Ian Crosby

As it happens!

2011-11-11T18:36:00.002-07:00

I am loving this blog app. I can stop for 5 minutes, write something and then carry on. This is practically live blogging!

If you have yet to try the Festool domino joiner I am going to suggest that you do. Thanks Byron for lending me yours. I might just have to put that in the ol' Christmas list and hope santa's had a good year!

Anyways, as I had previously mentioned, my apron to leg joints are a live/ floating tenon combo. The domino is literally as easy to use as a biscuit joiner except it gives you the strength of a tenon. A bit more exactness is required in laying out as you don't get any forgiveness like you do with biscuits. Your tenons have to be lined up perfectly as they fit totally snugly in the mortise. Essentially you line up the line on the joiner with your pencil line and plunge. Really awesome!

I was a bit nervous at first but it does almost seem idiot proof.

Once again the 8' pipe clamps my brother gave me one year have come in handy. I laughed at the time, wondering when I would ever use such big clamps but I laugh no more.

I'll post a photo of the joinery soon but I forgot to take one before I clamped it all together. Damn this live blogging...

Live tenons are a nice change of pace

2011-11-11T14:24:00.002-07:00

After a week of hectic action at work, this day in the shop was just what the doctor ordered.

Cutting the shoulders on the table saw is easy if your saw is cutting perfectly square. The tape was a tip from IP wherein your short shoulders are left a hair proud. This is swiftly removed by a razor sharp plane blade in the fitting process. Perfect shoulders every time...

These are the aprons, both long and short. The tenons on the long are a touch shorter do a simple shim avoids the need to change your setup. Sometimes souvenirs are the perfect thickness. Thanks Don!

Fitting the cheeks in the shaper is super accurate and you can run all of your pieces quickly once you've nailed the setup. I like using a 90' sled to hold the piece while the shaper fence acts as a depth stop.

Almost ready for fitting. First I like to round over the first half or so of the tenon with an appropriate sized round-over bit.
In this case it was 3/16" (half of the 3/8" tenon thickness) This serves 2 purposes: First, waste removal, but more importantly, it leaves a great indicator for the radius of your tenon.

Back to the bench with a few simple tools and soon a perfect fit is achieved. Patience is a virtue as it's easy to blow by your perfect fit if you start getting too aggressive with your files.

Seeing parts go together is the payoff.

More fitting to do and then on to the dominizer...

Beginnings of joinery

2011-11-06T21:07:00.001-07:00

I've begun the mortise and tenon joinery for the aprons into the legs. Each joint is going to be made up of a combination live tenon and two floating tenons. This will make for a very strong joint but also allows me to use techniques that I've not used in quite a while. The live tenons will be a good review while the loose will actually be done using a festool domino. Below are the mortises for the big live tenons. These were done on the minimax mortiser table.

Setup for these was dead simple and the repetition allows for very accurate and quick results.

Next up, cutting live tenons! Sweet!

Top done, base milled up

2011-10-30T15:17:00.001-06:00

With the top finished and stowed safely under a mattress in the spare bedroom I am on to the base. It is not going to be your usual four legs and an apron, however it will in fact include those elements. Here is a photo of the parts + spares, rough milled, settling and awaiting further instruction.

This is the waste, which was not much really...

This is the mockup with some joinery brainstorming drawn in.

You can see that the top will actually rest on stretchers that span across the long aprons. I'm going to go back to live tenons into the legs from the aprons but the stretcher/apron joints will b a series of four horizontal floating tenons. More about all of this later.

Chairs are done and the table is coming along

2011-10-22T15:20:00.004-06:00

I never imagined that this dining set would the whole of my woodworking life for 2011 but that is indeed what it represents. Working full-time does not leave a lot of shop time but I have salvaged what I could. That being said, I'm happy with the results and have enjoyed my time, however infrequent it may be.

Photo 1: six chairs ready for delivery
Photo 2: table to is currently being finished.

The table top is solid walnut, and to say that it was a challenge graphically would be an understatement. I fought with myself for a month about matches and color and actually glued, then cut apart many joints that didn't fit my eye as it obviously had when I decided to glue it up. Anyways, in the end it shows intent and I feel like I got the most that I possibly could out of the wood.

Photo 3: The underside of the top. The top is roughly 41"x73" and 1 1/8" thick. To lighten up the edge it is beveled to about 3/4" at the edge. Similar to the arms of the chairs, the corner also offers a little tactile interest hidden underneath.

Like I said, short and sweet. See ya!

Blogger App

2011-10-22T15:10:00.001-06:00

I'm hoping that I might be more inclined to find time to carry on blogging if I can do it from my phone. No more Downloading photos and then having to sit at the computer... I'm going to try the on the fly approach. If something interesting is happening, BAM!, time to post about it. Short and sweet but hopefully frequent.

Hope everyone out there in the woodworking world are doing well and making nice things.

I'm going to post again here ASAP about where my project sits..

From Joinery to the Creek: The Lost Tale of a Family of Chairs

2011-05-23T16:44:00.003-06:00

All the parts needed for six arm chairs.

Mortiser mortising

Nice fitting tenon. I went as close as possible off of the machine this time. I figured better to spend an extra half hour nailing the tenon stock than to spend hours and hours sanding tenons.

Tenon stock, before and after round-over bit.

Great trick for mortises with more than one depth. Magnets simply act as a stop for both depth and lateral movement, allowing you to repeat for each piece without having to change any of your setups. My side seat rails have twin tenons with the outer one in each case being haunched so this came in handy.

Mortises for twin tenons

A pile of joined walnut pieces. Still just rough pieces so no need to care for them yet.

Fitting templates for the back rails. These ended up being very complicated as the joints were compound angles. All the other joints on the chair were only angled in one direction.

One of the features I went for with each chair, in order to make them look like a set, was the sapwood on the top and bottom of the rails. Once shaped this becomes much more subtle but you can see it's there.

A mortise for the back rail. Jigs were very valuable in the joinery stage of things. This one held the back leg at an upward angle as well as angled sideways. The important thing being that each piece registers easily and consistentlty otherwise you may as well do them individually.

One of my favourite photos. These are the tenons and dowels required for ONE chair. All told there were 264 mortises, 132 floating tenons, 24 dowels and 48 dowels holes. That's a lot of joinery! You can see why this type of project takes so much time. As mentioned earlier, the haunched tenons are the ones with the little "tail".

Joinery done, doesn't look much different than the first photo.

Tapering jig for front legs.

My two best friends for what seemed like 3 months. Shaping by hand is part of what sets this type of furniture apart. You can achieve curves, smoothness and details that machines just aren't capable of. This is where the "production" process came to an end for me. Two hands, one spokeshave and one piece at a time.

There aren't many ways to expedite shaping when doing it by hand. One trick I did use though was this one. In order to achieve the "pillowed" shape to the side of my front stretchers I first ran them through a round-over bit, set to cut a little deeper than normal. This served two purposes. First it removes a lot of waste, but also it gives you a depth gauge for your spokeshaving. Once the little groove its gone, you know you've gone deep enough and you can begin to round over the corner and smooth out your pillow.

First chair to be shaped.

Time for a nice oily rub-down. I used a 2 parts antique danish oil (tung oil and varnsih) and 1 part spirits mix. This is very similar to what was used at school. This was my first crack at finishing with oil. All of my projects at school were shellac and wax. I really enjoyed applying the oil (especially the exciting first coat) but it took a lot of discipline to allow the proper drying times between coats. This was the drying station. Extra tenon stock always comes in handy!

I went 2 coats, followed by a steel-wooling and then a final oily-rag rub. I didn't want gloss, just a nice soft, protective finish.

Some tenons glued in, nail holes drilled, nails in and pre-wrap done on front and back seat rails.

So many parts, I really do consider it a miracle that I managed to keep them straight through all of this.

Glue-up of the back assembly. The first few glue-ups were nervous (especially since I'm alone) but having done so many now I'm pretty well practiced. I'm thankful that as of yet (knock on wood) they have all gone smoothly.

Four down, two to go.

This was the "lucky" one that got to come to the coast to be sat on, poked, prodded and otherwise inspected. It was like having to choose your favourite child but in the end I liked this one's back rail graphics so it got the nod.

Don't tell my Mom, but a drunk X-Games champion lounged in this chair.

I feel better now. I hope you enjoyed this recap as much as I enjoyed revisiting the process. Once the final two chairs are done, I'll be on to the table to match. The best news?...there will only be one.

Aaargh! Blogger!? Que pasa!?!?

2011-05-23T15:43:00.000-06:00

Thanks for coming out Blogger! So if it wasn't bad enough that I failed to find time in the last 5 months to sit down and write anything, when I finally do, Blogger crashes and has apparently deleted that post from existence. I've been waiting on promises that things would be restored but now I'm giving up, the show must go on! I'm not even going to attempt to re-create what I said in that post because it never quite comes out the same twice, plus it is now three weeks later.

To quickly re-cap:

Ten or so of our class returned to the creek for the year end show and had a blast catching up. It was really great to see those friends again and fill in the blanks from the past year.

The Inside Passage class of 2010-11 did some really great work that I was so glad to be able to see in person. They also, not surprisingly, seemed like a really great group of people and I enjoyed talking with many of them.

The curriculum and format changes at the school seemed to have paid off as productivity seemed to have been up despite the machines having been on for 450 hours less this year. There is a lesson in there for all of us who are perhaps still too reliant on electricity in our work. Needless to say, with all that extra time spent at benches, the quality was as high as ever.

