Proy Wood

My favorite beer: Spotted Cow, craft brewed locally here in New Glarus Wisconsin.

My favorite restaurants: Local, family owned places win out over any chain/franchise store every time.

I prefer to buy my lumber from a small saw mill up the river as opposed to buying at a box store.

I guess Im a domestic kind of guy.


But walking the straight and narrow is difficult, and sometimes I cheat. Ill drink a Coors Light or buy supper in a fast food drive through or buy boards at Home Depot. Ive also strayed from the domestic woods I love and despite myself Ive gathered a small collection of exotic woods. Most of them came from a random grab bag buy at one of my semi annual pilgrimages to the Woodcraft store in Madison.

Ive horded these pieces for a while, but two things made me decide to dig through the dusty collection and liberate some of the selection. The first was the build itself. James Krenov often used exotics to highlight and draw attention to details in his work. I wanted to emulate that, but I found myself waffling in the decision. Working with exotics can be a little like playing with fire. Time after time Ive read accounts of accomplished woodworkers, artists who have made their names in grain and sawdust, who have played with exotics and developed an allergy that has made it dangerous for them to be around sawdust at all. An allergy that steals their avocation and their art from them.

If Im honest, the off chance of that happening is very scary to me. Ive held those pieces of exotic on the shelf for a while because of that fear. I thought maybe Id make the door pulls from black walnut and more cherry wood.

Then I received my copy of "To Make As Perfect As Possible: Roubo on Marquetry" and started reading my way through it. The book starts with an extensive listing of exotic woods, their properties and colors. It took me a while to work my way through that part of the reading, but the overall listing of it was fun and fascinating. It made me think more about my small horde and about how silly it was to have it sit there on the shelf.


I piled it up and planed down several pieces. I wanted to use two contrasting woods. Since the pieces came in a turners grab bag and Im not very experienced outside my little domestic circle. To me the pieces look like Rosewood and Bloodwood.


Planing the blocks yielded some of the most entertaining shavings Ive made. Looking at the color contrast in this small pile helped satisfy my worries that I had made the right choice.


I used the bandsaw to break down the stock into the dimensions I was looking for.


There was some great subtle grain in the bloodwood. I paid attention and set up to bookmatch the grain on the handles. It will be a subtle touch, but the kind that I like.


The rosewood broke down into four blocks to hold the handles.


I marked out the mortise on the rosewood blanks. I drilled them out and squared them with chisels.


Test fitting for a tight fit.


Then I used rasps to round the corners and smoothed them down up to 400 grit paper.


I set them out on the door fronts, I played with several configurations. horizontal, vertical, and asymmetrical. In the end, with some consultation from my wife, we decided that a standard vertical placement in the middle of the door height was the best.


I set them out and mortised the space for the rosewood tabs.


Its satisfying to stand the cabinet up, look at the results, and be happy with what you see. There was one problem Im not happy about.


Maybe I was overzealous paring out the mortise, the grain of this pine is wild and weak in places with all the small knots and I blew out a significant chunk on the inside of one of the doors. I havent decided how Im going to repair it. I imagine it will have to be some kind of patch.


Other than the patch, the cabinet is in the home stretch. The final work will be the two small accent drawers for the inside. Im using spalted maple for the fronts and cherry for the sides. Ive been saving the maple board for just this kind of thing.

What will I do when I run out of these specialty odds and ends?

Ratione et Passionis
Oldwolf

 I guess I feel like I have a little bit of a thing for squares. (My wife would say my tool collection issues dont really stop with just squares, and I guess I cant argue but thats besides the point) In the pic above I spent about five minutes just grabbing the squares I have within easy reach of where I like to stand at my workbench. So these are just the ones I use "all the time"
I guess my real point is that youd think I would be pretty content, and you would be dead wrong. I have stayed away from drinking the wooden square kool-aid for awhile, but then I saw Chris Schwarz blog about a wooden square he found on Patrick Leachs monthly email of tools for sale. Whether its the proportions, the detailed shaping, or just the subtle elegance of the piece, I knew Id been had and I was going to head down the path of wooded squares.

