Category: Projects

By Ty Black

Because Chris is on the other side of the globe, things have been coming along with the drawing table.

The web frames were nailed through the sides with $25 worth of Peter Ross’s finest. What a pain adventure that was, trying to get the right combination of pilot hole and clearance hole.

The drawer box had be squared and the back nailed on. Then I realized I hadn’t prepped the sides. Now I have two (or more) choices: try to dodge the nails with my plane, use Chris’s and claim ignorance as to how those nicks got in Raney’s smoother, or use a random-orbital sander.

The frame for the table side of the project is ready for glue. Now I just need to figure out how to thicken tenon cheeks. I am sure something will come to me, possible involving JB weld, spit and O+. (Voice from Australia: Luke! Glue shavings or veneer slips to the tenon cheeks to thicken them.)

Sugar pine and walnut will be used for the drawer boxes. I plan on making two extra drawers to get some practice before I start cutting such a visible joint. Lord knows I need to knock this part of the project out of the park.

Now for the controversial part of the post:

Had I to do it over again, I would use a Festool Domino. This isn’t an historical reproduction; it’s for my wife who values looks and sound construction over righteousness. At my skill level, most of my work needs a fair amount of  love and blue tape to make it look right. I want my work to look great, not just right. Though for the rest of this project, I am going to stay the course using the same techniques I have used so far.

Lie-Nielsen Toolworks has just received stock of my latest DVD on building a Shaker Side Table entirely by hand.

If that’s all you need to hear, go here to order it from Lie-Nielsen.

Here are more details. This is a long-form DVD – 269 minutes of video footage covering the entire range of operations necessary to build this maple table, which is a variant on a design from Thomas Moser and Christian Becksvoort.

Why is the DVD so long? Well the political answer is that we wanted to show every operation at a level of detail that is typically missing from many DVD presentations. The truth? I just didn’t shut up. When I work – at home or in front of a class – I talk nearly non-stop. I do this at home as a way to check my own work. I do it during classes to keep the poor sods from falling asleep (this happens).

Anyway, the DVD covers a lot of ground, from processing stock with handplanes to….

• Tapering legs with handplanes
• Mortise and tenon by hand
• Half-blind socket dovetails for the drawer rails
• Making drawers by hand – grooves, layout, dovetails all around
• Installing drawer runners
• Fitting drawers
• Beveling with a jack plane
• Getting a final surface finish
• Finishing with a homemade varnish and oil

This is the sort of project DVD I’ve always wanted to do, and I’m pleased that Thomas Lie-Nielsen and the crew at Lie-Nielsen Toolworks let my freak flag fly.

And yes, that is me on the cover. I got a haircut right before that photo shoot in July. Since then, I’ve gone back to seed – to the dismay of my spouse.

The DVD is $40 and is available now from Lie-Nielsen Toolworks.

— Christopher Schwarz

Note: The chest is sold and I have a waiting list of six people if that deal falls through. Thanks everyone!

I have a new tool chest I’d like to sell – if you are in driving distance of Fort Mitchell, Ky., and would like to come get it, let me know at chris@lostartpress.com.

It is a full-size chest I just completed for a DVD shoot with Popular Woodworking Magazine. It’s 25” tall (including the casters), 39-3/4” long and 26” deep. It has three sliding tills. This chest is made from birch plywood and poplar and is screwed together, but everything is plugged and painted to look like a traditional tool chest. It is totally solid and fully functional.

The hardware is all home-center stuff that I stripped the zinc off of. The lid is hinged with three steel butts. The lifts are steel utility-grade items. The casters are cast metal – the same ones I have on my regular chest. The chest is painted black with General’s “Milk Paint.”

I’m looking to recoup only the cost of materials. Price $200.

I do not wish to pack and ship this chest – hence the cash and carry. The first person to say “I want it and will come get it” gets it.

— Christopher Schwarz

To reward myself for finishing my edit of the translated text of “To Make as Perfectly as Possible: Roubo on Marquetry,” I spent the morning in the shop finishing a try square that had no connection whatsoever to Roubo or the French people.

It’s the small try square from Benjamin Seaton’s famous tool chest that is featured in the must-have book “The Tool Chest of Benjamin Seaton: 2nd Edition” (Tools and Trades History Society).

The first edition was fantastic; the second edition is twice as good. It features lots more data on the tools thanks to the careful measurements and drawings made by Jay Gaynor and Peter Ross at Colonial Williamsburg. Their scholarship pushed this book into one that is rivaled only by “With Hammer in Hand” on early tools. So buy it. Right now.

I bought the second edition the week it was released and have been poring over the drawings for months now (One quibble: The hand-lettered dimensions are too small in places.)

One of the many surprises in these drawings was the detail on the wooden try squares that young Seaton built for his toolkit. The photos make them look like two flat pieces of wood and barely worth note.

But the drawings point out details that made me start building a run of these squares to put to use. Here are some of the details:

1. The blades taper in thickness. They are thickest at the stock (about 1/4”) and taper to .065” slightly at the tip to .16.

2. The blade is joined to the stock with a double tenon. This is a little trickier to make than an open bridle joint.

3. The stock of the square is beveled at the top, bottom and outside edge.

I had milled and mortised about a dozen stocks using wood that was left over from a campaign chest. This morning I discovered that all but four of the stocks had cast horribly. So those wonky bits will become something else.

For kicks, I fooled around with making the blades on the band saw, but found that was a fool’s errand. It was much faster to taper them using a jointer plane and saw the tenons with a tenon saw.

All in all, this square was noticeably more complex to make than the square shown in Roubo.

— Christopher Schwarz