Personally, I've been working as a carpenter since January. We're building a massive house that backs on to the river, just south of downtown Calgary. I'm really enjoying the mix of interesting, challenging work that pays the bills and then woodworking on the side. I find myself in a much more comfortable state in which to work well when I know the groceries and mortgage are already taken care of. I see it as the quality vs. quantity thing. Although I now have far fewer hours in the shop, they are far more enjoyable and I value them a great deal more.

What has that amounted to then? Well, four chairs are complete and the final two are awaiting glue-up. I realize that I skipped ahead from wood-selection to completed project but worry not, I am going to follow this post with a whirlwind review of joinery, shaping, finishing, glueing and weaving.

Thanks for taking the time to read this.

Mock-up and wood selection

2010-12-12T13:29:00.004-07:00

Finally I am sitting down to share this...I'm going to try to catch up on where this project is at over the next couple days, but for now some photos of the chair mock-up and a quick discussion about wood selection and part harvesting.


No, the not-so Hobsonian lattice work won't be part of the look. I wonder if those window shade Bruce made are still in use..?

The shaping on the left front leg is sort of what will happen, only less severely than this.

All six chairs are going to be arm chairs. It's a departure from traditional dining sets but that's the beauty of custom furniture. You can ask for whatever you want and all of your guest can sit in as much comfort as the hosts!

The seat rails are curved both top and bottom. This weave of the seat will therefore not be flat, but slightly bowled which I think will look unique.

Once the mock-up was ok'd and the comfort was dialed in I used it to create full scale drawings that are used as a reference for the construction of the real thing. From the drawings I created templates of the parts that I needed to find in the wood.

This is a negative template of the arms. It was handy because it gave me a look at the graphics while the outside rectangle showed me what I was aiming for as far as the initial rough stock size. Pieces such as this stay square until the joinery is done, and are then cut to shape.

I got my Walnut from a place in town call Upper Canada Forest Products. They were really helpful and actually brought this in for me from their Vancouver Warehouse. I requested rift and they sell it as rift/quartered so I knew I was taking my chances on getting enough rift to do the job.

As you can see, there was a fair bit of quartered in with it but I managed to get all of the pieces requiring true rift out of what I had. It was really interesting to look at a pile of wood, knowing that you need to find 12 front legs, 12 arms, 12 back rails, 6 stretchers, etc, plus extra parts for setups. In this case starting with lots of clear wood that was relatively straight was a real blessing.

My "scrub-plane". I never liked scrubbing and with so much needing to be done, this kicked ass. Time saved here can be better spent later on something that will make a difference to the project.

I was discussing with someone over e-mail, the idea of straightening grain when harvesting something like a front leg of a chair. This is how I do it. Keep in mind that I basically needed a 2x2 rough dimension out of 8/4 (2") stock. My final dimension is 1 1/2 x 1 5/8 so this allows room to tweak graphics and allow for settling and movement as it nears the final size.

Photo 1 :My piece is nice rift, almost perfectly 45 degrees but as you can see, the grain is not running parallel to the edges of the board.

Photo 2: You can also see that on the edge, it is slash grain, meaning it cuts diagonally across the surface. Now, I could give up on this and go looking somewhere else as upon first glance you might think that it must be slash grain all the way through. The truth is that cut at this angle, it is. If you sawed this piece into 2x2 and said to hell with it, you'd have ugly slash grain all down the front of your chair legs. So what to do?

Photo 3: It's really a matter of taking care of one side. I started by drawing a line parallel to the grain ignoring the existing edges. Then rip your piece along that line. A quick pass over the jointer to flatten that new edge and I was ready to set my band-saw fence to 2" and rip off my front legs. Ok fine, but what about that slash grain on the side of the board?

Photo 4: What? It's gone?! These are the 2x2s rotated so that you see what would be the front of the legs and what was the edge of the board before. Essentially, because the end-grain in photo 1 was angled diagonally, taking care of the slash grain on one face, winds up giving you nice straight grain on all four sides of your piece. Also of note, if you take the two center pieces from photo 3 and open them like a book, you get a mirror image (book-match) with identical grain on the front of both.

I hope that makes sense but you may also be saying: "What a waste of wood! Half of that piece went to the scrap pile and all you got out was two legs!" It has taken me a while to get used to this idea, and honestly I struggled even while at school with the "waste". I'll tell you what RVN told me though.

He said, "What's a bigger waste? Getting two beautiful legs out of that piece and wasting half, or getting four ugly legs out of it and wasting the whole thing?"

I think that was when I stopped worrying about the "waste". Besides, I've made a nice end-grain cutting board out of all those types of scraps, and now our Chirstmas shopping list is shorter.

This is what parts, and extra parts for six chairs looks like. The back legs wound up being cut from flat-sawn stock. I debated doing bent tapered laminations, but in the end, after a few very valuable consults with my IP alums it was decided that this was the way to go, both graphically and it terms of time. I didn't like the idea of seeing the glue lines in the end-grain at the top of the legs and flat-sawn cut right gives you nice graphics up the four sides.

Joinery has begun and I had an exciting realization about floating tenons that I'll post about next. Bye!

Mom's Dining Set

2010-11-23T07:04:00.001-07:00

So, I said I had an exciting project to start on soon. It is exciting, but it is also large and not really an ease yourself into things way to start. I am psyched though and ready for the challenge. I'm really thankful for the opportunity as it seems like a good kickstart to what I hope will be a successful venture in furniture making.

Below you will see some sketch-up renderings of the dining table and chairs that will one day belong to my Mom. This month was a milestone birthday for her and without giving away her age, lets just say it was a big enough one that my Dad decided he wanted to commission an extra special gift for her.

Keep in mind the purpose of these was to give them a general idea of what I was thinking. The slightly off proportions and shapes leave them looking quite blah but you'll get the idea.


Side view of arm chair. The stretcher will not have that weird angle...thanks for that sketch-up...

Seats will be woven and yes, I realize Ill be weaving for a week. I'll pop in a few good movies and tada!...I hope.

I like the armless, plus it keeps thing less crowded around the table...we have discussed the possibility of having 6 arm chairs but I will be voting neh.

The table top looks nice with this perfect quarter-sawn walnut graphic. I'm still debating how to best construct the table-top. Veneers or solid wood? Both seem to have their advantages but we'll see.

The legs of both the chairs and the table will taper slightly and be a little heavier on the bottom.

The mock-up of the chair is done and awaiting testing and approval from Mom. Mylene and Byron have been kind enough to lend their bottoms and opinions in the name of comfort but I will talk more about that in the next post. I also have a big pile of wood in the downstairs family room that I will share...well, not share but you know.

Bench Top (Ulmia-ish Pt. 2)

2010-11-13T11:14:00.146-07:00

The bench-top involved many "strips" to be glued together in order to make up the big, flat surface that is the goal. This isn't simply because my lumber wasn't wide enough to get it out of one piece. With the top being made out of roughly 2" wide pieces, glued together with the growth rings alternating, it is a much more stable piece of wood. If you simply took a big wide plank and flattened it into a bench top, in time it could cup and you'd find yourself re-flattening it often. What this meant was much laminating and much blistered and sore hands. A wiser man would have worn gloves...

I believe this is the thick section being laminated.

This template, together with a plunge router and guide bushing made the dogholes in the front-most strip before it was glued on,

These are them...

One improvement might have been to make sure that the cleat that seated my template was as thick as my routing was deep. This would have prevented the jagged bits you can see in the bottom right corner.

The big final glue-up of the top. I had most recenty jointed and thicknessed these parts when they were in thirds of what you see here. This left a lot less flattening to do at the end. Not sure what the plane was there for...just hanging out I guess.

The bread-board ends are slotted with and edge guided router.

The end of the bench is made to match and then a plywood spline is inserted to hold them flush to each other.


This joint is left unglued as the bench top must be allowed to come and go with the seasons. As such, a big bolt holds the two snugly together. It is not a lag bolt but I didn't take a photo of the mortise in the underside of the bench that houses the nut. The end is finger jointed to the back of the tool tray.

Both bread-boards done and the tool tray back glued in place. It is really beginning to look like a bench. The tool tray bottom is plywood and it is screwed on in case it ever requires replacement.

The tail vise is also finger jointed together but this sucker was a beast. Those pieces were basically 6x6s. Some careful cutting on the bandsaw and, chopping by hand and some fine tuning and they eventually went together. Likely the biggest joint I'll ever do.

This is the tail-vise installed. I did not unfortunately take any pictures of the process. I'm sorry because it really was quite interesting. The hardware was the veritas tail vise from lee valley. It differed from the one that the guy had in the plans so in the end I had to alter the elbow part of the tail-vise. As you can see it is now thinner because my screw was shorter than his was. No need for fancy handles...a piece of dowel rod and hockey tape is far more Canadian and is quite comfortable too.

The dawgs, also a fun process, also unphotodocumented. I promise to be better in future.

I put several coats of oil on the top and sides, letting it soak in, mostly to avoid stains from spilled coffee that I know will occur sooner or later.

The front vise hardware was also from lee valley, their "large" veritas one. Why do those dogs look so long? I put a special bit of spalting on the front just because. No drawer because it always annoyed me that it interfered with the dogs and vise-versa. I can have a drawer elsewhere.

Done and done, at home with his friends the tool and plane racks and sharpening station as well as a few homages to IP and reminders of how I want to work.

