A couple of weeks ago, our  photographer friend, Greg Hren, came up to the shop to shoot a proof of concept for a local company, Work’NGear. They are interviewing customers who use their products for their “Driven” campaign.

I had no idea what to expect, but was told to muster out in my Sunday best Carharts, boots and workshirt for a little video shoot.

Greg and his assistant Richard, aka Rabbit, showed up around three, and we shot for four hours around the shop, including the interview.

Working with Greg and Richard is always good fun.

I hope you enjoy watching it as much as we enjoyed making it.

CB

I continue to struggle with keeping up the blog. I could write something trite about my New Year’s resolution to be a better blogger, but there are more pressing things to make resolutions about this year and that excuse would be three months too late.

That being said, here is the latest installment of the long (and slow) running blog about the “Low Sideboard for Modern Living.”

Low Sideboard

One thing that is often overlooked on furniture projects is the back. For this project I decided to use a traditional design strategy but stood it on its ear. A shiplap back is traditional, but given the length of this piece it would not be practical. And since I am not overly concerned with water leaking into the back of this cabinet, function would come second to form in this instance. Besides,personally, vertical shiplap looks more elegant.

Shiplap Back

One hurdle to overcome is finding twenty-four linear feet of quarter-sawn cherry that matches in color and grain. Not impossible, but more easily accomplished by purchasing 16/4 (“sixteen quarter” or 4-inches thick, every profession needs to have their own language to keep the general public guessing.) flat-sawn or plain-sawn cherry and resawing it into quarter-sawn myself.

Re-sawn 16/4 Cherry Board

Whenever resawing material you can expect some wood movement and should plan accordingly. Under normal circumstances I would only need to rough mill the material 1/4 of an inch over in thickness, but since I am resawing I cut the boards at 4/4, a full 1/2-inch oversized. But knowing that all the boards will match in grain and color makes this process and waste worth while. I frequently use this technique to match the grain and color for kitchen cabinet face frames, rails and stiles.

The resawing process is simple. You can use a bandsaw or table saw, but which ever you chose make sure you have a thin-kerf blade to reduce waste. I prefer using the band saw and generally use a 1 1/2-inch wide blade that has 2 teeth per inch. It makes for a rough cut, but I am going to have to finish mill the pieces afterwards anyway.

Yates 36-Inch Band Saw Set Up For Resawing

1 1/2-inch blade with 2 teeth/inch

I use an auxiliary fence to help keep the board a uniform 1-inch away from the blade and if I am resawing a wide piece I would clamp another board to the fence to help keep the cut parallel to the face.

Bandsaw Fence and Resaw Mid Cut

When resawing you also need to make sure you give the wood a chance to move before finish milling. I usually give the boards a couple of days before I start milling and while they are still rough sawn I start off clamping them to the bench in the same order they came out of the board to try and limit the rapid loss of moisture and wood movement. (If you are interested in learning more about wood and wood movement, I highly recommend Bruce Hoadley’s Understanding Wood.) After I start to mill the boards down I make sure to keep them stickered.

Stickered Shiplap

I needed to drill holes for the pan head screws (I choose these to keep the head from splitting the end of the board.) and to counter sink the heads, so I set up a simple guide to make the process of creating multiples go faster. Many people tend to over think these jigs with stop blocks and hold downs, but when drilling on a drill press these steps are a waste of time. I used a stop to keep the holes the same distance from the edge and then simple pencil marks to align the edges to put the holes in the same place in relation to the edges of the board. Also keeping your work area neat and organized helps when creating multiples.

Drill Press Set Up

Simple Jig to Aid In The Creation of Multiples

In the vein of simple jigs, I frequently use what is at hand to aid in construction and for repeatable results. Here I used my 12-inch Starrett (my most frequently used tool in the shop) to space the shiplap exactly an 1/8 of an inch apart.

Shiplap Spacing

Here is the finished product before finish, note the consistency in color and grain.

