Getting Organized

Completed a much delayed little walnut shelf project earlier in the summer. I had received a bunch of air dried Oregon walnut from a neighbour a couple years ago, made this as a simple thank you. Inspired by a piece I saw in a book about the work of some of James Krenov's students. Finished with shellac, but it was all streaky. Very odd. Gave up on shellac, first time ever. Went to Tried and True varnish, worked like a charm. The colours on the air dried walnut are so much more alive than they are in kiln dried walnut. It's really quite an amazing difference, though the picture does not do it justice.

Casting about for a new project. Want to avoid the problems I've had in the past with trying to shoehorn a piece of wood into a project that it just won't work for. Not ready to take on a big display cabinet with legs - yet - although that remains my 'ultimate dream' project.

Started on a Wendy Maruyama inspired shelf out of arbutus. The hardest part for me is deciding on sizes and proportions, and figuring out if one wood works with another. Part of the learning process. Guess I am a slow learner . . .

My wife out of the blue wants me to build a desk for our daughter, a desk made from, get this, a slab! Yes! I have a garage full of slabs and this I can do! Watch for the worlds fastest slab desk to appear here at the Slow Woodworker!

Unfortunately the ladies chose this slab, which is magnolia. The wood is pretty much identical to poplar, with some rather unattractive mineral staining. I planed it to about 1 1/2 thick, cut it to 55" long, then beveled the underside with a router jig so that the edges appear about 1" thick. As you can see in the photo, it was time for the palm sander. Next up will be the legs, etc and finishing.

Summer: Going, going . . .

I had the chance in early July to spend a week at the Inside Passage School of Fine Woodworking. It was a wonderful experience, a whole week on mortise and tenon joints! More than that it was a chance to connect with some like minded woodworkers, learn some great things from the school, and recharge my woodworking batteries.

Otherwise, I've pretty much taken the summer away from the shop. Have run a couple of loads of slabs through the kiln, so now I have plenty of dry wood for this winter's projects, as well as space in the backyard for more fresh slabs! I guess I must have cut a lot of Douglas fir, as there seems to be a lot of it running through the kiln now. Not especially desirable as a cabinet wood, but this is old growth with tight growth rings. Krenov made a cabinet out of "Oregon pine" that was featured in one of his books, this is another name for Douglas fir.

Every time I load the kiln I am reminded of the physical nature of woodworking. It never ceases to amaze/frustrate me how much work it is moving these planks around. Of course they weigh more when the are freshly cut and still wet, but I can assure you that even a nearly dry Doug fir plank that is 8' long, 10/4 thick and 2' wide is a substantial stick of wood! I must be getting smarter as I get older, now I use a cart whenever I can, rather than just when I must. My back is thanking me.

In the sun, pulling boards off the stack, cutting to length, resealing the end, carrying over to the kiln and stacking. Several boards had rat feces on them (I trapped two this week), so that had to be carefully swept off and disposed of while wearing a mask. Reorganizing and tidying the stack back up afterwards. The whole business took the better part of the afternoon, probably 4 hours, and I was perspiring like mad the whole time. It's hard work plain and simple, and the pleasure of working with the wood to build something hopefully beautiful, seems a long ways off!

My kiln is only 8' long, I don't know why I have milled some of my boards a couple inches too long. Of course I have to get out the saw (skilsaw in this case) and cut off the end, then reseal it before it goes into the kiln. Pure 100% unnecessary work. Make mental note for next time I am milling . . . 8 feet MAX!!!!!

This 'n That

My recent flurry of plane tuning while convalescing continued onto a couple other planes, a spokeshave that belonged to my grandfather, and some Japanese chisels. With all these great functional tools now lying around, it was inevitable that progress would be made on a project.