Assembly table out of 2x4s and MDF. Holds all of the F-clamps, bar clamps and glue-up supplies. Also rolls over to act as an outfeed table on the table-saw.

Sharpening station. I bought the motor at a garage sale and combined it with the right sized pulleys so that it goes more slowly. It's faster still than a hand-grinder but I like having two hands free to guide the blades over the stone. Not running to the machine room to grind is also nice, I tend to do it more often because it's right there.

So that's it, the bench is done and the shop is really 99% where I want it to be. The next step is doing some work!! I have an exciting project in the initial stages and I will share more about that in the next entry as this one is already a monster...

Happy woodworking!!!

Ulmia-ish Part 1

2010-11-04T08:49:00.007-06:00

This is going to be a whirlwind post about how I made my bench. It has been an ongoing project over the last couple months but has mostly come together in the three weeks. I found plans on the internet that were based on an Ulmia bench like the ones we had at school. Front and tail vises, tool tray and solid trestle base.

"Here we go..." - St. D.S.

The wood I chose for my bench was "Natural" Maple. It was the cheapest hardwood available because apparently no one likes the heart-wood color in their maple. OK?! Bring it on...

The mortises for the base were challenging because of the size. I needed 2.5" x1" mortises that went 2.5" deep.

I tried this jig (left over from Rya's crib) using a 1/2" bit, figuring I'd rotate it 180 and have a nice centered mortise. Problem: it left the ends needing to be cleaned out by hand and I was ending up with varying mortises, thus requiring more custom tenon fitting than I wanted to do.

In the end I made a template and used a bushing to do them. It worked really nicely and my first attempt with the jig turned out to just be waste removal! :) And no, the legs are not all nice straight rift....

Some nice shaping detail on the front ends. Tenons were cut on the tablesaw and bandsaw and then fit using the shaper before being fine-tuned by hand. It went quick and made for an incredibly strong joint.

The front and back stretchers. You can see the stub tenon and the holes to accommodate the 6" bolts, nuts and washers that secure them to the leg trestles.

A little edge softening with yes, a roundover bit and the base is done! It's rock solid and what more could I ask?

On second thought, I'm going to break this into 2 posts. It'll be too long to get through if I do it all in one. The rest is more interesting so check back!

Some pics of my shop

2010-10-20T17:16:00.004-06:00

I've been working in the shop now for a week and a half and needless to say I've been enjoying myself. The first couple days I was actually down there by 6:30 and the sound-proofing has been worth all the effort as my girls were still peacefully sleeping upstairs.

I'm going to skip the rest of the construction phase and get to the good stuff. Don was actually in town on a wood/ Lee Valley run and was able to help me get all of the machines downstairs with the aide of a furniture dolly. Anyway, here's some photos of the shop:


My little 14" band-saw that has actually surprised me. I thought it would be the first thing needing to be replaced but it has been working quite nicely.


The "cyclone" has actually worked well. It needs tweaking if I ever get around to it but it grabs maybe 80%. I've emptied the can 5 or 6 times and the bag is still only half full.


The DC is actually in that booth. It has helped dampen the noise but also filters the air before it returns it to the shop.


The Mini-Max combo I found on Kijiji took a lot of time to get set and tuned up but now that it is running it is sweet! There are no words to describe how brilliant Tersa knives are...


Looking the other way, that space will eventually be home to my bench, wood rack and an assembly area. In the foreground is the table-saw which again has been a pleasant surprise. It's just a GI 10" hybrid but combined with the cross-cut sled it has been great. have a 50 tooth CMT combination blade in it most of the time.


Back in the corner is the Delta shaper I also got of of Kijiji. I've outfitted it with the router bit spindle attachment and it is running nicely. I really need to invest in some decent bits at some point though.

As you can see the bones are there but I still have a lot of work to do in terms of organizing and making it user friendly. Currently I find myself tripping over clamps, moving hand tools from the table saw, to the shaper, back to the table saw, to the floor....etc. Thankfully the bench is almost done and in time the rest will follow. The tool show is this weekend, maybe I'll find a drill press.

I'll do a post about the bench progress asap.

Ian Crosby: Woodworker

2010-10-09T08:07:00.001-06:00

For the last 4 months I have been working in the hole, which quite literally was an enormous hole that we worked in. Doing concrete form carpentry in a setting like that provided ample contrast to the peaceful woodworking we all experienced in Roberts Creek. Anyways, long story short...the company I was working for expects 60 hour weeks Mon-Sat and with Mylene and Rya at home who wants to work that much, especially in a hole. I will miss some of the guys there as we often shared good laughs but I am more than excited to get back to wood and have as much family time as I want.

As I haven't posted anything since July, despite the other job, progress has been made in the shop. In fact, the shop is done and the work bench is currently underway. I remember people saying that to build your own was a ton of work. They weren't kidding, but it has given me a great opportunity to tweak and tune machines without worrying about spoiling precious project wood. I want the bench to be nice but functionality is all I'm really concerned about. Don't worry, I've put no effort into grain graphics...that would be ridiculous.

So as of this coming Tuesday, I will be in the shop full time, trying to make a go of this whole woodworking thing. No time better than the present!!

Shop construction

2010-07-25T08:32:00.000-06:00

Much like when Mylene was pregnant, the shop seems to progress very slowly. The anticipation of the final result and all the good times that will follow is almost too much but yet I must wait. I still am not feeling it kick, but at least the morning sickness has subsided for now.

Here's where it's at:

The stairs down to the level that will be the shop.

I'm being as diligent as I can be with regards to containing the sometimes unpleasant woodworking sounds. I decided to separate the furnace room from the shop with a "party" wall. The idea being that there is far less solid material to transfer the sound as no stud touches the drywall on both sides of the wall. Basically 2x6 plates with staggered 2x4 studs. Insulation to come and hopefully I'll be ok to thickness things at whatever hour I desire. Fingers crossed.

Another soundproofing measure has been to insulate the ceiling with Roxul Safe and Sound. I've also put strips of 1/2" styrofoam insulation on the bottoms of the joists to further dampen what could go through to the upstairs living space. As you can see the pot-lights are also in.

I decided that from a re-sale perspective, should that day come, that very few people would want their basement wired with 220V all over the place and bench height plugs etc. Therefore I decided to first finish the space as a rec-room with all the appropriate plugs and lights for that. Once it is drywalled I'm going to run the shop power off of a sub-panel with the wires in conduit on the outside of the walls. This way I can tear it all down, patch the walls and no one will be the wiser. Plus, I can take all my expensive wire and breakers, etc with me to the next shop. Who knows if this will ever matter but it seems sensible, plus I can always move plugs if I want to re organize the shop for whatever reason.

Ah yes, furniture quality sawhorses as a reminder of what all of this effort is for. As I said, it seems so far off that this will result in woodworking but I'm plugging away as fast as this whole working thing will allow and before I know it, it'll be done!

Home in Calgary

2010-07-02T20:40:00.000-06:00

It was a weird feeling as we drove past the "Welcome to Alberta!" sign. I still have a hard time believing that Ian's time at Inside Passage has come and gone. It was a fantastic 9 months, not just in terms of school, but also as far as a life experience for our family. We met a lot of really great people and had a chance to see what it was like to live in a totally different community. The Creek is a very quiet place and Mylene appreciated the time to bond with and enjoy little Rya. It was amazing to see her grow, and somewhat of a measuring stick for our time there. Above all, it has given us a lot more perspective with which to decide what we want our lives to look like.

On the woodworking front I think my post IP hangover is beginning to wear off which is nice. I'm working a construction job for the time being and it feels nice to be making some dough again. It is an interesting thing, leaving school; or at least leaving this particular school. I've been struggling with how to move on and really make the time I spent learning how to make beautiful things from wood mean something. Unlike university which left me with next to nothing, I want this to be a part of my life for good. It's really just a matter of figuring out what that looks like.

In terms of a post IP shop, the analogy I used with my friend who is a photographer, is that it's much like learning to take pictures with the best camera, lights and gear you can get and then suddenly not even having a camera. You really want to take a picture but can't...simple as that. Maye you have a little point and shoot from before you learned how to really take a photo but you know it just won't cut it anymore.

I've decided to hell with it though and am going to go for it. The house we bought has a perfect space and I've been religious in my scouring of the used machine market. I realize that the order in which I've acquired things so far is not what Robert suggested but I figure when a good deal is to be had, prioritizing goes out the window.

Here's what the shop looks like as of now:

Table saw : I'm going to stick with my General International 10" Hybrid until it proves to be unworthy. I'm optimisitc however that with a sweet cross-cut sled, it will serve my well.

Shaper : I found a guy in High River who had a bunch of stuff sitting around from a cabinet shop that he had closed down when he decided to make pre-fab walls with his rack of 30 framing nailers that all fire in unison. Anyways, long story short, he had a brand new Delta shaper just sitting around. The motor had never even been put in. I had been pondering the router table route but when this popped up and I felt the precision of the lift I was sold even if it cost a little more. This was what I was talking about with the wacky priority, the best machine in your shop probably shouldn't be the shaper but you gotta start somewhere.

Jointer/ Shaper : Interestingly, the same guy who sold me the shaper (perhaps my woodworking guardian angel) also had a Mini-Max FS30 12" jointer/planer combination machine. I debated for a couple weeks but finally we agreed on a price and I went and picked it up yesterday. Just like that I am ecstatic to have 12" jointing capacity.

