BigBob's Blog at LumberJocks.com http://lumberjocks.com/BigBob/blog Tue, 11 Nov 2008 13:45:47 GMT Krenov Style Jewelry Cabinet http://lumberjocks.com/BigBob/blog/6398 I’m secretly building a jewelry cabinet for my wife for her birthday.. She collects vintage costume jewelry and she works in an antiques shop that specializes in vintage jewerly. She has boxes and treasures of hers all over the house. So I’m building her a show cabinet in the Krenov style.
I’m a big fan of Krenov and I thought I’d see what I could do with the style he is so famous for. The cabinet will be made of Cherry, with Spalted Maple doors. The door pulls are made from Zirocote as will all the drawer pulls. I have to work on the cabinet when she is not around so progress is slow, but I’ve completed the doors.
I made the doors first because the spalted maple panels I resawed would dermine the door size. So I will build the cabinet in reverse.

Joinery in the doors is haunched mortise and tenon.

Really nice figure in the panels.

I made the pulls out of a hunk of Zirocote that I had stashed and shaped them for her fingers. The joinery to the door is wedged thru mortise and tenon, so they will never pull out. The tiny wedged are maple for contrast and were cut with a very fine dovetail saw and then prefit into the slots I cut in the pulls.

These are not great photos, they were taken with my cell phone. It would give her a heads up if she sees me out in the shop with her camera, so sorry for the quality.

Test fit of the wedges.

I cut the moritse in the door with a jig and and a plunge router, and then tested the fit of the pulls in the doors.

The doors are lipped so that will be no gap when the doors closed.
The finished pulls installed

The completed doors. Next will be the case and the stand . I’ll post the construction when I start them.

I took this under a light so that you can see the doors better. I made a small jewelry box as a decoy, to throw her off of her real present it’s in front of the doors. It will fit in the interior of the cabinet as a seperate box.
The box is hand dovetailed and has a sliding tray.

]]> Tue, 11 Nov 2008 13:45:47 GMT http://lumberjocks.com/BigBob/blog/6398 BigBob BigBob Building a Yacht Tender http://lumberjocks.com/BigBob/blog/6355 I’m really enjoying this site, and I thought you all might like to see something a little different and what it takes to build a small yacht tender.
Boat building is totally different from cabinetmaking, as nothing is square, everything is on different plane, and it takes some practise to learn to make compound curves that are pleasing to the eye. We call it a ” fair” curve.
This is a 10 ft yacht tender that I built for a friends sailboat. I also made them a ships wheel and some otjher goodies.
The plans are from around 1932. I found them in an old book. First you “loft” the lines. That means to take the designers plans, and draw them full size so that you can make patterns and then molds, from which the hull is built .
Basically it’s like the old connect the dots drawing that kids do. You take a piece of plywwod and draw a grid. The ” offsets” are the designers points expressed in ft/ inches/ and eights. So a notation from the table would say 8-10-3, which means 8 ft, 10inches and 3/8”. You put a point on the grid and drive an icepick in it. Then you bend a batten around it and draw a line. They call it “lofting” because in the old days the only flat wooden floor in a boat shed to draw on was in the loft. From there you pick up patterns.
Here is what it looks like:

The plans.

A thin piece of plywood is slipped under the pointers and drawn on the pattern.

You now have half of the mold and you make a full size mold like this:

The full set of templates are pattern routed onto plywood for the full size mold.

I built a level strong back to build the hull on and set up the molds. The hull is built upside down.My workbench is perfectly flat, and ensures a level strongback.

The completed mold .

Strip planking started.

The hull is made of Honduras Mahogany and Alaskan Yellow Cedar. It is covered with 6 oz cloth and epoxy
follwed by ten coats of UV varnish. I hope you enjoyed something a little different

The completed yacht tender.

Hull #2

]]> Fri, 07 Nov 2008 20:19:37 GMT http://lumberjocks.com/BigBob/blog/6355 BigBob BigBob Restoring a Vintage Jointer http://lumberjocks.com/BigBob/blog/6353 One of the machines on my wish list for my work shop was a jointer. I had a planer and wanted a big jointer to be able to save money on rough boards and to be able to mill to any size I needed fro my projects. The 8” jointers I was interested in were all thousands of dollars, way beyond my means. I started to research older cast iron machines and went searching for one I could restore.
I bought a 1950, Northfield 8 inch jointer on the “bay” for $800. The machine was just past Gettysburg, PA and I’m in Ft Myers Fl. The owner thought I was nuts, my wife already knows I’m nuts, so I loaded up and my trailer and headed out on a three day, 2000 mile road trip to claim my prize. This thing weighs 1150 lbs. so I made a cradle to bolt the machine to for the ride on my little utility trailer.
Here is the machine safe at home as I found it

I had to disassemble the machine to get it off the trailer. Just the base alone is over 300lbs. I took digital photos of the disassembly and carefully labeled and bagged parts and bolts together. The jointer was completely disassembled down to every last nut and bolt.
Northfield Foundry in Minnistoa is still in business, almost a hundred years now. They still make this jointer, not close, this one. They have every part available for it. They even have the part and service manuals online!
A new jointer from them is $10,400…....

Taking it apart

Once I had it apart, I carefully masked all machined areas with duct tape to protect it from the sand blaster.
I hauled the parts over to a guy who does this and then primed all the parts the same day to protect the parts.

Northfield uses a forest green color and they just told me to use a Rustoleum paint that I got from the bog box store. I sanded all the parts and painted them.

I painted the base and made a mobilre plarform for the machine. It has a plywood base with a one inch hardwood border aoriund the base of the machine, I made 3×3 inch UHVM plastic feet that I milled a 45degree bevel around and screwed it to the base. I can move the 1150lb machine by sliding it around the shop, but the friction from the feet hold it firmly unless I move it. Toal cost about $10 and some scraps.

Going back together

Northfield sent me all new decals.



Before the restoration

The pride of my shop, total cost including machine, travel, and restoration $ 1700.

Thanks for looking!

]]> Fri, 07 Nov 2008 16:49:12 GMT http://lumberjocks.com/BigBob/blog/6353 BigBob BigBob A Cabinetmakers Workbench http://lumberjocks.com/BigBob/blog/6345 A few years ago, I started to think about building myself a real workbench. I had read Krenovs books and wanted to get away from corded apprentices and start to really see what I could do with out a machine screaming.
The decision was made to built a Cabinetmakers Workbench. I wanted a bench to do handwork only on, no machines would ever come near this bench. I have my old bench to run routers on etc. I had a few hundred board feet of white oak in the shop that I bought a few years ago. I just could not really afford to go out and buy 12/4 maple so I laminated the stock that I had on hand. It would end up with it’s quartersawn edge showing and it wears like iron.
I started the bench with the tresle base. I laminated 3×3 and 2×3 raills and then joined them by hand with wedged thru mortise and tenon joinery with ebony wedges.

(The base joinery)!:http://i55.photobucket.com/albums/g148/robmill54/P1010049.jpg

]]> Thu, 06 Nov 2008 17:40:20 GMT http://lumberjocks.com/BigBob/blog/6345 BigBob BigBob