The Rusling Box, Part One...

So I was able to get started on the latest presentation box this past week. This box is a new size for me, designed to hold both a dirk and a sgian dubh. The buyer decided upon a reclaimed white oak box with bog oak accents and inlay. Working with reclaimed lumber created a little more of a challenge to try and find a board in my stock that was long enough and wide enough for the lid. I have plenty of boards that fit the bill, but for this one, I wanted very little "character" to detract from the focal point (to be discussed later).

After some minor delays and one or two setbacks, I started to see progress. That is always motivating! And yes, I did remember to bring my camera (er... Dana's camera?) into the garage/basement/wherever I happened to call "shop" at the time.

I started off by cutting the sides to length and mitering the corners. It's a pretty simple process... in theory. Really, it's a pain in the butt to make sure you have your angles right. I still don't always get them exactly right, which means I need to work on my jig-making skills. But I do put the fullest of efforts into doing them the best I can, and that's really all I can ask of myself.

In this first picture, you can see some of the character you get working with recycled wood. There is a nail hole in one of the side pieces and some old worm trails in a few of the pieces. I'll do nothing to hide any of these details in the finished box.

After the miters are cut, I ran grooves for lid and bottom. I really wanted to try out my new/old Record 043 plough plane (that I've yet to write a blog entry on), but with the shop in a state of, well, non-existance, and the plane still in as-purchased condition (i.e. not sharpened), I felt it most wise to just cut the joinery on the tablesaw and call it done.

Once the grooves were cut, I measured and cut the lid and bottom (room for seasonal movement with the lid, very little extra room for the plywood bottom).

Before I glued it all up, I wanted to do as much of the inlay in the lid as I could (I have the bog oak, but one part is still en route from Scotland). That way, if I mess it up too badly I can just start the lid over instead of starting the whole box over.

After cutting the bog oak to proper dimensions (thanks to my friend, Vic, for letting me use his bandsaw to resaw the bog oak to its 1/8" thickness), I took measurements to properly place it in the center of the board and lightly scored the edges with a marking knife. I then carefully deepened the lines after removing the piece of inlay. This is one of the tricky parts because white oak is so grainy that the knive can take a path of its own if you're not careful.

Once I have it marked up enough, I darken an 1/8" section of the wood just inside the border. That is a guide so I know where to stop routing. I don't ever try to route all the way to the edge; that's what chisels are for! After routing out most of the area, I finish up with chisels (sorry, I got a little anxious at this point and forgot to shoot a picture).

I don't know if you can tell in this picture, but the white oak I'm working with looks and acts a little different from white oak you might buy from a lumber yard today. The biggest difference is that the grain is less-pronounced. Anyway, that was just an aside...

After champhering the back of the inlay for an easier fit (I found a microplane works well for this job), I test fit the inlay. Satisfied with the fit, I spread glue in the recess and clamped the inlay in place.

For an inlay in white oak, I'm pleased with this result.

It was late by that point, and I had glue to dry, so I decided to call it a night.

More in a bit!

Woodworking as a math equation...

No shop + Short Deadline = Intense Pressure

As luck would have it, just about the same time I totally dismantled my temporary shop setup in order to start working on building the more permanent one, I received an email from someone who wanted me to make a box for them. I didn't have a whole lot of information other than what the box needed to hold (a dirk and a sgian dubh) and the deadline wouldn't be far off.

Aside from the fact that I could certainly use the extra money for shop construction, I was drawn to the idea of making my first dirk and sgian dubh combination presentation box. So with less than one month to completion date, I accepted the job.

Fortunately for me, I do some of my best work under intense pressure.

After a few days of e-mails back and forth, the buyer and I finally agreed upon some specifics (reclaimed white oak box with Irish bog oak accents, bog oak and brass inlay, and a closure method I've yet to determine - either a full-mortise lock or a push-button lock). I worked out most of the design ideas, milled my lumber to approximate dimensions, and am now ready to start turning wood into something functional.

I have a dentist appointment tomorrow morning and an eye doctor appointment tomorrow afternoon, so I'm just going to take the whole day off from work. That will give me a few undisturbed hours in the middle of the day where I can knock out the first five or six steps to making the box in one go. I've found that once I get the initial construction started, the rest seems to fall in place.

As much as I'd rather use as few power tools and as many hand tools as possible, with the mess I have in the basement, I'm afraid most of my hand tools are not conveniently accessible so many of my cuts will be on the table saw. I will be doing some block planing on a 2:1 champher I'm putting on the lid and there's always a fair amount of tablesaw cleanup I can still do with my bullnose plane and scrapers and chisels and whatever else it needs.

I have received several requests for step-by-steps on one of my boxes, so my goal with this one is to document it as best I can. I have the camera batteries charged and ready to go, so we'll see how well I do at photo documentation...

