Woodworking Hobbies

My son wanted a book case. Wow! He actually asked me for something. He wanted to pay for the materials. I showed him several sets of plans I had from woodworking magazines and he picked one out. I did a calculation for the costs for the materials and he just about gave birth! This unit took 53 board feet of solid red oak and a full sheet of 3/4 furniture grade oak ply

Anyways away I go. Off to Riemer's Hardwoods in Abbotsford BC. One of my favorite places to shop next to KMS Tools just down the road from there. One thing about buying from here is that their solid wood is actually a full inch thick. Every plan I have seen is based on stock 3/4 inches thick. When you buy your 1" thick stock that is so called planed you are really only getting 3/4 inch and you are paying for sawdust that is left behind. So in any event, maybe it is good. If I bought the 3/4 stock, I would not need the thickness planer and have to haul away tonnes of saw dust and shavings. But this place does have really nice quality oak so I am happy.

This is what it all looked like when I started this project. My garage that is. I was accused by someone here, and promise not to mentions Rob's name, of having a neat and tidy garage. Well this is as neat as it gets and it did not stay that way long.

This is what a book case looks like. I need you to use your imagination here a bit. Note the relatively clear floor below the saw.

All those boards are 1" thick and are about to be planed to 3/4". And so it starts.

The plans called for the corner legs to be constructed and assembled by milling 8 approx 2" boards and daddoing four of them to receive the other four which were to be biscuit joined. I think that is a waste of time and effort. Biscuit joinery is a pain in the ass and not the strongest joint in my opinion. If you have a proper daddo and a good fit, and clamp it up proper, you do not need biscuits. The wood glues today are so strong that properly applied and clamped the part will never fail unless the wood fails along the grain lines.

Speaking of clamps. You may have a couple dozen assorted clamps but you need to go out an buy another couple dozen assorted sized clamps. In this photo, I used about 3/4 of my clamps just to glue up the four corner legs.

They end up looking something like this

I knew that there was going to be a lot of inside corners to deal with so I sanded these boards as I went along. It is so much easier to sand a flat board than to sand into corners of an assembled piece. Normally I sand to 150 grit but the plans called to sand to 220. I think that is a little overboard for oak. It already has a deep grain anyways. If it was maple or an exotic wood, I would but it don't think it is necessary for oak. But what the plans called for I did. So, three sandings. 80 grit, to remove the planner and edge planer cut marks, then 150 grit to remove the swirl marks from the 80 grit and finally the 220 grit. I wore out my old Makita random orbital sander after only 25 years of service (cheap piece of crap LOL) and replaced it with a nice Bosch random orbital sander that had a decent dust collection filter. But with the amount of sanding I did, that filter cartridge filled up right quick. I can't wear a paper dust mask cause my glasses keep fogging up on me so I just keep the garage door wide open, put a big honking fan at my back and sand away, blowing most of the dust out to the street to land on my neighbours black Dodge truck. I think he still likes me. Windy days are ideal. So, most of the pieces are cut and sanded. Only a few smaller trim pieces to be milled.

Now some more assembly. I said something about clamps before. BUY MORE FUCKING CLAMPS!



It is starting to come together now and look something like a book case.



I don't have the best tools for cabinetry. I have a Crapsman chop saw for cutting the pieces to fit and a contractors table saw to cut the ply and mill the solid stuff. But things do fit quite well this being considered. The plans called for trim pieces to be quarter cove. You can buy pre-milled quarter cove oak. But the goddam plans called for the 1/4 cove to have a 1/2 inch flat edge on one surface of the cove, and a 3/8" edge on the other. The fucking bastards! I suppose I could have just gone out and bought the pre-milled stuff and no one would know, but I would and that bothered me, so I milled it myself. Besides, that is part of the hobby.

I have a pretty decent router table set up and the choice of four good quality routers to use. One of them is actually a very cheap and quite old 1/4 inch Black and Decker router I got from my father in law. I gave him a more expensive Crapsman router in exchange for it. He is of the mind the bigger the better. I just love that little B&D I got from him. So easy to use with one hand. It really has its place in my collection of stuff and use it a lot. But mounted in the table is Bosch. Lots of power to run through the oak.

