Dovetails

My main instructor, Dan, is not good at pacing the class.  Because of this, a few of us keep running out of things to do.  After a week of seeking him out every day to tell him I had nothing to do, he finally decided to give those of us who have been moving quicker a special instruction session on how to cut dovetails.  This gives us plenty to do because they are used a lot, so we need to get really good at cutting them.  It is a very strong joint because it is held together both by the interlocking of angled pins and tails as well as the glue, whereas something like a finger joint is just held by glue.

Dovetail joint. Pins in blue.  Tails in white.

Finger joint

The process is fairly straight forward.  You start by marking the width of each board on the other board with a marking gauge (I will be posting about marking gauges soon).  You then lay out the pins on one of the boards.  Next you cut close to the line with a dovetail saw

Dovetail saw

Then you pare to your lines with chisels.  It is important to have very sharp chisels in order to get clean lines.  When you have the pins finished, you trace them onto the other board.  On that board you cut out the pins, leaving the tails.  In order to get a perfect fit you must pare to your lines exactly.  Because the lines are an outline of the pins, if you cut into the line at all, you have gone too far and it will show when you put them together.  Here are the first dovetails I ever cut byt hand:

They had a good, tight fit, but there are way too many gaps.

This is the same joint from the other side.

Mallets

It is so nice to be finally actually working with wood.  Our first real project was to turn mallets.  We use these wooden mallets much as one would normally think to use a hammer.  The advantage to them, though, is that they don't mar your work when you hit it with them.  We could just turn a mallet from a solid piece of wood, which is how most are made.  However, the quality of these mallets is not as good as it could be.  If you hit a piece of wood enough you can start to delaminate the growth rings.  This is how vaneers are made.  The wood pulls apart in sheets that each represent one year of growth.  However, we don't want our mallets to peel apart.  So, we start with a single piece of hard maple (which is a very hard wood, and thus good for making the mallet head).  We cut it into 3 pieces that are the length we want our mallet head to be and glue them together.

My future mallet head.

Next, we cut it into thirds again (It is important to cut with the grain.  I cut mine the wrong direction on my first attempt and had to start over).  We take the middle of those pieces and cut it in half.  Then use our hand plane to make sure the pieces and our walnut handle are flat and square.  After a couple of glue ups, we get a club like rough mallet ready to be turned.

Ready to head to the lathe.

It still looks like a club.

The entire outside face of our mallets look like the face of a quarter-sawn board.

The purpose of doing all this is to try to produce quarter-sawn pieces to use.  When a piece of wood is quarter-sawn the growth rings run perpendicular to the face of the board.  By getting all of our pieces to be quarter-sawn we are essentially making all the growth rings run from the center of the mallet to the outside of it.  This way the growth rings can't delaminate.

One of the other guys in the program also cut his first mallet head wrong.  On the one I messed up, the end grain would have been facing out.  This would have made a very hard mallet and would have helped with the delamination problem, but would have been nearly impossible to turn.  What the other guy did was got to the point where he had to cut the middle of the three pieces in half and cut it across the length instead of the width.  This would make the mallet head half the size it was supposed to be.  Wanting to not just waste wood, he and I decided to divide up his improperly cut mallet head and each make mini mallets.  This ended up being a great idea, because I was able to use the mini mallet as a test run in order to figure out how I wanted my full sized one to look.  Here are the pre and post turning pictures.

Almost there...

Beautiful new mallets.

Grandpas

So, it was my Grandpa Lohmar that got me into woodworking.  He got into woodworking later in life and mainly did machine wood working.  In his retirement years he and I have been able to do many projects together.

Grandpa and I sitting on the porch glider we made for Nathan's wedding.

I always knew that my Grandpa Bussen had done woodworking throughout his life, but I guess I had never given it much thought.  He passed before I really got interested in it, so I never had that connection with him to it.  However, it struck me when we were going over the tool list for school that these were probably all the same tools that Grandpa used, since he did more of his work by hand.  Unfortunately, most of his tools got sold at auction after my Grandma passed a few years back.  However,  I called my mom to see if she had any of Grandpa's old tools.  She sent me this photo of some sweet old wooden hand planes.

