White oak and hatchets too

In some ways it feels like I’m starting all over in my woodworking project. I know it’s not as simple as that because much of what this project is supposed to do is produce experience, skill an knowledge. One could argue that the physical object I end up with when I done is probably just icing on the cake. With that in mind I don’t mind showing pictures of the new wood I got for the panels I managed to turn into sawdust and veneer.

A rough board of my new white oak rests on a workbench at school. I have some marks laying out where each panel is coming from. I personally really like the golden color of the wood... I don't think I really had appreciation for the look of white oak before starting this program.

You can see the beautiful color and grain now that I've milled these up a bit more. Some of the walnut I bought I am still going to be able to use and I think these two woods will really compliment each other.

In Drawing we are finally done with the conte crayon exercise. I think i posted a picture to point that I deemed complete on my twitter… let’s see… here we go:

if you click on it, it will take you to a larger resolution.

Now we are onto a new medium entirely. That would be cross hatching and stippling. I’m sure most of you are familiar with these methods… cross hatching is creating a tonal drawing with crossing lines and stippling is doing the same with dots. I chose my hand at stippling… not sure why, just seemed appropriate at the time. The teacher had a handout with a bunch of examples and allowed students to simply copy one of the examples (this would still be quite challenging). Not that i wanted to give myself more trouble, but I felt like I would rely too much on mechanically matching each stroke that the artist did, so i chose to draw something from life.

I not only appreciate the look that this produces, but it was one of the least stressful drawings I've done in class. Personally I can get really engrossed in drawing this and it can be really relaxing. A lot of the other students were annoyed at how slow-going and tedious this method is (in fact most chose cross hatching instead because it's not quite as repetitive) Maybe this doesn't bother me because everything I draw takes a long time right now... or maybe I have more patience than some.

We have a bench

So last week I managed to get my little bench glued together. It was a fairly crazy process. It took two people to do it, and even then we were scrambling to get it all together before the glue set. We Put the dovetails together first… which was not wise in hindsight, because the stretchers went in next… and that requited a good deal of bending (yeah that wood is way to thick to bend… it was pretty difficult). After that we clamped it up causing lots of creaking sounds and me cringing. About then we noticed that there was not enough glue in the dovetail joints. We had to pull these apart to put more in, which involved banding on the underside of the top with a mallet (used a scrap piece of wood so i wasn’t actually hitting the wood of my bench directly). The rest went pretty smooth and in the end it turned out quite well. I’m really happy with the result… it’s not perfect, but I didn’t expect it to be.

The Sunday Score – October 18th 2009

A good while back I had proposed the idea of making a segment on this blog called the Sunday Score. It didn’t really take off, but I still like the idea.. so I thought I would try again and see how it goes. Obviously this blog has changed a lot since I proposed that idea so I think the idea of what I want out of this segment has changed too. Basically I just want to share some awesome things that I’ve found in the week.

I also welcome submissions by people who are doing something they want to share (maybe a blog, maybe artwork, music, writing… I’m gonna leave this vague on purpose). So yeah, send me an e-mail from the address on my contact page and put Sunday score in the subject line and your stuff might get featured on the score.

The Google Trike

Most people have probably long ago discovered the street view feature in Google maps. One of the developers on the street view team decided it would be fun to make some street views of places where cars cannot go. They created a trike with a big camera mounted in the back and started rolling. You can submit ideas of places they could make a street-view map of on the trike as well as view some of the views they’ve made already (including Legoland in California and the Monterrey bike trail).

This is Your Paradise

User Hoodwatch on livejournal has an amazing blog called This is Your Paradise.  It contains tons photographs of different places he visits. These include abandonded buildings, museums, festivals and more. Definitley worth a look.

Picture is from his flicker photostream and the property of Hoodwatch.