Shiplap Completed

Shiplap

Last time we talked about the shop, I pointed out that the machine room floors needed to be refinished, like the bench room.

Difference in the floor between the two rooms

We thought we might be able to live with it, but after many dirty knees while working on machines trying to get them online that did not prove to be the true. The Yates American 36″ bandsaw, the radial arm saw station and the table saw island proved too big to move, so we decided to sand and finish around them. Here you can see the machine room with most of the machinery pushed into the empty space at the East end of the shop.

North wall of the shop before sanding

North West Corner Before Sanding

Table Saw Island

South East Corner

While this set back was frustrating, in the end the results definitely were worth the effort and time. Besides, we have become highly efficient at sanding and finishing floors. The entire process took three days. And here are the finished results.

Planer was pivoted out of our space on a pallet jack

Lathes Back In Place

East Side

West Side

South Side

-CB-

Machine Room Coming Together

Midstream of Machine Room Build-out

Machine room with ductwork plan

After some careful planning on paper, see “Planning the New Studio“, we massed all our machinery at the shop.

We were able to move James’ equipment out of his old shop and up to Lawrence in two trips in a 22 foot Penske truck. It went pretty seamlessly since everything was on wheels or on pallets, and I had recently found a pallet jack on Craigslist.

Don was bringing over his 8-inch jointer from his basement shop and we were able to muscle it out of his basement with four guys and some elbow grease.

I was not as lucky. Most of my machinery is 40 plus years old, cast iron and enormous. Adding that to the fact that my old shop did not have a loading dock, I needed to hire a rigger. As luck would have it, a machine I recently purchased from IRS Auctions was located at a rigger’s shop, so he agreed to bring it over and pick up all the other machines for a reasonable rate.

Enter Mike Kane of Woodworking Machinery Services and his amazing transforming truck. It basically is a 18 wheeler trailer that operates like a flat bed truck. He was easily able to unload his fork lift and move about 10,000 Lbs of machinery in a about a half an hour.

After all the machinery was at the shop, we started to move the machinery into position, bring electricity to them and hook up the dust collection system. Early on we decided to try to use the two dust collectors, a small Penn State and an Onieda, that we had rather than purchase a new/used one.

Onieda Installed With Duct Work

We built a small Stub wall to hold the Penn State dust collector, which will service the Wadkins 24-inch planer and the south wall, which has two lathes, three shapers and drops for a mobile sanding station.

Here is the run from the Onieda along the north wall that services the two jointers, the radial arm saw, and the three band-saws.

Duct Work on the North Wall

The Onieda also services the table saw island and the area that we are calling a tool corral, that houses router tables, William and Hussey molder planer, Dewalt Planer, scroll saw, and our 37-inch Performax drum sander.

Table Saw Island Coming Together

We had to raise the SawStop about 2 inches off the ground so that it would be level with the Oliver 260-D, a dual arbor sliding table saw. Here is the table saw island coming together.

Table Saw Island Nearing Completion

I have some trepidation about these dust collectors keeping up with all the machinery, but we thought we would give it a try first and then upgrade as necessary. Also we plan on eliminating the filter assembly and venting the fine particle out the shop window to improve their efficiency, being 6 floors up has some benefits. Adding blast gates to isolate entire runs, as well as at each machine, would also improve efficiency.

Time will tell if these two smaller dust collectors will be able to keep up with three people in a busy shop.

-CB-

While we were moving, the locating arms of the Leigh jig were damaged. (Why do manufacturers insist on cutting corners on the most integral and delicate parts? They are needed to remain square to the jig yet they stick out 6″ from the main body of the jig, and it is made out of pot metal.) With deadlines looming and all the North Bennet Street School moxie I could muster, I decide for a mix of hand and machine work on the dovetails that hold the case of the low Shaker side board that will ultimately be used as a TV stand.

First I cut the pins of the half-blind dovetails by hand.