She said they probably originally belonged to my great-grandpa.

I am really excited to go home in April for spring break and see what else she has.  Generally, the older the tools, the higher quality they are.  They were designed in the best way possible, but over the years companies kept cutting corners to save money.  These hand planes may be a little too old, though.  Wooden planes are difficult to keep tuned up.  The best quality came when they started producing cast metal bodies.  These will still be awesome to have for their history.  It has always meant a lot to me that I have some of my Grandpa Lohmar's tools that I can use in my own work.  It will be awesome to have some from Grandpa Bussen as well.

Chamfers and Quarter-Rounds

So, we finally got our boards perfectly flat and square and they made us disfigure them by using them for another exercise.  We practiced making chamfers (an angled surface connecting to flat surfaces, in this case and typically 45 degrees) and quarter-rounds (a quarter circle connecting the 2 flat surfaces.)  On the ends we did this with our hand plane and on the edges we used chisels.

Chamfers

Quarter-Rounds

The process for making quarter-rounds was especially interesting to me because I am a math geek.  First you mark off how much you want to round over.  The amount doesn't matter.  You take that amount and imagine it to be made from 12 parts.  For example, dividing it in half would put a line at 6 parts.  For this you want to divide it into a 5:7 ratio, with the 5 being toward the inside.  Do that on both the face and edge.  Cut a chamfer that connects the 2 lines.  Now you have created a flat 45 degree surface that is  about 10 parts (Yea pythagorean theorem!).  Dividing that surface in half gives you a line that is on the outer surface of the quarter round, which if this were a full circle would be 1/8 of the way around the circle from starting lines.  It also leaves you with 4 5 part surfaces.  Divide them in half, cut chamfers to connect the lines on surface 1 and 2 and on surface 3 and 4.  Clean up a few edges and you have fairly accurate quarter rounds.  Anyone follow?  Diagrams would help.  They would be fairly easy to do, but I don't have any photo editing software. :(

Here is a quick sketch of the quarter-round concept that I took a picture of with the camera built into my computer.  I never realized that using that camera is like looking in a mirror.  Makes sense for video chatting, but now my numbers are mirrored, which makes this hard to read.  You can start to see how it is becoming round  after only 3 cuts though.

I added 4 more cuts to this sketch and it is now really round.

Marking Knives

One of the random tools we need is a marking knife.  It is a 6" piece of steel that is flat on one side with two bevels on the other that form a point.  You use it to score a line when you need to be super accurate and a pencil line is too thick.  I went down to the gallery (which is where they sell tools at the school) to buy one.  They wanted $39!  That is absurd.  So I called my dad to see what scrap steel he had around the shop.  He sent me 6 pieces that were perfect.  I ground bevels on them and bam! free marking knives.  I kept one for myself and gave away the others to 5 lucky people from my program.

Planing

In the 4th week of school, we finally got to do something with a piece of wood.  We started by tuning up our hand planes.  A hand plane has a flat bottom (the 'sole') with a small slit (the 'throat').  A blade (the 'iron') sticks out of the throat a very small amount.  When you run it across a board that is not flat, the sole rides along the high points and the iron cuts them down until the whole surface is a uniform width.  Of course, since the iron sticks out through the bottom, it is possible to go too far, so you have to be careful.

  After we had tuned up our hand plane they gave us a piece of wood that we had to flatten.  Wood can be warped in 3 basic ways.  Cup is a bend across the width of a board.  Bow is a bend in the length of the board.  Twist is when the two ends turn in different directions.

