A few select pictures tell the story of where all my spare time has gone in the last couple weeks:

-b

On with the work! The design comes as 2 sheets of 30×48 blueprints, from which I made many actual-size trace sketches. From “cuttable” sketches, I tried both a copy trace onto wood, as well as cutting directly with the Xacto knife. I think I prefer the latter, but it requires a steady hand.

To begin, I had to build a platform that would stay straight, and bandsaw the molds to support the backbone and planking, etc.

The platform is 5/8” cheap ply, sitting on top of 2 old wheelbarrow handles, which were jointed. Curiously, that wood was a gorgeous swirling red wood of unknown type. I may have to re-reuse it when this is done. The cross supports are jointed 2×3s, placed at locations designated by the plans. Everything is screwed together and jointed, in hopes of keeping this platform as straight as possible. The molds are 3/4” ply, bandsawn and chiseled were needed.

My plan was to use cedar for all of the planking, and ash for the structure and transom. Unfortunately, the cedar which I’d planed a few days before started cracking as it got thinner and thinner. It was donated to me, and poorly stored, so I wasn’t sure how well it would work. Guess I have my answer. In any case, the cradle will now be all ash, except for some of the trim, which I may do in walnut or whatever else I have around.

Unfortunately, my ash supplier only carries it in 13/16th width—nowhere close to a true 4/4. Luckily much of it was quarter sawn, so I have plenty of straight grain, but for templated pieces that required 1” thickness, I had to glue first. In fact, you can see 1 of the glueups in the background of the above picture.

Once the glueups were done, I thicknessed the pieces to their various sizes, and cut the keelson and stern to length (these were straight pieces). Then I traced and bandsawed the stem and the knees:

Note the Xs across the stem. Next up is a bevel cut on the bandsaw. If you were to look at the top of the stem, it should look just like home plate. If I had a spokeshave, I would just use that, but lacking such a tool, it’s the bandsaw + rasp + plane for me. Luckily it went fairly well:

After this was complete, it was assembly time for the backbone. It was surprisingly difficult to hold these little pieces together for glue-and-screw. Screws are needed here, particularly because the knees are semi-end grain, so the glue is likely to have limited effectiveness.

Once together and put into the mold, I’m done for the night:

Too bad I screwed up one of the stations on the platform:

Luckily, it was a predictable and easily corrected mistake. Just move the station 1.5 inches, and voila!

Done working for the weekend, and rambling for the moment.
Next up (wednesday, probably)... resawing more ash planks, and maybe the first round of plank installation.

• Keep the design open… aka not a true case. Inspired by: supersystem one

• Center around curves… not traditional for a book case, but interesting. This inspiration came from several places, but the initial seed came from Neil Lamen's Furnitology blog and the Carlo Mollino coffee table he’s been building.

Here is what I came up with:

The sketchup for the design is found here: sun case.skp

Design Details

This design came out of playing around with sine waves. After looking at various angled and overlayed sine waves, I couldn’t find anything that made even a slightly useful bookcase, unless the waves were located to just make curved boxes. Ultimately, I wanted to be able to build the waves from only 1 or 2 bending templates, so I had some limitations.

After some playing around with alternative ideas for the sine waves, I came up with the sun idea, and just rolled with it. I considered the sun in various side and corner position, but ultimately chose the lower left because it seemed to yield the most useful configuration of identical waves. I debated whether to make the frame more prominent. My original drawing also featured the 3-layer design of frame-sun/rays-frame, but looked too heavy, and started to feel like a closed case, so I went back the other way. In order to maintain the “looking out the window” motif, I put the sun in the back, and added radial tapers to the rays. (They go from 1” → just under 4”, and could be done by building a ramp jig for a planer, and running all 5 curves together.) The final touch was to add the (boxey) trinket shelves in the sun space. Overall I’m happy with the design. It’s half form and half function, and it achieved its initial goals.

I assume a Walnut window frame, Padauk sun (or something with red/orange aniline dye), and Ash (or any pale/yellow bend-friendly wood) for the rays.

The design is intended to stand on the floor, and have some sort of wall
mount for vertical stability. One could easily imagine putting it all on
the wall, if the weight is substantially limited.

Considerations

Things I would reconsider, or that may need consideration if/when I build this thing:

• Ray ends—right now they are square cut. I like them at the sun side, but not on the ends. Perhaps a simple curve or point would look nicer, but I am a bit indecisive on this one.

• Trinket shelves—are they worth the bother? The contrast from square to curve has mixed effect for me.