Oh, and I'm also excited about making this box because I've solved an issue I had with fuming my boxes with anhydrous ammonia (it had to do with the lining and whether or not I could fume a box with the lining in place), so I'm going to fume this one as part of the finishing process. It's a technique I take severe precautions with, but I enjoy the end results.

Disston in Training...

Last night my Disston backsaw came home after a long hard week in Bad Axe Boot Camp. At first, I was skeptical this method of therapy would work, but I quickly realized he was a changed saw! Sharp as a tack (more like 104 of them), amped up and ready to get back to work in the shop, he practically jumped out of the box.

Before his "vacation", it was hard to get him up and working. His teeth were so dull he couldn't bite into a Twinkie! And when I finally did get his lazy butt into a kerf, he zigged and zagged all over the place like an AK on full auto.

Now, after his TechnoPrimitive Tune-Up, when I say, "saw," he says, "how fast?" He jumps into that kerf like it's a fox hole and rips perfectly straight lines through wood fiber and lignin as if it were punked!

Thanks, Mark, for getting my back saw back into tip top shape and making it all it can be!

Ethan

My New Shop, Episode 2: It's Still Purple...

But it's framed in!

Mike and Jimmy showed up right on time Saturday morning to get my workshop framed up and work on the electrical bits. I'd spent several hours on Friday night (just before I took pictures for the last blog entry), cleaning the area up in preparation for their arrival. Mike had a shopping list and a cost estimate, so I grabbed the money I'd set aside for materials and we headed to the closest Orange Box store (just five short minutes away, if that).

Jimmy and I started on lumber while Mike went to pick out electrical supplies. We were amazed at the quality of 8' long 2x4's we could pick from! It didn't take us 5 minutes to come up with the 30 boards we needed. Picking out the five 16' boards took a little more time, but not as much as it took us to find the one straight 12' pressure treated board we needed! By the time we found Mike, he was pretty much done, as well. Ten minutes later, we were in the checkout lane. I was pleasantly surprised when the total amount came in at just under $325 (plus I was able to return $27 worth of unused materials this afternoon).

After we got it home and unloaded, I was only able to help out for an hour or so before I had to take off for a few hours. I had to go to a shop tour of Quinn Saw Blades, something put together by the St. Louis Woodworkers Guild. I'm the newsletter editor, so I wanted to be there to better write an article for the next issue. I didn't get back from the tour until almost 1:00 PM, at which time most of the framing was done and Mike was already started on electrical. They had to frame in a steel beam and some duct work and plumbing, so I'll lose a little ceiling height in a few areas, but that can't be helped. It is the cost of building a shop in a basement.

Much of the existing wiring was a hodge podge of sorts, so we took it all out and pretty much started over from scratch. It is now wired to use five shop lights in the main part of the room and three more on the left-hand side over by the windows where the bench will be (I only have two lights up right now; I'll hang the rest after the drywall is up). I went a little "green" at this point, re-using three cam lights behind the steel beam in the back of the room that were pulled out of a room upstairs earlier this year.

I wanted to save as much space as possible while keeping my costs down, so I didn't frame out the concrete walls; I'll just paint those white with semi-gloss paint. The outlets on these walls are high enough that I can put a bank of cabinets along the back wall and have these sit a foot or so above the counter top. The wall on the right is drywalled and we had access to the other side (via the tearing down of the really cheap peg board), so that's why you just see outlets and no PVC conduit there.

That's where we stand right now. I called my little brother the other day and he said he would be happy to come up and help me hang drywall. Before he does that, I need to insulate the ceiling and walls. That's something I can do on my own, of course. Hopefully I'll be able to get it taken care of this week or next.

Unfortunately, the same weekend I decided to make my temporary shop a hectic mess, I got a box commission! And a rush job, at that! So I might have to hang one or two more temporary lights, drag my small bench into the shop space, and make do for a few weeks to try and get this order done.

I was tempted to not accept the order, partly because of the lack of a shop and partly because the time frame is so short (the wedding is on May 2nd, which also happens to be my birthday), but I'm always up for a challenge.

Yeah, I know. My shop is still purple. I'll just have to deal with it for a few weeks, mostly by not looking up from my work if I can help it.

My New Shop, Episode 1: It's Purple!

Ok, let's get this out of the way. Yes, I have a purple room in my house. Horrible, innit? In its previous life, it was apparently used as an exercise room. I don't know about you, but it makes me want to high jog in place, singing, "I want to live forever."

Can you see past the purple (it's really more of a lilac, I believe...), though? Can you see the potential? A bank of cabinets against the back wall, pegboard storage above, a nice bench in the middle of the room and a few select power tools along the sides (bandsaw, drill press, scroll saw, and my latest acquisition, an old Delta/Homecraft disc sander). Tomorrow morning, I'll have a small crew of two over, helping me with Part One of turning this purple room into my new workshop!

