Here is an excerpt a small part of what to expect in the new issue.  The magazine is far from complete but I thought I’d give you a teaser.

New and improved chip breakers

The purpose of the cap iron ie chip breaker is to deflect shavings, when setup close to the cutting irons edge, supposing to reduce tear out. Leonard Bailey introduced the curved cap iron to his thin irons to eliminate the vibrations which caused chatter. With the Bailey/Stanley versioned cap irons you can modify them to completely eliminate tear out altogether by slightly honing a small bevel on the front edge. The mouth opening no longer plays a part and you can safely even plane against the grain with no tear out, which eliminates the need for a scraper. With the modern so called improved version you can’t do that, I have tried and ruined the cap iron. The reason why toolmakers refuse to reproduce the Stanley/Bailey cap irons is due to the high costs involved in creating a hump in the steel. They need to renew their advertised claim of “new and improved chip breakers” to “new and not so costly to us chipbreakers”; if you have an old Stanley plane do not replace it with a thicker iron and nor the chip breaker with the modern one.

Here are my final thoughts I haven’t included in this issue.  The old Stanley planes are remarkable in every sense of the word.  Why modern day tool makers felt the need to change them bewilders me.  The extra mass in modern day planes is taxing on the body, their reasoning behind it is the more mass the easier it is to push through the wood, I personally cannot agree with this.  Whilst working professionally I used it all day everyday and with my bad back I could barely walk at the end of the day.  I refurbished an old record smoother last year and found myself to be less fatigued whilst using it.  The thin irons are easier to sharpen and quicker also as there is less metal to remove than the new thicker ones.  They are also easier to sharpen freehand than the modern day type.  The cap irons can be easily modified to plane against the grain eliminating all tearout while the modern day type cannot.

Lie Nielsen and Veritas and others that are coming on the market are high quality planes without a doubt but if I had to do it all over again I would make the switch.  I don’t wish to rub any toolmaker up the wrong way but the facts of practical use speaks for itself.

I call this piece the “everyday table” because you see this design everyday. I spotted this one at Home Goods just last week. It’s kind of a cross between a table and a bookcase. As far as construction goes, it’s very simple. Six framed legs with a top, a couple of shelves and a cross “X” on each side. In fact, there’s a website that shows how to build this table, pocket screws and all.

Say what you want about the design and construction, but they are very popular and super easy to build. My wife found the website the other week and asked me to customize one to fit in our dining room as a coffee bar.

Being true to form, I built ours out of southern yellow pine (2 x 10’s). I wasn’t a fan of the thick 2 x 4 legs so I milled all the parts down to 1″ thick.

Keeping it simple, I used pocket screws and glue to attach all the pieces. The shelves are southern yellow pine boards I ripped and glued back together to create a quarter sawn panel so they wouldn’t expand and contract too much.

The hardest part about building the piece are the X’s on the sides, but all that entails is cutting a couple of half lap joints.

Here is the finished bar with a vinegar steel wool solution and gel stain on top to give the wood some depth. The coffee bar has turned more into a display table for my wife’s Rae Dunn collection, but that is another story for another day.

I have since played around with the design again and built another one using eastern white pine. Construction is similar except I used floating tenons instead of pocket screws to build the frames. I’ll still use the vinegar and steel wool solution again on this one and stain it a dark color. My third design will probably have a thicker top and I may use plywood for the shelves. Stay tuned.

I’m in the final week of a project that in some respects highlights my idiosyncratic nature, and truth be told I sorta revel in not fitting in.  (I’ll be blogging at length about this project starting in a week or so, and it will take several dozen postings to get it all.)

My first sense of not fitting in with woodworking came on November 9, 1980, when I attended a weekend workshop in Atlanta taught by Ian Kirby.   I remember it so precisely because it was in a classroom at Georgia Tech, and that was the day that Tech tied the #1  football team (Notre Dame) in the country and the campus went wild.  The subject of the workshop was ostensibly mortise-and-tenon joinery, but I seem to recall him spending an inordinate amount of time extolling the virtues of a new power tool, the biscuit joiner.  Of course I bought one, and of course it has remained unused for the past 46.99 of the intervening 47 years.  I’m soon sending it off to my friend Pete who can put it to good use.