Mortiser : Best of all, the combination machine also came with an x-y table that turns it into a slot-mortiser. Needless to say, I was pretty pumped to welcome Max into the family.

Dust-collector : As part of the bargaining for the Mini-Max I got him to include a 1.5 hp Delta DC that he had sitting on a palette up in the rafters. I'm excited to make it crazy-carpet cyclonic a la Ian Godfrey's shop.

Bandsaw : Still browsing but have my eye on a couple used ones. The 3-phase power thing is getting me down a bit though. Do I really need to go there or should I be patient and wait for something else to come along.
Workbench : 100 board feet of maple, a front vise and a tail vise, waiting patiently for the day that they will be transformed into a bench. I found a sweet plan online based on the Ulmia bench. It will guide me through what promises to be a challenging but rewarding project. Don't you need a bench to make a bench?

Anyways, it's coming along. More importantly I'm blogging again.

Year End Show

2010-05-19T22:41:00.000-06:00

The year end show was a nice way to cap off the year and showcase all of the work we did and all that we learned. It was held at the Kozai gallery in Vancouver.

Bruce's Sapele coffee table

Barb's boxwood, sycamore and kwila showcase cabinet

Daisuke's sycamore and maple coffee table

Steve W posing like a proud papa beside his zebrano and walnut bedside table

Don's chair (top) of white oak and danish cord, Steve N's cherry coffee table and Junior's mahogany chair

Michael A's (tall skinny on left) Sycamore and Olive wall cabinet, my Walnut and Red Elm wall cabinet, my maple hall table middle and my parents looking at Hong's kwila, arbutus and maple stand and cabinets. I'm sad I didn't get a better picture of this because it is one of the coolest pieces of the year.

Steve N's walnut and maple hall table and mirror

Michael A's Kwila and cord Super Leggere chair and Byron's Ash and Aformosia laptop desk

To follow up the last post, here are the little Wee-dar chairs and matching table made from white oak and danish cord

Jason's (left) chinese elm writing lap desk

Lord Godfrey's white oak bench (left) and Bruce's upholstered ash piano bench

Meredith's silver inlayed aformosia hall table

Daisuke's Shedua and Ebony wall cabinet

Michael O's Sapele box (top left), Barb's lacewood box (bottom left), Jacques' maple box (bottom right) and Byron's yellow cedar box (top right)

Don's chinese elm cabinet

Steve W's (middle) kwila jewelery cabinet and Evan's (right) Arbutus jewelery cabinet

The Hobsonian one, doing something Hobsonian to my Dad.

Crowd outside and the Daisuke and Jacques' U-Haul for the long trip to Totonto!

Three lovely ladies

We were lucky enough to share a table with Hong and his family. We enjoyed a great dinner.

Six and one thirty-second lovely men

We're now enjoying the last week in the Creek before we hitch up our U-Haul for the drive home. I think I'll gather my final thoughts on the year and make another post about that later.

Two Weeks of Mayhem

2010-05-16T16:48:00.000-06:00

With two weeks to go in the program I decided that the chairs were in good shape time-wise and decided to pursue the idea of a table to go with them. This was part of the idea from the beginning but was left as an "if there's time" thing. I wanted the table to look like it belonged with the chairs. The obvious features of the chairs were the bow-tie shaped stretchers, the narrow and tapered legs as well as the flat curve on the front of the seat. These three elements were my starting point for designing the table. Above you can see the mock-up of this. I scaled it based on the size of the chairs which left the legs at roughly 19" long.

The veneers you see above are what became the top and bottom of the table top. I went with a veneer construction because I wanted a frame and panel look but Robert pointed out that the groove between the panel and the frame if I did it in solid wood would be a trap for crumbs, juice and all other nasty kid stuff. This way I could have heavy applied edges, that looked like a frame while having the whole top flush.

Baltic birch substrate this time instead of lumber core. In this application either would be fine but time said ply! Baked in poplar edges going on.

Stock for the base all milled up. The two planks of oak I had for the set was so gorgeous and made hunting for parts enjoyable and easy. I didn't waste nearly like I did on my first two projects. With wood, you definitely get what you pay for. Thanks Goby!

Veneers edge joined. This was at the time to be the underside of the table but once the top was done we all agreed that it was more interesting than the actual top so I flipped it over and promoted this to A-1. I guess there is something to be said for taking care with grain graphics even if it is under the table or on the back of the cabinet. You just never know!

The original top-side with the applied edges doweled and glued on.

Smiles denoting that we were happy to have our projects coming along well.

At the same time as the table was taking shape I couldn't let myself forget that the chairs weren't done. Above is the shaping of the crest rails. Holding them was the biggest challenge but finally this jig was the answer.

With two aprons joining the relatively thin leg at the same point I had to be creative with the mortises. All four are haunched with the deeper tenons crossing over one above the other.

These are the tenons on the longer aprons, the side that has no stretcher. They were given a little more beef than the others.

Band-sawn and shaped, the aprons also received the subtle curve, to mimic the chairs. Perhaps one of my favourite parts about the shaping was that I actually used part of one of the curves from the full scale Vidar chair as my template. It seemed fitting that the original curve he created be the starting point for the shaping of the table parts.

Photos from the open house. The machine room once again became a pseudo-gallery. Lots of people came through and enjoyed seeing the fruits of our labour. We all patiently waited for the afternoon to pass so we could get back to work...

Five days to go until the year end show....

When I wrote out this to-do list my heart kind of sank and I had the feeling that I might not make it. That's a lot of black ink.

The days became about getting the chairs done as machines were still required to do some of the joinery for the back splats. The bottom tenon shoulders were cut on the table saw while the top ones had to be done by hand for a variety of reasons. Fitting these four (two on each) pieces of wood was the most difficult task I ran into all year. I told Don it was my final exam. At times I thought I was in way over my head and I panicked more than once. In time however it became one of the most satisfying accomplishments of the year. I learned a lot from those four little pieces of wood and they made me appreciate how far I had come in the last nine months.

Getting close, but as Evan said, seeming a little blocky.

That's better! Shaped and finished! I spent many hours obsessively shaping the four little suckers with my spokeshaves and files. I wanted them to be as close to identical as possible. In the end, I was very pleased. The graphics worked out beautifully as well, notice the following curve?

As I mentioned, the days were for completing the chairs. That meant that the table was left until night time. I decided on this strategy because I knew that the focus would be a little better earlier in the day for the more difficult task of fitting the chair backs. I also knew that I needed something to re-build my enthusiasm at the end of the day and the table work showed results much quicker. Above you can see the final of three glue-ups for the table base. Shaping all done, parts finished and waxed, the joints went together nicely and slowly but surely, the to-do list was getting erased one task at a time. Very satisfying and motivating.

Also motivating was the fact that other people were frantically trying to get their stuff done too. For the last two weeks the evenings and nights became alive with activity and Jacques Breau was here to guide us through the late hours. Some nights there were as many as seven of us working our hearts out. My routing became one of going in at 730, working until 530 as usual, then going home for dinner and Rya's bedtime, before going back to school some nights until 2-230. Exhausting but fun.

With the table done (photo to come in next post), all hours became about the chairs which came together in the eleventh hour...litterally.

With the backs glued in I was pleased to know that I had made it in time. Perhaps too tired to be proud I was at the very least relieved that my efforts paid off. My biggest thanks went to Mylene who held our household together and blessed me with the support I needed to spend the 16-18 hours a day at the shop. I wouldn't trade those last two weeks for anything but I also hope I have learned not to leave myself in such a pinch again. I wish I believed that for even a second.

Next post: Year End Show pics and wrap-up

Weam Dreaver

2010-04-27T22:10:00.000-06:00

This is a short foreign language film I made about weaving. Let me clarify that this is not a movie, but rather a film. Interestingly, I began at night (hence the beer) and finished the next morning (with a quick coffee.)

The chairs are in their final stages now while I finalize a design for the table to go with them. We only have 12 working days left! AH!

Starting to Wrap Up

2010-04-24T22:37:00.000-06:00

While we still have a few good weeks of hard work ahead of us, the title of this entry has more to do with the fact that my little chairs are nearly ready to receive their danish cord wrap. This has been the last couple weeks. The joinery for the chairs went really well. I was pleased to learn that compound angled joints are really not terribly difficult. I tackled one angle, then the second and once combined you have your joint!

We've gone down to the beach and had a fire for elephants a couple times in the last few weeks.

But now back to work.

The seat rails were cut to shape on the bandsaw and then refined, corners rounded over and a slight scallop put in the seat so that when you sit on it and the cord flexes, you don't feel the frame beneath you. It's hard to see but below, where the tape is is sort of the low spot.

You can begin to see it looks like a chair even though the shaping that will make it a nice chair has yet to be done.

I spent a couple days with a spoke shave and file, making all of the edges nice, pillowing some faces and giving it the attention that sets something hand-made apart from mass produced stuff.

Don and I have had an ongoing battle of wits (or dimwits if you ask anyone else) on the chalkboards throughout the school this year. Don got me with a doozy as seen above. This chalkboard is in the bathroom and having neither written, nor said what you see I was surprised when people began asking me how I could say something like that to Don. For the record, Don's workmanship is excellent and he gets it done at his own thoughtful pace.

As promised in the beginning, the chairs are ready to be wrapped, almost. First is the pre-wrap. which as you can see below come pre-glue-up. The method I'm using to wrap my chair involves L shaped nails and it allows me to wrap the front and back seat rails before I assemble the chair. This makes the process much simpler.