So more assembly, more gluing, very careful gluing. Everything is sanded now. If you have squeeze out and don't notice it, you will just scream at yourself when you apply the stain. Stain will not take where glue is on the wood TABERNAK! I learned this from experience. SO I was watching very close on the set up of this. My son wanted this to be stained black so any no taking of stain would show up like it was a neon light. The good thing is this. If there is glue present and noticeable after staining, being black, I can easily cover that up with a sharpie before applying the finish coat. Starting to look good as far as I am concerned.

Now for the staining and finishing of the case. But before that, the garage needs a MAJOR cleaning. I took out 3 1/2 garbage cans of saw dust and wood shavings to the municipal composting pit. I was offering the sawdust to everyone I know with gardens but found out sawdust is terrible for gardens. It robs to soil of nitrogen. Sawdust needs to be composted for at least a year before it goes into a garden. Well shit! So I had to truck it away with the scrap pieces as well.

I swept the garage, blew the floor and shelves, 3 goddam times, with the compressor. Then I vacuumed the floor. Then I brought in the leaf blower. Not the fairy who follows the Toronto Maple Leafs around either, but a real garden leaf blower. I blow all around that garage a few times for what seemed like hours to get rid of all that built up and settled dust before I go for the stain and finish coat. Then close up the garage and leave it over night.

Next morning I very lightly sweep the floor again with a wide soft push broom. There is not much dust there any more. Let it sit for another day and fly at the finishing.

Sonny wanted black stain. Minwax's only black stain is a two part product. Stain and finish at same time. I don't have a lot of confidence in such products so would not buy that. As well, it looked more like a solid black paint instead of stain. I saw ebony. Ebony is black right? Wrong. It was a very dark, dark walnut. But I really like the way it turned out. But it was not black. Tough shit son. That is what you get. I was expecting the grain to raise after applying the sealer before the stain, but if it did, it was not noticeable. I was surprised but went on.

The finish coat was going to be Minwax rattle can poly in a semi gloss. I gave the case three coats of this stuff. That took 5 cans of this stuff. Man was that expensive. I really need to take some course on using automotive spray guns and compressed air. I tried this a couple times before and ended in pretty dismal failure. But you can buy a gallon of Minwax Poly for the cost of three rattle cans, and this project "May" use about 1/8th of a gallon. It doesn't look like a big shelf but there is one hell of a lot of surface area to coat. The end result.

I am quite happy with the end result. I am sure the boy will like it. If not, I will keep it for myself. Regardless, I think I will build one much like it for myself except out of cherry. That will cost!

Hope you enjoyed the post. If you live close by and want a book case, come on by. I will drive you to Ikea.

 

Looks pretty cool! Yeah it can get expensive fast but then again you're doing this for fun not to save money. Have you looked into lathes? You can have some fun making bowls, candleholders, etc.. I did that as a kid with my dad and made some pretty cool bowls.

 

Ya know Joey. I have never had any interest in turning. Kinda strange. Maybe if I tried it, I would change my mind.

I said that I did not start woodworking until around 1992. That is not quite correct. I put together a burl table back around 1981 or so. Had an old 4 inch thick, three feet long by 1 1/2 foot wide hunk or Douglas Fir burl that a friend had pulled from the burn pile at a local lumber mill in Campbell River on Vancouver Island while I was there. Burls were almost a dime a dozen out there then. Anyhoo. I used my router to plane that down smooth on one side, sanded the shit out of it, coated it with a product called Crystal Sheen and mounted that to a stump of cedar. This made a beautiful burl table. My first wife kept that when we divorced about two years later. But that's OK. I made it for her and wanted nothing to do with it after I kicked her out of the house and changed the locks.

I understand I could have gotten thousands for that piece of wood if I were to take it to Japan. They apparently cut very thin veneers off burls and sell it at an amazing mark up.

