MAKING THE DRAWERS

I trued up some stock on the jointer and planer out of Birch for the drawers:

And then made the half-blind dovetails on my Incra router table (first time I’ve done that… so sweet)

Assembled the drawers:

And glued them up:

Then I routed a stopped groove on the drawer sides:

This seemed to work just right for sanding the inside of the grooves:

Then I glued the “bead” around the drawers. It took me a while to get the angles right since I am working with a trapezoid. Those miters had to be tight. I used two part epoxy because I am gluing the bead to end grain on the sides. Also, I wanted to glue one section of bead at a time and the epoxy cures fast enough to make this practical.

Glue the top bead on one drawer, clamp. Glue the top bead on the other drawer, clamp. Then the first drawer’s glue is already hard and I can un-clamp and glue the next bead, clamp… etc.

It is a shame to cover up those dovetails:

Here is the “runner” for one of the drawers (it slides inside the groove on the side of the drawer). Notice the paper thin shims that I glued to the top of the runner to fine tune the drawer’s position and sliding action. I glued shims on as needed and then planed/sanded them down until it was perfect:

The finished drawer being fitted:

And believe me, it is a perfect fit (if I do say so myself…)

I gave the drawers a little peg on the inside so they don’t slide all the way out and fall on the floor:

And of course added the hardware:

THE TOP

I used biscuits to glue the two front pieces of the top to the main rear piece:

Here’s the glue-up. The top is not attached to the table yet. It is just a convinient place to work in my tiny shop:

To attach the top I made “buttons” in a series on my router table:

I also pre-drilled holes on the drill press and then cut them apart on the R.A.S.:

I used my palm router to make slots for the buttons on the inside of the apron:

These buttons will allow the wide top to expand and contract in changing moisture conditions over the next ten-thousand or so years (I expect this to last a few generations)

The buttons installed:

And finally the top is on!

I took it outside to use the router on the edges of the top. The hand-held router is one of the few power tools that is nearly impossible to use dust-free. I chose to use a panel raising bit that had a nice curve to it. I like the shape but most importantly it will allow the fabric to slide easily over the edge of the table:

I’ve got a lot of scraping and sanding to do. By the way, today has been a really strange day for Santa Cruz weather. We have had a heat wave (and a lot of fires) lately and today we are having thunder storms which is unusual for us. Just about the time I finished using the router The power started flickering and browning-out.

So I decided to shut down the main breaker and go no-juice for a while. It was really nice. Instead of blasting music and machinery noise I just listened to the thunder roll over the Santa Cruz mountains and a few fat raindrops on my corrogated fiberglass overhang. Then I got out my scraper and went to work. It was the perfect time to finish my project with hand tools.

Every time I use a jointer, planer, thickness sander, hand plane, scraper or random orbit sander, I make these pencil lines so I know when I have removed a complete and even layer of material…

I love scraper shavings:

And here is the last glimpse you are gonna get before I get a chance to take some formal photographs tomorrow. Then I’ll post it in Projects. Besides, it wouldn’t be fair if you got to see it before my mom does ;)

I spent several hours sanding, sanding, and sanding. Then I oiled it with boiled linseed oil and sanded some more with 600 grit automotive sand paper to make the top shine like glass. You can see your reflection in the top and the figure pops like a hologram. I’ll try to take pictures in a way that does it justice, but (teaser alert) you’ll have to wait.

Today is my mom’s birthday but tomorrow evening is the party. I have to work tomorrow which is why my deadline was tonight.

By the way, here is the original sewing table. This is the table that my great grandfather made for my grandma. My mom said that it is the only sewing table that she can work on without hurting her back because it is just the right height. So I based the vertical proportions on this table. It is very simple and made of pine and plywood. My mom said she wanted a sewing machine table ”just like that one, and it can be very simple… just make it out of pine and plywood.” Sorry mom, I tried to make it just like that one but I couldn’t…

I think this is just about the most fun I’ve ever had in woodworking. I think am more proud of this project than I’ve ever been of anything else I’ve ever made. This project represents a lot of firsts for me:

• First full-sized piece of furniture
• First time calculating board footage for a project
• First mortise and tenon joinery
• First time using the mortise machine
• First tapered legs
• First time using stock thicker than one inch
• First project on a scale that requires some serious consideration of wood movement
• First time making drawers
• First time making dovetails on my Incra router table (I had only done box joints)
• First time building a commissioned piece with a deadline
• First time ever sanding something to 600 grit… what a trip, DAMN that’s smooth!