There are more wraps on the front (the longer pieces) than on the back ones, in order to make up the difference in length between the two. Once the other pieces are shellacked and waxed they are all organized, ready to begin glu-ups.

The fronts come out of the clamp looking good, next the backs and then join the two together. That's up on Monday. Tomorrow we're going to the Skookumchuck rapids for a nice walk and a spectacle of nature.

Year End (Already?!?!) Info

2010-04-18T15:50:00.000-06:00

I literally just stole this from the resident craftsman blog but thought it was an easy way to pass along to all those who are interested, even if just in a "that's nice but I live in Calgary kind of way."

Those of you who have paid attention this year should recognize at least one piece in the cool graphic put together by Michael O (as opposed to Michael "Effin" A.). Can you spot it? Wow this is my first interactive post...

Open House
Inside Passage School of Fine Woodworking

Saturday May 8th 1pm-5pm

1055 Roberts Creek Rd

Sunshine Coast, BC

Furniture Exhibition

Kozai Designs

Reception: Saturday May 15th 1pm-5pm

Exhibition closes May 29th

1515 West 6th Avenue

Vancouver, BC

Wow! Rift Sawn Crest Rail Wonderment!

2010-04-14T22:20:00.000-06:00

Hello again. As you can see this is the second post in 3 days and it is not just because Mylene and Rya are in Calgary and I get bored once the machines are turned off if I haven't left myself any hand work. This post is devoted to something muy (very) excitante (?exciting?)!! Today I cut the crest rails, the top piece of the back of my chairs. Now without going into to much technical detail I hope to show how cool it is and share a little grain graphics enthusiasm. The piece pictured above is the end result...whatever, right? Wrong! Here's why:

This little member, only 13" long in my miniature scale, began as a 2 1/4" by 2 1/4"by 14" piece of perfectly rift sawn white oak. Perfectly rift sawn means that if you look at the end of the piece, the grain will go diagonally, corner to corner at 45 degrees. Tecnically anywhere from 30-60 is rift but for this I needed 45.

The key is that the end grain must be rising from front to back. You'll see why shortly.

After tracing my templates, which are also shown above, one for the front, one for the top it was time to cut. This involves first cutting the shape out based on the tracing on one face. Then you stick the pieces back together with double-stick tape so you're still working with a nice square piece and then cut the second faces pattern.

Here's the result.

The cuts have been made, now it's time to take apart the puzzle and reveal the little gem inside.

Anyone excited yet? As you can see, the cutting divides the piece into 3 part both on the horizontal face and the vertical face. Our little precious is tucked right between the top and the bottom of the middle section.

And alas, there it is, with the two red pens pointing at it.

Now if you're still saying, "who cares? What a waste of wood for such a little piece," let me explain. Notice the grain and how it follows the curve of the piece? It does that on all four sides. It's not by chance, but rather almost like magic! Since I started with that perfect 45 degree rift sawn piece (and remember the grain was rising front to back?), as the concave cut was made into the depth of the piece the grain rises with it because we're basically climbing the 45 degree slope we could see in the end grain. The end, where the cut was more shallow only just begins to rise. (Click photo to zoom in)

Sorry, I tried not to get into the technicalities but once you understand it, it is pretty cool. We do a lot of manipulating grain for all things but nowhere is it more exciting than in this case where you get a complex shaped piece that looks like the grain lines are painted on perfectly. Plus it comes wrapped in a cool puzzle box that you have to take apart to find the treasure inside.

If you held on this far, thank you and I hope that all made some sense.

Chairs for a Tea Party!

2010-04-12T23:59:00.000-06:00

When we arrived in Roberts Creek Rya was only 6 weeks old and could hardly even hold her head up. It's amazing how quickly time has gone here and perhaps nothing is a better reminder that it has been almost nine months, than the fact that our little baby girl now looks like this!

Now I know I am biased, but somebody as cute and as sweet as this is going to need a nice place to sit and have tea parties with her friends. I envisioned a very simple little chair and table set but Robert felt I could challenge myself a little more as the joinery in what I was proposing was very basic. As such, my current project is a nice set of miniature Vidar's chairs and a little table.

Vidar Malmsten was JK's friend and he designed a chair that has been built by numerous people at College of the Redwoods over the years and most recently, Robert built one out of Wenge as seen below. Mine will be without arms and will be made of white oak.

The glorious thing about doing Vidar's chairs is that the full scale working drawings already exist and therefore I was able to warp-zone my way past the designing, mocking-up and drawing stages, right to the building. I feel like I've still learned how to go about those important steps by watching other students do it, but with limited time left I'm happy to be going full throttle with the real deal. Below you see the drawing of the back of the chair. Mine will be to 65% of the actual size.

Below you see my white oak cut into very small but very carefully selected pieces. Vidar's chair is a great exercise in both complex joinery, but also grain graphics. Every piece has to be a certain cut in order to have the grain follow the curves once the shaping begins.

The back legs are the first to take shape in order to begin laying out the joinery and cutting the mortises.

White sticky labels makes it easier to make crisp, visible lines and avoid confusion when you get back to the mortiser to start cutting.

I made a cradle to hold my pieces while I mortised in the side of the legs. The nice thing about the two dowels is that they allowed me to maneuver the piece side to side until my marks were perfectly parallel to the top of the x-y table.

The back of the seat is fit between the back legs with twin tenons.

Next the front legs are joined with the seat front and the front rail between them. The rail is connected with a single live tenon while the seat front is once again joined with twin floating tenons. I discovered doing this part that while live tenons take longer to cut, they are a joy to fit. The floaters on the other hand are quick to mortise but you have twice as much tenon to fit and at this tiny scale the chicklety little tenons are hard to hold on to.

This is just some tenon stock. Perhaps I should have explained earlier but a live tenon is one that is cut on the end of a piece like the rail and is then inserted into a mortise in the other piece. A floating or loose tenon involves two mortises (one in each piece) and a separate tenon that joins them together, more like a dowel. Twin tenons are just two, one above the other.

Marching through March

2010-04-04T12:17:00.000-06:00

We took advantage of the week-long spring break at school and returned home to Calgary in order to find a house. It was quite a process. When we bought our first house we spent a day with a realtor, and by the end of the day had found what we were looking for; easy as pie. This time however, we spent the better part of a week out looking during the day an d scouring the mls by night. It was frustrating at times but in the end we found a great house in a great neighbourhood and knew that the effort was well worthwhile.

Meanwhile, back in the world of wood and wonder, things have been going well. The school has emerged from the "winter months" ( I still laugh when I hear people talk about "winter" here because it is so nice not to have had snow and frigid temperatures but I guess it's all relative) and the mood in the shop seems to have returned to one of excitement and enthusiasm.

Once my table frame structure was glued up it was time for fitting drawer bottoms. This time around I did NK drawers which are different than traditional drawers in that you actually only fit the bottom to the pocket and then glue the dovetailed box portion onto it. It is much easier to get a nicely fitting drawer but does involve significantly more steps.

I used ash as drawer sides because I like the colors with the maple and the bottom, which I neglected to take a photo of, are red elm. The three woods really worked nicely together but the ash did prove a challenge to dovetail with the maple as both are hard and you cannot rely on any compression to help the joint.

In order to accurately attach the top of the table to the legs I used a doweling template made from a piece of 3/4" mdf. The template was first drilled on the press and then used to drill corresponding holes in both the legs part and the table top. It worked beautifully.

The top was then glued on but not without the center sliding panel being in place. I wrote myself a big note because gluing the top on without this in place would be disastrous. What is this center panel you ask? I'll share more later.

As you can probably imagine, with as many people working in the space that we have to work in, it gets crowded and it has at times been very cluttered with projects and mock-ups. This is a view towards my bench. Yikes.

With the drawer boxes glued down to the bottoms all that remained was to mortise a slot into which a pull would be glued.

Pulls are a tricky thing because they can really change the feel of a piece. At first I carved a pull similar in shape to this one out of Olive but once finished the colors went from soft to rather gaudy. I wound up making the same pull, this time out of London Plane, which goes really well with the elm in the drawer bottom.

A little polishing and waxing on the top and tada! just like that a finished hall table. I am pleased with how it turned out but will look forward to getting it out of the shop because it occupies more than my share of space.

As I suggested earlier, the center compartment of the table has an interesting sliding door. Truth be told, and I kept this a secret even from most people in the shop and certainly from Mylene, there is a secret compartment! I'm not sure how many additional hours were spent in pursuit of this bit of fun but I spent many morning laying in bed trying to come up with the mechanics in my head.

This was where I finally landed. I'll give you a few clues: the sliding door, a shallow drawer, the stop above but I'll say no more. That's some kind of poetry...

This is the box that slides out from the compartment. Awesome quilted ash on the top and bottom.

And a token Rya shot, testing out the comfiness of Don's chair mock-up. She's grown so fast, check her out in past posts! She's a real little girl now!

Table takes shape and I frieze my ass off

2010-03-05T22:47:00.000-07:00

Above you can see a sample of the joinery I used between the aprons and the legs. The twin tenons in between the applied edge and the leg, combined with the top being doweled into all four legs will give the table great racking strength and avoid the need for any kind of stretcher lower on the legs.