As is often the case at weekend workshops, regardless of the setting or instructor, there is the opening ritual of the attendees introducing themselves to each other.  At this particular weekend the attendees were a mixture of doctors, lawyers, accountants and such.  When I introduced myself as a finisher by trade and that I loved finishing, I could almost sense the rest of the students recoiling as though I was some alien creature whose spaceship was parked out on the lawn.  Despite that, and despite the fact that I was the youngest participant by two or three decades, at every break and every meal I was peppered with questions about the mysterious and un-knowable world of finishing.

I’ve heard that surveys of the populace reveal that the single greatest fear is the terror induced by the prospect of public speaking (I have no such trepidation, probably because I do not care if the audience agrees with me or not).  During that student introduction I was left with a distinct impression that has become cemented over the decades that some/many/most/virtually all woodworkers are as terrified of finishing as they are of public speaking.

Which brings me to my current project, as this week I am rubbing out and detailing the finish I have been so lovingly applying for the past 40 or so hours of shop time.  Not only has every moment of the surface prep and application been something to savor, the bringing of the piece to exquisiteness through the finishing process is simply an embarrassment of riches to me.  Sure, I found it amusing to make the piece from scratch using almost exclusively early-19th Century technologies as specified by the client, including resawing the lumber, cutting all the lumber and joinery by hand, carving all the moldings, hand sawing and assembling the veneerwork.  But to me they were simply the appetizer.

Finishing is the feast, and the whole point of the making.  Which I guess makes me a polisher luxuriating in my own peculiarity.

Come on, you witty and waggish woodworkers!  Caption this illustration.

From  ‘Livre d’Amour’ by Pierre Sala, first quarter of the 16th-century. Collection of the British Library.

–Suzanne Ellison

Many pieces of English Arts and Crafts furniture, especially those of the Cotswolds school, feature a cheerful detail known as decorative gouging. It’s a simple technique and amenable to endless variations depending on the combination of gouges used, the spacing and depth of elements, and so on. Here’s an introduction based on the legs for a hayrake table. Decorative gouging gains as much of its effect from its context as […]

The post Decorative Gouging: A Traditional English Arts & Crafts Technique appeared first on Popular Woodworking Magazine.

Back in June I found this modified plantation desk at an antiques shop in Winston Salem, NC:

A plantation desk, another flexible term with many definitions and no real meanings.

It had been modified to change the angle of the writing surface:

Tapered pieces added to the sides to change the pitch of the writing surface.

This piece was covered in Less Than Fancy Furniture.

We were in Hermann, MO over the weekend for a wedding. We arrived Friday night and the wedding wasn’t until 3:00 PM on Saturday leaving some time for research. Our plane left at 7:15 PM on Sunday leaving more time for research. I am a very diligent researcher. In a shop in Warrenton, I came across this desk:

Another desk with a history.

This desk has also been modified to change the lid angle:

Same idea but not as severe since the original angle was not as severe..

Looking inside leads me to believe that they might have replaced the front legs as well.

Front legs are too tall to be original.

This desk is has a gallery rail and locking storage box affixed to the top:

The swan is not attached.

The tag gives one possible history of this desk:

Ir that’s what the dealer says, it must be true.

I am now looking for a third one and I won’t stop until I find it.

And not even then.

For most married men, an age-old question seems to be: ‘What should I get my wife for her birthday?’ Considering that my wife is already the girl who has everything (let’s face it, she hit the proverbial jackpot when she married me!), I usually struggle every year to find a gift clever enough to convince my wife that I actually put some thought into her gift. So this year I went a completely different route, and I’m glad I did.