My wife just walked in and saw it completed for the first time. She is a little pissed that I am giving it away… ”I want one! I’m so jealous! That’s not fair!” I guess she likes it. She started giving me the design specifications for her table :)

Thanks to all of the LJ’s who have supported me, helped me, given me advice, let me call and ask questions when I was unsure, made comments and followed along with this blog. You know who you are.

Total Project Time: 55 hours… And done before the deadline!

Done, done, and done. Good night.

DRAWERS

So I milled up some strips for the bead:

Here’s how I made the template to fit the drawer with the bead…

I drew the outline of the bead on a scrap of plywood:

Then I cut some scraps to fit those lines and stapled them to the plywood piece:

Let’s make sure it will fit inside:

Then on the router table I used a template bit to follow those scraps to make the final template:

And Walah… a template:

Finally that drawer opening is squared up:

And now I just need to chip away at those corners:

ASSEMBLY TIME

I decided to use dowels to join the front-to-back supports for the sewing machine recess. That router template I just used came in handy to give me a bigger surface to steady the portable drill press for drilling the dowel holes:

One last dry fit:

And finally its together:

Once the glue was dry and the clamps were off I had quite a bit of scraping to do:

The middle cross piece was secured between the two supports with dowels. I almost used screws here but at the last minute I went for the all-natural:

SEWING MACHINE SHELF

The dropped-down sewing machine shelf will need to be attached permanently to the front of the table but the back end of it has got to have some room to expand. So I drilled the holes with some breathing room. I made slots for the screws:

The front of the shelf was biscuited to the apron:

And the rest was screwed through those expansion slots from underneath:

I also made an opening for the machine’s power cord:

I’m on a marathon this weekend to finish this project. More will come soon!

Deadline… Saturday night!!!

Total Project Time So Far: 29 1/2 hours

So in my excitement to see it take shape, I did a little last minute trimming of the tenons and one more dry fit, and then started assembling it with glue in sections.

Here’s the front:

And the back:

Then I dry fit the two sections together with the side aprons for the final glue up:

Which is when it occurred to me… was something missing? THE DRAWERS!!!

I forgot to cut the drawers out of the face of the front apron!

I panicked. I wasn’t even sure how I was going to cut the drawer fronts out of the piece, because I wanted to use the cut-outs as the drawer-fronts (so the grain is continuous). This means that I need a very small kerf. I guess this dilemma was what made me put this job off until later.

The glued-up section was way to awkward to put on the scrollsaw now. Well, lets start by drawing the lines and seeing where these drawers are gonna be.

I used a scrap from the apron arch to mimic the bottom line of the drawer:

Now that I had my lines, I needed straight, thin kerfs around those drawers. So what did I think to do? (I should not even be admitting to this!)

I figured I could take a cheap, dull, hobbiest handsaw and saw straight through the middle off one of the hardest woods I’ve ever worked with. Yea, that’ll work. (I hope nobody actually reads this blog.)

(Viewer discretion advised, some may be offended by the next picture…)

Well, as you can imagine, that didn’t work. (Shocking, huh?) During the next three hours I did not take pictures because I was so frustrated I forgot. Sorry.

I wrestled that stupidly awkward apron with legs attatched up onto the scrollsaw and cut the drawer fronts out and the result was not pretty. The edges were fairly ugly and the pilot holes I had to drill for the blade were certainly visible. I wasn’t too happy with myself.

But I finally popped those suckers out: (notice the saw mark on the first photo left over from the handsaw delusion)

I don’t think those photos show how bad and uneven those saw marks are. Take my word for it.

