Let’s start with the “trio of trugs” – I’ve made 3 of these over the last 2 years – you’d have thought you’d be able to tell from the picture which came first etc, since I’m supposed to be getting better!

Mostly pine – the bent handle is bent laminations of beech – mahogany details.
Oh – it’s sitting on a big slab of cedar attached to an old sewing machine base.

Next up – racklet for the bathroom…

I confess – it’s a broom handle. In my mind it integrated nicely with the sides, but, of course, everyone knows (except me, it seems) that you can’t have sharp edges like that and expect them not to splinter.
She who must be obeyed decided, after the first coat of varnish, that she wanted it dark to match the toilet roll holder, so the finish is kinda weird. I tried rebating the pieces together, but that requires that the wood be straight, I discovered.

Fresh from that “success”, a somewhat similar one for the kitchen…

The moral here, I learnt, is not to try and build things bigger than you can clamp! The garage looked like something from a Heath Robinson sketch with clamps tied to bits of string, tied to bits of wire, tied to other clamps. Then, of course, the string broke! Still, the mahogany spliney bits came off OK, I thought. But this frustrated me – it’s sooooooo simple, but with so many bits that simply “aren’t quite right”.

We end with the second thing I ever made – it’s in ash …

The joy of moving house and having no furniture is that you have to make some (well, that’s what I tell the wife). It’s hard to tell from the picture just how big this is – I’m 5’11” and I can just about stretch out on it. Part of the design allows it to be unbolted since it won’t go through the door – at least I thought of that before I built it!

There was/is a forum discussion about design types – G&G, rustic etc etc. I’m currently trying to work out whether my “chunky” stuff is because that’s what I like to design, or whether I design for my limitations, and, whether, on that basis, I’ll ever be able to do more subtle things since I avoid trying them. The jury is out.

The demons and I continue to chatter as I fall asleep…

Just some pics during work…

Router out what’s going to be the hidden compartment…

Once it’s glued together, router out the sliding dovetail – not easy with no router table, but this is what i came up with…

Cut the other half of the dovetail in what’s going to be the base…

As always, allow members of the zoo to examine the work…

“Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead” – Benjamin Franklin

So.
It’s been cold and raining, and something called “Christmas” and then, as if that wasn’t enough to destroy one’s rhythm, “New Year” came up, so I haven’t had much time to spend in what is laughingly called my “shop”.
No-one, however, can stop the brain from ticking over, so that’s where I’ve been putting in the work, even whilst wearing the silly hats.
Analysis is what I’ve been doing, and I thought I’d dump some of my thoughts for your general amusement.
But first off, let me say I know I haven’t a hope in h$$l of winning – I looked through the entries for the last competition and was, frankly, gobsmacked – awesome stuff. In any event, I don’t have a half-inch router so those bits would be no good to me anyway (sob sob sob).
Still, I’m English, so the whole “it’s in the taking part and not in the winning” thing is in the genes.
However, I did come to one decision in that regard – if I’m going to build something with a hidden compartment, it has to actually be genuinely useful – we travel a lot, and almost invariably forget where we’ve hidden the stuff we hid when we get back – to this date we’re missing 2 credit cards, 3 cheque books and a mobile phone – they’re here somewhere, but where?

This has lead to…

Problem number 1.
Ok, so I build the most beautiful box you can imagine (with all that pine and my complete lack of skill, yeah, right!), with the most devilishly hidden compartment that even Prof Hawkins on drugs wouldn’t be able to find, or even know existed. We get broken into – they’ll simply nick the box!

Conclusion 1. Either build something that doesn’t look great (I favour this – sorta suits my woodworking modus operandii), or build something fairly immovable, or, at any rate, not desirable – wooden toilet with hidden compartment?

Problem number 2.
Size matters, ya know. I came up with several ideas where I could stash my valuable collection of pin-heads. Cute, neat, and, with suitable skill, possible winners. But not a lot of use.

Conclusion number 2.
It needs to be big enough to store some cash, cheques, passports, travellers cheques and keys (the car would be useful too) – real stuff.

