Marking Gauge

One very important tool for woodworking is a marking gauge.  It allows you to mark a knife line on a board at a consistant distance from the edge of the board.  It turns out that all of the marking gauges commercially sold kind of suck.  It is very important that once you set the distance that it not change.  Obviously the NBSS solution to this problem is make our own.  Here's mine:

It was pretty simple to make.  We made a block out of maple for the fence.  We drilled holes in the fence for the arm and key.  Then we turned a dowel out of maple for the arm to fit the hole and flattened a portion of it with our hand planes.  Next we cut a little pad out of maple to fit against the arm and chiseled out the top of the hole for the pad to sit in.  Then we inserted the key, which pushes on the pad and locks the whole thing together.  The hardest part was making the hole for the knife.  It is very important that the knife is parallel to the fence.  So, we set the arm so where we wanted the hole to be was against the fence, then used the chisel to pare the inside of the hole so it was parallel to the fence.  We also had to angle the other side of the hole, so that when we made and fit an angled wedge it would lock tight when pressed against the knife in the hole, holding the knife in place.  The hole width was determined by the size of our homemade knives, which were made out of jigsaw blades that we ground the teeth off of, flattened the back of and ground a cutting angle on.  It was a good days work for a very important and useful tool.

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.

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.