LumberJocks Woodworking Forum banner

Project Information

There are three stories behind this little project. The first is the stained glass panel. My wife made this panel for her dad, a retired math teacher and science buff. She designed the pattern after a quilt pattern the my mom had made and selected glass to reflect the color spectrum. Her father recently passed away from cancer and before he died he wanted her to have the panel back.

The second story is the wood. I don't know the exact year, but I believe it was in the late 1980s, I realized I wanted to become a woodworker. I bought a few hand tools, a table saw and a router and began making sawdust. But I was busy starting businesses and a family and I never really managed to get any traction. For my birthday that year, my dad gave me a gift certificate to a local hardwood lumber yard. I used it to purchase a couple of boards of African Mahogany and a couple boards of Maple. I have moved 4 times since and carefully packed and moved those boards each time. I didn't want to cut into those boards until I had the skills to make something beautiful. I thought it was time to see what I could do with them.

The third is the frame itself. I have designated my shop as a hand tool only woodshop. As such, I ripped my 8" board into 2" pieces by hand. Squared the edges with a jointer plane. Smoothed the faces with a 4 1/2 Lie Neilson. I marked and sawed the miters by hand then cleaned the cuts on the shooting board. Once it was glued up, I marked and hand cut the key slots, chiseled the waste, and cut and planed the keys. They were flush cut then planed smooth with the block plane. Then the whole surface was finished with a scraper.

It is the first project I have completed using only hand tools and represents my current hand tool skill level. Thanks to nearly a year of reading LumberJocks, watching YouTube videos and playing with scraps of pine I am now a hand tool woodworker! Oh yeah, what started the whole woodworking thing in the first place? I received the first Lie Neilson catalogue featuring just 2 or 3 models of planes. I no longer have it but I kept it for years and promised myself someday I would be worthy of owning one or more of his tools. I now own 3 planes, 3 saws and a chisel set and each time I pick one up its like holding hands with a wonderful lover.

Gallery

Comments

· Registered
Joined
·
3,876 Posts
Very Nice Work Indeed and a Great Story! Thanks For Sharing.

Rick
 
Top