Let me first catch things up to the last, unpublished progress, and then I’ll put up another post with the newer news. Here’s the first chunk of changes that I never got around to posting:

In May I continued on with building the frames. The next step was placing siding on the front (or back depending on perspective) frame. In the previous post you could see the underlying structure of this frame. Below see the next stage – siding and painting:

I don’t believe I’ve explained my chosen material for siding here yet. After considering weight, aesthetics and cost, I decided to try out a method based on the boatbuilding books I’ve been reading. This is a variation on plywood lapstrake construction as demonstrated in the excellent Ultralight Boatbuilding among others. I’m using very lightweight and cheap ($10/sheet) ‘doorskin’ plywood, ripped into 5″ strips, and laid down in an overlapping clapboard style. Each lap is throughly glued both to the underlying structure and to the board above. The top of each board is nailed with ring-shank nails. Many hours of placing, pre drilling and hammer. The theory is that each of these double-ups will add strength, but overall it will be very light. The other benefit is this stuff is smooth – easy to paint, no roughness or knots. The downside is it’s certainly not weather-proof, hence the overkill on paint. I believe with proper maintenance it should last quite well.

On the sides of the vardo I’ll have a chance to try out another method from the book – scarfing. This is a way to take your 8′ long strips and lengthen them as needed. This will let me run continuous strips from from to back, in theory.

One construction note: it’s a little hard to see in the photos above, but I started the siding 3/4″ below the bottom of the frame. This will then overlap the edge of the trailer to keep water from pooling under. To keep this delicate lip from damage, I tack-screwed strips of 1×4 to the bottom before starting the siding. This first row also received extra glue as it was mounted flat to the frame.

Note the pipe clamps above – plenty for the rafters yet to come (at least at the time of this photo). A massive upgrade over my previous collection! I love pipe clamps.

More updates very soon, at least to get us caught up.

Here you can see the curved main rafter. I’ve cut off one end to the proper length, and I’m cutting the notches for attaching the side posts. The uprights will be laminated from a 2×4 and two 1x4s, as you can see here I’m allowing room for the two outside thinner boards to carry on through to the top and the thicker middle will stop below the rafter to hold the weight. I’ll then peg through the sides to fasten together.

For a closer view of the finished rafter end, see the picture in the previous post.

Here’s a quick look at one of the pieces I’m working on. This is the first rafter and I’m cutting the notch in to fit with the side posts. I hope to have more up soon.

To get all the joinery right and angles accurate, I’m putting together a jig for the frame. I’m starting with a ‘table’ built of 2×6 lumber, 9′ x 10′ about 30″ off the ground. I’ll cover it with doorskin (thin smooth plywood) and draw out the whole frame horizontally. I’ll used this same structure to line up angles for the offset joinery and to bend the laminated rafters.

Building a jig for the vardo frame

So far I have most of the plywood on – a little more and I’ll start transferring the lines from the computer to the wood. In the photo above you can see the main structure of the table, waiting on more 2×4 cross pieces that will actually support the doorskin (seen in the back of the photo). You can also see the two 2x8s that I will mount the lamination blocks to, toward the back.

I’m waiting on pictures, but I have some good news and bad news on the oak I mentioned in the previous post. Good news, it’s some great wood, solid 5/4 white oak between 5 and 10 inches wide, 8.5′ long, 525 board feet worth. On the downside, it’s just a tad fresher than I expected – we actually had to wait for them to finish cutting it at the sawmill. So it’ll make some great building material in 6-12 months!

While doing some more research I found a reference to Jim Tolpin in my copy of Freewheeling Homes by David Pearson. He builds a similar layout to what I’m doing, and uses all soft wood above the base. So I’ve decided I’ll go ahead with a pine and cedar laminated structure. Should be plenty strong and will definitely be lighter.