You can see that this is a serious mechanical press. Inside was the bottom panel of my table, once again veneer construction and sandwiched under great pressure to ensure that everything bonds as it should. The thing is intense, we've actually crushed pieces in it when we cranked too hard on the clamps. Even with the 4 inches worth of cauls, you can sometimes crush shallow valleys into softer materials if you get too excited about the tightening.

The joinery dryfit.

I had to establish the dimension of the top of the leg in order to reference from the outside for the joinery. This was in order to ensure a consistent offset between all of the legs and the aprons.

The applied edges going onto the drawer partitions. Notice the baked-in edge between the outer veneers. We sandwich those in so that you have a long grain glue surface onto which we apply our edge.

The bottom panel is held in with a series of splines around the three sides. The front edge is once again tenoned into the legs. I elected to go with a panel on the bottom at the suggestion of Lord Godfrey, one of our guest teachers, instead of a web frame because as he pointed out, it looks clean and finished from underneath.

The chamfers we cut on the tablesaw and bandsaw and then cleaned very carefully by hand with chisels and files. It was a very intense process because unlike most handwork where a small error can be cleaned up by taking a little more off or whatever, in this case a slip leaves a less than crisp line and is quite obvious.

The top after veneering and being cut to shape. The curve, while symmetrical, is not a radius but actually tightens on each end and is flatter in the middle. The process of refining the curved front and curved sides with a spokeshave was really enjoyable. I like being reminded of how far I've come since September. All of the above, 7 months ago would have sounded like gibberish to me but now...

I guess I kind of gave up on having this done by break when I was convinced to do a Frieze around the top of the table. I think Robert sees the maple as boring because he suggested it and I saw it as an opportunity to not only try something new but also add some flash to the top. This photo is of the first step in that process, routing a channel around the edge of the table.

A Frieze involves glueing individual pieces around the perimeter using either grain or prismatics to make a pattern. In this case I chose to alternate the grain 90 degrees, but the prismatic effect works beautifully as well.

I spent almost 2 whole days patiently fitting and gluing on the little squares.

In the end I was really pleased with the effect and felt it was well worth the time and energy. Do not however, hold your breath to see this type of thing in any of my work in the near future.

With the Frieze done it was time to flush off the edges again and apply the solid wood edges.

And lastly, the top can be planed down, flushing the edges, the frieze and the top veneers. At this point I have put it aside, awaiting the rest of the table before I will really surface it, finish it and get to see how it truly turns out. I'll keep you posted.

Been busy working away!

2010-03-03T22:59:00.000-07:00

I can't believe it's been more than a month since I posted anything...that's bad. The good news is that in the last month much progress has been made on my table. When we got back from Portland I got right into it and so far everything has gone well.

The first step was harvesting the legs from the 12/4 maple I brought back from Vancouver before Christmas. I chose wisely this time and found five very nice straight, rift sawn legs. Yes the table only has four but it never hurts to have an extra. Rift sawn means that the end grain runs 45 degrees, corner to corner. In some places this meant having to "rotate" the cut.

Rift is important because it gives you the straight grain on all four sides, instead of having some flat graphics which would be ugly on a leg.

The aprons of the table are all veneered, with a lumber core substrate. This means that the center core is made up of strips of poplar, glued together. Cutting them releases tension in the wood and allows you to glue them back together in alternating directions so as to make it more stable and less likely to warp. Next, you laminate commercial veneer (the 2nd and 4th pieces in the photo) with the grain going perpendicular to the direction that the poplar runs. This "cross-bands" the poplar, locking in any potential seasonal movement. Finally, you veneer the core with your nice wood, in this case maple (the two outermost pieces in the photo). I know this is a lot of blah, blah, blah, but the technique is quite interesting because it frees you from the limitations of solid wood construction by stabilizing it. It's really just fancy, home-made plywood.

Above you see the applied edges for the bottom of the aprons. The dooewls are simply to locate it when it comes to gluing it on. Sometimes an edge is just an edge but in this case, it will be shaped to give the chamfered profile around the bottom of the table.

One of the best things about being at school is the different perspectives that everyone has on something. One day , we had a guest teacher in who looked at my newly applied edges and legs and thought that the edges looked thin and the legs too heavy. After considering this input I decided that he was right and chose to remedy the problem. Without going into detail, the leg thickness have a very specific relationship with the apron thickness so this meant major surgery on what I thought were finished pieces. First I ripped my nicely shaped edges off in order to later apply thicker ones but I also ended up ripping through the middle of my core (above) in order to thin them down to match the legs. I had to cut through the middle in order to preserve my nice veneers on the outside like liposuction, you have to suck out the fat, not just lop chunks off the outside.

Above you see the pieces post-op with their new thicker (taller) edges.

Sometimes it gets loud in the workshop, especially for the little woodworkers.

As this is beginning to get long, I'm going to make a promise to myself, and to you that I will post again while we're home in Calgary this weekend. I have many more interesting photos that will show the table taking shape.

Got wood?

2010-01-31T20:47:00.000-07:00

We have now all returned from the good ol' US of A and what a trip it was! I had never and may never again see as much wood as I did in the last couple days. Many of you may be thinking, yawn....but it was pretty thrilling. The Gilmer Wood company in Portland, was mind boggling for several reasons. Three massive warehouses, stocked to the roof and with absolutely no organization whatsoever. It was incredible. We were climbing over pallets, twenty feet high to get at wood that had apparently been buried for up to 30 years! Thankfully, no one was buried alive, although it seemed a definite possibility throughout the day. By my very rough estimation, inventory in the tens of millions and that doesn't include the hundreds of old, rusty, industrial sized machines that were scattered everywhere. I'm realizing now, as I look at my pictures, that I've done a poor job documenting the above description in photos, but you'll have to trust me, it was ridiculous.

Don, Meredith, Robert, Steve N. and Roberta during a Masur Birch log and Pear plank search.

Jason and Byron atop a pile of Pear planks that were 3 inches thick and in the $1000 a plank range, which as you can tell, was shocking to Byron.

Surf's up for Evan as he scopes out a big pile of ?????

This was the smaller half of the Claro Walnut log we looked at.

Don with a giant band saw that his ancestors must have manufactured.

Meredith and her nice log of Masur Birch.

I know that when I'm home I'll miss Robert's bountiful variety of woods for accents, drawer fronts or pulls and such and so my strategy going in was to come back with as many nice little pieces of wood in various species as I could find. I was thrilled to find a couple bins of cheap offcuts that I could sort though. Pieces like Brazilian Satinwood, Curly Pear, Castello Boxwood, Kingwood, Macassar Ebony and Ziricote were among the highlights but I brought home a whole box full of treasures, most of which were a buck or two. Saturday, before hitting the road our car also went to a place called Goby Walnut and had a much different and very pleasant shopping experience. It's just down the road from Gilmer but being much smaller allows them to display their stock in a much more buyer friendly way. They specialize in Walnut and had some beautiful planks that Steve and Byron indulged in while I found a couple nice planks of white oak that caught my fancy. Best of all, at no point during the morning was I worried about any of us being crushed by a toppling tower of wood.

We also hit a nice co-op shop on the way down and saw another way in which people can work and share a space, much like we're all used to at the school. McMenamins Edgefield outside of Portland was a great place to stay if you're ever in the area. It is an old building converted into a hostel/ hotel with numerous bars, restaurants and a cool atmosphere. On the way home we stopped at the Northwest Furniture Gallery in Seattle; lots of nice pieces worth seeing. A bit more driving, missed the second to last ferry by five minutes and then caught the last ferry home.

Robert has continued down the road towards Fort Bragg, California to visit Britta Krenov, JK's widow. Best of luck to him and hopefully we'll all make some good progress on our projects while he's away.

Off to Gilmer's!

2010-01-27T23:38:00.000-07:00

We're off on a bit of a road trip for the next few days! We're going down to Portland to visit a wood supplier, the Gilmer Wood Company that Robert has described as Disneyland for woodworkers. You may be thinking that it seems like a long way to go to buy wood, and I'm with you on that, but I'm optimistic that it will be worth the trek. They have every variety under the sun and it'll be fun to come back with a few nice gems.

ps. I've harvested my table's legs....I'm excited about them.

Preview of 2nd project.

2010-01-24T16:23:00.000-07:00

Now that I've completed my first project, including the pull, it's time to move on to bigger and better things, namely veneers. I definitely had it in my mind when I go here that at some point I wanted to do a table and learn about the construction and joinery involved. Solid wood table joinery is different than if you are using veneers. Since mine will be a veneer construction,this means is that it will be doweled together instead of using mortise and tenon joinery as most table are built with. The benefit of veneer construction is that although technically, you're still working with solid wood, we engineer it in layers so that it is stable, not subject to wood movement like a regular piece of wood. I'll talk more about this process once I have some photos to share and explain.

This is a preview/ sketch of the table.

Finito! Walnut Wall Cabinet!

2010-01-21T23:43:00.000-07:00

So when I left off, the back panel was mostly put together and I was ready to move on to the drawers. Not many pictures of the process but here they are.

Robert gave me a beautiful little piece of Tasmanian Blackwood for the fronts and the sides were actually some mystery wood that came bolted on the new table saw when it arrived. Whatever it is, it's nice and dovetailed beautifully. The bottoms are red cedar and the pulls were carved from Imbuya. I was really pleased with the fit I achieved on the drawers. They actually act as pistons, pushing and sucking each other in and out...sort of a vacuum effect.

