Arbutus Box Photos

Photos by Ingeborg Suzanne.

preped for finish

As the project gets closer to a glue up the visual changes become smaller and often the prep is a lot of the same procedure for most of the pieces. This isn't bad of course but a bit on the boring side for stories and photos of which I have few this week.
Here chopping the corners flat, square, and consistent. I put a couple locator dowels in the bottom piece and put the op over that so the horizontal pieces would align the way they will with the sides in place. Then clamped a corner chopping block I made to the top where I could get a thin but clean chop.


Hinge mortise. I'm always amazed at how many chisels I use for such tasks. But this work isn't really about making do.


Set up for edge treatments. A seemly small step but they take a while to do. I hear that in some traditional Japanese woodwork the edge treatment is one of the most important features and only highly train craftsmen perform the treatments.

Doweling

This week's update is a little late but here it is.
Finally doweling the vertical pieces. seeing as how 2 of these parts are rather wide I used 2 rows of dowels where I could. First the holes were mapped out on doweling jigs, which are used as a guide for the actual hole boring.

After the holes were made, or wasted rather, I transferred the jigs for an MDF template that would then act as a jig for the horizontal pieces. The paper that is taped onto the MDF was a full sized drawing I used to figure out some of the curves and angles I wanted for the side pieces... why mess with more measurements when I already have it traced out?


More holes!


After I could get the cabinet to stand it was one to some initial surface prep. The Chinese Elm isn't the easiest to plane though you can do it. I have found that a high angle plane is safer for this log but it still gets a little dusty when planing and certain grain lines are left a little more fuzzy than sheared.


Later on it was time for some flattening and surface prep on the larger surfaces. Turn up the mood lights get a good grip on the planes and work up a rocking and sliding sweat but I still have a little more to go.

slowly

Progress is happening, but slowly. I can measure it by beard as I haven't groomed my face since I got the main substrate together... I think.
Here are the substrates for the main vertical pieces. Since they are shaped I'm using lumber-core. Glue up a bunch of slats orient the grain so that pieces opposite of their neighbors, and put a cross-band of veneer over them AFTER shaping and they you go. Easier said than done of course.



This would be the form for the back panel(s) before shaping.


Drawer partition substrate to get a thickness I fell was right I had to modify the 1/8" 3-ply that we had with 2 more plys. Though after Ian's mentioning I'm now considering doing web frames instead. Hmmm.


This is basically what I have so far. The main surfaces have been veneered, received bake-ins, and applied edges on the front and back. The vertical members have been shaped, veneered, and currently have applied edges as well. The panel underneath was made with 3 layers of 1/8 plywood. Then there is the Euro Cherry leg stock taken down to pre hand work thickness and width.

Short One

Hmm I don't feel that I accomplished all too much this week. A lot of sitting and waiting. Waiting for the long lines at the machines and waiting for glue to dry. I'm learning that with veneered projects it really helps to have a VERY close idea, nay, plan of what what is doing. Meaning pretty much exact dimensions, lines, curves, weights etc...
This piece is not a good example of planing. It wasn't meant to be. I wanted this piece to speak as much for itself as I could for it. A mock-up in Poplar can tell you a fair deal but it can't show you the exact graphics, colors, and therefore weights of the "real deal". Almost always things change from mock-up to finished product, sometimes the changes are small sometimes larger. I didn't want to chose the location of the vertical cabinet members before I had the complete top and bottom. Therefore I don't know what angle the sides are to be so I also don't know what angle each side pieces needs on the inside to get the interior space parallel thereby not knowing how thick the substrate needs to be to achieve those angles. So yes, I need to put together the top and bottom before I can move on. However I needed to get pretty finalized with the leg dimensions before before I could get the horizontal pieces together because the legs will protrude through them.
So I did that, I guess I didn't take any photos of the legs... Well they are just poplar still. I will when they are the real thing!

To the picture above. I knew plywood wasn't going to chisel well but I underestimated it's non-workability. So I put the Elm bake-ins on first, then paired them to make the corners square.