Problem number 3.
Obviousness. I’ve looked at literally hundreds of hidden compartment things on the ‘net (my “shop” has no lights), and, whilst I don’t dispute that a lot of them are hard to find, I suspect a lot of them are not hard to find with a sledgehammer. If I were a thief and I broke into someone’s house and saw a cool old-fashioned table, I might well figure there was a hidden compartment with someone’s valuable pin-head collection in it. I wouldn’t spend 3 hours trying to find it, I’d just trash it!
The same applies to all that “subtle locking mechanism” stuff – great for after-dinner discussion, for the intellectual challenge, but not sufficient for my “real-life” needs.

Conclusion number 3.
You must never dream in a month of sundays that it’s even worth looking at the thing (I’m liking the wooden toilet idea more and more)

Problem number 4.
I like to be contradictory, or at least my head does, and it’s nice to WIN! I wonder what people will use to judge? Will a reasonably made and incredibly clever thing win out over a beautifully made but rudimentary thing? I suspect I know the answer.

Conclusion number 4.
No conclusion, since my skill set leaves me little choice. I’m a mathematician (or I was in my previous life), so the “devilishly cunning” appeals to me. I can’t, of course, make it, but it still appeals.

I think that’s as far as I’ve got.
But don’t get me wrong. When I see that beautiful box or desk, with that oh so cool locking mechanism, I’ll still vote for it as a piece of art, it just isn’t what I want to be building, even if I could.

PS The internet is a scary scary place – did you know there’s a “purse blog”? Did you know that the state of Illinois banned secret compartments in cars (struck down – it was declared unconstitutional in April 08, but it was on the statute book for 6 years!)

I finally bit the bullet and tried a design that included joints, moreover, important joints.
I periodically go through the offcuts box to see if anything jumps out, and I had a few “long triangle” bits of ash. I’ve made stools/small tables in every kind of wood I’ve used except the ash, and, after a bit of playing about and brainstorming I came up with this idea. I’d also been wondering for a while about a “2-legged” table.
It got the “Origami” nick name while it was being glued up…

!

Being only joined to the top with 2 legs, it was important that those joints were strong, and could survive a turning moment, so I pushed the boat out and went for some kind of weird “slidy” sort of joint – I daresay that has a name…

I managed to “sneak” up on the fit, so it was pretty tight.
So far so good!

The “small leg” I attached with a tapered “flap” joint. Not half half, so I could attach the cross piece…

This I couldn’t sneak up on, so it ended up a wee bit looser than was ideal, but by making sure I clamped it under the right strain, I could make sure the crucial bits to take the strain were actually flush during gluing.

The cross piece was the first time I’ve ever actually aimed to cut a piece to the exact correct size, rather than cutting big and sanding down, and I actually managed it just about right. Getting the faces at the right angle without a table saw required planing at an angle, but someone was obviously watching over me and that seemed to go OK. Gluing it in place, what with all the weird angles, was a challenge, but it worked OK.

Leveled the legs and cut the small 45 degree on the top and it was finished, except for removing glue and lots of sanding.
Done!

Learnt lots.

I like the ash, but one thing I don’t like about it is that the end grain “dumbs down” when the oil is applied.

I think this is, technically, the best thing I’ve ever done. And I like the result too – a bit weird, but not toooooo weird.
It was also enjoyable to make – most projects have enjoyable bits and bits of drudgery, but this was mostly fun – small but not tiny helps, as does not messing stuff up and having to recover along the way.

I think I might try some more joints soon :-)

I know most people’s blogs are useful, instructional and informative.

Mine aren’t :-)
All I can do is let you peek into the scariness that’s in my head.

I recently posted a project entitled “Another stool (failure)”. I think I got more feedback on that than on all my other projects put together. This, I’m fairly sure, was because of the word “failure” in the title.
Which lead me to thinking about what constituted “success” and “failure” in my woodworking. I’m talking hobby wordworking here – as a professional anything that sells is, in some sense, a “success”.

I’m new to this, so my standards are pretty low – that’s not to say I don’t aim to produce the most perfect joint anyone has ever seen, it’s just that I don’t expect to achieve it.
When I started, I was supposed to build a new kitchen – I read a lot – didn’t seem that hard. Thankfully I tried some other things first – a settee and a chair. Woodworking is hard! The kitchen will have to wait.

