As woodworkers we many times get very snooty about furniture. “Ikea? I’d never put that crap in my house” “MDF? That cardboard crap is only useful for making Jigs”. I am just as guilty of this as the next wood snob.

While I love the path of heirloom quality furniture that my transformation into a woodworker has lead me down, it has left a number of the rooms of our house quite empty. (Maybe someday we will actually have a table and chairs in our diningroom). Recently our neighbors have been updating a few of their rooms and cleaning out old stuff. This has lead to some wonderfully usefull hand-me-downs. When they ask me if I could use a white set of bedroom dressers I didn’t even hesitate or ask the wife…. “Absolutely!”. I was sure they would be useful in one of our many empty rooms.

It turns out this set was made of cheap materials… in the truest definition of the word. The top, shelves, sides and drawer fronts were profiled MDF. The drawer sides were particle board. The only wood of any kind I found in the pieces were the drawer slides and the corner braces for the casework.

The set had originally been cream but had been painted white with a roller so it had that undulating texture that a roller leaves (not to mention it was covered in heart and star stickers ) In its pressent condition I could think of no room it could go in.

One of the many projects on my list is new kitchen table and a set of chairs. I’ve already secured a set of birdcage windsor chars that were stripped and just needed repair work and refinishing done to them. My plan was to Milk paint them black over red and make a rugged farmhouse trestle table.

This set of dressers seemed like a good place to practice some finishing techniques.

My first step was to clean them up and put a coat of primer on them. I applied every coat with a brush to bring some texture the furniture.

Then 3 coats of latex red I had laying around the shop. I picked up this can of paint a couple years ago for $5 from the “oops” section of our local big box. I use it for shop projects mostly and I still had around 3/4 of a gallon left.

After the red dried I painted it with Pitch Black Milk Paint mixed with EXTRA-BOND to assist in bonding it to the Latex paint underneath.

After the milk paint had dried to the point of no visible wet patches I took a wet rag and began to distress portions of the pieces. Essentially I just went around and washed off the milk paint. My goal was to add a since of history and time to the piece. I wanted to focus on areas that would receive the most wear over time, so I focused about what portions would get rubbed the most. Corners, edges, the bottoms of feet, around handles and pulls, and surfaces that would have gotten things set on them. My goal was to simulate a history.

Once I was happy with the distressing I just waited for the paint to cure for a day or so and then went back and applied a coat of oil (I used boiled linseed). I just soaked a rag and made sure every part of the paint got soaked in it and wiped off the excess. I kept coming back to the piece over the next few hours and wiped up any excess with a rag and generally just tried to even out the appearance of the sheen. Over the next couple days I kept working small amounts of oil into the paint until I was happy with the evenness of the sheen.

I also did an old bed frame I had in the same finish. I still need to pick some hardware and actually decorate the room. But at least it has some furniture now.

I’ve been fairly active in the online woodworking community for a while but have never really produced anything I would classify as furniture. I began working on this table about 7 months ago but got sidetracked with priority shift of renovating 6 rooms in our house. A few weeks ago, I was finally able to dive back into the project and managed to finish it.

It’s clearly influenced by much of Darrel Peart’s Greene & Greene styled work as well as work by Marc Spagnuolo, Timothy Rousseau and looking at other random Asian tables builds. I do sincerely apologize to all of the above for my poor bastardized attempt to be influenced by them.

The table is crafted out of solid cherry and ebony and finished with shellac and satin Arm-R-Seal. It’s a bit orange right now, but should mellow and darken as the cherry ages over the next few years.

This was a challenging project for me as it was my first real attempt to incorporate curves into any of my woodworking. Almost every edge in this entire piece has some form of curve to it.

Most of the G&G hall / sofa tables were a bit heavier and more bulky visually than I wanted to put in our entrance way. My goal was to make a piece that had a sense of airiness to it, but I also had to ground it a bit so it didn’t look like it would topple over.  The entire leg has a slight curve to it and they flair out at the base to try and ground it visually…. at least those were my goals.

As much as I love Greene and Greene styled work, I think my next couple projects need to focus on a style that is slightly more efficient to build.

A couple people ask for my sketchup file so here is a copy for anyone. Just bear in mind that this was just a design file for myself and was never intend for general use. So there isn’t finalized joinery or anything fancy in it and there were changes to the overall design after I got into the build.