I must admit, half of why I haven’t made any physical process lately is confidence in the details of the frame design. I’m used to straight and simple walls with 90 degree transitions. Here I’m dealing with offsets, angles and curves, all built to stay as light as possible while also handling highway travel. So, it’s taking me a while to work out the details. I do believe I’m getting very close though.  I built a small prototype of part of the frame this evening (pictures later) and it’s working well.

More soon.

Also, he takes some really awesome pictures, check them out!

In other exciting news, I will be heading out in the morning to pick up a bunch of oak that I’ll be using to build the frame.

Getting the hang of components and other quirks in SketchUp has paid off. I’m very happy with how the design is coming along, and I think the 3d rebuild is going to really pay off.

There are a couple of very exciting things in the works, another update soon!

I don’t have time right now to go in-depth on any of the items, but here’s what I’ve been working on since my last post.

Modeling the Vardo

As shown in the previous post, I have been working modeling the vardo in 3d. I started with Google SketchUp but due to inexperience and lack of knowledge, I was quickly frustrated. I returned to my animation roots with Luxology Modo and built the design you see here. This helps me visualize details as I’m getting closer to the final design. I was primarily interested in window placement for this round, and I think I’m getting close.

Our version of the vardo will be used for a mobile store at craft fairs (though I’m considering drawing up tiny house variations) so we want lots of windows. You can see some of the unique elements here such as the stepped sides over the wheel wells with corbel details. The design is somewhat of a mixture of a traditional vardo with pieces of old passenger rail cars thrown in, all seasoned with conforming to modern towable standards.

To be honest, I’m considering returning to SketchUp. Modo is a great animation tool, but it’s not intended for product design, and there are some great tools in SketchUp that really help if you use it right. I’m working on a new bit of furniture design there now and starting to get things figured out. Also, I finally got around to watching Michael Janzen’s SketchUp series on TinyHouseDesign.com and that answered a few of those problems I’ve been wrestling with.

Vardo Construction Progress

Sadly there’s not a whole lot to report on here. I’ll go over each part in more detail in further posts, but here’s a quick summary.

After using drafting the final (well, I thought they were, more later) roof curves, I wanted to get started experimenting with rafters. My hope has been to use the cold months to start building smaller sections, so this seemed like a good start. I did manage to get one rafter pair built by ripping cedar into strips, building a bending jig, and then gluing and clamping it together. It actually worked really well. Unfortunately I’m re-thinking the lightness advantage of the cedar. Since there are no interior walls spanning the entire width in my design, I’m afraid the cedar wouldn’t be up to the task of keeping the structure pulled together, and am considering using oak instead. I’ll definitely need a clamp upgrade in that case.

I’ll also post more on my trailer later. For now, yes, I do have a trailer, it’s been sitting virtually untouched in my backyard since June. I got a great deal on  a new custom-specced trailer, but one of the reasons  it was so inexpensive is that it’s just covered with enamel paint. Since this is the foundation of the vardo and will be very difficult to change later, I think I’m going to get it powder-coated. First I need to have a local welder add the front/side step, and brackets for the rear step attachment, and then remove all non-metal elements including wires, axles and wooden floor. That’s going to be a big project, and not cheap (over 50% of the original cost of the trailer).

The Vardo Set

Back in November I hinted at a ‘surprise’ coming up soon. My wife’s business, Baby Vardo, was accepted into an indoor boutique show at the last minute. While we’re building the vardo for use in outdoor craft shows, we’ve never had a decent set up for the indoor shows. So, inspired by our vardo design, I designed and built a vardo-themed set in a week. It was great fun to see some elements of the vardo come together, even if not contributing directly to the final product. This version is about 90% scale of the real deal, so it’s pretty big. In the interest of time and length of post, you can visit the photo gallery on the Baby Vardo Facebook page (Facebook account not required) to see the whole construction process.