My wife enjoys to read, though we have drastically different tastes when it comes to reading material ( I wouldn’t be caught dead reading some of the stuff she reads, but oh well). Rather than just purchasing a book for her, I wanted to make the gift of a book more of an experience, and that is why I decided to try the Mysterious Package Co., which specializes in some really out of the ordinary stuff. Without giving away too much information for those who may be receiving a gift, from the MPC in the future-the surprise is a huge part of the experience-you choose a package from the company web page, and the recipient receives a series of mailings featuring packing hay, old newspaper clippings, creepy introduction letters, haunted diaries, beat-up shipping crates, and demon-possessed statues (it all depends on which story line you go with). In any event, the box that contained my wife’s gift was pretty intriguing, and my wife nearly destroyed the lid in her zeal to pry it open. I really loved the vintage Indiana Jones , Ark of the Covenant like appearance (the crate the Ark was stored in, I mean), and since she’s received it I’ve built several different versions of it.

A mysterious package…

The mysterious lid repair; it was in 3 pieces…

The box interior..

As you can see in the photos, the box is of simple construction, so it can easily be made with hand and/or power tools. I used only hand tools because my daughter wanted to participate, and she was responsible for the stencil print, which put her personal touch on the project. And for good measure I used pallet wood from my company warehouse (I refer to this wood as Danish Pine). The pallet wood had me a little concerned, because it’s pretty common to find old nails and stones embedded in the boards. Thankfully, I have several hand planes from my restored “collection” which were given to me, so I wasn’t overly concerned in using them. That being said, I hardly treat these tools like second class citizens, because I spent a great deal of time and effort restoring them. I am just saying that I am not the type of person who would use his $300 LN jack plane on a sketchy piece of pallet wood- in factI should have taken some photos of the unfinished wood, because it was pretty rough.

On that note, I just so happened to set free a fair amount of hand tools over the past month. It was much more quick and painless than I thought it would be, yet I still have a whole cabinet filled with hand planes.

My version of the mysterious box…

Finished box, one coat of wax, and my daughter’s stenciling added (guess what her favorite TV show is…)

Anyway, the box sizes were determined by the wood I had available, of which I had a decent sized stash. I sawed the boards to rough length and width, used a smooth plane to square the edges, and used a block plane to shoot the ends. I smooth planed a great deal of the roughness from both faces of the wood, though I truly did attempt to leave a few small rough patches to complete the vintage look we were trying to achieve, but considering the boards are all from pallets and were fairly warped/bowed to begin with, simply flattening them enough to be usable removed much of the roughness regardless. I probably could have left the faces of the box rough sawn, but because we were adding stenciling, and I wanted to apply a protective finish, I decided that a smoother surface would work much betters.  To finish off the appearance I glued on some battens to the box sides, which my daughter chamfered with a block plane. Dimensionally the box is approximately 11 in x 5 in x 4 in deep, the wood thickness around ½ inch (I say around because it varies).

The lid for the box featured in the photos was also constructed with pallet wood, which I believe is a hardwood (I’m guessing oak, but that is just a guess). I butt jointed two pretty nasty boards together and left them dry overnight. After they were dry I sawed them to length and then used a scrub plane for the initial flattening, as those boards were by far in the roughest shape of the lot. I then smooth planed the panel, once again attempting to leave the box somewhat “unfinished”. Lastly I used shoulder plane and sanding block to create rabbets so the lid would recess into the box, which really helped to lighten the overall appearance.

The joinery for the boxes is mainly butt joints and cut nails. The only place where I got a little fancy was the for bottom of the first box I made, where I used ship lap joints, and the only reason I did that was because I want to save as many of the wider boards as possible for future boxes, so I pieced it together with smaller cut-offs. Any box with stenciling will receive coat a of shellac and/or some paste wax, more for protection than to enhance the appearance. If you ever plan on adding some type of ink stenciling to a box (we used heavy duty magic markers), I would suggest waiting at least a few days for the ink to dry and really seep into the wood. In fact, I would wait up to a week. Thankfully, I attempted a practice run on a scrap board, and the ink smudged somewhat when I applied BLO, so I knew for future reference to wait at least a few days before applying any type of finish.

This was a fun and relatively easy project, though using all hand tools made it somewhat time consuming (mainly flattening the boards to make them usable). I completed two boxes so far and repaired the original, which as I mentioned was damaged when it was opened. I currently have enough pallet wood left to make at least two more boxes, and I have in inexhaustible supply constantly coming into my company warehouse. And I think making boxes from several different pallets could make them a bit more interesting.