I have heard some folks scoff at wooden squares, and I understand their issues with durability and the fact that there is no way I could build a square within a .00001 tolerance of square like a steel manufacturer could, but take away from the wooden square small advantages like the fact that it is a lighter weight and that it has no hard metal edges to ding or bruise the wood its being use on. In the end The advantage of a square like this is that you built it yourself, and you will know this tool, inside and out, better than you will ever know any tool youve bought off the shelf. The other things are what you learn along the way while you are building your own tools. You get to know them better by building one.

Ive made myself a couple of different tools over the past few years, not jigs but actual tools. The one that gets the most interest on here is the staircase saw I built awhile back. In order to build your own anything you have to do one really important thing. You have to think about it.

You have to think about it and make some conscious decisions based on those thoughts. Whats comfortable to you? What seems to work well? What angles make it work right? What is the danger of making it work poorly? All those things and more, and even just this exercise of thinking your way around the details of a tool will probably make you better with that tool. Its a common woodworking piece of wisdom that you should check over and do maintenance on you power tools at least once a year, its like changing the batteries in your smoke detectors at home. Blow out the sawdust from hard to reach places, check the blades for alignment, check fences for square, and maybe add a layer of paste wax to keep the corrosion off the table.

Now with hand tools, at times the maintenance is a constant, You sharpen the plane or chisel blade when it needs it. You apply some wax to your handsaws after every use. (I really try to but my shop has some moisture issues, maybe youre luckier than me). Hand tools rarely require one big day of TLC, they ask for it in little bits and pieces along the way. So in the place of the annual or biannual maintenance day, I feel that anyone with a real connection to hand tool woodworking spend a little time at least once a year, and build a tool from either scratch or from parts. Whether you build a Krenov plane from a kit, or a turning saw, build your own scratch stock tool, or just make some wooden handles to replace those crappy plastic ones from the store. It will give you a little more meaning, a little more connection, and a little more understanding, and all three of those are pretty damn good things.

Just about now I decided to build a couple sets of different wooden squares. Now for less words and more pictures.

Taking the 1X4 mahogany board I cut it to length for the first square and then used a marking gauge to set the widths Ii wanted.

You can see that my marks left some "wiggle" room in the center so as I ripped the board with the hand saw I could just get a move on and plane out any wavers of issues later to get the boards to exactly the same width.

I used my band saw to resaw the boards in half, I then planed them smooth. Down to around 3/16ths thick in the end. I chose two of the boards for the arms of the square and set about cutting the half lap joint for the corner.

Here Im testing the fit of my cuts. A little planing and they were smooth.

I then used the pattern from the Popular Woodworking article to draw out the details to cut in the arms. The stock I used ended up narrower than what the "plan" calls for so I was not able to just trace the details on, Instead I used some a calipers, pencil, and ruler to layout something very, very similar. I cut it on one arm, shaped it with some rasps and a card scraper, then I laid it on top the other arm and traced the outline.

I used the same process to create this little detail up towards where the arms join. I have to be honest, I think this detail is the repeated interest that sells this piece to me.

I then went to the glue up of the arms knowing that it would be easier to size and joint the cross piece if the arms were stable. In order to try and save some work later I used a carpenters square to help in the glue up. In the end Im not sure it really helped all that much but I guess it was worth a try.

Well I think that makes a long enough article for one post. I will be back in the next few days following up on the process and talking about what else I began to cook up while building "just one square"

Cheers
Oldwolf

This was a spontaneous project - created to address one of my silly habits.

We use a lot of rechargeable batteries in our house. Whenever I recharge batteries, I take the freshly charged ones and sit them on the desk by the computer - where they instantly start mixing with the uncharged batteries that also sit on the desk by the computer. Hmm. Not too bright.

Last weekend, after yet another round of trying endless combinations of batteries in the camera in an attempt to come up with a charged pair, it occurred to me that maybe what I needed was a little organizational help.

So, a quick visit to the shop yielded "The Little Battery Box." Just a small, rabbeted box, made from a resawn chunk of 1x scrap. The bottom is beveled to fit into the grooved sides. The divider is housed in dados cut with saw and chisel. It has one side for charged batteries, and one side for depleted batteries.







It looked a bit too plain after it was finished, so I gave it a hint of Tramp Art with a knife. Beeswax and oil finsish (none on inside bottom - no oil on battery terminals) completed the job.

A short, useful, and fun project. Perfect.