Bowling for Charity

I have just completed my latest turning. It is an Osage Orange bowl, by far the largest bowl I have yet turned. It measures 7 3/8″ in diameter and is 2 3/4″ tall (it is 2 3/8″ deep).

 

My wife’s work is having a Charity Auction this Friday and I am giving them this to put in the auction. I’m going to be very interested to see what happens.

 

There is a season (Turn, Turn, Turn)

I just recently celebrated my 20th wedding anniversary, and as part of the celebration my wife and I took a private wood turning class together (neither of us having ever turned anything before).

I was able to set this up at McLaughlin Woods, where I had recently taken a joinery class.  We had a load of fun and a lathe may well be in my shops future.

Mrs. NickedFinger at work at the lathe

We ended up the day each making two turnings, one dry and other from a green cherry burl.

My Wife's Bowl from a dry blank.

My Wife's "Green Wood" Live Edge Cherry Burl Bowl

My Bowl from a dry blank

My hollow form turning from the Green Cherry Burl

I decided in mid-turn that I wanted to try to do some hollow turning and didn’t make a bowl per se but more of a vase shaped thingy that we might put a t-light candle in or something like that.

All in all it was load of fun!

Another Woodworking Class = More Dovetails

Well, it has been quite a while sense I posted, Christmas has come and gone as well as the whole winter.  I was in the ranks of the unemployed for about 4 1/2 months at the end of last year, and spent a fair amount of that time taking care of my mother who diagnosed with Pancreatic Cancer in August.  She ended her fight on April 14th, rest in peace mom.

For my birthday my let me sign up for another woodworking class.  This one was at McLaughlin Woods, which is I found is only about 3 miles from my house.  You can get a quick introduction to Tom McLaughlin in this video posted by Woodcraft.

Anyway, one of the things we did in the class was hand cut a drawers worth of dovetails, and I’ve included the pictures below.

While I’m not about to build a $15,000.00 Bombay Secretary anytime soon.  I think those ended up coming out OK.  I did get to use my new Veritas Dovtail Saw that I got for Christmas.

The good weather is now here, and hopefully I’m back out into the shop.

So much cutting, I got … board.

We finally got the new, permanent counter tops installed on the bank of cabinets in the kitchen.

Quartz Counter Tops

My wife loves the counters, but Quarts can be a really killer on your knives, so I decided to take a lesson from The Wood Whisperer and make a pretty end grain cutting board.  I didn’t document the whole process, however I did have a little bit of trouble with my board(s) cupping after the initial glue up, so I was unable to turn the pieces after the second round of cuts to expose the end grain.  All in all it turned out pretty nice anyway.

Here is the board before any finish was applied:

Naked Cutting Board

Being one to follow instructions I wanted to be sure I found a food-safe finish to apply to the board, so I went to the big blue store and searched and searched and finally struck gold:

WATCO to the Rescue

Three coats later, and the new board is ready for duty, and the LOML is happy, happy.

 

Finished (in more ways than one) Board

Acanthus Workshop – Woodworking Class

I spent the first weekend in October at the Acanthus Workshop in Pennsylvania taking the Woodworking Fundamentals I class.  All in all a great couple days spent with Chuck and Joe, with excellent lunches provided by Chuck’s wife Lorraine.

From the Acanthus Web Site:

This two day course covers the basic hand tools used in fine furniture making. Students will learn how to determine a good tool from a bad tool, what tools are really necessary for furniture making, how the tools work, how to sharpen and care for the tools and how to use the tools properly and safely.

Students will make a series of small, useful items using only hand tools. Students will also cut, by hand, several basic woodworking joints. All materials for this class are supplied for the students.

 

I can strongly recommend this course to anyone with an interest in starting or improving their basic hand tool skills.  I walked away from the class with a new handmade sanding block with my first ever inlay:

 

This may not seem like a very big deal but we started with a piece of Mahogany that had been cut out of square in every dimension on purpose, and then we flattened and trued it up using only hand planes.

 

 

 

To continue on with our hand plane skill torture test we also made this:

 

Yes, I know it looks like a dowel.  In fact it IS a 1″ dowel.  However it started as a 1 1/4″ square piece of stock (with 2 true faces) and we turned them into dowels using (again) nothing but hand planes.

 

 

 

 

Our final project of the weekend involved hand cutting both through and half blind dovetails:

 

Walnut face with poplar side.

 

 

 

 

“drawer” side and back.

 

 

 

 

 

If you click on any of the pictures above you will get the full sized high-res versions of the photo’s.

So know I feel much smarter, and more validated in calling myself a “woodworker”.  All that’s left, as Chuck told us when we left, is practice, practice, practice.

They call it labor day for a reason…

I finished the kitchen cabinets on schedule and my brother and sister-in-law came up this weekend and attacked the project with gusto…

First the sheet rock came down, and then most of the wall studs came out.

Then the carpet and the kitchen floor had to be cut back to the subfloor level so cabinets could sit down where they needed to be.

Once the final dimensions were figured out, the end post to support the overhead beam went in place (the beam was pocket screwed into the ceiling joists).

At the end of the first day, the beam was all done, and the cabinets were sitting in place.