Once the first set of bake-ins were stuck and trimmed I got the mating egde of the second bake-ins with block plane and shooting board. Also funny angles means funny looking cauls just to get the clamps to work.


Here are the bake-ins mated and trimed with lined-up grain. This piece went in the press with the veneer at the end of the day. Hopefully it will emerge as one!

Get Crackin

As many people say after the holidays "I'm Back". Before that I took a short trip to the Portland area. I flew out of Seattle which is about half-way to Portland from Vancouver. The main reason for this trip was Gilmer Wood Co. One may ask "why travel 7 hours to look at wood?" Then again one may exclaim "Only 7 hours to Gilmers!?" As their signage says this is the place for "rare and exotic wood".



I went to look for material for my cabinet stand and came up short. I did find this however. It was sold to me as Nicaraguan Cocobolo, which was the wood of the little box Robert made a bit ago. My heart skipped, there was no way I could pass up a large chunk of that!!! (which looked like great dimensions for a chair)
When I got it back to the shop and took a plane to it my heart sank. It wasn't even close to the same color as Robert's. WAY darker. It is still a very pretty selection but not what I wanted.


On to the project at hand...
Time to cut veneers. Which meant time to prep the board, but how does one flatten a piece that is larger than your jointer? There are a number of ways, I chose to use the planer with sled and shims. I cut out roughly the shape of the piece out of MDF then hot-glued shims between the MDF and plank so that it would sit flat and not come off in the planer. It's a rather simplistic method which is always nice. I actually took it to the band saw first to get a decent side first with the MDF on the re-saw fence. Then it was to the planer to get that side flat.
This specific operation would not have worked as well with thinner stock. Since the stock was at least 8/4" after the re-saw it was stiff enough for the planer with minimal bottom support.



We Started to cut the veneers with the "base" still on, I suppose just in case anything happened. I took it off soon enough and put it through the planer on the other side... much less bulk to work with. Though before I could do that.... ..........

This happened. We assumed correctly that a dull blade was behind this. I put on a fresh blade and looked over the whole saw. 45 minutes later we were back making good cuts.


Substrate. The stuff the goes in the things. Things being veneer and "bake-ins". I want the top and bottom of the cabinet to be finished around 5/8" thick. The shop-sawn veneer is finished around a 1/16" soooo I need my substrate to be 1/2". We did not have any 1/2" stock that was flat enough. We did have flat 1/4" and 1/8" material. A substrate sandwich it was to be which is actually sometimes a better way to go about it as... If you understand the principles of laminate bending the same apply for flattening.
Also I tweaked the thickness of the top by taking 1/32" off both faces of the core so the top will end up 1/16" thinner than the bottom.


Many woodworkers "now-a-days" would be more familiar with the vacuum bag, which the school does have (a large one at that). I will go for the bag in my own shop too but I was a little excited to used the good old mechanical press. It felt less stressful in a way, and you can get much more pressure (not that you should need it). I always find something, some feeling, towards the older or perhaps "primitive" techniques, machines, or "gadgets" that make me, naively maybe, long for the "old days". Ha I was never even close in time to those often imaginary days, but in these moments I feel a sense of admiration, pride, and a bit of nobility in what came before me, the path I have chosen to follow and hope I can maintain in the future.


On VENEER...
Before I came to this school, I must say that I was in the boat of "only solid is real". I confess that, well frankly, I didn't find veneered work to be terribly respectable. The paper thin SLICES of wood put over ply-wood to make it LOOK LIKE some exotic solid wood. It didn't have the same weight or sound, and it can't be oiled like the deep tones of black walnut with the soft depth of a natural treatment.
The "shop-sawn" veneer taught at the school is different. We cut our own veneers once we find grain-graphics that we want, not the rolls of completely flat-sliced waves. They are cut around 3 times as thick as commercial veneer, can be hand planed to final dimension, and can be finished with penetrating applications (i.e. oils).
I found that the amount of material needed to get the grain just right too be much more on the "waste" side than I was used to but I feel the end product is defiantly worth it! This also can be an argument for this kind of veneered construction as you can cover a much larger surface in a way that may be incredibly wasteful if not impossible to do in solid wood! In addition, the process opens up new ways of combining colors and grains... perhaps a brighter interior to light up the enclosed space.
I still feel more attraction to working in "solid wood" but I now have an appreciation for the use of this kind of veneer.