• Mullions / muntins—they are all simple and square right now. Since there are rays on either side, I thought this looked best, but in the wood I wonder if even a simple chamfer might look better.

• Joinery—The trinket shelves and the window frame feel like they should all be easily joined with M&T, biscuits, dowels, etc. My intention is that the waves are joined to the frame with dowels. Perhaps doweling the rays even in the “window spaces” would be good, to keep them nicely aligned? It would probably depend on how much springback I saw off the templates.

Notes

The sun is made from a 32” radius, and is center-aligned with the middle of the bottom ray. The rays are sine waves with a 12” amplitude and 30” cycle length, built on a template of 60” (2 cycles). The rays are 1” thick, 4” deep, the frame 2” deep, and 2” inches wide in the mullions/muntins, 3” width in the outer frame pieces. All of the other dimensions are easily snagged from the sketchup, but if anybody wishes to know specifics I’m happy to add them.

http://lumberjocks.com/projects/3210

I even asked him if he minded me using his design. In the meanwhile, I was reading Don Kondra’s photography entry and looked up his FWW article and was immediately in love. (Sorry, Steve… I just can’t fight it!)

So, I did some measuring and built up a sketchup design that thins the original plans down a touch and fits with the dimensions that I need. And here we go:

The sketchup is available here. Frankly, this sketchup was a serious challenge due to the curved legs and even the mitered table top (took me a while to figure out the “smart” way to solve that problem).

I am leaving for vacation in 10 days, and haven’t acquired wood yet, so I probably won’t make any progress for a month, but thought I’d share the sketchup and pic.

I welcome any and all commentary—positive and negative. I haven’t done curved legs before, so I think that will be the biggest challenge here. Luckily Don’s article has a pretty good explanation of what’s going on.

-b

Still to do: cut/glue/plane walnut inlays to length, sand the top-top w/ 80 grit before routing top and bottom table edges, sand the whole top, and finish. So here is step one. My intent was to have the routing and sanding done today, but an error (and other tasks) put a crimp into those plans, so here is what I’ve got:

Inlays cut and glued:

Inlays planed down:

Inlay planing oops:

Right now, there is a tiny triangular chip of wood glued and clamped into that mistake… in an hour or so I’ll gently take some sand paper to it to see where I am.

And wood porn for the plane enthusiasts in the crowd:

-b

It’s functionally done, although there are 4 small things I will be doing before calling it done:

1. Drill the speed-pin holes in the face-clamp bars (was planning to do it tonight, until I realized I don’t have a large enough bit for drilling metal).

2. Add a planing hook. That should take all of 15 minutes.

3. Cut a few appropriately sized blocks for clamp guards on both clamp setups.

4. Add another stretcher at the same height, so that I can throw a couple tool totes below (mainly planning to store my planes there). I have the stretcher already thicknessed and ripped to width, just need to cut to length, drill/cut the relief out and install it.

Finally, in the spring, I will plane/scrape/sand it down and apply 2 coats of BLO to it. Until then, I’ve only done a bit of nominal scraping to smooth the surface, as is obvious in this pic of the staggered cherry top:

Once I finish those, it goes from blog to project :-)

-b

I have the pipe already cut (just not in the picture), and ready to be installed. The top frame piece is not screwed in place yet, since I need the top before I can do so. At that time, the fixed vertical and horizontal pipe pieces will get put into place.

Had my share of mistakes to make this take longer than it should. Lessons from this weekend:

1. Draw out everything in sketchup. My cherry back benchtop will have to be 1-5/8” inches, because I tried to get the face-clamping pipe holes as high as possible, thinking that it would be more stable. I accounted for the height of the other pipes, but not the back benchtop width. (This meant re-milling 4 pieces to new width.)

1. Writing orientation and notes on the wood is good. Reading your notes before cutting is better.

1. Printing out the plans is better than trying to avoiding walking across the driveway in the blizzard, and going by memory.

In any case, no real harm done to anything but my pride. I have some extra pipe holes on 2 pieces, and few extra drill holes in some others, but it’s already solid, and just needs a top for the back.

Luckily it was easily recovered:

Eventually, I finished assembling the legs, cutting and drilling the end stretcher and end pipe-holding pieces and cutting all of the 8 foot pieces. After I drill the pipe and screw holdes in the 8 footers, I can assemble everything to look like a bench (except for the back 12” bench top…)

Finally getting started on this thing. All I have to show for it so far is a stack of rough cut SPF (can’t find Douglas Fir around here):

The back table top will be made from glued up cherry shorts which I got for cheap. That’s what I hope to be cutting this weekend: