Harvesting & Housekeeping

Nothing makes you feel like more of a man than cutting logs with Dan's new monster rig. The inaugural firing-up of Dan's 6' bar went well, and we were pleased, and we felt like real men. Sliced up a nice wide crotch piece of Manitoba Maple (Box elder) and a Birch. 12 slabs, a good days takings.

I decided to do some housekeeping before xmas, in between working on the panels for my doors, so the shop roof has been insulated, and a drying shed has been built in the backyard compound.

Here's a cool clip about a man whose in the zone after 30 years of dedication to his craft. I like that he's found the zone, and his multi-medium, japanese influence combination, nice work.

http://www.finewoodworking.com/item/19284/pro-portfolio-michael-hurwitz-planks-into-poetry

The Jack

A cool print from Brabant "the days last lesson"; makes trying to build a table that's bigger than your shop look like a walk in the park. I like it. Hand planing the western Maple door frames; what a pleasure planing something that actually fits on the bench.

The pleasure was heightened with the newly acquired Lie-Nielson No.62 low angle jack. what a sweet plane! Doing all that hand planing on the walnut gave me a chance to do some soul searching. While wooden planes are a beautiful thing, I've decided to reserve them for things like coopering or compass planes for now. Working in a garage has it's challenges, one being that I need to re-flatten the sole of wooden planes regularly, which opens the mouth. What i like about the bevel-up planes is you can easily change the angle of cut, depending on the angle of the micro bevel. With a bevel down wooden plane, you have to go make another plane with a different bed angle. I'm now using a honing guide & stop block jig to get repeatable micro bevels, and I also have a spare blade prepped with a steep angle for those difficult situations. The mouth on the bevel up planes is also adjustable, so it can be tightened up for fine shavings & less tear-out. I actually thought this plane was going to be on the first truck back to Lie-Nielson, it had a taper on the sole, so the leading edge of the iron was not parallel with the mouth. But I managed to lap it true in the end, & it seems to be running well. It's really like using a big block plane, very similar feel, I like it, I like it a lot.

I'm also really liking the Western Maple. One of my new favourites. It didn't machine that well, but it came to the party with hand planing & responds well to a good burnishing with the plane shavings. Nice to find a good local wood that's not too expensive (~$6/board foot). Hopefully Dan & I can harvest more soon.

Table No. 2

Equally at home in a converted barn loft, or the conference room. Measuring in at 118 1/2" x 40 1/2" x 30". XXL. 8 planks of Black Walnut finished with hand rubbed Kunos, a waterproof all-natural product, clear coated cold rolled steel and acrylic lacquered hot rolled steel.

Edge joints

After a quick tune-up the slot mortiser was thrown into production. I got carried away. an aircraft will be able to land on this table. Lots of dowels. But then, table tops do see lots of moisture over the years, so maybe aircraft carrier construction is not such a bad thing. Here's a couple planks getting stitched up for a dry fit. Before I got the mortiser, I was planning on using biscuits for the edge joints, but dowels provide more strength & a precise fit.

The scene of the crime - the nice thing about making tables is you have an assembly table for glue ups all ready to go. I glued up the planks in pairs, & flattened each pair with my jointer hand plane, top & bottom. Then started gluing up the pairs & re-flattening by hand until I had one big flat table top. About 9 days of hand planing! Nathan at Chapel Arts in East Van has a CNC machine for getting big wood flat, about 100/hr (he has the most awesome shop in a heritage building). Gluing up the whole table top, then flattening with the CNC machine & finishing with a smoother plane would be a more economical approach. I decided to do it by hand this time round because it's a good exercise to go through & was curious how flat I could get it by hand (pretty damn flat).

Workbench maintenance

My workbench is a Sjorbergs Elite 2500. A good bench; my most prized tool in the shop. I love my bench almost as much as I love my woman and my boy. So it's been a little distressing watching her move out of flat, as workbenches do, and deciding it was time for surgery. I hadn't made any adjustments to her since she moved in 1 year ago, this would be the first. We were both a little nervous considering it was our first time, but once I got my jointer plane tuned in & got my head into it, it wasn't too painful. I didn't plane the entire surface, just the trouble spots for now, to get her reasonably flat. oiled her up, & we're back on track. I'll probably do more regular maintenace with a plane stroke here & there as needed. A workbench is a tool after all & all tools need tuning up.

Edge prep

I prepped & fitted each edge joint with my shop made jointer plane. All cut to final width & ready for laminating. I like to fine-tune the machined edges with a hand plane. This gets the edges nice & square and mating well with the adjacent plank. I wasn't sure how the edge jointing would go given the length, but it worked out ok, it just took some time, especially having 8 planks. After all that noisy milling it sure was nice to work quietly at the bench with no machines running.

Of course at this point I needed a distraction. I spotted a second hand slot mortiser. Nice to have my final machine in place. She's in good shape, a Rojek, cuts a sweet mortise, and the xyz table is very cool, allowing for repeatable mortises once the stops are set. Could have spent a whole day cutting mortises, I was in some kind of mortise nirvana. Also a pic of the 4 flute extra long end mills. The right end mill is hard to find, there's thousands of different types out there, I got these through Sowa Tools http://www.sowatool.com/catalogue/carbide_endmills.html

Milling & Mortises

While the walnut rested after it's initial milling, I got to spend time at my bench, cutting & fitting the mortise & tenon joints for the doors. They're through mortises & with wedged tenons, doubled up for even more strength. This meant deep mortises 3 1/4". Cut with an end-mill & sliding table on the drill press. Time to pull the trigger on a slot mortising machine. With the tenons being so long, I roughed them out on the bandsaw first, then used the new 184 delta tenon jog to dial them in (really like the rapid fire macro adjust, & micro-adjust to creep up on it, nice jig), then did the final fitting with handtools. A card scraper works well to dial in the radius on the tenons, after initial shaping with a chisel or file.

Here's the Walnut all milled up to final thickness. moving these 8/4, 10 footers between machines takes some time. Setting up co-planer in-feed & out-feed work support stands becomes a Zen art form. How about a support stand with rack & pinion adjustment, & how about some levelling feet. I see Lee Valley has stands that look pretty good. These planks are tense. beautiful grain, but seriously tense. Dealing with such long lengths must be partly to blame, but maybe also because it's kiln dried, so probably drier on the inside than outside. But they just want to bow like madmen after a pass, and resawing really pissed them off.