1 Solidity
My first metric of success is whether the thing is solid. I don’t build boxes, or turn pens. If I build a chair or a stool you have to be able to sit on it without it falling apart. As well as the obvious reason of the fact that it’s in our lounge and used daily, wood is expensive, we have no wood burning fire, and, well, I wouldn’t burn it anyway.
This is the main reason what I build is “chunky”. I met someone at the supermarket cafe last week and she said “You’re the guy who builds the big furniture, right?”!. Not to say I don’t like the look of “chunky”, but I see all those chairs with thin legs and it scares me – I know they work, but I don’t yet have the nerve to build that way. Things I make are getting thiner, but it’s a slow process.

2 Fitness for purpose

This should really be number 1, but a chair that’s comfortable and pretty is no good if it wobbles and falls apart. Luckily, or due to a lot of research, my furniture has “worked” – I looked at a lot of stuff in people’s houses, and shops, and drove the wife mad pausing the TV every time there was an interesting piece of furniture. The joy here is that, building a second stool, for example, I know the right height, size etc, with a chair I know the angles and depths.

I guess everyone would probably agree with those 2 so beyond that we’re into more subjective, personal things.

3 Design
Personally, my main interest is in the aesthetic, in the design – and this causes me a lot of problems, since my skill set is so low. I try to draw a design that is “right”, but I’m also something of a minimalist, with a significant dash of weirdnessist. I have a constant battle between coming up with designs that have no joints, since I’m not very good at joints, and the other half of me that says “you gotta try some joints sometime”. I have some lovely drawings, but I know I can’t make them. Yet!
A few words, if I may, on “right”.
There’s a school of thought that there is no “right”, but I disagree.
I remember reading an article about Mondrian (paintings of coloured rectangles). They got a computer programme to generate “random” Mondrian paintings with approximately the same colour densities etc, and then they surveyed a bunch of people to see which they preferred. The original Mondrians won hands down.
When you hang a mirror or a painting there’s a “right” height for it. There is, I believe, a natural order of “balance” in the universe.
And that’s what’s wrong, imho, with “Another stool (failure)” – it simply isn’t “right”.

4 Implementation
Beyond that is how well I’ve done it – the implementation, and here I fight with the fact that I’m very much a sagittarian rat mathematician – knowing how to solve the problem is all that’s important, the actual solving of it isn’t – I usually make mistakes there.
I look at some of the things I’ve made and I know that they’d look better if I’d spent that extra hour sanding, but the design wouldn’t look any better, they wouldn’t be any more solid, or any more comfortable. This is a cross I have to bear.

5 Wood
I love beautiful wood, as, presumably, we all do, but this is at the bottom of my list. Perhaps it’s because I can’t get the exotic woods, the purple hearts, the ebony beading, the crotch this, burl that wood. Perhaps it’s because it actually detracts from the thing itself, from the design, and the implementation.
I look at every project that’s posted – all amazing and beautiful. The first thing I do is to try and imagine them in plain wood, to try and not be distracted by the grain, to see the design. Perhaps this is why I don’t make boxes – not until I’ve thought up a new take on the concept (that’s the “weirdnessist” side). Maybe that’s sacrilege, but it’s true.

I look through the projects I’ve posted, and I’m happiest with…
“Small Oak Table” – it’s offensive, it’s twisted, it’s upside down, it’s “wrong”, but it grows on you
“Adironveld Chair” – solid, comfortable, clean, angular
“Bench” – simple, solid, elegant, balanced, minimalist

I’m unhappiest with…
“Another stool (failure)” – obviously – just isn’t right
“Boxlette” – just a nice piece of wood

Here endeth thoughts for the day.