This is a photo of my back panel being glued in. It was a successful glue-up as I put far more time into planning than I did with the wabi-sabi back panel glue-up. Sometimes, it seems, an extra hour spent planning can save you from a disaster and much angst. It feels good when everything goes according to plan. Many cauls and many clamps.

The door was the last glue-up I had to do. I waffled over the shape and size of the "fin" leading up to Christmas and when I came back I decided that I agreed with Robert and several others who suggested it be toned down just a little bit. It now works much better with the grain graphics on the panel and seems so obviously right, in hind sight.

Next I fit and hung the door, installed the wall hangers I had previously made and put some shellac on the door frame. I am still debating whether or not I want to put a pull on the front or simply carve on on the side of the door, but for al intents and purposes, it is done.

And so, I present.... my Walnut Wall Cabinet

I really enjoyed working on this project and I feel like a did a good job. It was heavily influenced by those around me and was much better for it. Thank you to all of you.

Wood Summary:

Carcass and Frames - Black Walnut

Door panels - Red Elm

Drawers - Tasmanian Blackwood, Red Cedar, reclaimed wood, Imbuya

Back panels - spalted reclaimed wood

Stalling...

2010-01-10T01:14:00.000-07:00

I know I promised that I'd have photos posted of the finished cabinet by now but, and I'm not making this up, we were asked to put it on hold for this week. Robert feels that it's best for students to regain their touch and groove first, before any critical errors should befall the projects. As such, this week we have learned about and worked on a wooden spokeshave as well as a veneered curved panel door. I've also started working on a little dovetailed box for Rya, in which she can keep the locket we gave her for Chirstmas.

Speaking of Rya, here's a wonderful photo of her and Elli yucking it up. We missed the joke but evidently Elli caught the punch-line.

Local Newspaper Article

2010-01-08T19:39:00.000-07:00

During our open house before Christmas a reporter from the coast;s local newspaper came in to check out what we were up to. The school is quite a fixture on the coast as it seems that everybody you talk to know of it and the awesome things that go on there.

http://www.coastreporter.net/article/20091224/SECHELT0604/312249989/a-passion-for-wood

Walnut cabinet takes shape

2010-01-03T20:57:00.000-07:00

Prior to glueing up the carcass the shaping of the edges is done, all the surfaces are hand-planed and then everything is pre-finsihed with shellac and wax. Never-mind the misguided focus in the first photo.

And then finally it is glued-up.

I tend to over simplify things in terms of design. In the previous post you saw the mock-up with the off center "mullion" on the door. In my mind that was cool, in a sketch it was cool and then once I mocked it up it seemed overly simple and kind of dull. One of the most beneficial parts of being at the school is sharing the space with so many creative people and thus having other people influence your work. One such example occurred with my door. Meredith, another student came over while I was looking at the wood I had in mind for my door panels. Shown below, it's actually the same red elm that was at one pint destined to be my hall table.

So, Meredith sees my pieces sitting flat, overlapping each other as I pondered what they would look like once they were placed side by side. She says, "Cool! I like the offsetting panels!", or something along those lines. Being that I was stuck on the mulion thing, I had never thought about anything else. Basically to make another long story short, her suggestion or comment led me down a road that after consulting with Robert resulted in door panels that I'm super excited about.

As you can see, above the door panels have reverse flips for lack of a better word. It involved one joint to begin the angle before the fine tuning of the shape could begin. The panel is a book match which means that both sides share the same pattern and color on either side of the flip.

Once I was happy that the panels were roughly the shape I wanted it was a matter of creating the frame to hold them and complete the door. It took some doing to find nice straight grained stock, thus the once big planks were further dissected, but in the end I found just the right pieces. Robert encourages us to always have back-up pieces in case of an unfortunate error or the like, but in this case I was left with no such margin. After much stressful but also careful workmanship of risk on the through mortise and tenons, my pieces escaped unscathed and ready to be mated with the panels.

The next thing I wanted to tackle was the back panel. This involved more decisions regarding wood. The photot below is a piece of cherry that I quite liked and was quite prepared to go ahead with. While Robert said t worked, he also thought it was a bit too safe.

Below you can see what I came up with instead...once again because Robert pushed me to go a little beyond where I was headed. My favourite thing about the wood for my back panels (besides the incredible spalting and color) is that Robert salvaged it from a crate at some point in the past and we don't even know what species is.

Mocked-up with faux rails and stiles I'm please with my grain matches and ready to move on to the frame joinery as seen below and then some shaping, some pre-finishing and then on to glueing it up.

In my next post I will complete the process of catching up and then reveal the finished project. I just need a couple days to put the finishing touches on it and then voila!

Beginnings of a Walnut Wall Cabinet

2009-12-19T21:51:00.000-07:00

Knowing now, how big my cabinet is, it is shocking to see how big the planks were that I started with. These were the black walnut planks that Byron and I came back with from Vancouver after a day of adventure. We thought we had done well, and in some regards we did, but generally lumber yard selection is something that I still look forward to learning much more about.

As I explained in the previous post, but for those who heeded the warning and chose to skip it, I came to the decision that a wall cabinet would be my first piece. Wood selection came full circle and I decided to use the walnut originally slotted to be my hall table.

Once those decisions were made, and knowing I only had four and a half weeks until Christmas, progress was crucial and mocking-up, templating and selection of graphics went quickly.

I moved on to doweling the carcass first, as the door was to be a frame and panel and wouldn't impose anything specific in terms of carcass shape or size. This way basically you make a door to fit the carcass instead of vice-versa.

Next was the process of mocking-up the interior partitions and drawers as seen below.

Some hinge making... The hinges must be made early on so that the mortises that house the hinges can be cut prior to gluing up the carcass.

Pressure buttons and leveler holes are also drilled at this time. Much like the flipper-floppers we used on our wabi-sabis, the pressure button shown below is intended to secure the door when it is shut. It's a cool little mechanical device made from a screw, a spring and a little wooden doughnut.

I'll continue to play catch-up over the holidays here. I have lots more photos right up to where the cabinet left off for Christmas!

Wood selection kills the hall table

2009-12-19T20:08:00.000-07:00

Warning: This is a long boring story and is only intended for those who have a keen interest in the psychological turmoil of fine woodworking. Please feel free to skip to the next post.

The beginnings of this cabinet were a long and drawn out process that began as an idea for a hall table. After purchasing what I thought was nice black walnut that failed to give me a nice table top I began searching high and low through the wood room for something that would make a suitable replacement. I scrubbed plank after plank of everything from french walnut, to arbutus, western maple, hard maple, curly sycamore, chinese elm and finally found a piece of red elm that would provide me with not only the size I needed but also the color and grain graphics that were to be crucial if the table was going to be doable.

Content with my selection I began milling up the plank, deciding on the placement of each piece I needed from the board. As I got further into the wood, with thickness being at a critical point, I made a pass through the thickness planer and uncovered an imperfection in what was to be my table-top. To some it seemed like a feature and many said it added character and that "it's wood!, not laminate" but I couldn't get past the fact that it looked like a stain. Especially in the context of a table top, I couldn't live with it and thus was once again left with no suitable wood, and now out 3 or 4 more days. Determined I went back on the hunt for a piece but soon realized that it wasn't meant to be. I was discouraged, frustrated and had stopped having fun. Something had to give and so it did. I asked Robert if he had a few minutes to talk and we came to the conclusion that maybe for now, the table couldn't be done. I project cannot be forced onto a piece of wood if the wood isn't offering what you need. I shared with him a sketch I had put together of a wall cabinet that although simple would at least get me back on track, working and having fun. I walked out feeling much better, not having given up on the table but simply having delayed it for now.

I felt like I had wasted a week, having accomplished nothing but with the help of Robert and all those around, son realized that wood selection is a huge part of the process, equal to craftsmanship in terms of importance and sometimes it requires more time than planned to find just the right piece of wood.

Below is a mock-up of what the table would have looked like and perhaps one day will look like...

The Finishing of Wabi-Sabi

2009-12-12T22:04:00.000-07:00

Wow! I am verging on failure when it comes to the mission I stated at the top of this here blog. As I explained I always struggle with keeping up to date with such thing. I am however going to make up for it in the next few days and try to bring everything up to speed. In my defense, our internet connection was down for a little over a week, but I realize that that is not much of a defense.

So since the last post we have finished our Wabi-Sabi Cabinets. I was thrilled with how mine turned out. Throughout the process I was convinced that little mistakes would surely amount to a poor finished product but I was surprised at how quickly such things are forgotten and I was left with a little piece that summed up everything I'd learned and showed how far I had come.

Ok so get to some pictures already!

Fitting the drawer. We've learned a technique that JK referred to as "let-go" in which you pull out the drawer and it grabs just a little at the very end which stops it. Basically the drawer pocket is a wee bit bigger at the back than the front and the drawer matches so when you pull the drawer out the let-go kicks in and it feels really nice and smooth. I made my finger-pull hole nice and big for my fat thumbs.

The red cedar drawer bottom slides in from the back into grooves cut in the sides and front.

The shelf is held up by what is referred to as consoles. We carved these out of some pear wood because it is nice to carve.

The back panel is a floating panel held in a frame and then fitted to the back of the cabinet. I made the wall hangers from brass stock and once the door was fit and installed, it was done!

Gotta love the "character" on the inside of the door. We started with a big piece off of a plank and what we found inside was what we worked with. This picture shows the book-matched panel nicely.

My first real project is well under way and I will get caught up on blogging that asap!