 

I like how Ceasar thinks about work, he's got a much better life then I do

 

Cool Randy. had no idea you are that crafty. I've hand my hands on wood working too. being it kinda runs in the family as a work related skill set. I've had a few cool jobs where I needed to replicate old school building technics where lumber was of a size like a real 2x4s being a 2x4s Here I had some lumber ruff cut to match some existing lumber. these here are real 1x8"s needed for siding.

 

Out standing job and the finish is perfect imo.

Is that what they call the Mission style? Looks like it.

 

Dammit Jay. I don't know who that is in that picture but you have to have a word with him about safety. He should be using one of these if he is going to have his fingers that close to a spinning blade with not blade guard. Dam!

 

Ya. Mission or Arts and Crafts. Some may call it Shaker but I think the cove trim pieces takes it away from the simplicty of Shaker.

This was a little too plain for my liking. I think that a flute or two down each of the vertical slats, or the four corner post (not both) would add just that right touch of ornate features. That is easy enough to do if you have a plunge router or a well set up router table. I have both. I built my router table, the cabinet beneath and the adjustable fence for the table as well. Mostly solid oak and maple. The fence for that router table just looks like a piece of wood with a couple slots in it. There is actually several board feet of wood in the fence that is only about three feet in length and maybe 4 " square. But to get the moving parts and slots and everything else built to accommodate all the other pieces you can build to attach, you go through a lot of wood and have to edge join it all so that it will laminate nice clean and tight.

Next project, kitchen cabinets. After bringing all that sawdust into the wife's kitchen, I had better do something for her domain!

 

Post your cabinet making too. I need utility cabinets in the wash room and they're ridiculously priced.

Just going to use mdf.

 

Most of the painted cupboard doors out there are vinyl coated MDF. MDF is actually a very good product to work with for some instances, But damned, it is messy. You just have to make sure that shit stays well sealed from moisture. Otherwise it looks like it has developed cancer. When I was last at my lumber store and inquiring about the cherry plywood, they told me they cannot get it here. They sell cherry veneered MDF for cherry. Perfectly smooth. Unfortunately it is stupid heavy.

 

MDO works good if one can justfie the price LOL on the subject of using a push tool, this saw has an auto controlled feeder so what you see is just him touching ya know getting the feel, all is good he never even gets close. I will say being close as in like 5-6 feet that saw blade spinning is cool and creepy and knowing this is how it was done back in the days makes one go wow.

 

What the hell is MDO? Never heard of that. Maybe it is called something else here.

 

Medium density overlay panel, or MDO panel, is a paintable surface made of plywood with a weather-resistant resin overlay bonded to the wood by heat and pressure. The overlay, which has at least 27% resin content, resists water, weather, wear and degradation.

RVFR, layers of wood rather than ground up fiber, is that right?

 

I can see where that stuff would come in quite handy, but not for cabinetry. Maybe for outside cabinets, but not the kind I make. Isn't that the stuff that a lot of painted signs are made of?

 

Can anyone post up the rules on this before they start getting made up? This should include some translations of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics on veneering.

It's enough to have to work with Canadian and SOWese.

 

I saw this and thought of you Randy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfpo3MasyKQ

 

Beautiful book case Randy, and fun read. Thanks for sharing. So is furniture making a skill that one has to acquire when living in the great white north to keep from going stir crazy during the winter?:topsy_turvy:
John

 

Picked it up well after I moved from the prairies where polar bears fear the cold, to a very moderate temperature region on the south west coast. But we did get frost last night. My garage is not insulated to when it gets too cold, I do very little. Wood glue does not set well when it is really cold. Tkx for the compliment.

 

I was asked to post up the cabinet project. I finished that project quite a while ago but anyways, here it goes. The original cabinets had painted MDF doors with oak pull trim. The carcass of the cabinets were not European but a stile and rail design. The carcass was still in good shape. We wanted to paint the cabinets a charcoal grey rather than having it natural wood. So now I have to deal with building the doors. Seeing as the stiles and rails of the carcass were going to be seen, even though they were going to be painted, the deep grain of the oak was going to show, so I had to make the doors out of oak even though they were being painted as well.



As you can see in the below photo, the bottom of these cheap door fronts over time get water dripped on the and this MDF stuff swells badly.