Here are the first "bake-ins" being applied to the top substrate. If for some reason you want to know more about what a bake-in is or does feel free to ask but I felt like side stepping the technical stuff on this one heh.



And here is what I've been searching and waiting for! The wood for my cabinet stand! This is European Cherry harvested about an hour and a half outside Vancouver. A bit of an interesting story in this wood.
First off European ("euro") Cherry is different from the familiar Black Cherry. They both product fruit of course but the color of euro cherry is lighter and more mellow than black cherry, also unlike black cherry that darkens with age, euro just mellows a little bit.
So. European Cherry has, in the past, been in demand and mainly harvested from Europe of course. It has been pretty much of the charts for a long time and even Gilmer said they hadn't seen it for 15 years!!! Planks like this were bought from the same yard that this came from a couple years ago as "Cherry" now meaning Black Cherry. They got it in the shop and were mumbling disappointed about their purchase until Robert came out with a hand plane and a cut-off of one of Jim Krenov's cabinets in Euro Cherry. He planed the planks and set the cut-off on the surface. It was a match! It may not have been what they asked for but I think they felt pretty Lucky for it!
Some research was done and it was found that European settlers that came to BC brought with them some seedling of their cherry trees. This happened to come from one of those groves on Canadian soil! And a pretty big trees it was.
I hope that I can do this tree justice that it's berries would appreciate ;)

Break Time

The Holidays are upon us and the school is on a short break. The last day before break there was a gallery showing of the student first pieces along with pieces from students past. There was a pretty good turn-out considering the weather conditions and much wine and smiles were had! I can image the year-end show in May will be much more crowded and with a number of new larger pieces to see, touch, and ... buy?


Yes, I had finished my project a little while back but I have been busy. I made a new set of irons for my little bronze spokeshaves. The "irons" that came with those don't do a whole lot of good. I went out and bought a large file and took it to the torch. It was a bit of work but now the tools can give me respectable results. Also a nice little polishing plane was made.

The main thing I had been working on was the mock-up for my next project...



Here it is. I don't really know what genre to put it in... sideboard display divider hall cabinet table? Lets just say cabinet for now.



The mock-up is about 34" tall, 36" long, and 12-13" deep. It's set on a tapered curve (...again? heh) the front being convex, and back concave. The middle space will be enclosed and the two outer will be open from 3 sides potentially with some shelving.



The curve comes from the grain of the plank that I will be using for this piece. I spotted this particular cut early on in coming to the school and got my name on it to ward off the other hunters.
Working with such "irregular" shape I knew was going to be a bit of a challenge to find spacings and proportions that felt right. I started with a cardboard mock but anticipated the need to do a more extensive one. Also in dealing with a selection of wood that I can consider precious and the fact that this form belongs to this one particular cut of lumber, I didn't want to chance that I'd find it along the way as much as I usually do. Yes, a very similar piece could be made from another plank but the specific size, proportion, weight, spacing, and shape are unique.



This is the plank that the main cabinet body will be made of. Chinese Elm, another non-commercial tree. The heart wood is a lovely mellow golden brown with some "forte" in the grain lines. The stand I have not found wood for yet though I'm leaning toward Burmese Teak. I plan on taking a trip to Gilmers lumber company before returning to class to see what I can see. We will have 2 weeks of fundimentals when class starts again. I don't know hom much work will be done on this project in that time but hope to get images from a photo-shoot of the first pieces.

Until then, happy shavings.