Flutterby™! : Woodworking misc 2008-02-25 17:29:19.050767+00

Woodworking misc

2008-02-25 17:29:19.050767+00 by Dan Lyke 6 comments

First thing to come out of the new shop is a replacement for the slide-out cutting board for the kitchen. It's not terribly flat, has all sorts of flaws, and my cursing over that was what prompted Charlene to say "we need to buy a planer". First project with the router table I built probably a year ago, and first time I've made a breadboard edge, it's pinned with those dowels.

A big storm came through this weekend, we're still not sure about the source of one leak in a wall, so I tore out some plasterboard and I need to run over to pull a permit for rewiring the bedrooms while I've got holes in the wall, but I also spent some time getting our cheap ShopFox dovetail jig working. Replaced the cheap knobs with set screws, spent a bunch of time twiddling stops and bit heights.

Sunday evening, Charlene wasn't feeling like woodworking, so we didn't start on the bathroom vanity, but I felt like making some sawdust, so I started building a chair, just to give me some experience playing with ridiculous joints and the Domino. Wow, what an amazing tool. Normally I try to maintain a setup, no more so than, for instance, that dovetail jig, with the Domino it was trivial to set up for a 7.5° face, and for different depths, easy enough that I didn't worry about keeping a setup. Pictures coming as I get further on the chair.

Hey, you are really busy with the woodworking. Its a nice design with an interesting flair on the breadboard.

Breadboards should only be hard pinned in one place because the wood movement will rack them or pull them apart if you attempt to pin or glue them in two or more places. Typical wood movement is 5% perpendicular to the grain. Usually the pinning is done in the middle or one side if the design calls for that. The rest of the breadboard is held perpendicular to the board with screws or dowels in elongated holes on the underside only, so that when the wood swells or shrinks it can slide back and forth along the breadboard edge without doing structural damage. The following URL describes it a bit better than I do:

The current Fine Woodworking (April 2008) has an article on filling, sealing and finishing mahogany that you might want to take a look at.

The holes are elongated horizontally (I drilled the holes in the end, marked the centers on the tenon, and then drilled the tenon holes about 1/32" in and elongated them substantially across the grain, pounded in sharpened dowels and clipped them off with a flush cut saw), so, yeah, I think I've accounted for humidity changes across the width of the board.

I do, however, need to remind myself to sneak up on things with the router, it's far too easy for me to measure out what it needs to be and think I can get that in one cut.

Thanks for the heads-up on the FWW article, finishing is our next challenge. Charlene likes an extremely matte finish and thinks a gloss finish looks like plastic, I think that some of the more matte finishes I've seen look like plastic, I want something that looks like oil, but without the maintenance of oil.

#Comment Re: made: 2008-02-25 23:09:40.548902+00 by: Dan Lyke [edit history]

While I have your attention, I think my hardware purchase has ~~erased any possibility of the ShopFox dovetail jig actually being price competitive with a good jig~~ made our dovetail jig workable, but as a fallback we were going to do some keyed miter joints for another project in the queue, so I cut a couple of pieces of 2x6 at 45° and glued 'em to some plywood to make a jig for holding a box up on a corner so I could run that across the router table to cut the key slots (come to think of it, I could use a dovetail bit for the final pass and do a dovetail shaped key). Any suggestions on other ways to cut keys? I thought about something to hold the box corner up on a table and moving the router instead, but that seemed like it'd be both a big bulky jig to store, and one of those applications where I'd only want to move the router if the work piece were really really large.

(And on the other note, I still want to build the indexed fence for my router table, but the Akeda dovetail jig sure looks sweet!)

[Further edit: The changes to the ShopFox jig involved replacing the hold-down knobs with regular bolts. Yeah, I need an (Allen) wrench to change wood thicknesses now, but the knobs aren't slowly creeping off the ends of their threaded rod and confusing me as to why I thought that piece was securely clamped... Of course big metric Allen head bolts aren't cheap. I believe that I've finally learned my lesson on "cheap" tools.]

#Comment Re: made: 2008-02-26 00:04:49.227389+00 by: meuon [edit history]

I have some of both, cheap and good tools. Often duplicates. Example: I use the cheap circular saw with a rough cut blade I keep in it and toss it around a lot. My Milwaulkee saw keeps good blades and I set it down nicely to keep the face smooth and straight. I only get in trouble when I do with a cheap tool, what should have been done with a good one.

I prefer an oil finish myself, but oil provides little protection for the wood. There are semigloss and satin varieties of most varnishes. If they do not provide a sufficiently matte surface, then the finish can be rubbed with 0000 steel wool, a coarse pumice, or another coarse abrasive. There are also low gloss waxes, but that can mean a lot of maintenance.

Meuon, yeah, often an inexpensive tool is the right one for the job, mostly for when I don't care if it's single-use. I have a cheap circular saw for just that purpose, and I'm about to build a jig to run its blade through wood diagonally to do cove cuts. Wouldn't think of doing that on the $400 saw, but if I blow the bearings out on this one, oh well.