This is what the project looked like in the raw.



This is a well used tool for this project. I made the router cabinet several years ago including the fence which is solid maple. Used a lot of wood for that fence. But it has a few parts that slide and move. I make pretty good use of it. You can see three of my four routers there. Don't know where that fourth router got to. The next photo shows a very time saving and valuable stile and rail 1/2" cabinet door bit. A fair amount of time is spent doing a initial adjustment using very then shims between the cutting blades of the bit but time spent here, makes for a perfect fit of the router styles and rails.




This is the back side of the assembled doors. The oak plywood I used for the panels were good one side only. Figured I did not need to pay the expense for good two sides for something that is normally closed anyways.



I have no idea what went wrong here but a little planing, some filling and a lot of sanding and all ended up good.



When you are building panel doors, you need to be aware of the expansion and shrinking of the wood. If you don't, you get unfinished portions where the panel fits into the channels on the stiles and rails. Now, I used plywood and I probably did not have to worry about that, but rather than take a chance, I sealed and painted the panels before I assembled the stiles and rails around them. After the stiles and rails are glued up and dried, then they too can be sealed and painted. But I had to mask around the panels which I had already painted.



Now to the kitchen to prep and finish the carcasses. The inside in some of the cupboards were really ugly looking from years of shoving pans in and out. These carcasses are made from melamine covered K3 Particle board and there were bubbles in the surface. So I sanded some of them down and put a coat of sealer on all the inside surfaces. I painted the walls and ceilings of the carcasses with a tough quality cupboard paint and covered the bottom of the shelves with shelf liners. I am happy with how that turned out. Painting the inside of the carcass is a royal pain in the ass. Especially over by the stove where I had to contort myself to get back into the far reaches of those 45 degree corners by the stove and sink.



You have to understand, this was being done to a functional kitchen. I could only empty a couple cupboards at a time and store stuff on the dining room table while I cleaned, sanded and painted the insides so that we could use the kitchen. This was a very long and tedious process. One member of the family kept looking at me and saying, "When the fuck will this be finished?" I have an understanding now on how Michael Angelo felt.



Time to install the doors, remove the counter tops and strip that guddam fukken wallpaper! I will never ever again, put wallpaper on my walls. Dry strip able. Bullshit!



Had to wait quite a while for the counter tops. They had to do some fabrication on site due to that corner sink. They could not get away from a seam in the middle and if you look underneath the counter at the sink, in the second photo below, you can see how they joined the two. I thought this over that night and called them back in the morning. They have to understand people stand on their counter tops to clean windows, change light bulbs or what ever and that joint is going to fail. SO my neighbour and I came up with the idea of putting two pieces of "C" channel at the front and rear of the sink as well as laminating a piece if 3/4 ply in the rear in that triangle area near the window sills. That's my plumber neighbour helping out. I hate anything to do with plumbing.



Pulled brand new sink out of the box. Damaged. I was so pissed off. The plumbing shop where I bought the sink and faucet said they did not have another in stock. I had already cut the hole in the new counter tops. Fortunately these sinks were manufactured locally and they got me a new one next day. There were issues in getting that properly installed, not the least of which, their template was wrong and not nearly big enough and did not follow the necessary lines to accept the contours of the sink. But we got around that.



Finally it is all done. This was about a month long project. The wife was very understanding. The walls all had to be sanded and primed before repaint because they were all oil before and you can't get oil paint any more. The back splash on the counter tops were a different height that the old ones so we had to do some fudging with the drawer fronts, shimming of the rear of the counters to make the back splash meet nicely with the tile that was on the walls above the counters. I did not want to be ripping tiles off walls. That is truly another story I wished not to experience. I had to jerry rig some sort of casing to go between the window casings and the counter's back splash.



So all done and painted. This fall, when the temps drop a bit, I will sand and repaint the attached family room using the same colours on the walls. That should only be a few day project. We are happy with the end result. And I am not heading to divorce court.....yet.

 

Hmmmm.....not seeing the kegerator anywhere. Is that behind you in the pic or still out in garage letting the last coat of paint dry?

Nice work, btw.