"Exciting" is not a descriptive-enough word.

The short wall, over by the utility sink, is going to come out. The new wall will be about a foot closer to the sink and will meet up with an extension of the existing wall between the two support poles on the right. It might look tempting to just continue the short wall all the way over, but the steel beam above causes problems if we do that. I can't put a standard-sized door in a wall under the beam, you see. So we'll bring it out a foot and make the door open into the rest of the basement.

We'll just frame it up for a door for now, because I don't yet have it. I have three door requirements causing me issues at the moment. Call it green or call me cheap, but the first is that I fully plan on getting the door I'm going to use off of Craig's List or some place like the Habitat For Humanity store just a few miles from my house. The second challenge is that I need the door to be mostly glass. Because I need a mostly-glass door, it should be an exterior insulated-and-thermal-pane door. The third is that I want the widest door I can get, so it has to be a 36"-er. That makes finding a door from Craig's List or HFH a little more difficult...

Why does it need to be mostly glass, you ask? To be honest, it's for my cat, Petite Chaton Noir (Teeters, for short), as much as it is for me. Teeters is my shop cat, my work partner, my apprentice, and my mentor. Any time I'm doing a project around the house, whether it is hanging curtain rods or hanging a banister, assembling a wall cabinet or working on a box in my make-shift shop, she is there, watching me intensely with her big green eyes and fully-dilated pupils.

Anyone who has ever had a black cat knows just how difficult it can be to photograph one. I think this is a pretty good image of her. Honestly, it's a challenge just trying to catch her sitting still for 20 seconds. She's a bit of a racer...

I'm not yet decided on whether or not I'll be letting her in the work shop with me; she tends to pick up dust easily with her bottle brush tail. But she would be absolutely devastated if she couldn't at least watch me while I was working. So, for her, I will close off my room with a glass door.

Hopefully, tomorrow afternoon will find us with the framing and electrical done. That is pretty much it for the hired help. After that, it will be up to me and my brothers to insulate, hang drywall, tape and mud, paint, and put down the floor. A great friend of mine (the same one who put in the wood floor Teeters is lounging on) owns a carpet and tile store, so he's going to supply me with click-install cork flooring. Once I have everything else done, I'll finish off with that. It should make for an easy-to-stand-on floor that is also tool edge friendly for my more clumsy moments.

I can't really start moving things back in at that point, though. I don't yet have the cabinets for the back wall, so again, I'll be hunting Craig's List or the local papers or the HFH store to find what I need. There is a small section of ceiling behind the beam along the back wall. I recently took out four recessed lights from my living room (replacing them with airtight insulation-rated recessed lights); I'll be adding those back in behind the beam to supply lighting for the cabinet workspace. The rest of the room will be lit with a re-arrangement of the large amount of florescent lights found throughout the basement. I will try to achieve a natural lighting effect with a combination of cool and daylight bulbs.

I have other ideas for storing lumber and things I don't use all the time, like clamps and jigs, but I'll go over that some other time.

For now, I'm going to get some rest. I have a big day ahead of me tomorrow!

In case you're wondering... I have the paint picked out already, and it is "sailcloth white". Goodbye purple walls.

A Dark And Stormy Night...

It was a dark and stormy night on Friday, the 13th of February. You would think that I, a 35 year old guy, wouldn’t be anxious on such a night, but I was. It didn’t have anything to do with the weather or the date, though. I was on my way to meet up with Matt, our guild’s secretary, and Jeff Jewitt.

I always get nervous meeting “famous” woodworkers. I was antsy for weeks before my David Marks class and almost skipped dinner with Frank Klausz the night before his weekend conference! But every time I’ve meet one of these “prophets of the grain”, I’ve walked away with a new friend and the realization that they are just ordinary people like you and me. Well… Frank still intimidates me, but if you’ve ever met him in person then you know why.

I thought about all of that as I made my way to Erio’s Pizza and Restaurant, a great local Italian place not far from the airport, where Matt said they were going to eat. I’d called him earlier in the evening to see if they wanted anyone else from the guild to join them and he said they’d love to have me.

I didn’t know I would get to meet Jeff until earlier that night. Heck, I wasn’t supposed to be going to his seminar that next weekend! But through a series of fortunate events, I found myself looking at a Valentine’s Day weekend at home alone while my wife visited her family in Ohio. So I did what any warm-blooded woodworker would do – I signed up for a woodworking seminar! At first, I was hesitant about signing up for a finishing seminar – it sounded a bit boring. But then I realized a good finish is just as important to a project as joinery or design and that I could definitely learn some useful information.

