition that we have also shared with our two daughters. For me, the crafting began in November when I bought the materials I'd need for my projects from Home Depot. (I'd love to buy rough lumber and mill it but until I have a planer and a jointer, I have to buy my wood pre-milled.)

For my daughters, I built two versions of the same thing: a small writing desk with an internal divider for paper, pens, etc. I used half-inch poplar, four inches wide. I cut the sides to length while mitering them on my chopsaw then I cut the dadoes for the tops and bottoms on my table saw. Even my smallest dado combination was too wide so I just used my regular blade and cut two dadoes side by side. The tops and bottoms are hardboard that I cut with the circular saw and cleaned up with my block plane.



For assembly, I taped the back sides of the miters with blue painters tape, spread the glue, and held it all together with a band clamp. I used a couple other clamps to clamp it down at the corners to keep it good and flat (the top of my table saw was good for that, as you can see.)

Cutting the top off of a box like this seems like it should be easy but it has caused me trouble every time I've done it. I need to come up with a better technique. I didn't wreck anything but the top and bottoms don't meet nearly as neatly as I would like. Maybe hot-gluing some scraps inside to keep it all even as I run it through the table saw would help? Regardless, I cleaned up the top and bottom with a block plane and sand paper so they came out OK. The divider inside the box (with rounded corners) provides just enough friction to keep the lids closed and provide just the right amount of resistance when opening them. That is a nice feature of my design that I didn't anticipate.

The thin stripe on the front of the box in the picture is evidence of a lapse in concentration while I was cutting the tops off the boxes. I wasn't thinking and made a cut in the wrong place. After a bit of head scratching (every shop needs a chair or stool for long bouts of thinking) I decided to glue a thin strip of cherry in the mistake and show it off as a decorative feature. It works!


The finish is a coat of urethane inside and out (not on the hard-board, of course).
A close friend gave me a set of plastic triangles that elevate workpieces off of the bench for finishing that are very, very helpful. He probably has no idea how much I use them!

Here's a summary of the highlights of the design:

• Sides are 1/2" x 4" poplar
  
• Top and bottom are 3/16" hard-board, smooth side out
  
• The boxes are square, about 12"x12" inside dimension
  
• The corners are mitered and do not use splines
  

This design is so flexible and easy to build that I suspect I'll make a few tool and storage boxes using this technique.

Santa's Workshop 2009 - Spiral Candle Holder

The last gift I made for Christmas, 2009 (with a lot of help from my youngest daughter) is this spiral candle holder. It contains 24 small candle holes (1/2") and one regular candle hole (7/8").

I actually designed the spiral a year ago but didn't get around to finishing it until this year. Drawing a large spiral is not as easy as it may appear at first. I laid out a large piece of paper on the floor to start with. Next, I took a regular sized vegetable can (# 10?) and tied a long string around it with a pencil tied at the end. Using the can as the fulcrum, I drew a line on the paper while wrapping the string around the can, giving me one spiral-shaped line. I then moved the can over a bit (an inch or two) and repeated the process, giving me two roughly parallel spiral lines. This took a bit of experimenting so YMMV.

I cut out the spiral and traced it onto a sheet of half inch plywood. I then cut out the spiral with my jig saw. I smoothed the edges up, too, since this template can be used many times. I eyeballed where cuts should be to break up the spiral and cut them on the chop saw. So at this point, I had four curved pieces that when butted together formed a spiral.

Next, we laid out the ply wood pieces on a nice piece of clear 3/4"x5" poplar, traced the shapes, and cut the poplar into shorter pieces on the chopsaw. We used the scroll saw to cut out the individual blanks. Lots of sanding a smoothing ensued at this point to make the sides nice and soft.

Again, we eyeballed where the candle holders should go by laying them out on the spiral and getting what looked like the right layout. Then we traced each candle holder in place to make drilling the holes easier. I decided to finish the pieces with urethane before drilling so that I wouldn't have to worry about drips of glue getting in the holes and distorting their size. We finished all four sides, of course.

Drilling was pretty straight forward for my assistant as was inserting the candle ferrules. The big one fit nice an snug but the little ones each needed a drop of 5-minute epoxy to hold them in place.

This gift was a big hit and now we have a template to use to make many, many more if we want.

A Nice Trade

All that firewood has paid off! I traded about a cord for this old utility trailer. The lights are broken but that's OK since I'm mostly going to be banging around the woods with it. I had to replace the coupler (from Northern Tool) so for about $30, I got a new trailer. I'll rig up some lights on a 2x4 or something so I can take it on the road but I don't have to do that for a while yet.
The picture, above, was taken after we had cut a bunch of small trees to decorate our school's Winter Fair. The trees all go up in the auditorium at school to create a little forest grove where people can eat their lunch and listen to live music. It's quite beautiful. (In case you're wondering, yes: I drove it on the road without lights. But hey, this is Vermont in deer season so nobody noticed! That and I didn't drive through town or anything.)

The Same Axe Twice, orThe Woodchopper's Lament

After 3 years of hard use, my axe handle finally broke today while splitting some oak. The wood was from an oak tree we felled this summer that had been threatening the house.
This is the best axe I've ever used for splitting wood. It's the Iltis Oxhead splitting axe and (as long as the wood is seasoned) it almost always splits on the first strike. Luckily, after Sarah got it for me for my birthday a few years ago, I bought two spare handles to have on hand so when it broke today, I was able to replace it and get back to work quickly.