The Plan:

It’s all good, I’ve got a plan. After sleeping on it I decided to cut the drawer fronts down a hair until they are squared up and clean. Then I will rasp, file, plane and chisel the drawer holes until they are squared up too. This will leave a considerable gap after the waste is gone.

Then I plan to make a “bead” around the drawers to fill the gap. The bead will sit proud of the drawer front slightly and be rounded on both sides. It will look like I planned it the whole time (I promise!) So a new design detail was just born out of destiny, you could say.

The next order of business took over an hour of just staring at the half-assembled table and designing on my sketch pad. I had to do a lot of planning to figure out how the inside structural joinery would work around the dropped-down sewing machine recess.

Here’s what some of my drawings looked like:

I ran out of wood for these pieces (last night) so I picked up another board today. After all the careful planning this next section should go fairly quickly (I hope).

Total Project Time So Far: 23 1/2 hours

I just bent a stick between two blocks for the long curve and marked it:

I used a bowed stick with a string to mark the smaller arc:

I made the cuts on the bandsaw and left a hair extra:

Then the curves were trimmed right down to the line on the R.O. sander:

In this photo you can barely see the lines I drew for the “recess” drop-down for the sewing machine.

Well, this is how I made the vertical cuts for that recess:

Then I made the horizontal cut on the bandsaw and squared it up with a plane.

Marking the tapers in the legs:

I also cut those freehand on the bandsaw.

Then I cleaned the saw marks on the jointer with the tapered sides down:

My new thickness sander works equally well as a regular drum sander:

My dad stopped by for about an hour and helped sand the faces of the apron. He is the one that sort of “commissioned” me to do this project (and trusted my enough to buy the wood). He has been following this blog. If you get a chance say “hi…”

It’s pretty much ready to glue up at this point.

Total Project Time So Far: 17 1/2 hours + 1 dad-hour

First of all, thanks to all who gave me advice about the mortising machine from the last blog. I did hone and tune the chisel and mortise machine and it did cut considerably better. I also turned the chisel so that the open side faces the previously bored section and didn’t have any trouble with chips getting stuck (thanks Betsy!)

So I made the layout lines on my legs:

And cut the mortises. Notice the stop block for repeatability:

I was wondering how I would go about cutting the tenons. I decided to just do it the “easy way” and cut them on my radial arm saw (I love that thing.)

It takes a little while to hog out the waste with a thin kerf blade but there is almost no set-up time. Call me lazy but it works for me. It would have taken me just as long to set up a jig for my router or whatever other method.

A roughed tenon:

I made marks 1/2” from each edge of the tenons:

And I cut the notch out on the bandsaw (what is the correct terminology for this part of the tenon?):

I spent quite a bit of time chiseling the tenons…

...and cleaning out the mortises:

I also used my “Record” low angle shoulder plane to fit, smooth, and square up the tenons:

The finished tenons (aaahhhhh, at last.)

Finally, at 2:00 AM in the morning (on my Birthday!) I dry-fit the joinery. I didn’t start until after work last night.

And it looks exactly like it did at the end of the last section :( But I know that a big part of the work is done :)

I will disassemble it and do all the shaping (leg tapers and arches) before gluing it. But I had to see how it all fit together. Geez, that wood is nice, isn’t it? I never took Birch seriously before. I always used it for making jigs because it is hard and relatively cheap.

This phase took about 5 hours. Total Project Time So Far: 10 hours

I have the day off tomorrow. Check back later… I expect to make quite a bit more progress (after I sleep in).

Preparation:

I put a lot of time into laying out the joinery. I’ve never done this before. Here are some of the sketches I made including a printout of my sketchup drawing and a birds-eye view sketch of the joinery.

Vertical measurement sketch:

When I had worked out the details I drew it out on a scrap cut from one of the legs:

Test cuts:

I figured out pretty fast that you can’t use the benchtop mortiser unless it is bolted to your bench or it will fall forward when you pull down on it. So here it is bolted to a temporary tool stand and you can see the first test cut being made:

The first several holes were trial and error for getting the depth right. This picture shows the depth and how close the mortises come to each other:

One thing I learned is that it is good to have a pick handy for clearing chips out once in a while:

The first test run came out Ok but I realized that my mortise chisel was not perfectly square to the fence. It made several little ridges on the inside faces of the mortise.