Handmade Furniture

Finally on the furniture front, I’m mostly finished with my second piece, a ‘Christmas’ present for my mother-in-law. Turns out attempting to match her cabinets in hickory without researching the working quality of the material was a time-consuming mistake, but I’m sure it will look nice when I have it complete. It’s a small table intended to house a phone on top and small drawer for notes and pencils below.

More to Come

That’s a promise. I have plenty more I can share about the items above (let me know if there’s anything there that especially interests you) and there are many things coming up soon. My plans include more planning and drawing both traditionally and in SketchUp on the vardo, getting the trailer ready, starting on some of the smaller vardo pieces that fit in my garage workshop, and continuing to explore some possibilities on furniture and toy making to complement my wife’s baby tailoring for our little store.

Here’s to a more prolific-posting 2011 – hopefully if I state it that strongly it will shame me into continuing!

I’ve been working on building the curved rafters for the roof:

The 3D model is getting much closer to completion:

And I’ll have a new little surprise in the next week, and will post pictures up when it’s done.

I’ll be building this along the lines of a ‘tiny house‘, a wooden structure based on a standard utility trailer.  Since our business is dependent on a very heavy and expensive embroidery machine a standard tent doesn’t do the job. We’ll be able to park and open the shop with minimal setup with this self-contained storefront.

I’m still working through the details of the design, but here are some of the drawings I’m working on (3d models coming later).  First, some rough sketches:

Here you can see one of my initial sketches of the side of the vardo.  The side is a mixture between a traditional Romany vardo and an old-fashioned trolley or passenger rail car. One of my favorite bits is the mollycroft double roof.

To the left you can see an early rough sketch of what the interior will look like.  There will be cabinets and shelves running the length of both sides for storage and display space. Between the windows I’ll be mounting standard shelving attachments for display of the handmade clothing items my wife is working on adding to our product line.

You can also see how I’m going to build rafters running through the open space in the mollycroft.  The main roof will be fairly low, but the additional space above will add a feeling of more space, light, and air. I’ll have the long and low windows along the sides openable for air circulation.

Above you’ll see a rough sketch of the back view, and main entry door. You might notice that the two sides are a bit different as I was experimenting with how I’ll build it (going with the left variation).

I’ve moved on to the next stage of putting together more polished and accurate drawings, and trying to figure out how the main bits will fit together.  I’ll have more on that soon, but for now check out the drawing below (click to enlarge).

Assuming I figure out all the details of construction, you’ll notice I’ve changed the mollycroft roof line to match the original more streamlined look that’s commonly found in the old vardos and rail cars. I’ve also settled on the side structure which will go straight up from the sides of the utility trailer until reaching the height of the fenders, then go horizontally out halfway over the fender and then angle up and out to reach the 8′ 6″ maximum allowed width. I’m doing this to evoke the design of the old vardos with the box built out over the huge spoked wagon wheels. It does make it cheaper to build instead of welding on additional metal to use the full width straight up, but I’m mostly doing it for looks.

I’m still working through the details, and I’ll post up some construction-level drawings soon.  Feedback is of course appreciated if any of my few readers have ideas on how to make it better. Thanks for taking a look!

This is the setup that Homestead Heritage used, though at a dedicated sharpening station, and it’s a good one.  It’s cheap and easy to make, portable, and holds everything in place.

First, you’ll need a piece of plywood or similar flat wood.  I used some scraps of 3/8″ rough plywood that I had leftover from the bench itself.  You’ll need to use your stones as a measuring reference.  I bought 8″ diamond sharpening stones from DMT, and they’re 3″ wide.  My ideal bench hook size then was about 9″ x 8″, the length allowing an extra inch for the hook blocks and the width sized for two stones and some extra space.  My scrap was 7 1/4″ wide, so I went with that, it’s not too important.

I also grabbed a length of 1×3, cut it to match the plywood width, and then carefully split it down the middle to get two 1 1/4″ x 3/4″ blocks.  Now I should have done this step first since I ended up having to hang one of the blocks off the end of the plywood a bit with that extra 1/4″, but it worked out ok.