Most woodworkers I meet always started the same way; you need to do a project or two around the house, so you buy a tool or two and it just escalates form there. Thats how it started for me and I’m guessing that if you are just starting out that’s how it is for you too.

One of the most basic projects that always seems to be made are frames. Whether it’s for a picture or a mirror it’s a great starter project. Personally around our house right now we have 4 rooms under renovation. One of these rooms had an old mirror with no frame that had just been glued to the wall. Water from the sink had worked itself up under it and ruined the edges of the reflective material. Additionally years of sloppy painting has left the edged looking distinctly tie-died.

Instead of scrapping the mirror and starting over I decided to just frame it. The rabbit (a grove on the edge of a board) will overlap the edge of the mirror and hide all the dammage.

The tooling for this project is pretty basic. All you need is a combination square, tape measure, a block plane, a saw of some kind a router, and some clamps. If you are looking for advice on specific hand tools see my post from last year’s get woodworking week. I went to my local big box hardware store and bought 3 pieces of quality pine, free of knot’s etc.

Cutting your board to length and the 45 degree miters:

To get started it’s just a matter of marking 45 degree angles and cutting the line.

If you are just getting started, cutting an accurate 45 degree angle can be a bit easier said than done… this is where the block plane comes in. Just put a thin strip of something under your piece of wood to raise it off the table a bit and lay the block plane on it’s side. this allows you to clean up the end of your board and bring the angle to exactly 45 degrees.

Cutting the rabbit (the grove to hold the glass)

My frist choice for an extremely versatile power tool in any shop, is a router. I bought a used Bosh router off ebay years ago as my first woodworking tool. It’s served me extremely well and is still one of my most used tools for woodworking. Utilizing the edge guide you can make multiple passess until you have the width and depth you want.

If you mount the router in a router table you can cut the grove that way (this is a bit safer and my preferred method).

Splines

Mitered corners look great but they need to be reinforced somehow. You cant just glue the ends of two boards together and expect them to be a strong enough joint to hold together in the long term. One of the ways we solve this problem is through the use of splines (small pieces of wood that bridge two other  pieces of wood together).

Normally you want the grain to run across the two boards and bridge them. This would make for a very strong joint! I was in a bit of a hurry and didn’t have any pieces of pine wide enough to cover the entire length. You could just use two pieces of wood, but in my rush I didn’t think of that. For something as light duty as a frame, running the spline with the grain is more than strong enough.

One of the best ways to cut this joint on a long piece of wood like a frame is with a slot cutting bit in your router. As you can see in the photo below there is a bearing that rides along the edge of the miter and allows you to cut a slot in the middle of your board.

Glue up time

Step one in ANY glueup is to assemble the pieces and make sure everything is looking the way you think it should. This is the time to have a sanity check to make sure you didn’t make any mistakes. If any of the corners aren’t looking like they quite come together like you think they should, get out your block plane and see if you can clean them up a bit.

Lay out all your supplied and clamps and make sure you are ready to go. I’m using a couple pipe clamps, a square, a tape mesure, and a brush to spread the glue.

Put glue in each slot and on the spline.

Assemble the entire frame and adjust the clamps until all the corners look good to you and it looks square. Then use your tape mesure to mesure diagonally in two directions. If the numbers match then congratulations you have a square frame! If they dont match then just yank a bit on the longer direction to try and square it up. It make take a few times going back and forth but it should come into a close enough alignment.

Once the glue is dry take off the clamps and use your saw, and then your block plane, to trim the splines and then flush them up to the edge.

Clean up the corners with the block plane or some sand paper.

Congratulations you’re done! If you have a spouse or significant other that lives with you, ask for a high five! As your skills improve you can start playing around with other more complicated frames. Here are a few frames I’ve done this year.

Make sure to check out other Get Woodworking projects over at Tom’s Workbench

I don’t consider myself a violent person, I’m very slow to anger, and make it a point not to pick fights. And I dont like to kill anything, and try very hard not to do it unless it’s for food. Now thats not to say I can’t apply violence when it is absolutely necessary.

I grew up hunting a bit with a trusty BB gun, like many boys, and am actually a pretty consistently good shot with a rifle or shotgun. During college I did start training as a martial artist and kept it up for about 5-6 years and earned a black belt (I recently started training again, mostly for fitness). Those skills served me well on the farm this week….