Memories of the Future

I’ve been following Will Wheaton’s blog for a while now and he just released the first volume in a new series of books called Memories of the Future. It’s sort of a humorous cometary on startreck the next generation, going through each episode one by one. He also has been kind enough, or awesome enough, to make a podcast about the book aptly named Memories of the Futurecast . The podcast is really fun to listen to, he reads exerts from the book and… well it’s just really great to listen to. Here’s the first episode of the podcast (link to download it is at the bottom of the post before the comments).

Well that’s it for this week. See you next time.

Can’t help but join in their passion

The idea for this post was prompted by the a wonderful thought provoking post my friend rose wrote on her blog.

I am taking a design course at school and one of the things we talked about a lot is every artists worry that what they create might not make them money or be successful. The advice my teacher gave was… it will do what you want it to do.

What is important is not if your creation fits what other people are looking for, what matters is that it fits what you want to create. If it is true to your vision and you can hold it up to your vision and show people why and how it resonates with you, then people will get on board with you. It doesn’t mean everyone will go out and buy all your work… but if you can show people that you care about and love what you have created, and why you do then they can’t help but appreciate what you’ve done. In fact I think that that love and care you have for your work will shine through much of the time even if you don’t get to talk to people. I look at peoples work and I don’t need them to tell my why the care about it… I can see it.

I guess I’m not really sharing this to give anyone advice, as much as I want to share that it is a concern that I and many other “artists” and “craftsmen” I am in school with feel (teachers and students alike). I look at their work, and they are talented and skilled and create wonderful things, but the reason I appreciate it is not because of that… but because they are so passionate about what they have made. I can’t help but join in their passion.

90% of learning how to do something is screwing up

ot to sound negative or anything, but I believe 90% of learning how to do something is screwing up. I have been working on those re-sawn boards of walnut, trying to get them squared up so I could glue them up into a panel. They were relatively thin to begin with after the re-saw, and as I mentioned it wasn’t a very good cut. So I tried a variety of things to square up my boards. First was hand planning, which I may have mentioned already. The trouble I ran into there was the downward pressure I was exerting on the board made it bend and therefore keep the big bow I was trying to get rid of. My next plan of action was to build a sled for the planer so my board could run through it without shattering. Then I made little wood shims so that the planer would register the bottom face of my board as flat. This worked after some amount of fidgeting with the first board (my picture turned out blurry.. I’ll have to take another one). The second one would not cooperate and I ended up taking off too much wood for it to work. The third one quickly stared acting like the previous so I consulted with my teacher. I then went back to the hand plane and tried to make one face even enough for the board to register alright. I got it to work… but…

this beautiful walnut veneer might make a cool back for a ukulele some day, but it will not work for what I'm building. Measuring at a whopping ⅛ inch thickness, my teacher was actually impressed that I had managed to get anything through the planer at that thickness.

So the bad news is that none of the four boards are usable to do what I had planed. Good news is that I get to go buy some new wood!

In retrospect here’s what I learned:

• Do everything you can to ensure your board is against the fence and will stay on the fence when cutting with the table saw (using a fence obviously)
• You cannot make an accurate cut if you can’t see the fence from where you are standing (I feel pretty dumb that I had to learn that one)
• If you are planning to use a sled to plane thin boards use a hand plane as much as you can on one side first
• When doing this hand planing, square up the cupped side… it’s easier
• A block plane is a good tool for this type of job
• You can pick the lowest spot and use a marking gauge from that point to give you a rough idea where you are headed. (hope that makes sense)
• Remember… it’s just wood

I’m still here

y apologies for not posting anything new in a few day. Just wanted everyone to know I have not given up on posting, just didn’t take much for pictures and didn’t move very far forward in my projects. The boards I did the re-saw for my new project are giving me nothing but trouble right now. The re-saw was not a very good one so I am loosing a great deal of thickness… hoping that I can get them squared up and still have some amount of wood left. Trying to come up with some designs for my design class and I’m a bit stumped at the moment… I’m glad I started working on those today instead of Friday.That’s about it really.

reaching an end

reat googly moogly, am I ready for my bench to be finished. Lucky for me the end is very near. I spent last night cutting the last set of pins and they turned out great. I also spent some time with a card scraper cleaning everything up (I didn’t grab any pics of the scraping because it’s not really easy to see a difference with my camera). I think I enjoy nearing the end of a project as much as I enjoy starting one. It’s fun for me watching some big block of wood, that really doesn’t care about your project… or how much you’d like it to be arranged as as a useful object, transform into what you had wanted.