 Grampa's Spokeshave Rehabilitated

So I whipped up a simple wall shelf out of cherry and catalpa.  All the wood in it I milled up previously with my Alaska mill. The cherry about six years ago, the catalpa two or three. The back panel is a single piece of catalpa that is 13” tall and 23” wide. It was a leftover piece from a slab about 5’ long that I had cut to length for another project.

A friend resawed the catalpa on his 20” Crescent bandsaw with a Laguna blade. It was unbelievable, smooth enough to use without any sanding. My Minimax was choking on it, I need to do some work on the chip clearance. Wall hangers I made up myself from brass. The back is attached with loose screws and enough space to allow for seasonal movement.

 Resawing Catalpa on Crescent Bandsaw

One bad oops occurred when I drilled some holes in the catalpa in the wrong spot. They were for screws and supposed to line up with the backs of the shelves but did not! Luckily I had the foresight to cut up a couple spare back pieces when I was over at my friend's place.

The cherry was all planed, or for the ornery bits, scraped. I then rubbed it with the shavings and ran some steel wool over it. Edges were softened with a block plane and a strip of 600 grit sandpaper. Finish is a couple coats of padded on shellac with beeswax on top.

Now I can put my Hammond Glider accessories on the shelf and they will be “away”, I no longer have to constantly move them around my shop to get them “out of the way”!

Meanwhile, I had a bunch of burls lying around that got the better of me and I wound up slicing them all up, in the hopes that they would dry faster / more evenly in smaller pieces. Maple and walnut. Don't have much experience with burl so this is a bit of an experiment.

Spalted Maple Burl

I also scored three small firewood sized logs of holly from the yard of a demolished house in the neighbourhood. I have had trouble getting holly to stay white while it dries, so I sliced these up on the bandsaw right away and threw them in the kiln at full blast. I had hoped that this would prevent blue stain, but it did not seem to yield any real improvement.

Looks like my three dead 2100 chainsaws are going to come back from the dead, three new pistons and two replated cylinders later. If all of these come together I will own 8 high powered chainsaws. Three or four will be out the door in short order to help recoup some costs.

I also milled up another yellow cedar chunk down at the beach. Brutal embedded sand in the cracks. Went for 3+" thick slabs. Then I could not move them to my van so I wound up splitting them along the crack. The chainsawing area is now closed till the fall. Seems my rib has healed up enough to get back to the milling, just in time for the milling area to close until the fall. Sigh.

Plane Repairs

I have several wooden planes that I've been wanted to close the mouths up a bit on, so with sore ribs preventing me from doing anything very physical, it seemed like a good time to get to work on a couple of these.

(The ribs were initially diagnosed as bruised, but that was upgraded to 'cracked' after my second visit to the doctor. I lost an edge playing hockey and slid into the boards hard.)

Anyways, first up was a cocobolo Krenov style plane with a 1 1/4" blade that I wanted to put a cocobolo insert in, which I did by routing out the bottom in front of the mouth.

When it came to flatten the bottom, I decided to try something a bit different. I had taken a course on metal scraping in Seattle a couple of years ago from  a guy named Forrest Addy. Hand scraping a metal surface will yield a surface flatter than can be achieved by machining or by abrasion/sanding. I had had great success in scraping an old Stanley plane at that time, and thought I would see how the process would work on a wood plane.

 Scraping pattern on bottom of Stanley plane

I modified the procedure only slightly for wood, by using my very thin hand scraper (from Lee Valley I believe). With a granite reference surface, a tube of Prussian Blue oil paint, and a Brayer roller, I was off to the races.

I started scraping immediately after I had passed the bottom of the plane over the jointer, and as a result half the work was to get past the jointer ripples. Note to self: Next time sand off the ripples after jointing!

The process was to roll the dye out on the granite, put the plane down on top of the granite surface (which will mark the high spots with the dye), and then scrape, using the smallest strokes possible ( 1/16"?), all the dye spots off the bottom. Then repeat, until you get a consistent pattern of dye marks across the entire bottom. It took me about ten passes to get to where I wanted it to be.