Last year when we moved into our farmstead we had a goose problem, and not a minor one! Anyone who owns a body of water can testify that these things can be pests. Not matter what the migratory bird act says, these geese live in the area year round. So after much convincing, my wife finally relented and agreed that it would be ok for me to get an air rifle and encourage the geese to move along, and it’s been fairly effective.

This last 2 weeks that thing has been the farm MVP!

The Groundhog:

Since we moved in we’ve also had a problem with a ground hog living under our house (our sun room)… this presents a number of problems. 1. He eats all sorts of greens we want for ourselves. 2. He smells. 3. if he eventually expires under the sun room, he would REALLY smell.

Lets just say he is no longer a problem, and no, we didn’t eat him, but only because he was pretty old.

The Rabbit:

Despite our best efforts with electric fencing, we developed a rabbit problem in the garden. After he decimated two plantings of green beans and most of the lettuce patch my wife agreed he had to go. If you need a good rabbit recipe I highly recommend Jamie Oliver’s E.F.R. Essex Fried Rabbit (Jamie at Home Page 277) it was wonderful!

All that leads up to today….

Feral Dogs:

At around 8:45 this morning I get a knock on our door. Someone driving by letting me know that one of our alpaca’s had gotten out. I threw shoes on and ran outside. Looking in the field I only see one alpaca running around (we have 2). But I see a medium short haired type dog and a large one what looks to be a cross between a great dane and a doberman chasing the other one. As I run toward the field I grab the nearest tool I can find, a pitch fork.

As I enter the field the doberman charges me with teeth bared. He lunges at me once and I manage to keep him away with the pitch fork end. The next time I jab with the pitchfork he manages to dart inside…. thank goodness for bo staff training… instinct and training kicks in and I mange to transform my jab to a reverse upward strike with the handle that clocks him full in the head and knocks him back. WAY TO CLOSE! I really dont want to go through rabies treatment!

At this point, I back off and go grab the air rifle hoping I can encourage them to leave from a distance. But I need to do it quick, I’ve still got a alpaca running around the city and I really hope she is ok!

I take 5 shots from a distance and all 5 seem to hit. 2 into the smaller dog and he runs away, the last 3 go into the doberman. At this point the doberman limps away quickly and goes to the far corner of the field. The remaning aplaca seems to be able to keep away from him just fine so I hop in my car and go looking for our run away girl.

Long winded story short, she made it about a mile away and was very freaked out. With the help of a local sheriff we managed to catch her before she got hit by a car and I walked her home very slowly (did I mention she was freaked out?).

When I got her home finally the doberman was dead. Evidentially one of my shots was particularly effective.

Is there a take away from this? Every homesteader, even us, who live in suburbia, and just happen to have a few acres in the middle of it, need some wild animal defense. A projectile weapon of some sort, no matter how peaceful you are, is very handy. Also as my wife put it “yay for ninja skills”

4:05pm – Realize I dont have a dinner plan

4:10pm – Decide fish tacos sound good, but all we have are wheat tortillas. (ewwww)

4:12pm – Decide I need to try to make corn tortillas again (they didn’t turn out that great last time, crumbly and not thin enough).

4:13pm – Remember that I ment to go buy a tortilla press as some point, but never got around to it. Decide I could just make one (it can’t  be that hard).

4:15pm – Start hunting for hinges

4:20pm – Still can’t find hinges…..

4:25pm – More boxes… (I really need to finish unpacking at some point)

4:30pm – Give up looking… no time to go to store… must make hinges… I’m nothing if not persistent (some might call it stubborn)

4:35 – Back in shop, realize I have no time for glue ups. Grab the thickest pice of wood I can find, hunk of 12/4 ash.

4:40 – Finish jointing and squaring my hunk of ash, remember why I love my bastard bedrock #606 1/2 (actually a #608 someone shortened at some point. Pictured with a #605 for reference)

4:45 – Re-fall in love with my band saw

4:55 – Wish I had a 7″ long drill bit, and a drill press with 7″ of travel

5:10 – Finish tortilla press, realize any woodworker in any 3rd world country would disown me!

5:20 – Start making tortillas, works beautifully! I would contend it’s next to impossible to beat fresh made corn tortillas!!!!!

Tortilla Recipe:
1 3/4 cup – masa harina (any mexican grocery will have it, or you may or may not be able to get this at Walmart, depending on the demographics of your area)
1 1/4′ish – cup of warm water
1-2 tsp – salt

Combine ingredients adding just enough of the water to make it all stick together nicely without being gummy.