Above you can see the pieces I cut along with screws and the sharpening stones.  Ignore the clamp, I haven’t finished the face of my bench yet or fastened the top to the base.

Of course, the drywall screws I had picked out were a bit too long for 3/4″ block and 3/8″ plywood at 1 1/4″ inchs. I rummaged around and found some screws from a door knob kit I believe, around 1/2″ long which is too short.  So I drilled 3/8″ holes halfway through the blocks and then predrilled the remainder with a small bit.

You can see the size difference in the screws, the different bits I used, and the clamped pre-drilling set up in the photo above. Fortunately I got the distance for the inset good enough that none of the screws came through the other side of the plywood, and they’re holding well.

Now that they were all pre-drilled, I lightly clamped one block onto the plywood as shown above and then used a speed square to get it into the right place.  I wanted the bench hook to be reasonably straight once complete.  Then I screwed the block down, flipped the plywood over and spun it around, and screwed the second block to the opposite side making a sort of zigzag shape when viewed from the side.  This second one is the one I lined the stone up on, realized the hook was a bit short, and cheated the block off the end of the plywood a bit to compensate.

That’s all it takes.  I set the hook on the bench, slid it forward until the bottom block caught on the edge of the bench, and placed the two stones on top.  Now I can apply pressure pushing my blades along the stone without worrying about it walking away, but it’s easy to move out of the way when I’m done sharpening.

So far it works great. I flattened and sharpened my dad’s cheap Stanley low angle block plane (the $20 version), and was able to finish off my table’s top tapers now just waiting on sandpaper to finish.  I’ll buy a nice Lie Nielsen block plane when I can afford it, but for now this works.

FoundationalJoinery-sketches

The last day of the workshop – mixed feelings for sure.  It’ll be nice to see our families and get home, but it’s been a great week, I’ve really enjoyed the work and the results.

We decided to celebrate by coming early for the Homestead Cafe’s big Saturday breakfast.  Delicious! Just after the meal I took a quick stroll around the grounds, regretting again that I hadn’t had the time to really look at all the other places around.  Definitely will have to return some time, hopefully with the whole family.

Getting back to the workshop, you can see in the photo below most of the table is ready to go.  I forgot again to get a photo of the top with the clamps on, but you can see the three pieces of wood that make up the new solid top.  Frank said he’d been end joining with glue alone for years and he’s never had a piece of wood break on the glue joint.  I put some faith into that at the end of this post, and it came through for me. Jonathan came around later and knocked the top down to final width and length for us all.

Frank gathered us around and gave a demonstration of tapering the table legs.  Using a general design principle of reducing width by one third, we’d be removing about 1/2 an inch from both inside faces of each leg. He first demonstrated cutting down the taper with a hand saw.  Worked fine, though a bit intimidating to think about cutting that much length on a straight fine taper.  If that was scary though, the second method looked even crazier.  He sat down on a shaving horse, picked up a drawknife, and whipped out a taper in seconds.

Intimidating, yes, but it turned out to be lots of fun and most of us decided it was easier and more accurate than using the saw.  Here’s Jeremy and I doing some shaping, both with the drawknife and saw:

The tough thing with the hand saw was keeping the blade even for the whole length.  We cut about 18″ from a 1/2″ start to flush with the edge.  It worked fine, and did require less planing if we got it right, but had enough possibility for messing up that I didn’t care too much for this method. The one big advantage with the saw is that it handles the grain much better, you don’t have to worry about tear out like with the drawknife.

Now the drawknife, that’s fun. Frank explained how to go down close to the line all along one side, at an angle, and then flatten that across to the other side.  It’s more precise than it looks at first, and cutting through the walnut was so smooth.  It’s probably best I don’t have a shaving horse, drawknife and stack of wood sticking around at home right now, it’d be tempting to go out in the evenings and start carving everything up.

