Project completion gloat (long)
Darrell in Oakville
>This is cross posted from the Canadian Woodworking Forum & the Porch. I thought that would be enough, but Garrett asked me to post it here too.
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Warning: long windbaggy process gloat. No, really, this is *long*. If you like this sort of stuff, read on!
Otherwise: "I used a lot of hand tools to build a bed" (skip to next msg)
Well, I've finished a project. One that used loads and loads of hand tools. This time I was under a serious time constraint. Every April I donate something, usually one of those shaker style candle stands, to a local charity auction. These small tables don't require a lot of wood or time, so they're perfect for this application. "Oops, the auction is next week, what will I do?" I have in fact built a tilt-top candle stand from a single 8 foot long Borg 2X4 (but not for the auction!). Not much wood at all, eh?
This year, I decided to do something a bit more ambitious. A sleighbed. Given that the sleighbed I made for my son took FIVE YEARS to build, this is *really* ambitious. I started the first week of January (THIS year!) and the auction was mid-April. In order to keep the project small enough to actually get DONE on time, I chose to make a toddler sized bed (takes a standard crib mattress). I figured it would sell to some doting grand parent who wants to spoil a grandchild. If they're lucky there will be several such patrons in the crowd on auction day ;^)
I selected walnut for the project, with poplar as the secondary wood. This is because we have a pile of cheap ($2.50/BF) walnut and some *free* 8/4 poplar. Mmmmmm... Free Wood (insert Homer Simpson drooling noise here).
The forms for the prototype bed I built way back when were still hanging in the garage, so all I needed was to size the parts for the crib mattress. I traced the prototype bed post (yes we still have the pine prototype; it's a bit beat up and currently lives in a corner of the basement playroom, disassembled, in a heap) on some paper, and then fiddled with the design a bit to make the bed taller and give it more 'interesting' feet. Once I was happy with that it was time to start working wood. Off to the lumber rack...
I don't own a powah jointah, so all the face and edge jointing was done with my (t)rusty hand planes. I roughed out the bed posts on the bandsaur and cleaned up with shaves and scrapers. I was trying to use my LV low angle shave in the inside curves, but it would not get into some of them. So I switched to my blue Record round bottom shave. It was OK but a bit clunky and the mouth is too big. I took one of the un-tuned Stanley #64 spokeshaves off the shave rack and filed the bottom round. Honed the iron, and it works really well.
In the meantime, I ripped a big pile of strips (about 1/2 by 1 inch by 28 inches long) for the coopered panels. You didn't expect me to put *flat* panels in this did you? No way. My technique for these panels is to clamp the first strip to the form, then bevel each successive strip to mate with the previous one and glue them on one at a time. I put the clamps along the edge of the completed portion of the panel, and tap wedges between the clamp bar and the new strip. Works fine, but you can only do a half dozen strips per night. It took a week to get the panels glued up this way, but I was working on the bed posts at the same time.
Once the panels were glued up it was time to smooth them and fair the curves. Scraper time! Scrape scrape scrape. Burnt thumbs, cramped fingers, tired arms. The only good part was that I could reach all the way across the panel. On David's bed I had to work from one side then the other, so I had to be more careful about keeping an even curve across the width. Not that this would have been detectable by anyone but me (builder's angst?).
Then I started trying to clean up the ends of the panels. Uh Oh. Got a problem here. My panels are not anywhere *near* to being square! I think my forms were crooked. I'm gonna BURN those forms (expletives deleted). After I had calmed down and could go back in the shop without raising my blood
pressure I started taking some careful measurements. I think it can still be made to work, but there is no more room for error. I scribed the squarest line I could and started planing down to the line. Lots of end grain work. I tried a block plane, smoother, jointer, Hoosier Tools ebony-stuffed shoulder plane, but it was a Stanley #64 shave that did the best job on the walnut endgrain. Did I mention that I like these shaves?
Time for the headboard rails. The bottom rails are just basic rectangular pieces of wood, morticed into the posts. The crest rails are turnings. The crest rail mortices were bored on my post drill with a forstner bit. I roughed out the lower rail mortices with a brace and forstner bit.
I initially had some trouble with the crest rail turnings but a few questions directed at my friends in the Golden Horseshoe Woodturning Guild helped a lot. Build a full length tool rest they told me. OK, I have a chunk of angle iron which will make decent tool rest. A quick visit to my local Metal Supermarket for some round bar stock, some time with hacksaw, files, post drill, and taps, and I was all set. I clamped a stop block on my square nosed scraper and ran this against the full length rest. Presto! Two nearly perfect cylinders.
Now I needed to groove the crest rails to receive the top of the panels. I built a box or cradle to hold the crest rail. The side of the box would easily guide the fence of a plow plane. I grabbed the Stanley #45 off the shelf, picked out an appropriate cutter, set the depth stop, and had at it. Results were excellent. I pulled the turning out of the box and rushed upstairs to show Kathy. "That was quick, I never even heard the saw" she says. I explained what I did and she wanted to see me do the second crest rail. 5 minutes later she had seen it. Slower than a tablesaur? Yes, and quieter, safer, less dusty, and very satisfying to boot.
The grooves in the lower rails to accept the lower edge of the panels were a bit of a problem. It had to be an odd shape. Like an offset V.
I used a 1/4 inch dado blade in the tablesaur, set at two angles for the cuts so it produced this groove. Yeah, I know, I used a power tool, but sometimes you just go with the best method, and in this case the tablesaur was it.