Here are the dovetails lined up. Hurray they look pretty darn good to me.

Not together yet, but balancing. yeehaw!

New wood, new project, new joy

ust how happy does it make you when to mill wood for a new project? I know it makes my heart quiver with delight. You guessed it, I started a new project in my woodworking class even though I am not quite finished with my bench.

The other day I was watching Scott Kurtz, the writer and author of pvp online, on his streaming t.v. show where he draws his strips for his fans to see. He mentioned that it was important to keep your projects under your hat as long as you could in order to sustain the initial drive you have at the beginning. He obviously finds a way to do this and share his process with people. Although some may not love his work, I think most people would have to admit, it can be a bit of a feat to pump out a comic strip every day, so I want to take his advice to heart. I definitely have trouble maintaining that initial gust I have when I think something up and start working on it. So i thought I would take things a bit of a different route. Rather than explain in detail what I am planing to do I am going to show you what I am doing. (some of you know what I have planed for this project… but I am hoping I have, or will have more readers than just my mom and myself – no offense to you mom).

I chose Walnut for this project. I really love the dark chocolate color. I was glad to find a completely rough half-sawn board of it at the lumber store (I went to hardwood emporium in Golden Colorado again).

laying out my different cut on my board here. A fellow student was working with walnut the other night and I saw him using blue tape to layout his dovetails, so I asked him about it. It's hard to see pencil marks on really dark woods, so he went for the blue tape instead. I also liked the idea... as it is, it made it easier to move the marks around and adjust things as I needed to.

I needed to do a re-saw on part of the board. That's when you cut it standing on it's end... effectively doing the same kind of cut the saw mill does (hence re-saw). I used the table saw to cut the bulk of it. My board is wide enough it left a section in the middle around 4 or 5 inches, but generally you want about one inch. Then I used a ban saw to cut through the rest of it, using the kerf left by the table saw as my guide. Makes a pretty rough cut (plus I had a bit of trouble... it is my first re-saw ever)

The portion of the board I did not re-saw, I milled up. Here's how she looks after some love.

I cross cut the milled board into some rough lengths, and for now I have to let everything sit and calm down (everything that is nice and square right now will probably be all bowed and twisted by Thursday... especially the re-saw work I did).

Oh. I have not forgotten my drawing class either.

We are working with Conté crayon, which is like charcoal with a bunch of wax added. I find it pretty difficult to work with. It's really hard to do fine gradation with it. It's more like the heat in our bedroom - on or off. I do like the directional quality of my shading though... most of the students in my class are using stubs (they're like pencils made out of soft pressed paper) to bled everything together. I still might fine tune things a tad on Thursday.

Recovering from the inevitable

ventually it was bound to happen. I’ve been doing pretty well at minimizing the severity of my mistakes on my bench project. Today however, I goofed in a more major way. I was cutting the second set of dovetails. The tails are decent… not my best, but they are OK. I was cutting the pins and they were going pretty roughly as it was. I finished them up, blemishes and all and went to line them up with my tails to see if I needed to adjust them anymore. Alas, I discovered I had referenced my pins off the wrong tails. This effectively means I have two sets of pins that match the same set of tails… not very useful. I went through a variety of emotions. At first I believe wanted to either cry… or throw up. This lasted for a good ten minutes while I stared at the wreckage. I think in the ten minutes it came to me how I could fix it, and not go buy a bunch of wood and glue up a new panel that would look very unmatched to the rest of my project. By then I was just regular upset, mostly because cutting those dovetails took me about three hours. I ran into a friend who is a teacher’s assistant at the school, and he calmed me down a bit more, telling me some of his war stories in woodworking (it’s quite reassuring to hear that someone you admire made mistakes that were just as big, if not bigger). On the ride home I felt even a little better when it dawned on me that I only have to re-cut the pins on this joint. Pins take me far less time than tails to cut at this point… so the three hours seem like less of a waste of time.