Once we had the taper roughed out with either the saw or knife, we planed it down to the final shape with a smoothing plane.  You have to watch the top of the taper carefully to make sure it’s even on both sides, and consistent with the other legs.

We’re getting close on this project.  It’s time for assembly of the legs and rails.  My pieces were ready to go so Frank decided to demonstrate the assembly with my table.  Since I had already dry-fitted all the pieces we started adding thin coats of glue to each of the mortise and tenons.  We first connected the front rail and two legs, clamped them side to side, and then did the same with the back.  After that we laid the front down on the bench and added the side rails, and finally placed the back on top.  Standing it up, we added the remainder of the six pipe clamps and tightened them down.

Ah, time for the last lunch at the Homestead Cafe. I left the table clamped and drying, and enjoyed my cup of soup, saving room for a delicious piece of pie.

Here’s the table legs, dried enough to remove the clamps so Jeremy could use a few.

Time to finish the top.  Since this is a larger surface, we learned how to use cabinet scrapers.  They’re similar to a card scraper, but the ‘card’ is held in a frame that looks and handles a lot like a large spokeshave.  When properly sharpened and set up they really take off the wood.  You can get a lot of very fine shavings without worrying about plane lines.  We started with the cabinet scraper and then moved to card scrapers on both faces of the top.

I decided to cut a pronounced taper on the bottom edge of my top.  I measured in 7/8″ on the bottom and 1/4″ on the sides, and went at it with the smoothing plane.  It was a bit awkward held vertically in the vise, but it came out ok.  I’ll need to do a bit of final smoothing and then go over the whole thing with sandpaper before putting the finish on.

On to the final step – attaching the top to the base.  First, we had to cut the buttons.  They’re not quite like a shirt button, but they do a similar job.  Frank quipped that this final step combined all of our new skills in one – if it doesn’t work find a bigger hammer.  We cut two staggered cuts in short blocks of walnut, about 3/4″ of an inch apart on opposite faces, to halfway through, then tapped with a hammer to break them apart.  A little paring with a chisel, and the buttons were ready to be pre-drilled, countersunk and used to secure the table together.

And here’s the final result of the week’s learning, a small occasional table constructed with traditional joinery and hand tools.  I’m quite proud of it, and grateful for the experience.  I’ll still need to apply the finish once I have the top smoothed a bit, and I’ll post up with final pictures at that point.

So we have our mortises (slots) cut into the legs, and the tenons are the narrower part of the table sides that slide into said mortises. At this point in the morning the tenons were already cut, but they’re too thick intentionally.  Now the task is to cut them down gradually, and/or cleaning out the mortise, as we slowly get the fit just right.  It’s important not to make the joint loose, so we can’t move too fast.  We’re also checking to make sure everything is square and fixing that by changing how we cut both the mortise and tenon.  After we get the two pieces meshing together under hand pressure (too much and we split the leg), we need to make sure that where the two meet is a tight clean joint.

And we do all that 8 times for a table.  Roughly three quarters of the day was spent on some aspect of fitting including assembly and check.

One of the first things we did as we started fitting was cutting the haunches.  The haunch is a shorter section of the tenon made to fit into the top shallow part of the mortise.  The full mortise cuts deep enough to meet the other mortise so we can’t continue that to the top of the leg – it would be too weak.  The top inch is very shallow to keep the connection.  So we cut that section of the tenon shorter:

Now each tenon is matches to a mortise, and cut individually to fit it.  You can see the number system marked on the tenons above to keep things straight.

Following you can see a mortise and tenon with haunch being fitted.  The cut has been finished, but you can see how the tenon is tight enough to stay up out of th e mortise without me holding it.  The second photo shows the tight joint.

Since the mortises are so deep and do connect, we had one more step to do on the tenons – mitering.  We cut off a 45 degree section of the tip of each one with a dovetail saw.  This lets them fit together inside the leg without hitting.