I find that I much prefer to split wood by hand then using a gas powered splitter. The gas splitters are loud, smelly, and hard on your back. You can really only be efficient with one (IMO) if you have three people working it: one to run the ram; one to set the wood; and one to feed the wood to the person setting the wood in the ram. I don't get into the whole John Henry thing: I don't think I can beat a gas splitter one-on-one, but by splitting 30-45 minutes a day, I can get through a lot of wood and get a nice workout to boot. It's really the only way to go!

Study Nook Gets a Nice Top

I blogged about this built-in desk and cupboard in March, '09. Before that, we had a set of wooden utility shelves from Ikea. The Ikea shelves were very functional but not very attractive and we really needed a spot for Helen to do homework.
We lived with the plywood until last weekend when we went to East Wareham, MA to pick up a piece of Fireslate that we had cast to fit. The nook isn't 100% square so I made a template (including a 2" hole in back left corner for power cords, etc.) out of construction paper and sent it to the folks at Fireslate to have it made. It only took them a couple days and it came out great.

Now the homework area has a really nice, smooth work surface and it matches the rest of the kitchen.
We used Fireslate for our kitchen counter tops as well as our fireplace surround and we love it. We have to treat it with Tung oil every few months but other than that, it's pretty care free. That and it looks great.

Two-Man Saw Sharpening

Each year at our kids' school, there's a Harvest Festival. Last year we started having some events for the older kids: Lumberjack Contests.

One of the key events was the two-man saw competition but in order for it to work, we have to have two saws that are in good shape. So this year I took it upon myself to figure out how to sharpen, set, and generally tune up a two-man saw. I found two very helpful resources: The Crosscut Saw Company web site, and the book The Ax Book by D. Cook. Both were invaluable.

The first thing I did was to build this jig from scrap wood I had lying around the shop:



Then I assembled the tools I'd need:


...from left to right:

1. A file-cleaning brush to keep the bastard file clean
   
2. A wrench to tighten the bolts that clamp the saw blade in the jig
   
3. A small file (didn't use this one much)
   
4. A Stanley saw-set
   
5. A bastard file. This is the one that did most of the work.
   
6. An ax stone to clean up the rust, etc. on the blade. Also, it's used to take the wire burr off or each tooth after filing and before setting.
   

First, I jointed the saw which is just running the file over all the teeth and rakers to make sure they're all at the same height. You have to be careful to keep the file perpendicular to the plane of the blade.

After jointing, I filed each tooth. This was quite time consuming as each tooth has to be filed on both sides at the correct angle. Once I got the hang of it, though, and came up with a system it became kind of enjoyable. Almost meditative, really. This is when I used the ax stone: I'd run it up and down the saw on the flat to take off the wire burr from filing each tooth.



Once the teeth were filed, I worked on getting the rakers square and sharp. The idea is that the teeth slice the wood fibers and then the rakers take out the chips.

The rakers done, I set about setting the teeth. Using the Stanley saw set wasn't the exact right tool, but I was able to get it to work. The right way is to use a hammer and small anvil that's at the correct angle.

I was working on two saws and the steel for each was quite different. One was much more pliable than the other. In fact, one was brittle enough that I broke two teeth off with the saw set.

The Result
Oddly enough, the saw that I didn't think would work well turned out to be the better of the two. The key thing was that the set of the teeth was critical, even though they were plenty sharp. Without the proper set of the teeth, the saw will cut for a bit (about an inch or so) and then start binding up. It also helped to clean off the rust on the blade with the ax stone.

I'll definitely do this again: it was a very gratifying project.

Slide Rule Display Stands

I've been collecting slide rules since I was in Junior High. At one point, around 15 years ago, I lost my whole collection and have been rebuilding it ever since. The trouble with my new collection, though, is that it's just been sitting in a pile on my dresser: nowhere, really, to be seen. So I took it upon myself to build some display stands to get them out in the open.



It's quite a basic design. I made a jig for my table saw so that all of the triangle sides are cut at the same angle and at the same length. Then I cut the bases by eye on the chop saw and glued them up. I held them together with staples as they dried and then pulled the staples. The dowel holders on the bottom go through the back and extend out about 1 3/8" so that they act as the legs upon which the whole things leans. I wanted to be able to display two per stand, hence the second level of dowels. They work pretty well.




As you can see, I'm sharing our display cabinet with Sarah's basket collection and a bunch of history books but at least now the slide rules are out in view! There isn't enough room to show them all, so I just have the best ones out. The others are displayed on the desk where I do my daily work.
As it turns out, I'm not nearly as geeky about my slide rules as some people on the internet. Still, though, I enjoy having them and I even know how to use them for the simple stuff: multiplication, division, square roots, and cube roots. But that's enough to get me by. When I was a junior in high school I took a physics class in which we were not allowed to use calculators in our daily class and lab work: we could only use slide rules. Our teacher had a giant six or eight foot long slide rule hung above the chalk board at the front of the class upon which he did all his calculations. He was almost 7' tall. It was an impressive sight!