We had to start by checking for cup.  We put the arced side up so it would sit stably and shave wood from down the center of the board.  After taking out all the cup we checked for bow and shaved off the high spots, trying not to mess up the work we just did to remove the cup.  When that is done, we check for twist (which should be pretty well gone at this point.)  When it is all finished we had to hold a straight edge across it and hold it up to the light.  Anywhere we saw light we had to put a piece of paper under the straight edge.  When we pulled on the paper, if it moved the straight edge it was close enough, but if it slid out we had to keep working.  That means the whole board had to be flat to 3/1000th of an inch.  Then we had to square and flatten both edges and both ends and make the final face parallel to the first.  And we had to finish it all by the end of the day, because if we left the board over night it would release and/or absorb moisture causing it to warp. Here is my finished board with my plane on it:

Everyone was SO proud of their board when they were finished, but knew that if we showed it to someone they would say, "It's just a board, so what."  Trust me, it was a lot of work.  I am glad they started letting us use machines to do this work once we proved we could do it by hand.

Advanced Drafting

Here are some of my full sized furniture drawings.

Front view of step table

Top view of step table

This is the actual step table from the first 2 drawings.  I did not actually build it.  We used this one to take measurements for our drawing.  I added it to help you visualize what is going on with all those lines.

Drum table. Top view overlaps the side view to save space on the page.

Front view of blanket chest.  Here's a link with a small picture of what the blanket chest looks like.

Side view of blanket chest.  People always wonder how we fit full size furniture on a sheet of paper.  One trick is used here.  I used break lines down the middle because the middle is just boring straight lines.  All the interesting stuff I need to know is on the edges.  You can also see a center line of the front view on the left side of the photo.  The chest is symmetrical, so we only draw half, because the other half is redundant.

Desk on table side view.  This drawing took the longest to do.  It seemed super complicated because there is so much going on, but it is actually fairly straight forward.  There are just lots of parts to keep track of (check out the stock list below).   Here are some pictures of a similar desk.  Same basic idea, but he changed the bottom by removing the cabriole legs and adding a full set of drawers.

Close up side view of desk portion.

Front view.

Close up of front view of desk portion.

Ridiculously long stock list.  You can see the pendant from the bottom of the desk hanging down above it.

This is the slat back chair.  It was complicated because of the angles.

Front view

Top view of seat and arm

Basic Drafting

The first few weeks at NBSS are all about drafting.  Here are some pics from the packet of 20 joint drawings that we had to do.  All of the drawings are essentially x-rays.  The dark lines are the edges you see when looking from that angle and the dotted lines are hidden, either inside the piece or on the far side.  This helps us visualize how things go together.

All my drafts

First draft- learning the views and notation

Slip Joint

Rabbet and Lap Joint- this is used for the back of a case piece or desk.

Blind Slotted Dovetail

Miter with Spline- used for corners of picture frames

Mortise and Tenon- used where seat rails connect with legs

Tenon with Key- a very decorative joint

Dovetails- used all over because it is a very strong joint.

Another Type of Mortise and Tenon- this time is a stile and rail, part of a raise panel commonly found on doors

This is 7 pieces of wood jointed together.  I drew it from the wrong direction, but it still looks cool.

Welcome!

Hi Everyone,

I decided to start a blog so you could see and understand better some of the stuff I am working on while at school at North Bennet Street School.  I originally wanted to get boardbeyondbelief.blogspot.com in order to synchronize with my etsy site (boardbeyondbelief.etsy.com), however that blog was already taken by someone who clearly misspelled the word 'bored.'  Fail.  So, I tried boardbeyondbelief.wordpress.com, but hated the constraints on how to post stuff, so I am back to blogspot with my alternate company name: Heritage Woodworking.  I like Board Beyond Belief (especially with the tag line "Woodworking that won't make you bored") because it is punny and catchy, but I like Heritage Woodworking for a number of reasons too.  One huge reason is because my grandpa taught me most of my woodworking skills and is the whole reason I am going to school for it.  Also, my dad used to have a company called Heritage Airplane.  Lastly, I like to think I am producing work that will be part of my customers' families heritage.

Hope you check back frequently!

peace,

Sean