Now that we knew each tenon fit individually, it was time to test the assembly of the entire unit. Mine went together pretty well, though it was tight enough to make it hard to pull apart.

I did cut the bottom shoulder of one of my tenons at this point to allow it to drop a little lower in the mortise.  Worked pretty well.

Now we cut the buttons.  These are small mortises on the inner face of each side which will allow us to attach the top with some little blocks of wood later.  Six straight forward mortises – we’re getting used to this now so we hammered them out pretty quick.  You can see the mitered edges of the tenons in the photos below.

Time to finish the table rails.  First, we scrape them down.  No, not for the distressed look.  We received a lesson in using card scrapers.  This is the hand tool version of sandpaper. Frank related a saying about how scrapers are to sandpaper as word processors are to typewriters, and it’s true, a sharp card scraper works great.  It looks like a simple flat piece of steel, but it has a unique system of sharpening.  Here’s Jeremy using his scraper. You can see the tiny shavings it produces instead of sawdust, and it does it fast.

The final step in finishing the table rails is cutting the curve, just like the one in the pine yesterday. Photos below.  The spokeshave gave me fits today, first falling apart twice in mid stroke and then producing a bump finish. I borrowed Jeremy’s and it worked great, producing a silky smooth surface with no sandpaper needed.

The last thing of the day was edge glueing our table tops.  We each received several pieces of wood to make up the tops.  Unfortunately I forgot to get any pictures, I’ll have to show the finished product tomorrow.  I’m not sure what kind of glue we used,  but wow is it sticky.  Could hardly adjust it with a hammer after it had been sitting for a minute.  It’s clamped and drying now.

Last day of the workshop is tomorrow. It’ll be great to get home and see the family, but sure has been fun so far.

First, we needed to wrap up the details on the wall shelf.  We started with adding a curve to the shelf rails.  This is an important skill to develop in pine because we’ll be curving the panels on the table as well.  I started with a freehand penciled curve, and cut down to the line about every quarter inch along the length.

After that I shaved down close to the line with a wide chisel, to get the curve pretty well roughed out.

Followed by the spokeshave to smooth the curve out. If you’re not familiar with a spokeshave, it’s a cross between a plane and a draw knife. It has a small flat bit in the middle with a short plane iron, and it lets you freehand a curve that you couldn’t do with a plane with more control over the cut than a chisel or knife.

And finally you can see the rail set into the mortise from yesterday, and some chamfering I was doing on the top and bottom.  I didn’t get a picture of it assembled, I’ll have to do that later.

Project 3: Occasional Table

Working with a wood other than pine (which I’m very familiar with because a) it’s what you build houses with and b) it’s cheap) is very exciting.  I’ve never done anything with walnut, hadn’t even held any unfinished walnut stock before today.  So in many ways this project feels like the first real piece of furniture we’re building after two practice pieces.  I imagine that’s pretty accurate from the instructor’s point of view as well, though they’ve certainly put the many box and shelves they’ve made as workshop demos to use.

Layout and marking is extra important with this project so we work carefully at it.  Here’s Jeremy and I using marking gauges to outline the mortises. As always here at Homestead Heritage, we used physical objects to set our measurements. The width of the mortise, most importantly, was set by our 3/8″ chisel which will be used to cut the slot. Keeps everything lined up and working smoothly.

So we had cut a few mortises on the wall shelf, but these were going to be a bit harder and more important to get right.  Frank demonstrates how to properly cut a pair of mortises in each leg.

Then it was up to us.  Fortunately they have somewhat of a jig (‘training wheels’) to help us cut 1 1/8″ deep mortises into the walnut.  You can see my first leg set up and ready to cut below.  The block sticking up in the vise is to help us cut perfectly straight down, eliminating that variable.