After a couple scrapings

Getting near the end, fairly even pattern just not dense enough yet.

After the bottom was flat, I very carefully worked the mouth with small files until I achieved a tiny opening. This was rather tedious, but the plane yields full length full width shavings consistently now. I'd judge the procedure a success!

Next was an old beech coffin smoothing plane that I picked up a few years ago. It has good 'bones' and a great heavy old laminated 2" blade on it. I had glued a new sole of quartersawn locust to it some time ago, now was the time to finish the job.

I chose locust for the sole since it is the hardest wood available locally. In retrospect it was not the best choice as it is quite brittle and filing the mouth was too delicate as a result.

This one really taxed my plane tuning skills. The blade angle had become far too steep over the years, so I had to regrind and resharpen. The laminated steel was extremely tough going. The chipbreaker was warped and not closing tightly. The wedge was not holding the blade in evenly. And the new sole was not flat so I tried to flatten it with the same scraping procedure, but unfortunately the blue dye got into the pores of the locust and made lit hard to figure out where to scrape. After an awful lot more fooling around than I had wanted/hoped/expected, I started getting full length full width shavings .0005" thick.

 Time to put these bad boys to work!

More More Milling

It seems like what little time I have had recently for "woodworking stuff" has been dedicated to milling. Unfortunately my pile is now completely full, I have wood leaning against the garage and no place to stack it, and now I have injured myself playing hockey!

After picking up the yellow cedar a couple weeks ago, I went back to get some more of it, only to discover that a bunch of deodar logs had arrived. So I spent a morning milling up deodar. I have milled up deodar before, I love the smell.

Unfortunately, this log had a lot of knots in it, not nearly as much clear wood as I had hoped for, although still enough to make it worthwhile. I wound up with 9 slabs, and even left a couple of the worst ones on the beach, first time I had ever done that!

Started to have some mill problems as well, the mill seemed to be diving into the log at the start of the cut, making it super hard to push for the first six inches or so. Diagnosed some lose nuts on the mill, hopefully that will take care of it!

The week after that I went back to get some more of the yellow cedar. Unfortunately it started to rain pretty hard so I decided to save it for another day. Not before I noticed a couple more promising pieces of deodar though.

Then I planned to go back and get the deodar and the yellow cedar, except I hurt myself playing hockey and it looks like the milling is done for a while now. That's what happens when 50 year old guys play hockey I guess. At least as soon as I can plane without pain I can get back to the shop!

More Milling

Had a couple more milling sessions recently.

Some friends joined me one brisk morning for a maple crotch, an enormous and ancient red cedar stump/burl, and a short piece of maple with quilting in it. Unfortunately this day went badly and ended early, as both maples were punky/rotten/blue stained, and the cedar was too deeply fissured to yield anything decent.

Subsequently I went back and took a look at a large piece of yellow cedar that had obviously been cut down ages ago, eventually drifted ashore locally, and had lain on the beach for several months.  After a minor string of bad luck with rotten logs recently, I was a bit reluctant to go at it since it struck me as being kind of marginal. Twisted, cracked, weathered, full of sand, etc. Despite this, it contained some very promising looking sections.

While the log was indeed full of sand and incredibly tough on my chain, I wound up getting five nice slabs from it, all quarter sawn or rift sawn. While there are some cracks, I have no doubt that I will still have a lot of very fine material once it all dries.

Sometimes it does pay to take a chance!

Some BIG Milling

Scored this big maple log last week. 9' long, 3 1/2' wide at the narrow end. Probably the widest log I have ever attempted.

Unfortunately it was totally punky, my friend and I did not get anything from it. Which was a shame as there was some beautiful quilting in some areas.

But it was a darn fun day!

We did pick up a few pieces of cherry though. 3' across, but only about 2' long, with the graft union in them, it was a flowering cherry.

The new saw was cutting well, we used the 5' bar.