• Most importantly – do NOT buy completely unfinished boards – I estimate that about 80% of the time making this (about 3 weeks beginning to end, but I don’t work hard) was spent simply smoothing the boards from “rough cut” to something vaguely passable. For small money they’d have cleaned them at the yard. This also killed my belt sander (a cheap one), but it was under guarantee and they just gave me another one. It also killed my angle grinder (a very worthwhile 10 bux) – next week I’ll take that back and they’ll probably give me another one of them too – I love“2 year guarantee” tools.
• Need to be more careful on board selection. There’s some quite red beech, and some that’s quite white. The problem was I was trying to pick the boards whilst perched about 4 metres up on a huge stack of wood at a yard where they were obviously waiting to go to lunch. I had my sketch – but matching what’s available at the time to what you need isn’t easy. I guess I should have gone more slowly, or gone back later – but patience isn’t my thing.
• I’m getting better at the sizes – this one is basically similar to the adirondack sizes – gone, hopefully, are the days of making things that are only suitable for giants.
• It is NOT smart to cut something an inch too big “because you can always sand it down” – it’s just that I have this fear of cutting too small (from which it’s really hard to recover) – but this again added to the (unenjoyable) sanding time.
• Glue is a big problem. “So a thin bead of glue squeezes out” all the books say. Trouble is, you then have that bead to get rid of. And, almost by definition, it’s in a place, like a corner, where it’s hard to sand, or impossible – my sanding finger is about an inch shorter now, but presumably it’ll grow back. And when I think of all those paper nail file things they used to give me on flights when I used to travel – and I threw them away!

Finished pictures are in with the projects.

Drawing – (click to enlarge)

The snake is about 4 feet long and turns up on warm days.
I had to, alas, do for the wasps nest – it was OK while they just buzzed around watching, but then they started passing comments on my work by stinging me – I didn’t think it was going that badly but they obviously did. I hate to kill things but it got to the point where I couldn’t work – as it was the stings on my hands grounded me for about 5 days – so they had to go.

Leo…

...rarely has anything good to say about my work – he has this “why do you bother” look on him most of the time he sits outside the garage – some days I suspect he could probably do better!

1. As they say in financial circles – “past performance is no guarantee of future performance”. In my case this translates into “where the garage roof leaked yesterday is no indication of where it will leak today”. Some of my wood got wet – not serious, but annoying – I was looking forward to a happy day of sanding (yeah, right), but the rain put paid to that – with no dust extraction except the wind blowing, I at least need to have the garage doors open which wasn’t possible – gone are the days of sheltering in the garage because it was too hot to be outside, sigh.

2. Stain is a product of the devil. The tin sits in the corner, whispering constantly – “I can enhance your finish. I can make the ordinary, extraordinary. I’m easy to apply.” True, perhaps, in skilled hands on a perfect piece. I tried a bit today on something I worked on a few months ago and could finish in a shut garage with little lighting. In my mind the result was spectacular. In reality the stain sought out every tiny imperfection and highlighted it as if with a stabilo boss red marker – my beautiful finish (or so I’d thought) turned into a dog’s dinner – more sanding to try and get back to something half-decent.

3. Sanding after a round-over router bits burns your beech is easy. Sanding after a round-under bit burns your beech is a labour of love, a creator of RSI in your fingers, and a sure way to insanity.

4. No matter how much you love your dogs, you shouldn’t let them in from the pouring rain into the room where you just finished varnishing something.

I’m not sure woodworking really suits my temperament, which is part of the reason I do it.
I used to write software for a living, and whilst it might take 6 months to bring a product to market (after all the “lying in the bath staring into space” time, which might last years), some kind of prototype was usually up and running within a day or two – after that it’s nose to the grindstone making it look great and be solid. It’s a metamorphosising (is that a word?) thing – you have something, and you gradually turn it into something else – at each moment it works and day by day it looks and works better.
I guess it’s an instant-gratification thing.
And that’s what I hate about woodworking.
I’ve been working on this outdoor bench for about 10 days now (I’m retired, and the garage leaks when it rains, and it’s not that I work hard).
What do I have to show for it so far? 7 boards that aren’t quite flat, or quite smooth, or quite parallel, and the structure of the arm bits – also not quite smooth.
10 days!
In maybe another 3 days I’ll be ready to cut a coupla slots, and then it’ll be frantic for the 15 minutes I’ve got until the glue sets (it’s the only glue I can get).
And then it’ll be done, except for the finishing.
Instant-gratification along the way – almost none.
At the end of a day I like to take a pew, light a fag (cigarette :-)), see that I’ve made some progress, and plot the next day’s work. “More sanding, more planing” just don’t hack it.

“The building of a fitted kitchen starts with a single joint”. Except it doesn’t, it starts with hours of planing, cutting and sanding!