Once that’s set up, we grab the designated chisel and set to work.  As already noted, the mortise is measured off this particular chisel, so it’s perfectly one chisel width we’ll be cutting.  I started with a short chop cut well away from the front of the mortise to guard against tear out, and then, holding the chisel bevel down, angled, away from me, start striking down at about quarter inch increments across the mortise.  You alternate that with clean out passes, and continue until the mortise is about 1″ deep.  After that you flip it to the other side and cut the second mortise, meeting the two in the middle.  After cleaning, it’s all set.  3 more to go.

Above you can see the result, four legs mortised.  Each slot goes through and meets the other inside – we’ll have to miter the tenons to match.  One more step remaining on the leg mortises though – they need haunches.  This is a shallower version of the mortise at the top, something to hold a bit of the tenon but not go all the way through to keep the strength of the leg.

These mortises took us from about 9:30 am to 5:00 pm, with lectures and breaks interspersed.  Pretty good workout too.  However, we weren’t done yet.  After a delicious dinner break at the Homestead Cafe, we went back to work on the tenons.

The tenon is the opposite piece of a mortise joint, and is a smaller section of another board made to fit tightly in the mortise slot. After instructions by Frank, we set to work with dovetail saw and chisel to cut the shoulders (the edge between the full and narrow sections of a tenon’d piece) on our tenons.

Of course we still need to cut the haunched portion, miter the ends, and then fit them.  Plenty more to do tomorrow.

On to project 2: the wall shelf.  It’s a simple pine shelf, but gives us the chance to integrate dados, learn mortise & tendon joinery, and do some more shaping work.

Frank explains the shelf layout

The main frame is constructed with six dados.  Instead of a measuring tape, we’re learning how to make our marks using the stock we’re working with.  This reduces marking errors and eliminates assumptions about the items.

In the following photo you can see the lines I scribed by first placing the side piece onto the top below, making a tick, moving in one width for another tick, then squaring a couple lines across.  We also used the stock to set the stopped dado line in from the front and then the marking gauge pictured was used to scribe a 1/4″ depth.

Here’s Jeremy starting one of his dados.  As in the previous post, we’re chiseling to the sides and then cleaning them out.

Jeremy was gracious enough to take a couple of photos of me working, so here’s me cleaning one of my dado joints out.

Dado joints are not as easy as they look.  They’re easy to cut, but it’s hard to get the width just right.  You want the fit to be just too tight to push in by hand, but you do need to be able to tap it in with a hammer.  We’re talking thousands of an inch difference here.  Needless to say, about half of my joints today were acceptable – the rest will look and work fine but they’re too loose to provide any structural integrity.  Good thing we have some pieces coming up to help with that.

Next was dry fit assembly and sizing for the middle shelf.  That shelf piece came long, and we cut the length then cut shoulders in the edges around the stopped dados.  You can see all that tapped together in the next photo.

With the dados behind us, it was time to learn our third joint of the week – the mortise & tenon.  Basically this is a hole in one piece with a narrowed end of the other piece to fit inside.  There are lots of variations but we’re starting with a very simple barefaced tenon and both a stopped and through mortise.  Below you can see the first stopped mortise (to right) and the first half of the through mortise to the left.  The through mortise will go all the way through the board, so it needs to be flipped over and continued.

Here are the completed mortises.  You’re seeing both inner sides of the shelfs, with the tops to the left.  There are rails that go across the front under the shelfs running vertically which will dramatically help with stability as well as with style.

Cutting the tenons was pretty straight forward as well. We did simplified barefaced tenons. This means instead of cutting all sides of the rails smaller to fit through the mortises (holes), we only cut the front side smaller.  Unfortunately I must have bumped my marking gauge when starting my mortise layout so my mortises ended up about 3/32″ less than the stock rather than 1/8″ – makes a pretty big difference.  I just had to cut my shoulders (the smaller bit) much smaller and more precise than expected.  Worked out fine though.  You can see the dry-fit assembly below.

There’s still a decent amount to do.  The rails will be arched, top and bottom will be chamfered, and we’ll do some free hand chamfering on the sides too.  We had planned on finishing today, but things got behind.  Partly because of the photo below – we had a visit from Southern Living, they’ll be running an article on the school.