Hallowe'en and Cliff Gilker Park

2009-11-01T19:56:00.000-07:00

Hallowe'en brought a visit from a cute little lady bug!

And a monkey too!! ( Steve looks like he was amused...even if they weren't!)

Hallowe'en would have been James Krenov's birthday so Robert decided to have a tribute to him. The shop was full of people who came to share in hearing Robert speak and see a slide show of JK's work. We all wrote a note on a piece of yellow cedar, made a shaving and put it in a box that will be sealed up and burnt down at the beach. The plane we used to make the shavings was made by JK in 1960, then given to Michael Burns when he took over as the teacher at the College of the Redwoods. When Robert founded Inside Passage in 2003 it was passed on to him...pretty sweet!

Today we went for a walk in CLiff Gilker park, just across the highway. Our neighbour showed us the beautiful trails that wind through the trees and cross over numerous creeks and rivers.

This week Ian Godfrey is guest-teaching as we finish our cabinets and begin the prep work for our first projects. Everyone is very excited to be done with the poplar and get onto creating our first pieces.

Dovetails!

2009-11-01T18:31:00.000-07:00

So we finally tackled one of the skills that I had most been anticipating...dovetails. I had tried in the past, with very little success and then given in to frustration. Robert's method, however, has me excited and feeling like I will indeed be able to include some beautiful hand-cut dovetails in the pieces I build. Many students are considering burning their completed cabinets as sort of a ritual but I'm thinking that I will be throwing in the book I bought, written by one Rob Cosman, on cutting dovetails. That will be satisfying enough for me.

The front, sides and back of my drawer. We did through dovetails on the back corners and half-blind or half-lap dovetails on the front so that the drawer front isn't interrupted by visible joinery.

The slot that will hold the drawer bottom has been rabbeted and the pull has been cut, carved and filed to accept a curious finger.

The drawer, dryfit, awaiting glue, a bottom and then on to being fit in the cabinet.

These were some practice dovetails in ash and maple. The ash is a little harder than the poplar sides we used on the drawers. The joint is harder to get right because there is less compression in the harder ash so it doesn't just squeeze to gether. I was really pleased with how this one turned out. I plan on continuing to cut a joint here and there when I have a chance because it is definitely something that gets better with practice.

Rya having the giggles...

2009-10-18T20:30:00.000-06:00

While a good part of my time out here has been spent at school I still always look forward to Sundays and time spent with Mylene and Rya. Mylene captured some footage of our giggles at bath time tonight. This was the first prolonged giggle session that she's had (at least with Daddy)!

Watch her in action!

Beginnings of Wabi Sabi Cabinet

2009-10-12T13:35:00.000-06:00

This year Robert decided to do things a little differently than in the past. After discussing it with JK over the summer he decided that instead of just doing random exercises we would build a little poplar cabinet, and in the process, learn most of what we will need for our first project. It has been referred to as our Wabi-Sabi cabinet, meaning, "beauty in imperfections" in Japanese.

The piece of wood we began with was roughly 13" wide, 18" long and 3" thick. We began by flattening one face before re-sawing it into thinner "slices". The first piece became our door as you can see in the first picture.

The door is coopered, and will be concave when viewed from the front. On order to do this we began by cutting our piece into staves and the edge jointing them at an angle to produce the beginning of our curve. This was done with my jointer plane, which produces perfectly straight edges to glue together.

After some shaping using the coopering plane, the door begins to take shape. It is tapered slightly from the thicker hinge side across to the other side. It gives the door a more delicate feel than if the doors thickness was consistent across.

We used negative templates of our pieces in order to select the grain graphics that we wanted for each piece.

The carcass of our cabinet is all joined with dowels. We started with a simple doweling jig in order to line up our holes.

The pieces went together like magic. Still lots to do though before we glue it up.

Much more to come this week as we have to make hinges, shape our pieces, fit our door, put in our partition, make our drawer and then glue it all together....eventually.

Planes and other tools

2009-10-12T12:46:00.000-06:00

I've finished all of my planes and they have been working great. Each one has it's own purpose and when perfectly set-up are a lot of fun to use.

This first one here is a polishing plane made from Mesquite, with an African Blackwood cross pin.

This one is a coopering plane. It has a curved bottom for hollowing out inside curves on doors and such. It is made from Jatoba with a Maple cross pin.

This is my jointer plane. It's made from Maple with a Kwila pin and an applied sole of Kempas.

Last but certainly not least, the first plane we made, our smoother, from Jatoba with a Kwila cross pin.

In between other things sometimes we have a little extra time so make things like my plane adjustment hammer from Ebony and a marking knife from Maple.

This is a mallet that I'm working on for our Secret Santa. I know it's early but better to do it now than when I'm trying to get my first piece done!

Speedy Gonzalez, James Krenov and Wooden Planes

2009-09-25T23:42:00.000-06:00

Our first couple weeks at the school have seen us all experience a lot of firsts...first real work bench, first time sharpening to a razor's edge, first time making a wooden plane and most importantly, first shavings with our new planes! It is a wonderful feeling, to make a tool with as much care and precision as you possess and then to see it carve off a beautifully thin, "full width, full length" shaving that gently floats to the floor. When it's really thin Robert exclaims something like, "That's less than half a thou!".

On our first day we were asked to introduce ourselves and say a little about why we were here. I said that I was here to learn how to slow down and enjoy the process of doing my work, ahead of thinking about the product. Three weeks in I'm quite pleased with the results I've achieved but I don't think I've slowed down much, if at all. After the last few years I'm hardwired to work efficiently and I'm struggling with the pace. I take solace however in a quote I found by James Krenov. He said, " Good work makes its own pace." I look forward to further working on this, especially as the tasks we are given become that much more complex and challenging.

I was not familiar with James Krenov until I looked into coming to this school and discovered that it was all based on his teaching and his ideas. While reading his first book, A Cabinet Maker's Notebook I really gained an appreciation for wood as more than just another material and for woodworking as much more than just building with wood. He taught that in order to be a craftsman in the true sense of the word, you had to be connected to the wood and work with your heart, your hands and your eyes. Sadly, on September 10th which was our third day of school, he passed away. It was really special to be at the school and feel connected to the "legend" as Robert Van Norman, who is our teacher and the founder of the school has enjoyed JK as a friend and mentor for twenty or so years. It is really special to be part of the school that as Robert explains, Krenov felt was his legacy.

I'm going to attach a bunch of photos of various things such as the making of our smoothing plane, our jointing plane and our coopering plane. We have also done an exercise with grain graphics and the shaping of a "gumby" leg. For now I will spare you too many details but perhaps will get into it more later on.

The first two here are my smoother place in various stages of construction. The third is more or less complete. It was made from Jatoba which is a really hard, stable wood; good for making planes.

This is the pieces that I cut to make my jointer plane ( light coloured Maple) and my coopering plane (darker, again Jatoba). We shaped the cross pins for our planes (the part that holds the blade in) by hand with chisels and files.

Some Tibetan monks were doing a Mandala at a church in Davis Bay. They create an incredibly intricate design out of very fine sand. It takes a week to create and then they ceremoniously destroy it. It was a lesson in patience and process for all of us.

Our first lesson in grain graphics was amazing. We started with a 4 by 4 piece of wood and n order to get the grain to cooperate with the curve of our leg we had to cut it out so that the end grain ran diagonally across the top.

Then, when you cut out the concave shape to the leg, the grain is manipulated into following the shape. Almost like magic, so simple but so cool! Notice how in the first photo the grain curves upwards? Then in the second, the grain has been altered to curve down along the shape of the leg....

Ok, goodnight. I'll share more soon.

First Impressions and Our Trip Out

2009-09-19T23:16:00.000-06:00

Our trip out here was great. Rya turned out to be a wonderful little traveler, although really she's proven to be wonderful is most respects so we weren't too surprised. We loaded up the trailer the night before and were ready to hit the road the next morning as soon as we took Mylene to the foot doctor, waited for her to have x-rays, found out it was infected, went to Walmart to get the antibiotics, waited until 9 for the pharmacy to open...blah, blah, blah. Finally we hit the road around 12 or 1 and at last, my vision of the 2 (well now 3) of us driving out past COP with our trailer in-tow came to fruition. We drove along at about 90 because the trailer said max 45 mph. We were by far the slowest vehicle on the road. We passed only one vehicle all day; a circa 1960 car pulling an even bigger trailer than ours. We left them in our dust... Long story short, we made it to Revelstoke, I cheaped out on the hotel,we got what we paid for, woke up around 6 the next morning, sped up a little and managed to catch the 5:30ish ferry from Horseshoe Bay. We found our way to our cottage, took a couple day to unpack and settle in and make ourselves at home.

I have found myself, on numerous occasions, blown away by this place. Roberts Creek is exactly what I needed. I know I have been lucky to live in Calgary and it was a great place to grow up but I don't know that I've ever felt more at home than I do here. It's more than just the magnificent trees and the proximity to the ocean; it's an overall sense of calm that seems to define everyone. I start most mornings sitting on the end of the pier with a cup of coffee, hearing the waves crash on the rocks and watching the birds fly about. The last two mornings, a fisherman has been out casting his line in hopes of catching something, or perhaps not. After a few minutes of enjoying the scene and letting my thoughts come and go I resume my trek to school.

I have already learned so much from Robert and also the other students. We've begun tool making and preparing our tools but I will get into that more in my next post.