At the end of the second day the cabinets were permanently set (the were screwed together and pocked screwed into the floor), and the temporary counter top was installed.

And finally around 1:00pm today (day three) the three massive drawers were installed (they were built on day 2), and the sliding trash bin was also installed.

Everybody is now tired, including Reba the Wonder Dog, and Grace the cat.

It’s Time for a Cabinet Meeting

The great cabinet build started in earnest on Thursday.  Before any cabinets got built, however, I had to wait for a little help to show up to cut the full sheets of plywood down.  While waiting I gave the shop a pretty good cleaning and even managed to organize my sheet good pile.

I even manged to measure and label all of the partial sheets with their size, including thickness.

With the layout of my shop, cleaning up this space was very important in order to have a clear path for feeding the plywood over my table saw.

As it turned out, after much initial frustration of not getting consistent sized cuts off my table saw, I found my rip fence was loose when locked down and was moving as much as 1/8″ during the cut of the big sheets.  Once I figured what was happening and snugged the fence adjustment down, I ended up with my cuts being a full 3/8″ narrower than I had planed.  It’s not the end of the world though as long as they are all ripped to the same exact size.

Using the tablesaw, bandsaw, and mitre saw, my wife and I (she came home early to help) got all the pieces cut, assembly line style, for all 4 cabinets.

Here is the first:

This will be the only cabinet with an exposed end and will eventually hold the trash can for the kitchen.

When we stopped working that night we had the first cabinet’s twin also done:

The second cabinet will have one door and a sliding shelf.  These cabinets are both 15″ wide.

Saturday we went into my wife’s office and painted all the walls to freshen the place up, but I did get out into the shop around 4:00 and put together the last cabinet in the row (skipping the 3rd cabinet because it is the biggest at 36″ wide and I was working by myself).

This cabinet will up with two doors opening into a 28 1/2″ space with one or two sliding shelves (I’m thinking about putting a “false bottom” shelf in for easy access.

That just leaves the last big cabinet that is going to have 3 drawers in it (a 12″ deep, a 9″ deep, and a 6″ deep).  Right now it is sitting in parts waiting it’s turn (maybe tomorrow).

As with any new project, the opportunity presents itself to add a new tool to the arsenal, and surprisingly enough my wife grabbed this little gem off the shelf at the Big Blue Box Store and threw it in the cart while I was getting some more pocket screws.

As funny as it sound, I think I might prefer the Multi-Mark to my regular adjustable square (I’m not big fan of the way a regular square tightens down I guess).  I just wish this came with a12″ ruler instead of the 6″.

That’s all for now.

One Project Down, Another Project Ready To Go

Finally finished the face frames on the built-in bookcases, and they are now done except for painting (and my lovely wife is going to take care of that).

Here is the “finished” product that still needs some “finish”.

Now on to new and (gasp) even bigger things.  We are going to take a wall out of the Kitchen and open it up to the dining room, and where the wall was, we’re going to put in a new set of Cabinets with a built in breakfast bar.  The run of cabinets is going to be 8′ long.

We started out with a hand sketch:

I then took this to Sketchup and rendered some views:

Did I mention I have to have these cabinets done by Friday?  No?  Thank goodness for the Kreg Pocket Hole Jig!  I really just need to get the cabinet(s) into this stage shown below.  I’m going to build in 4 pieces and bring them into the house one at a time.

Maybe I will be able to post a quick update each day this week to show progress.

A journey of a 1000 books begins with a single shelf…sort of.

It has been unusually hot and humid here for the past few weeks with a couple breaks in the weather recently.  The small air conditioner in my shop does an admirable job of keeping things bearable, but only if I give it a 2 hour head start to get things under control.  This means really no work on the really hot days after I get home from my day job.

I have been working, slowly, on a new set of built in bookshelves in our home office.  I had some nice simple plans in one of the many books I have collected over the years.

The plan has a 2 sets of shelves on the left side of the door and one set on the right (the door not being in the middle of the wall).  Construction starts with a 2×4 frame for each side.

I screwed the top and bottom plates directly into the ceiling joists and sub-floor accordingly.  The vertical pieces were secured using 2 1/2″ pocket screws.  I used my Kreg Mini to make all the holes and cut a spacer to help make sure they were in the proper position.

Next 1/2″ plywood was installed on the 2 exposed ends (near the door) and to make the bottom shelf and the top “cap” of each unit. Also we painted the wall behind the shelves a deep chocolate brown.

Next, 1/2″ plywood was run up the insides of the units at set lengths and 3/4″ plywood was installed horizontally across to make the shelves.

Finally (so far) some 3/4″ poplar was cut and installed to begin the face frame.

Hopefully on Sunday I will be able to cut and install the rest of the face frame across all the shelves, then the whole this is going to be painted white.

Sorry the photo’s aren’t so great, but the room is not big enough to get far enough away from the shelves to get the whole thing in frame….

Don’t put my heart on a shelf … or in a box

All has been pretty quite on the blogging front for the last few weeks.  I’ve been working on a little project for my wife’s birthday (I won’t say which birthday) and she is one of the few people who read my blog so I had to keep mum about what I was really doing.

So without further ado, my first bandsaw type box … happy birthday honey.