Yet,  not sure if it would be better to purchase pre-surfaced boards and add my own touches to change the appearance (beads, chamfers, different widths etc.) Because while I did enjoy all of the hand plane work, I don’t want to spend the entire summer flattening pallet wood for hours on end, in particular because the hot and humid weather is now in full swing. Still, I’ve already prepped more boards which are generally ready to go, so I can pretty much guarantee that I’ll have a few more of these boxes finished in the next few weeks.

We are on the verge of releasing a four-hour video on building a full-blown 18th-century French workbench in the next week or two. The video, starring Will Myers and me, is as complete an explanation of the process as we could manage, and it covers everything from dealing with wet slabs to what is the appropriate finish for a workbench.

In between, Will and I discuss a variety of techniques for completing every operation necessary to build a bench, no matter what sort of tools you use. For example, for making the tenons on the stretchers, we show how to cut them by hand, ho to cut them on the table saw and even how to use a Domino XL in the process.

The video will be available to stream through our website, and (if all goes to plan) you will be able to download a copy of it so you can watch it while not connected to the Internet.

Before we launch the video, two things have to happen: We have to settle on the retail price of the video, and I have to complete the construction drawing that accompanies it. Unfortunately, my computer was fried in an electrical storm a few days ago (don’t worry, everything was backed up), but I don’t have a machine loaded with the suite of software I need to make the drawing.

So stay tuned.

— Christopher Schwarz

This past weekend I had the good fortune to visit Frank Klausz and his shop in preparation for shooting some videos on Japanese woodworking tools for Popular Woodworking in August. It was a great time, and Frank and his wife Edith were completely gracious hosts to me and my sons. 

Those of you who know our history might be surprised at this, but us New Jersey guys stick together, in the end.

Upcoming in Issue Three: "The Best of Both Worlds: Embracing Art in Craft" by Danielle Rose Byrd ...

Why do we gravitate towards seeing things in black and white, right or wrong, this or that? In this article, Danielle explores the tendency of such a dynamic in the world of woodworking, a world where art is frequently thought of as less-than; a recurrent villain to the hero of craft. Why does the word “art” incite such pushback and how can we inhabit more of the gray areas that exist, in both our own work and the appreciation of others’?

Speaking from her perspective and using the work of furniture makers who inspire her as an example, she describes the journey of balancing traditional hand tool techniques and practicality with the importance she places on the many modern, improvisational, and experimental methods used to shape and embellish her work.

Her encouragement lies in the acceptance of many modes of expression, and emphasizes that the very recognition of one mode does not necessitate the negation of any other. This article does not escape the sociological scope that Danielle frequently employs to identify and make sense of common human behaviors, especially within the realm of hand tool woodworking.

 As a child in a declining rural Maine paper mill town she sought beauty where there were only gray smokestacks nestled in the foothills and an overwhelming sentiment of collective defeat. She learned that what she was searching for was something she could create. With this perspective she addresses the value of beauty within the world of craft and the function it serves, suggesting that function goes far beyond the capacity to perform a task. Beyond her own role in this sect of the trades, she makes a case for others to explore their own vision of beauty within utility, either theoretically or in their own work, to help further the craft in all its forms.

Stay tuned for tomorrow’s announcement of the next article upcoming in M&T Issue Three...

The rabbit hutch project is finally taking shape.  I usually don’t paint or finish a project until the very end, but this one really calls for painting along the way.  Painting many of the inside parts would be difficult later, but easy if done now.

• The Rabbit Hutch – Part 1 (Front frames and doors)
• The Rabbit Hutch – Part 2 (Sidewalls)
• The Rabbit Hutch – Part 3 (Carcase assembly)
• The Rabbit Hutch – Part 4 (Floor frames)

In the last post, I made the floor frames for both levels of the hutch.   I need to install these, but first I’m going to paint the inside of the hutch while I can still get in there.