I walked through the front door of Erio’s and glanced around the room for just a second or two before I spotted them; they were an easy pair to find, being the only non-family table in the restaurant. I grabbed the chair across from Jeff and introduced myself.

I have to be honest with you here. As much as I say I’m intimidated meeting well-known woodworkers, I’m actually a very gregarious person. I am quick to strike up a conversation with a complete stranger and it was no different with Jeff.

It didn’t take me more than a few minutes to figure out we were separated by fewer than the six degrees of Kevin Bacon. His wife is from a small town just a few minutes drive from my wife’s home town of Akron, OH. His mother-in-law worked in an Akron branch library for many years and my mother-in-law has managed all of the Akron branch libraries for several years and worked in the Akron library system for more than 30! We were both pretty certain they knew each other.

I tried to keep the topic of conversation away from woodworking, knowing that is all he would be talking about for the next two days. He said he tries to live a healthy lifestyle and several years earlier became one of those cycling nuts who gets all geared up with the special outfit and shoes and makes automobiles enter the opposing lane on country roads on Saturday mornings. He also said he wasn’t a vegetarian (and then promptly ordered the vegetarian pizza).

The food was good and the conversation was great. After an hour and a half, though, Jeff wanted to get settled into his hotel room and rest up for the next day. I headed back to my house for the same reason, a lot less anxious and much more excited about the next two days.

(Thank goodness he did get some rest, because he really had to work hard! Check out the power sanding demonstration!)

Finishing off the week the right way...

Let's see a show of hands... Who likes the idea of hand-cut dovetails? Who doesn't like the idea of putting the finish on your project?

Something tells me just as many hands were raised for the second question as were raised for the first.

Let me ask you a different question... At the age of 16, if you had the opportunity to learn how to drive a car or fly an airplane, which one would you pick? Sure, it would be great fun to know how to fly an airplane, but it isn't a skill you'd be able to use right off the bat. You'd have to have a plane handy, you probably couldn't use it to get to high school (unless you lived in Alaska), and you don't even want to think about gas prices! So the smarter choice would be to learn how to drive a car, right?

Right.

Now let's get back to the first two questions... If you had the opportunity to attend a class on learning how to make hand-cut dovetails or how to improve your finishing techniques, which one would you pick?

Be honest now.

You'd probably pick dovetails, wouldn't you? I imagine I would, too. In fact, now that I think of it, I did. The first woodworking class I ever took at Woodcraft was how to hand-cut dovetails. I was actually quite impressed with my end result - I still have those first dovetails on a shelf above my tablesaw. But I have to admit something else to you. I've never made a box - drawer, carcase, or jewelry - with hand-cut dovetails. I've always used some other method, like mitered or rabbet joints. So while I did learn some good sawing and chiseling techniques, that class didn't really give me a full return on my investment.

Now contrast that with how many projects I've put a finish on, which is pretty much all of them, and one would wonder why my first class wasn't on finishes! Taking into consideration that most new woodworkers think the hand-cut dovetail is the sign of a a true woodworker, I can see why it was my first class. But after this many years, I would like to think I'd learned my lesson a little sooner and would have picked up a finishing class a long time ago.

Well, I haven't... until now.

This weekend I get to spend about 15 hours with Jeff Jewitt and 20 other woodworkers at a seminar sponsored by the St. Louis Woodworkers Guild (I'm not just the newsletter editor, I'm also a client).

A few months ago, when we announced the seminar and the date (February 14th and 15th), I thought there would be no way of going. My wife and I don't actually celebrate Valentine's Day to any significant degree (we choose to celebrate the week before, on the 7th, which is the anniversary of our first date), but still... I thought spending the whole Valentine's Day weekend at a woodworking seminar might be pushing it.

It wasn't really a big deal, though. It isn't like I was missing out on a hand-cut dovetail seminar, right? So I quickly resigned myself to not doing anything fun in February and then didn't give it a second thought.

Jump ahead to just a few weeks ago when my wife called me from work. She had to travel out of town for a Friday/weekend in February and wanted to know what weekend might work best for our busy schedule. I quickly reminded her she couldn't travel on the weekend of the 7th because that was our dating anniversary!

(Yeah, I know how to score brownie points.)

I followed that with the Wronski feint, suggesting the following weekend was clear if she wanted to go then. She agreed that would be the best travel weekend of the month and, before she knew what hit her, I was signed up for a Finishing Seminar with Jeff Jewitt!

(You've got to keep these skills sharp, people, or they will fade away!)

Tonight, Jeff flies into town. One of the guild board members is going to pick him up and get him situated at his hotel. I'm supposed to give them a call and join them if he's up for dinner with a small group of people. It will be a good way to end one of the worst work weeks I've had in a long time and a great way to start a Woodworker's Valentine's Day Weekend!

(I'll be sure to follow this blog entry with one about the seminar.)