Hand-cut pins

In this picture you an also see how I laminated up the sides of the case. The outside is a resawn panel from the flitch that I bought from Berkshire Products for this client that is book-matched and the inside is shop-made quarter-sawn cherry. (More on that at a later date.)

And then switched to the router to hog out most of the material.

Router Set-Up

I clamped the two sides together with a board on top so that board and other side would act like a stop while routing so I would not rout too deep into the pin board. This made the process go quickly. All I had to adjust between passes was the depth of cut of the router bit.

Router Bit

Because the router bit does not cut a flat face, I decided to do multiple passes to make the clean-up of the bottom of the tail socket dovetail joint easier. This is avoided when using the jig because the tails are sloped to match the bottom of the pin board, but when hand cutting and chopping the pins you need a flat bottom of the tail socket. Also, by cutting in lighter passes, it was easier to come close to my initial saw cuts without the fear of the router bit pulling into the keeper side of the pin.

Stepped Bottom of the Tail Socket from Router Bit

Below is the sequence of cuts that I made.

First Pass with the Router

Second Pass with the Router

Last Pass with the Router

I left about 1/32″ to pair along the face and checks of the pin board. It was quick work to clean up these cuts with a chisel.

Paring the Cheek of the Pins.

Pins Are Paired

Whenever dovetails are visible I take the time to cut them by hand, as there is a certain quality to dovetails that are cut well by hand. Since these dovetails are not visible once the top is on or unless someone is on the ground looking up at the piece, this was an expedient way to cut these dovetails.

A secondary challenge in the cutting of this joint was cutting and paring the tail boards that are about 6′ long. I ended up clamping them to the pallet racks that we use for storing our sheet goods and standing on a step stool.

One of the things I love about furniture making is while there are some standard practices, there is not “one way” to build a piece. Each piece has unique challenges and solutions, and each time you build a piece of furniture you are learning new techniques and strategies for common problems and adding to your knowledge base.

“When you stop learning, stop listening, stop looking and asking questions, always new questions, then it is time to die.” Lillian Smith

Still learning something new everyday,

-CB-

While the wall was going up, it quickly became apparent that we needed to do something about the floors.

Anything that touched the floors came up stained a dark brown; 2×4′s, knees, tools, my oldest daughter, anything. Not so great if you are building fine furniture, although we could instantly create a 150 year old patina on a project, just by kicking it around the shop for a few minutes. A quick trip to the Home Depot rental center and we were off to the races.

I think we developed a pretty good system; a belt sander hooked up to a Oneida Dust Deputy, hooked up to a shop vac, all on a hand truck. But after looking at Oneida’s website we are not the first to come up with this system.

Here you can really see the extent of the problem. I know many of you will notice that we are sanding across the grain, but the floors have enough dips and valleys that sanding with the grain we ended up with mixed results at best.

Here are the finished results after a sealer coat, 2 coats of high gloss polyurethane (for durability), and one coat satin polyurethane (to cut down on the glare).

In this picture you will notice the darker streaks on the floor. We are not sure what caused this, but we have some theories. We think that at one time there were rows of pallet racks on the floor, and this is either where the racks were or the space between them. Either way it is really strange.

The floors are 1″ thick rock maple laid on top of 4″ thick sleepers set perpendicular to each other on top of poured concrete. One of my shop-mates, James, espoused an interesting theory that you can tell an old floor by the length of the floor boards. In a really old floor the lengths are shorter because the methods for moving the logs out of the forest were more labor intensive and therefore early lumberjacks sawed raw logs shorter to make them easier to move.

One obvious problem though is that we are going to have to refinish the machine room floor. Too bad most of the machinery is already in place.-

-CB-

Truth be told the blog is not running in real time (shocker). There is about a six month lag between what is happening here and what is really going on at the shop. Several large projects have come and gone, but I will try to bring this part of the website up to date. Also, some people have expressed interest in the process of setting up our shop.

