Corona Virus Projects

[JohnnyEgo]

Sort of like an extended version of the 'Bored Yet' thread. Since I have more shop-time than usual, I decided to take on a larger project that I had been putting off for a while, which was to make a small card catalog for my son's Pokeman collection. Over the last few weeks, I made some progress on the easier (relative) parts of my project, and figured I'd post up some of it here. I also have no objections to anyone sharing their long term Corona virus projects as well, or answering any questions I can about what I have done, both well and foolishly.

So first, the chaos I plan to address:



I figured for this I'd go with solid cherry. Ply would be easier, faster, and more stable, but I figure I've got some time and wanted to build something that might last a while. Maple and walnut are my usual domestic hardwoods of choice, and aside from some cherry veneer ply, I cannot think of the last time I worked with the stuff. But that didn't stop me from buying a big old plank of the stuff.



Rough lumber is bought in board-feet, which is a measure of volume. I picked a plank that was about 10 feet long, mostly 7-8 inches wide, and about 2" thick, also known as 8/4 when buying rough lumber. Then I started with the first of many rounds of stock prep to come.

First, I chopped it up to rough length, plus a couple inches:


Then on to the jointer-planer set in jointer mode, to make one face flat:


First pass didn't quite flatten it, so it went through again:


Once the face was flat, I flipped the board on edge and ran it through a couple times. This gave me a board with one flat face and one flat edge at 90 degrees to one another:


Then I ran them across the tablesaw to clean up the opposite edge:


Ran them through the planer and then stacked them up to get some air:


I let them rest in the shop for a day at this point. When you take down solid stock like this, it changes the equilibrium of the water distribution in the wood, as well as any hidden tensions. It is very easy for wood to warp, cup, or bow, particularly as you make it thinner. I don't know that it makes too much difference at this point when the pieces are still fairly thick, but I do it anyways.

Next to come: Making the first box joints.

[JohnnyEgo]

I had a bunch of big boards where I last left off, but I needed thinner boards, so I set up my bandsaw to split them, also known as resawing.

First, put in my big (for this smaller bandsaw) resaw blade, and squared it to the table.


Then, split some big boards into littler ones:


I had hoped to get four 3/8" boards out of each segment of plank, but that didn't happen. The plank I bought was nominally 8/4, or 2" thick, but it was skip-planed at the lumber yard to give some indication of the face grain, which reduced it to about 1.9". I lost another 1/8" to jointing and planing, and my resaw blade ate up 1/8" in each slice. By the time I was done planing off the drift after resawing, I ended up with three 3/8" boards and one 1/4" board out of each piece, or 25% less drawer material than I had planned for. This would be the first in a comedy of many, many errors that happened that day, and will no-doubt happen throughout the project.

Now that I had my stock dimensioned for thickness, I could start cutting parts to length. I usually use my tablesaw sled for this, but I didn't feel like swapping out my ripping blade for a cross-cut blade, so I figured I'd just knock it out on my compound miter:


That was a bad choice. I have had my compound miter for many years, and it has served me well for things like framing and rough carpentry. It's been knocked around many times, and I haven't been great about keeping it tuned up, because it mostly hasn't mattered in a while. But it mattered now, and I didn't check before I cut. As a result, none of the ends were square. Had to clean them all up with a miter plane:





Could have avoided all of that if I had just spent the time swapping blades on the tablesaw or checking the alignment on the miter saw before I started cutting.

Anyways, I now had a pile of cut parts, and it was time to join them together. I decided on a box joint as being one of the simplest ways to add strong, functional, and decorative joint that wouldn't crush my soul to batch out 13 drawers with. I set my dado stack to 3/8 of an inch, and then screwed a couple of boards and a 3/8" piece of walnut directly to an old dado sled to get my box joint jig. Then I just ran them through:


And my first run of boxes, setting on top of the material for the next run:

[Irving]

I always enjoy your detailed break down and attention to detail.

[JohnnyEgo]

I appreciate the compliment, but if I paid that much attention to detail, I wouldn't have to fix so many mistakes. If I had a show, I'd call it 'Attention Deficit Woodworking'.

[whitewalrus]

I appreciate the compliment, but if I paid that much attention to detail, I wouldn't have to fix so many mistakes. If I had a show, I'd call it 'Attention Deficit Woodworking'.

The mistakes is how you learn you need to pay more attention to that step

[JohnnyEgo]

Another day, another round of stock prep. Going to try and finish the remaining drawers out of this plank:













Not bad at all. I did my resawing considerably better on this round. Got enough of a yield on the first couple of pieces that I was left with plenty of stock to cut the face frames, runners, and dust panels that will eventually be needed for this one.

[JohnnyEgo]

Last Sunday was nice and quiet, and I had about a three hour run in the shop. Started by stacking up all the boxes and spacing them out so I could get some relative measurements:


I was ready to cut the drawer stock, but I had a measurement locked into my compound miter that I didn't want to change, and my tablesaw was set up for cutting the box joints, so I decided to go old-school. My grandfather was a carpenter who could eyeball a straight line and free cut it to the nearest thousandths. I didn't get that gene. So I marked my real measurement, and then a cut line with a comfortable safety margin:


Then over to the bench hook to cut it. This is a $5 saw. I bought 6 of them when the Cub Scouts came over to work on their woodworking merit badges.



Came out closer to square than normal, but still needs some work to be furniture-grade:


So I used my $10 block plane to square it up.



You do not need to spend a bunch of money on tools to make simple, clean, and precise joints. Just takes a little bit of sweat. Power tools save you that sweat and speed you up, but they can also speed up the pace of your mistakes.

While I enjoyed the sweat equity, I had 7 more edges to square up, and didn't want to do them all with the block plane, so I pulled out my #5 1/2 bench plane to speed things up.


505mm right on the money.

[Irving]

What is a dust panel?

[JohnnyEgo]

In between each row of drawers is the rail that they rest on. In traditional solid wood construction, that rail is actually a frame, rather than a solid board shelf. The reasons were that using a solid wood shelf between each row of drawers make a piece of furniture heavy, more expensive, and then you have to allow for a lot more wood movement in your casework and back boards. So rather than use a solid board shelf, cabinets of this sort use a frame. A light-weight panel inside the frame gives it some rigidity, and also stops the contents of the drawer below from interfering with the drawer above, while also keeping out any dust between the drawers. Hence, the dust panel.

Not as common in contemporary furniture, where ply and MDF are both very cheap and very stable. Here is an example of a plywood dresser I made my wife about 18 years ago. It uses a face frame and drawer runners. If there was a panel in-between each drawer, that would be the dust panel.







I've got some work to do to get to the dust panels for this guy. Mostly, I need to finish shaping all the boxes, get the bottoms in them, glue them square, and flush sand the joints first. Then I will make the face frames and size them to the case. Once that is done, I will turn the rails of the face frames into dust panels. That part will actually be pretty easy and fast, but the all those other things before it are tedious. Going to put some time into the boxes this weekend.

[TFOGGER]

I am pretty useless when it comes to woodwork. Everything I put together looks like it was made out of unrefinished used pallets, regardless of the time or care I put into it. Metal is a much friendlier medium for me.