First, a picture:

From 230809 milling almond

At first I was not sure that milling this was worth my while. However, the good LJ’s here pointed me in the right direction and so I found myself loading the mill on the trailer on Sunday morning heading toward my friend and the tree. BTW, the mill was kept loaded on the trailer for a month and no opportunity showed itself. two days after I unloaded it, I get a call from this friend. go figure.

Anyway, as Steve (daltxguy) is now in the woods i got another friend to help me with the setup and just keep an extra eye. you can really make stupid mistakes sometimes.

managed to back the trailer into the right place (I am actually getting better at doing this) and we looked at the tree. two obvious problems – there was a 30 degrees bend in the middle and a fence wire (good thick quality one) was popping from about the thickest part of the tree.

as for the first problem, we managed to cut the tree to two parts with a small chainsaw and big bowsaw. took a while to do…
as for the second problem – we tried to pull it out but it seems to start in the middle of the wood. we nibbled with the chainsaw but we couldn’t get it out. eventually we decided to try and keep it in the slab.

this wood was cut about 3 weeks ago. it hardly dried (its winter here) and it was HEAVY. it took 3 strong (ok, 2 strong and me) man to roll each half it to the middle of the lawn (the smaller half was about 2m long with 30-40 cm diameter, the larger half was 1.5m with 50-60 cm diameter)

once positioned we set up the mill around it, making no more than 4 mistakes..

we started milling the thinner half and didn’t get much quality dimensional timber from it, but the slab the we had at the end was very pretty and just shouted “I am a Y shaped bench!” (sorry, no pictures of this, maybe in a few days)

we milled the thicker part and got lots of excellent quality 8”X1” boards with fantastic grain.

From 230809 milling almond

From 230809 milling almond

From 230809 milling almond

the end of the milling was very hard as the blade was very blunt, and I did not have the sharpener with me, but we finished it (at the end I think it cut by friction only…)

you notice that the timber is sunset orange. this is really weird – its pinkish white when you cut it and within a minute or two its orange. at the end of the day the lawn looked like a scene from Mars:

From 230809 milling almond

and you can see there the bigger slab that might end up as my living room table…. who knows…. here is a closer look. the photo was taken right after the cutting and the timber did not reach its full orange colour

From 230809 milling almond

All in all it was a fun day and I would like to thank all the LJs that tried to find how this timber looks like for me.

I ended up with making these, which I find so far VERY satisfying. Actually, they are much better than i thought they would be. The overall cost for the pair is ~5$.

ok, lets do it:

From 270509 hold down

these are the things you need:
1) 2 lengths of threaded rod (i used 8mm). they should be (the thickness of your bench) + (the thickness of the work you aim to hold) + 3-4cm. don’t make them too long, it will make work awkward. you can make another set of longer rods if needed. I used 15cm pieces of rod
2) 2 knobs that fit the rod you used. i used knobs from hafele just because i had some. you can make your own knobs from t-nuts and piece of plywood the niki way.
3) 2 heavy washers
4) two pieces of softwood (I used Douglas fir)
5) some T-nuts that fits 8mm rod

Thats all!

From 270509 hold down

Drill some 10-11 mm holes in your bench all the way through where you want the holddowns to be. I drilled 8 holes. use the threaded rod, the washer, a nut and a spanner to pull the t-nut firmly into the bench on the bottom of the holes. this is how it looks from below.

From 270509 hold down

Assemble the holdowns: knob, washer and piece of wood all on the threaded rod

From 270509 hold down

to use, just drop the holdown into the hole and turn the rod several times so it will catch the t-nut. now adjust the knob.

From 270509 hold down

sometimes when the edges of the piece are fragile, you might want the pressure to come from above. one way to do that is to notch the piece of timber (wide V). I just put another piece of timber on the back.

From 270509 hold down

and they can also be used as a very versatile bench stop (that can have an open section in the middle or slanted sides)

apparently all issues of american woodworker from 1980-1999 are available for browsing for free (full content) on google books:
http://books.google.com/books?id=8fYDAAAAMBAJ&dq=american+woodworker&as_brr=1&source=gbs_summary_s&cad=0#all_issues_anchor

This is the first of (I hope short) series of blog entries that follows projects and the mistakes I made while doing them.

remember that i am an amateur. I am sure an experienced professional would finish this project perfectly in a few hours…. I would appreciate any feedback.

first, here is the final result:

now, this is the original design:

The most critical mistakes were done at this stage – the design. i’ll go over them briefly:
1. the design calls for having the same exact angle at three places – the back and the sides. this is hard to achieve once, and much harder to achieve 7 times (for each shelf)
2. the design calls for very complex assembly. if the back is glued first to the shelves than clamping is very hard as the shelves are angled and many (so probably a jig with slots for the shelves has to be made which is not trivial as well). if the sides are glued first (what I did) than it is very hard to to complete the gluing in one go and it is also very hard to position each shelf so that the back will be flush.

ok. to the process itself:
initially the shelves where wider, but my saw sliding table played tricks on me (see the ducky project), so i had to recut everything. by now it was too narrow, so i decided to add a small piece of wood at the back as extension. that was actually not a bad decision. it gave the project a more “airy” feeling. it also simplified cutting the angle at the back as i could made this piece on the mitre drop saw.

the shelves are made from recycled Rimu, and not from my best pieces (mostly sap wood). Rimu has a very different colour before and after applying finish – it darkens substantially. being a recycled timber, it had lots of nail holes. I used timbermate filler (said Rimu on the packaging….) but as you can see in the photos it did not darken.

I have decide to use biscuit joinery for everything. this was a big mistake. I should have used screws for the sides. screws would provide me with much better ability to position the shelves correctly and would simplify the assembly process considerably. as it is, the big benefit of biscuits (they can be repositioned 1-2mm) was a big problem in the process.

I have decided to glue the shelves one by one to one rail and then glue the other rail. this was a tedious process…. I made a jig to position and support the shelves but the jig got in the way of the clamps so i had to remove it and the shelves moved.

after finishing the gluing of the shelves, when i tried to glue the back, i noticed that there are unbridgeable gaps:

luckily, it was convex, so i could still glue the back to the top and bottom shelves.

i learned heaps from this project. I hope this entry will help others in designing and assembling their projects.

Project Gutenburg has 3 very detailed books on building mission furniture. they contain detailed plans (although not as detailed as some modern books) and they have LOTS of plans in them. The construction ideas are also very enlightening and worth browsing through (for example this swing)

to make a long story short:

Mission Furniture
HOW TO MAKE IT
by H.H. WINDSOR

PART I
PART II
PART III

(i think the basic idea was taken from time life’s “art of woodworking”). The jig is basically piece of 19mm hardwood plywood with packing tape cover and 9mm pieces of plywood brad nailed at both ends. the wedges are tapped with a mallet to create the pressure.

Lately, i decided to recycle my thin scrap into coasters, very much like tonyu’s.

Unlike tonyu, i don’t have a lathe (I think that this is what he used, but not sure), so I had to use router for shaping the center. After several sleepless nights and much contemplation, i suddenly noticed that the gluing jig is perfect for holding the coaster while routing.

This is how it is done:

first, you put your thin material into the jig and wedge it.

Next, you put your template on top and brad nail it onto the plywood scrap

I used my router with the template collar that extends 7mm and the template was 9mm thick.

This is the piece after the routing, and an almost finished coaster (just one layer of LO/terp/varnish. going to put some poly on it as well)