So I squared the chisel to the fence with a machinist square.

I had to shine a flashlight under it and turn it until there was no more sliver of light between the chisel and the square:

The last lesson I learned the hard way is that a mortise chisel gets VERY VERY HOT. I burned my finger. It is hard to tell in this photo because it was taken just after I did it. But today (the next day) I have a perfect square on my finger the shape of a mortise chisel.

The test cuts went well. Now I am set up and ready to make the real mortises. I’ll keep you posted.

TOTAL PROJECT TIME SPENT SO FAR: 5 hours

The Design:

Here is the original Sketchup model from the first blog in this series:

The Lumber:

Here is the wood my dad and I settled on at the lumber store. It is birch, which was affordable hardwood for us, but the most beautiful birch I’ve ever seen. It has a curly figure to it.

(Yes, that is my delta contractor’s saw looking dwarfed under that board.)

As you can see, I am pushing my jewelry box making tools to their limits:

Getting Started:

To cut that massive slab into the 4 legs I decided to cut it half way through on the table saw and then finish it off on the bandsaw. For this job, I decided it was time for a new blade.

Definitely need outfeed support here:

Cut, flip, cut, flip, cut, flip, cut, etc… very accurate because I only moved the fence once:

It cuts very fast on the bandsaw:

And the remaining “ridge” is cleaned up with a block plane.

I run them through the planer until they were all perfectly 2×2. Tapers will be cut later.

Taking Shape:

I also cut my apron pieces to length (adding inches for the mortise and tenon joinery) and at the end of the evening I clamped my pieces together and I saw my table come to life:

TOTAL PROJECT TIME SPENT SO FAR: 3 hours

Last week I looked at an apartment that I thought about moving into and made measurements of the inside space. I wanted to play around with Sketchup to see how furniture would fit, etc. I thought maybe there would be an easy way to use Sketchup for this very basic architectural drawing.

Usually when doing something like this I use the push tool a lot. I would just draw a rectangle the size of the wall and then push it about 6” until it is a 3D wall. But constructing a room like this gets a little funky. Is there a better way?

I’ve seen some of the amazing architectural stuff people have done with Sketchup. I’m sure they are not drawing each wall individually as a box… are they?

Thanks.

I bumped into John Ormsby. and got to chat with him for a few minutes. Unfortunately I saw him when I was on my way out to an fire dept. physical agility hiring test (the other reason I was in Sacramento) and couldn’t talk for long. Sorry John, I wish I could have talked longer. But good to meet you.

I looked for other LJ’s but didn’t see any. Where were you, Odie? I kept looking for a guy with a baseball cap and mustache giving someone a half-jokingly hard time about something. I thought for sure I would recognize you instantly.

Anyway, I had fun looking around but I guess overall I was a little disappointed. I was at the Pleasanton WOOD show last year and I thought for sure that the Sacramento show would be bigger. And the only vendor I REALLY wanted to see was Incra. Apparently they baled. I didn’t see them.

Incra doesn’t sell anything direct from there website, and all of there dealers only sell some of there stuff. Incra has products that are not sold by ANY other dealer as far as I can tell. So I really wanted to see there display and get my hands on some of the new products.

I think I will email them and ask what gives.

I spent about $100 bucks on several small toys. I got some nice router bits, a “deadman’s” foot switch for use on my scroll saw or drill press, and some accessories for my bandsaw. I spent just about all of my money at “Woodline USA.” They had some great deals on several things I have been wanting.

Here’s what I got:

She likes my grandma’s sewing table because it is “just the right size” and doesn’t hurt her back when she sits at it. The old sewing machine table is very simple, made of fir or pine. It has an insert 3” deep for most machines to sit in, level with the table.

Anyway, here is the sketchup I created based on the measurements from the old table, and my style/design ideas. I kept it simple but threw in a few curves for aesthetics and extra leg room.

Let me know what you think.