I walked you through my thoughts for the shop and the decision to divide the shop into three rooms:the finishing room, the bench room and the machine room. We decided to use an existing office as our finishing room so that space is already built out, although some modifications will be necessary. Our insurance company is mandating that we have explosion proof lighting and a fire-proof cabinet, which we were lucky enough to find on craigslist for a mere $75 and $100, respectively. God Bless the internet. We also need to provide an exhaust fan and a filtered inlet for fresh air. In addition, we are going to build a loft above the finishing room for storage. (More on that SNAFU later.)

The first major hurdle is building the wall between the bench and machine rooms. We were able to accomplish that in a timely manner. These rolling stairs came in so handy that we decided to purchase a set from our landlord.

Rolling Stairs

Framing

Bench Room Side

Machine Room Side

We decided on painted sheetrock for the bench room side to help bounce the light around the room to brighten it up for close hand work, and we used OSB, (oriented strand board) on the machine room side to make it easier to hang hang jigs, clamps, duct work, patterns or your favorite Studley tool box poster.

At the center of the wall will be a pair of 4×8 doors on double hinges, which will be the main passage way into the machine shop. At the far end of the wall is a second 4×8 door that will be next to the lumber rack in the bench room and next to the radial arm saw/band saws in the machine room to help with work flow. The doors are oversized to make the moving of large materials (4×8 sheets of plywood) and machinery a little easier.

Now for the fun part, starting to fill the space up with machinery…

-CB-

Despite having a enormous amount of room for storage (the other half of our side of the floor is empty) we are going to start the build out before moving in most of the machinery. Early on we decided that we would divide the space into two rooms, really three if you count the finish room. I liked the set up at North Bennet Street School where there was a bench room for close hand work and a separate machine room for all the noisy/dusty work. Besides being a fairly logical way to divide the shop, I think it will be a healthier way to work. (Who wants to wear a respirator and hearing protectors all day.)

My youngest daughter Grace showing off the latest Spring fashion

Before any actual building gets started, I took the time to create a floor plan on Photo Shop to figure out machine configuration. I find Photo Shop easy to use for this type of activity because I could create layers for each machine and move them around on the screen and look at things like in-feed, out-feed, and work flow. Here are the plans for the machine room and bench room.

Machine room with ductwork plan

Bench and finishing rooms

So first thing up is a wall dividing the space in half with two doorways: one that is a full 8 ft across for moving sheet goods and another that is only 4 ft across that will be closer to the lumber racks. While we are working on that, our electrician set to work with our layout and machine list to wire our shop. More about the construction in another blog.

-CB-

Well, CB Kearney is quickly outgrowing our current location, and it is time to expand. Besides, working by myself all day can get kind of lonely, and there is no one to bounce ideas off.  Two of my friends and fellow woodworkers, Don Price and James Watriss, from North Bennet Street School have come to similiar conclusions and are willing to look for space to share. We can consolidate our machinery and tools, reduce our overhead, and help each other out throughout the furniture making process.

Exterior of 250 Canal St (Washington Mills)

It took a while , but we were finally able to locate some decent studio space that meet our requirements; 200 amp/3-phase electric service, loading docks, freight elevators, adequate light, and relatively unobstructed space. We found all this at the old Washington Mills building at 250 Canal St in Lawrence, MA.

We were looking for a few months and every place we visited was lacking one thing or another; from cinder block walled contractor bays with no windows to flood prone basements. We saw it all and are happy that we waited. When we walked through the doors of the studio we knew that we were home.

The studio is just over 3500 sq ft and has 14 ft ceilings.

South West End of Shop

Only thee columns interupt the space, so there is plenty of infeed and out feed room. There is a small office at one end of the shop that we will convert into a finishing room for hand finishing. We’ll leave the spray finishing to the guys with a spray booth. One wall is all windows and the natural light is amazing. The only draw back that I can forsee is that the windows are south-facing, and it is going to be hot in the summer. We plan on air conditioning the finishing/office room, so hopefully we will be able to find some respite there. Besides I could probably stand to lose some water weight.

Let the build-out begin!

-CB-