The plan:

• I need to cut off the pins that I screwed up and then make the other side of my bench the same length (cutting from the bottom).
• Need to do something about the mortise holes that will no longer line up with each other on my bench. So far my best idea is to make some kind of decorative thing to hide the holes… and then cut at least one new set mortises somewhere else.
• The arches on the bottom of each side… they will not look the same anymore, since I will have to chop off one end. I’m thinking they will look rather odd that way, so I’ll have to figure out how to make them look the same.

Lessons learned:

• After drawing out pins for a joint, set the whole work up to make sure you did it right
• Check it again.. just for giggles.
• Lay out as much as you possibly can before ever making sawdust!!!
• When you inevitably mess up, remember, anyone who was ever good at anything, sucked at that thing quite horribly before they were good
• Now that you’ve composed yourself, make plans to drink beer with a friend over the weekend

smooth boards and finger joints to boot

A more productive day at the woodshop would have been impossible. I got two small assignments out of the way in my intro class. We had learned how to handplane a board and had to turn in a panel that we glued up and then hand planed.

Here we have my three little boards that I glued up into one panel

It's important to have everything set up in place and handy before you actually put glue to wood. In fact check and make sure all your clamps are working smoothly.. it would suck to spend time futzing with them while your glue is getting dry. I have the glue spread on here, next use something to spread it evenly across. Notice how I only have one side of each connecting edge with glue on it... if you did two sides you would likely have too much glue.

Here we are all clamped up. finger tight only, not a lot of torque on these. the glue squeezing out should look like a string of pearls or beads. Mine is not perfect, I have too much coming out in some spots and not enough in others. After about 20 minutes, when the glue is the consistency of rubber cement I started scraping it off. By the time I had the majority of it off I un-clamped everything and finished. It's important to get as much glue off as humanly possible.

here we are after everything is done with the gluing. I let it sit overnight before using tools on it.

here I am plaing the board down by hand. Yay!

Kinda blurry (sorry my camera is somewhat broken.. but I do what I can). This is how she looks.

Some things I thought of from this exercise:

• When planing endgrain work towards the center rather than all the way across? I noticed it was impossible to avoid tear-out if you planed straight through.
• consider getting a cloth to put around your board when you throw it in a vice. I totally messed up my clean faces when I went to plane the sides.
• Paying attention to grain direction makes your life a lot easier
• it’s a stupid idea to glue a panel with grain going in different directions.
• don’t set you plan face down on a workbench… or anything for that matter, lay it on it’s side.

The other assignment was box joints. I didn’t really take pictures of the process, mainly because it’s so involved and I’m not extremely confident with it yet. However, I’ve been borrowing The complete illustrated guide to joinery By Gary Rogowski from the library and it has instructions on how to make finger joints that are almost identical to what my instructor taught. It’s a book the program at redrocks recommends… and I certainly have found it useful (might have to break down and buy a copy).

The best tip I got on these tonight had to do with the fact that I screwed my first set up. So, to make these you make a jig, that sets the exact width of the fingers. When I did this I set it up so the fingers were a hair to big compared to the holes cut (the holes width is set by the datto blade of your saw, not as easy to adjust). Hopefully you cut this on some test piece of scrap wood, because the fingers you cut are not salvageable.  Rather than burst into tears and make the whole jig all over again, (assuming you have your fence of your jig clamped down to a sled) you can take a mallet and lightly tap the fence over, so the gap between there you butt up the end of your board and the saw blade has decreased. This will effectively make the size of the fingers smaller. You could even draw some reference lines so you have an idea of how far the fence moved. This is an extremely small amount, like a 32nd of an inch or something tiny (I guess it could be more if you really made them huge). Now cut a new set of finger joints and they should fit together.