Aalto Inspired Tea Cart #3: Refining the laminations and underwater basket weaving

Did I mention how over my head I am with this project? Well after taking a week off from woodworking between a trip to Vegas and not being able to work in the shop due to the smokey air in the Sacramento area I am back to work. Now that I have the laminations glued up I needed to figure out a way to trim them down to finished width. I intentionally glued the laminations up at 3 1/2” knowing that I needed to yield a 2 1/2” wide leg. This was a challenge since I couldn’t use my 6” jointer to clean up the edge nor could I use my Bandsaw or Table saw due to the shape. To be honest I didn’t think this through and didn’t discover this until I was working on my test piece. How do I clean up these edges? I decided to use my bending forms as a reference point to clean up the edges. putting the laminations back in the form I let one edge pertrude from the form and set the form on its side. I made a simple sled for my router and began the task of routing the edge down until it sat flush with the form.
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I followed this up with a belt sander. This established one flat side which I was then able to reference for the second side. I flipped the form over and followed the same procedure to bring the second side down to just shy of final thickness.

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I needed to do a little filling on the edges so I made a mixture of some titebond II, a little water, and some sawdust that I collected from sanding.

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Now time to break out the card scraper and do some hand sanding and cut to final length.

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Finally I again used my router this time with 1/8”round over bit to ease the edge. Here they are all cleaned up.

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Now to do some veneering. The lower tray of the tea cart calls for a veneered surface so I layout the veneer and decide to lay it up with a slip match. (I like the way quarter sawn grain looks slip matched).
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I trim up the veneer using a flush trim bit and router placing the veneer between two jointed pieces of plywood. This made it easier to joint the edge at the jointer.

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I edged glued the veneer together both front and back and glue to some 1/2 birch ply. since I don’t yet have a vacuum press I pressed it between some melamine and particle board and clamps.

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The other thing I needed to figure out was how I was going to build a woven wood basket that the client wanted. So after thinking about it I come up with a way to build a basket and I do a partial mock up. It envolves soaking the wood in water to loosen the fibers. When I go to do the real basket I will use only the tight parallel grain. Well off to work thanks for checking this out.

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!http://http://i300.photobucket.com/albums/nn9/bsfuller/PA040025.jpg!:

-- Brian, Folsom, CA