Starting the painting process.

I left the top of the drawer runners unpainted and gave them a heavy application of paraffin wax.

I also applied some wax to the side of the hutch where the drawer makes contact.

The two floor frames were installed with screws.  I had drilled countersunk pilot holes in the last post, and they made installation must easier now.

I installed the two floor frames.

You may remember way back to my first post in this series when I made the doors.  Now it is time to install and paint them.  I also installed galvanized latches.

Installing the doors.

I gave a little thought to the inside of the hutch and decided that it would be pretty dark in there once the back and the roof are on.  I decided that I could lighten it up a little, by painting the interior surfaces gloss white.  This will help to reflect what light does come in through the wire mesh doors.

Cutting the plywood for the back of the hutch.

Due to the dimensions, the back had to be made from two sheets of plywood.

Testing the fit before painting.

I beveled the top edge of the plywood.

After testing the fit off the back, I prepped it for painting.

Filling the worst of the defects on the plywood.

White paint on the inside face.

With the back installed, I moved on to fixing an oversight in my design.  There is a large gap above the front face frame and below the roofline. I decided that I could fill this with a piece of plywood, but needed some backing support to attach it to.  I cut three pieces of douglas fir and beveled the tops to match the pitch of the roof.

I cut and fitted some backer blocks.

These will allow me to attach a plywood piece to fill the gap.

I cut a plywood piece to fill the opening.

I screwed the backer blocks to the hutch and painted them before installing the plywood board.

I painted the backer parts.

That will keep the wood protected.

Painting the plywood.

Installed with some screws.

I countersunk the screws.

I filled the holes and caulked the edges.

After the caulk had cured, I painted.

Another part done.

With that, the main body of the hutch is done.  Now I need to build two poop drawers, a roof, a ramp, and a small insulated box that the rabbits can go into to avoid the worst of winter.

In the next post, I’ll tackle the drawers.

– Jonathan White

It’s not very often that I get requests for projects that I build.  Some of my stuff is a little out there.  But, when I do get a request, I try to accommodate.  My version of the ratcheting book stand design that Peter Follansbee brought back into focus has proven popular among family members.

The nephew is in from college for the summer and asked if I would make him a “medium” (3/4 scale) version to take back to college in the Fall.  Of course I will!  Apparently the Summer is all but over because he will be packing off for the Fall semester in a few weeks.  Given that sobering time frame I figured that I had better get with it.

I dug through the offcut pile and culled out enough bits from which to mill up the parts.

I began with the posts by first bringing them to a rough round at the shaving horse and then to final shape on the spring pole lathe.  I turned a small urn-shaped finial on them and a single, simple bead.  The locations for the rungs/spindles I set in with a skew chisel and then used my bit of welding wire (shown in use on a garden dibber) to burn them in.

Each of the parts progressed in the same manner, shaving horse, lathe and done.  I’m definitely no speed demon at the spring pole lathe, but I am getting quicker.  So by the end of the day I had all of the parts turned and ready for assembly.

Today I did the boring bit and then shaped the shelf.  Everything went pretty smoothly , mostly due to my working at a relaxed pace.  Or it was just pure luck.  Either way, the dry fit and subsequent glue up is done.

One trick-of-the-trade that I have been using is to pre-finish the individual parts while they are on the lathe.  It gives me a jumpstart on the finishing process.  More importantly though, it makes cleaning up the glue squeeze out much easier.

I’ll add a couple of more coats of my usual Tried & True Original over the next few days and this little ratcheting book stand is ready for college.  I hope the nephew has been saving his pennies from his summer job in preparation for his upcoming economics lesson…

…uncle Greg doesn’t work cheap!

Greg Merritt

On a regular basis, probably at least once a week, someone contacts me looking to have a pin oak milled into lumber. They are excited because they finally got their hands on a truly giant specimen of a tree, and even though it is just a red oak, they are excited to get to work with a hardwood at a reasonable price. Unfortunately, I have to be the bearer of not-so-good news and try to get them to reconsider.

This pin oak is less than 20 years old and is already over 15″ in diameter.