Time to scribe the groove for the panels on the bed posts. I dry fit the crest and lower rails in their mortices, then set the panel into the grooves. Try to square everything up as best you can, then pencil along both sides of the panel. I roughed out the groove by drilling a line of holes, and then used a couple of incannel gouges and paring chisels to pare back to the lines. I cleaned up the bottom of the groove with a Stanley Router plane.
The side rails are rather simple hunks of wood, with bits glued onto the upper edge at the ends. These bits are rounded off to fair the curve from the post into the side rail. The joint between the posts & side rails use some knockdown hardware I got from the local home centre. I hope these will stand up to the punishment they'll get from a 4 yr-old. I might someday get a desperate phone call and have to retrofit the bed with some new hardware or make a new set of rails... but I really hope not.
Then I had to dub all those beautiful crisp sharp arrises I had created. Sigh. Spokeshaves, chisels, SJBT infill block plane, files, and some sandpaper take care of this. Dunno why I'm so set against rounding off the corners. I get cut by wood far more often than by steel. Maybe it's just a reaction to that quarter-round router bit profile you see on everything Norm makes. I can't stand that look (yuk!). Gimme a nice uneven roundover made with a block plane any day.
Now, how will the mattress be supported? Kathy thinks a series of closely spaced crossmembers supported by cleats would work. Some canvas strips tacked to the crossmembers to keep them spaced apart, and allow you to roll up the slats for moving the bed. I dunno about that. Kids are pretty rough & tumble at times. I decide to put in TIGHTLY spaced crossmembers (i.e. NO spaces). This requires quite a lot of material. But I have a couple of 10 foot lengths of 8/4 poplar I got free a couple years ago (thanks to Mike in Paradise) This is perfect.
Interlude: jointing, ripping, resawing, thickness planing.
This is where work grinds to a halt. It's time to start the major glue-up of the headboards. Make or Break time. Everything looks fine dry-fitted but what will happen when it's all glued together? I dodge and duck and rationalize and otherwise weasel my way out of doing this. But the deadline keeps on inching closer, so it MUST be done. I gather my supplies and my courage and head for the shop. Calmness, zen, careful precision and all that good stuff. I conscripted my wife as an assistant assembler. In order to ensure that everything lines up nicely after the glue dries, I thought that I would do the assembly of both head boards at the same time (thus the need for another pair of hands) and hook up the side rails before the glue sets. This way the bed sits properly on a flat surface. And I can tell the buyer he has an out-of-flat floor when he complains that the bed wobbles. It didn't go together as easily with
glue as it did dry. I ended up paring a glue-smeared tenon at the end of the assembly session, and using some serious persuasion (large heavy hammer) to get the last joint together. But it did go together, finally.
A bit of squeezeout to contend with, and then it's time to mount the cleats. These will support the slats that form the bottom of the bed. Glue and screws for the cleats. I drilled the pilot holes with my trusty Millers Falls two-speed hand drill. Then I rough cut the slats to length. I just want to get them all in and trimmed to width first, before I start cleaning them up. And once all the slats were in place on the cleats I walked on them. If they have to support a 4 yr-old then they better be able to hold me up! Wow, the contrast between the very white poplar and the dark walnut is really stark. Jumps right out at you. It'll be even better after a couple coats of shellac, eh?
I hauled out a clean and very nice Mathieson & Son #4 skewed hollow to round off the long edges on all the slats. My daughter loves the long spiral shavings this plane produces. Looks like she's making a bird nest out of them.
Time to put my name on this thing. I bought a stamp from Mazzaglia Tools [shill shill] for marking stuff. It's a planemaker's stamp, so it is designed to work on end grain. I stand next to the bed, hammer in one hand, stamp in the other, and I look for a nice flat bit of end grain to bash my name into... there isn't any. Can't stamp the end of the side rails because the hardware is in the way. The top and bottom of the bed posts are curved. Time to grab an offcut and start trying face-grain stamping. It's gonna be difficult to get a good mark in face grain.
I tried stamping face and edge grain and if you support the stock solidly (like on the concrete floor, tempered by some scrap) you can get a decent mark. Then I used my letter and number stamps to add the date & location (Bronte 2004) next to my name. I put the marks on the underside of one of the short rails.
The finish is super blonde shellac. Nice, simple, and effective. I dumped some flakes into the "spice" grinder (garage sale), whizzz them into dust, and dump this into an old mayonaise jar. Fill with 99% isopropyl alcohol ($13/4L from the AllColour Paint factory outlet just down the road) and drop in a rod magnet I bought from Lee Valley. Then I set the jar on the magnetic stirrer (which I built from a discarded 5 1/4" floppy disk drive) and swing the 100W desk lamp over to heat up the jar whilst it mixes. Leave this for a couple hours and you got fully dissolved bug stuff.
Shellac should be up to the task, as that's what I used on David's bed. And if it worked for his bed it'll work for just about anyone's. Unless the kid's a chewer, in which case nothing will work, and shellac is non toxic so even in this extreme it's still the finish of choice. Wow, does that walnut ever look rich when the first coat of finish goes on. I'd gotten away from walnut in recent years, using mostly ash, cherry, and beech, and now that I've started working with the Dark Stuff again I'm wondering why I ever stopped using it...
After the first coat of shellac has had a day to dry I went over the bed with some #0000 steel wool to knock back the raised grain. Then another two brushed on coats, some drying time, and another steel wool treatment. After that, it's just a matter of wiping on a few thin coats.
So there it is. Once again I've built something nice that won't be around to show off to anyone. Well, at least I got a few pictures, and helped out a worthwhile cause.
Let's just say
"It was fun, but next year I'll make a candle stand"
Darrell
Wood Hoarder, Blade Sharpener, and Occasional Tool User