Cover dough and let rest for 30 min.

Roll a ball of the dough into a 1″ – 1 1/2″ ball (depending on the size of Tortilla you want)

Flatten and cook on an un-greased skillet or pan (I prefer cast iron over non stick for this) over medium high heat. Flip when it just starts to brown.

But in the last 6 months I’ve added a couple tools to the shop, namely a power jointer and a bandsaw. My first attempt at dust collection was 4″ PVC from my 1HP DC to the table saw and jointer, with blast gates. It wasn’t very successful for lots of reasons. (underpowered DC  for the long runs, not good enough seals on the joints, etc…)

So for the last month or so I’ve been reworking the entire shop. I got a new single stage DC (the Grizzly 3HP double canister ), reworked the entire shop with 6″ metal ducting, and built a Thien Cyclone Separator.

Actually I built two of them, one for my new system that is based on 6″/7″ ducting ports and a second one based on 4″ ports that I’m handing off to my father-in-law for his woodturning shop.

Building them was pretty simple, if a bit time consuming, and it generated a TON of MDF dust. Eventually I started working outside just so I quit filling the shop with fine dust.

Honestly the priming, painting and glueing took the longest. It turned a quick 4-6 hour project into a week long adventure, but I’m happy with the results.

I shot a quick video of my top hat in action for anyone thats interested. Sorry for the poor video quality, I didn’t feel like busting out the DV camera and messing around with Firewire, etc… so I just shot it with my iPhone.

Having been long inspired by the Greene & Greene wall sconces I decided to embark on making my own as a cover to the doorbell hardware. I’m NOT a stained glass artist and as I looked at what went into making a piece I realized I didn’t have the time to learn (on this project, but I’ll definitely do so in the future).

The Wood: The wooden parts of the sconce are your basic Greene & Greene woodworking. It’s all just frame and pannel constructions with groves, mortices & tenons. The lighter wood is my standard Cherry with liberal used of ebony plugs (I had to batch out 18 ebony plugs for this project. This video by William Ng is invaluable is speeding up this process!!!). The top I carved out of a solid block of Cherry utilizing a router, rasps & carving chisels.

The Glass: In our last house the former owner has done some wonderful stained glass looking artwork on a number of our windows utilizing a product called Gallery Glass. Would this product fool someone that knows stained glass? Not even close. But it really does come out nice looking, and unless someone looks really closely it’s very hard to spot that it’s not the real thing. So I picked up some stained glass for my base piece and used the Gallery Glass as color gels on top of it.

As for lighting… since I’m using this as a doorbell hardware cover I didn’t have room for any kind of traditional bulb. So instead I used LED Flexible Light Strip and a 30 Watt 12v LED Power Supply Driver. I cut a hole in the wall behind the doorbell hardware and stashed the transformer inside the wall and ran a 110v line to it from a nearby outlet. After that it was just a matter of peel and stick the LEDs to the doorbell hardware and cutting to length.

Right now I have a photo sensor controlling the light, unfortunately the entranceway doesn’t get quite enough sun many days so the light is almost always on. So I’m going to swap it out with an analog timer control.

Modern western plane makers have two approaches to this problem. Lei-Nielsen sells replacement frogs for it’s planes that come in 50° and 55°.  The other approach is to just flip the blade over, make the plane bed a low angle, and work with the bevel up (such as the Veritas Planes).

I wasn’t quite ready to drop a couple hundred $ on a new plane so I went with a third option. Hock Tools sells very nice and very thick blades for Krenov Style plane making. A few years ago  I bought one of these blades with the plan of eventually making a small infill plane. Allas, the blade had just been gathering dust on a shelf next to the stack of steel and brass.

I have also developed an interest in Japanese style planes and had been having the thought of making this in the back of my head for a while.

The final straw was seeing this post by Wilbur Pan; I decided to make a high-angle pull plane with my Hock blade (Minus the metal mouth insert from Wilbur’s post).

True Japanese planes have a tapered blade that wedges itself into the body (Dai) due to a matching taper cut into it. (if you want to see the process that goes into cutting a Dai this page over on daikudojo.org has a nice photogallery).