As I mentioned, pin oak is in the red oak family, but that is about the only relationship it has to any decent red oak lumber. Pin oak is not milled and sold commercially under the name red oak, and as far as I know, is only used for low-grade products like pallets and blocking, where the only requirement is that it be made of wood that will stay together. And funny enough, pin oak often falls short of even that low requirement.

The problem is that many pin oak trees suffer from ring shake, which is where the rings of the tree peel apart like an onion, making that section of lumber nearly unusable. The beauty of ring shake is that it can’t be seen from the outside of the log and it won’t always be visible even early in the milling process. Sometimes, it won’t be until the lumber has been fully processed and dried for it to start falling apart. Needless to say this is frustrating, especially if you are counting on that lumber for a project and then end up with no wood to work. Even if the ring shake isn’t bad enough to make the lumber actually break, it very often leaves at least one fancy break line somewhere in a board where you would rather not have it. Again, super frustrating.

So, let’s say you find a pin oak that is solid, with no ring shake, then it is all clear sailing, right? Far from it. You may have lumber, but you probably don’t have great lumber. One of the main attractions for pin oak is the giant size and the promise of a never-ending bunk of lumber comprised of super-wide boards. This, you may indeed have, but it comes at a cost. The cost is that all of the super-wide lumber will have super-wide growth rings, rings that may be up to 1/2″ or more in width. Because the tree grows so fast, putting on up to 1″ in diameter per year, the logs get big in a hurry too. It isn’t uncommon for a 36″ diameter log to have only started growing 45 years ago. It was planted because the trees grow to a large, stately appearance quickly, and that means big, wide growth rings.

Big growth rings mean a coarse textured wood, no matter how you cut it. Whether flatsawn or quartersawn, red oak is already known for its open, in-your-face, grain, and pin oak is ten times worse. Imagine an 8″ wide flat sawn board that may only show a couple of annual rings on the face. It looks more like the cheapest of spiral cut plywood for sheathing the side of your house, instead of quality hardwood lumber for building fine furniture. That same 8″ wide board, if quartersawn, will probably show about 20-25 rings, where a high quality white oak board will show 60-80 rings. The difference is night and day, with the higher growth ring count looking much more refined and not so clunky.

Even if the wood stayed together and for some reason the growth rings weren’t so wide, pin oak would still be far from a great hardwood. The lumber typically also sports bad color, bad smell (commonly referred to as “piss” oak by local tree guys), and many more knots than are outwardly apparent. Since the trees are usually open grown and well pruned, the always straight, always perfectly upright trunks appear to contain up to 30′-40′ of clear lumber. The truth is that the trunks typically contain only 8′ of clear lumber near the ground, with the remainder being full of knots from previously trimmed branches.

Overall, I have nothing good to say about pin oaks, except that they grow big, tall and straight. And, while it may be possible to mill pin oak lumber that meets some minimum requirements (like staying together), the best pin oak is still easily surpassed in quality by almost any other reputable wood. Just know, if you are thinking about paying someone to mill a pin oak tree for you, that I wouldn’t even mill a pin oak if it magically fell on my sawmill. I would take the extra time to get it out of the way, so I could mill something better. It’s just not worth it. Move on.

I’ve mentioned a couple of times that I was working on an office interior in which all four walls had something made from sapele. I thought I’d share some of the woodwork, but I particularly wanted to show the before and after when using shellac – off-the-store-shelf, right-out-of-the-can shellac. Thank you Zinsser.

And thank you suppliers for stocking fresh shellac, when they had it. The first stop – big blue – had two outdated gallons (one from 2008 and one from 2010) and one from 2014.

Continue reading A Good Shellacking at 360 WoodWorking.

 Week in Review   At Pop Wood, we create a lot of great content and I think it would be downright tragic if you missed an article, social media post or YouTube video. So I have compiled all of our content in this post for your reading pleasure. Not included is the outstanding content that Megan Fitzpatrick curates on our Instagram account, find that here. Have a great Sunday! – David […]

The post Week in Review – Week of July 10th appeared first on Popular Woodworking Magazine.