Tomorrow we start working with walnut stock instead of pine, I’m very excited.

Today in class we continued on our first project, the small dovetailed box.  Frank started the day with a demonstration of hand planes and their use.  We didn’t cover any of the exotics, but did get a good overview of your basic smoothing and block planes.  I’d been looking forward to planes, so pretty exciting for me.

After the explanation and demonstration, we were handed pine blocks to try out the smoothing planes.  I can’t say I’m confident in my planing skills yet, but I certainly put in some good practice.  That poor demo board was about half gone in shavings on the floor by the time I stopped.  Most of the shavings in the photo below are from that.

View of our workbench. Note huge pile of shavings from my hand plane practice.

After we’d finished having fun with the practice boards, it was time to apply our new skills to the project.  The candle box we’re building has rounded edges on the base and top.  No routers, rasps or sandpaper for us – hand planes all the way.

Jeremy uses a block plane to smooth his box top

I tried using the No. 4 1/2 smoothing plane as demonstrated by our instructor, but it seemed too awkward for me to get the precision you need for this project.  Fortunately I realized this on the practice board, so by the time I started on the box pieces I’d switched to the low angle block plane.  Wow! This plane is amazing! I was able to quickly adjust it from taking a solid curl at the beginning 45 degree chamfer to almost producing sawdust sized curls for finishing polish.  I was so happy with the result I decided to skip using sandpaper.

Finished top and bottom of box, penciled lines later removed with smoothing plane.

The tricky part of doing these rounds is working with the end grain. We had to hold the planes nearly vertical and slide them sideways to shear the wood instead of directly cutting it.  Worked great.

We also used the planes to smooth down the dovetail joints to even with the rest of the box, and then ran a few strokes across the sides for good measure.  Up to this point I’d been doing very well about slowing down and not getting way ahead (though my personal plane iron has gradually been getting sharper during my occasional wait moments).  However I decided I wanted to move on and smooth the tops of the box sides.  Fortunately Frank decided to go over how to do this a few minutes later so I didn’t get the time to do too much damage to them.  He demonstrated how to slide the plane all around the top in a big circle.  That was fun to put into practice – the only hard part was stopping.

The next step was cutting the mortises for the box hinges.  Unfortunately I didn’t get any photos of the process.  It was pretty straight forward but did require some precision.  Frank told us he used to cut all his hinges in with a router for cabinets and such, but since he found this method it’s all he uses.  Much safer and more accurate, and doesn’t take too long once you learn in.

The basics are finding the correct depth (half of the barrel of the hinge) and length (leaf of the hinge), marking them appropriately on your piece, and then chiseling out the slot.  With sharp chisels it’s easy and fast to walk across the spot, an 8th of an inch at a time, peeling up a chunk of wood with a single tap.  Then slide the chisel in underneath to clean it out, and you’re ready to mount the hinge.

Project two is a wall shelf and involves several new joints and techniques.  With limited time left in the day we received a demonstration of cutting a dado joint and got to work on our practice boards.  See the photos below as I cut my way through my first dado:

Dado 1: Marked, knifed, chisel to knife line

Dado 2: After getting first line knifed and chiseled to approximate depth, do the same on the opposite side

Dado 3: Smooth slot out with router plane and chisel (note I cut too deep with chisels to start with so not as smooth as it should be)

Dado 4: Complete!

Fortunately this was a practice piece – the joint was very loose.  Should require a loving tap or two with a hammer. Running out of time, I cut a new dado in three minutes flat (take that friends who think hand tools are archaic and useless!) which was much better.

We finished off the day with glueing and clamping the base to the rest of our dovetailed box.  Forgot to get a picture, but I’ll grab one first thing in the morning.  I might even nag Jeremy for a shot with his uber iPhone4!  My 3G lacks a bit in lower light situations.