The hybrid plane I made may look somewhat like a Japanese plane,  but it’s construction technique is based on Krenov Style plane making. The blade is bedded at 55°.

Matt over at mattsbasementworkshop.com has a great 2 part video series on making a Krenov plane from the kit available at Hock tools (part 1, part 2). Kari over at The village carpenter also has an article about Krenov planes. Finally David Finick wrote an article in Fine Woodworking issue #196.

I made my high angle smoother out of quarter-sawn Wenge because I  had it around, it’s DENSE, and I thought it would look cool

A quick tip: Pen Blanks
Anyone that’s done anything with any Greene & Greene style elements like ebony accents knows that ebony is body expensive.  But ebony pen blanks are relatively inexpensive.

Unless you are doing really small plugs, ripping it with even a thin kirf blade on the table saw will only get you 1-2 sticks out of each blank.

A band saw kirf is smaller at about .6 -.7mm. you may get one 2 larger medium sticks and 2 smaller ones.

…But if you use a Dozuki you only have a .2-.3 mm kirf. and can get 4 nice sticks out of each pen blank if you are careful.

Most japanese woodworkers, from what I can tell, just put a big hunk of wood on the floor and sit cross legged. Most westerners   (including me) don’t like sitting on the floor much though.

But when Japanese do work standing up, I found a number of different sawhorse styles. During my research I found a old plan by Jay van Arsdale published in American Woodworker Jan-Feb 1990. These sawhorse seems to fit my desires almost perfectly and they are all built using japanese compression joints, wedges and no glue. They are a fun fast(ish) joinery project that gives you something useful to work off of for future projects.

I’ve only made a couple deviations from Jay’s plans, so refer to American Woodworker for all the dimensions.

This is part 2 of my posts for:

(part 1: tools selection can be found here)

Make sure to head over to Tom’s Workbench for more posts on getting started in woodworking by the blogging community.

1. Wood Selection

For this project  you should be able to get away with 2x 8′ long Douglas Fir 4×4′s and 2x 8′ long Southern Yellow Pine 2×6′s. I got out of the local big box hardware store for under $50. Stay away from any pressure treated wood and any wood labeled ”white wood” or “white pine”. Species of wood to look for: Southern Yellow Pine, Douglas Fir, Port Orford Cedar, White Cedar, Alder, or Poplar. What you find will very greatly depending on where you live just make sure it is kiln dried, and heavy.

Take your time at the store and buy the straitest and knot free boards you can find. Avoid any boards the came from the center of the tree and ideally get the ones that have the grain running diagonally.

2: Breaking it all down: A few Sawing Tips

Use your tape mesure and square to mark all of your cuts.

For every saw cut start your cut at the far side of the board, away from you. Saw very lightly and bring the saw cut all the way across the board back toward your body. When you hit the edge near you, start working down the face of the board keeping as much of the saw in the cut as you can until you have cut half way through the board at an angle. Then go to the other side of the board and repeat. Once you have complete cuts made on 3 sides of the board you can then just cut strait down. This is the most fool proof way to cut precisely. It means you are always only cutting lines you can see.

3. Layout all your joinery marks and cut the slopes on the feet

Sometimes a few clamps help.

A plane does wonders for cleaning up the faces.

4. Drill out as much as you can then use your chisels to square it up

5. Then do the same thing for the legs.

Eventually you have all your parts and are ready to assemble.

Bonus Points:

This is where I deviated from Jay’s plans a bit. If you cut a slope on the top tenon of the legs and make a matching slope on the mortice on the top of the horse then when you drive the wedge in place it draws the leg and top together even tighter. (it’s hard to photograph the mortice but i’ve undercut it with a matching slope).

6. Drill the holes in the feet, THEN insert the legs. Push the drill bit in and it will mark where the hole would line up. Then offset the hole on the tenon by about 1/8 of an inch. By doing this when you drive the peg in it will draw the joint together.

7. Make all the wedges out of the hardest wood you have around. I used some scrap Ash but the Southern Yellow Pine would work ok as well.

Right now I just have a SYP 2×6 on top as a work surface, and it works ok. Ideally you want to find the thickest widest board you can and put it on top. I’m considering 2 options: Getting 3 more 4×4′s or getting a 10″ wide 12 quarter piece of Ash. Either way it will be about a 6′ to 8′ long by ~10″ wide beam about 3″ thick. I’ll try and get something next week and make a post about adding a planing stop.