…stringing details.

Stringing On Finished Top

This detail adds a great amount of drama to the finished piece, and no it is not painted on. It is thin black veneer inlaid into the top. Normally I would hand cut the veneer with a veneer saw or a sharp knife, but I had heard of people using a pasta maker to cut the thin strips needed for this detail. It certainly was faster, but the end product was greatly inferior. It tended to cut along the grain and splintered in many places. I ended up planing each individual piece of stringing to get an edge that would slide easily into the grooves.

Planing Stringing

It is always easier to plane small pieces like these by placing the plane upside down in my bench vice and carefully sliding the stringing veneer over the plane.

Normally I would use a scratch stock and slowly scratch the groove into the top. But in another effort to speed things along I turned to a small Dremel fitted with a base and router bit from Stewart MacDonald, primarily a guitar maker’s catalog but it has lots of interesting tools for furniture makers too. I clamped a long straight edge to the top and, after carefully marking the start and stop points, routed out the groove. In retrospect I would go slower and make a couple of passes because I broke two of the router bits. (I am glad I ordered extras.)

Dremel and Straight Edge

After routing the groove along the length of the top, I started preparing the inlay strips. I did not have a strips long enough to do the entire length so I had to scarf the pieces together.

Creating Scarf Joint

I took two pieces and laid them on top of each other and used a chisel to make an angled cut in the two pieces at once. Now the two pieces would match up perfectly and the joint would virtually disappear. (In the background of the picture you can see the scratch stock I usually use to make the grooves for stringing wrapped in blue tape. I made these from a dull Dispoz-a-blade from our 24″ Wadkins Planer)

Cutting Scarf

To glue the stringing in, I used a sharp stick to get the glue deep into the routed groove and then pressed in the stringing. After the glue set up for about fifteen minutes, I used a burnishing tool to press the stringing further into the groove.

Gluing in the Stringing

After the glue set up completely, I simply used a chisel to pare off the piece of veneer that is sticking out of the top.

Paring Stringing

When making the cut like this with a chisel, I usually turn the chisel over to keep it from acting like a ramp and diving into the work. I also had to move slowly and pay careful attention to the grain direction to keep the stringing from splitting out of the top.

Corner Detail

The corner detail was a little more difficult, but with careful layout, setup of the straight edge and routing I was able to create the grooves for the corners.

Routing Corner Detail

After cleaning up the corner with a chisel, I was ready to inlay the stringing.

Before Cleaning Up The Corner

Each corner needed to be mitered, so I used a 45˚ chisel block to make the cuts.

Using Chisel Block

Miter Cut

Here is what it looked like after the corners were cut before I pared it down to the surface.

Mitered Corner Before Paring

After all the stringing was pared down I cleaned up the top with some careful scraping to get it ready for finish. Here is the top with the stringing completed.

Finished Product

Top with Single Board Top

From the beginning of this project we knew that we were going to use a single board top. Thankfully we have the capability to handle boards of this width. Our 24-inch Wadkin Planer came in handy in planing the top to its finished thickness of 1 and 1/4 inches. It is impressive seeing a board that size rolling through the planer.

Infeed Side of the Planer

Planer Outfeed

With newly sharpened knives in the cutter-head there was very little tear out. I was able to use the newly acquired 37-inch Performax sander, in the back of this picture, to clean up the top.

After cutting the board to finished length and laying it on top of the carcass (the first photo), the need for a chamfer on the bottom face of the top to help lighten the look of the piece was obvious.

Starting the chamfer along the length was relatively easy on the table saw, but the ends would have to be chamfered by hand. So out came the corrugated Stanley #8 jointer plane for the ends and the Lie Nielson #4 smoother to finish off all the surfaces.

Hand Chamfering the Ends

Hand Chamfering

In this photo you can see the lines that I plan to chamfer to on both edges.

And here is the finished product.

Chamfer Finished

The results are well worth the effort, and it was an effort to remove all that material.

This project is nearing completion, but there are many more challenges ahead. More on the finishing of this piece later.

-CB-

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-

This project has had more than its fair share of challenges. First the dovetails that needed to be cut by hand and then the tails that were cut standing on a stool with the six foot board clamped to the top of pallet rack. Now the through mortises that add strength to the carcass and keep the bottom of the case from sagging also need to be cut by hand because the board is too wide to use our mortiser.

Chopping Moritises

To make the layout and chopping of the mortises easier, I ran a stop dado in the top and the bottom of the case referencing off the fence to ensure that they are in the same orientation on both boards. I laid out the tenons on the two vertical boards, scribing them with a marking gauge slightly more than the thickness of the horizontal boards, so that the tenons stand proud of the top and bottom and can be planed flush. Then I cut them on the table saw standing them vertically and using the miter gauge to run them across a 3/4″ dado blade. I was not too concerned about the size of the tenons because I was going to scribe the mortises directly from the tenons.

After scribing the mortises, I used a forstner bit to start the mortise and finished it with a mortising chisel and mallet.

After the mortises were chopped, I fit the tenons taking care that the mortises bottomed out the same time that the front shoulders closed up.

Everything went together without a hitch, but if I were to build a case piece with similiar construction I would shoulder tenons so that I would be less concerned with gaps opening up. Also, I would have used Tage Frid’s technique of cutting the tenon diagonally and wedging it to add strength and close up any gaps.

Still learning…

-CB-

One of the jobs that has gone through the shop over the last few months was a bookcase job for a client in Weymouth, MA. While the construction of the bookcases was straightforward, the site provided some challenges for the install.

The install ran the entire length of a staircase that leads to an office upstairs in the client’s barn. Unfortunately I left my go-go gadget arms at the shop, but luckily I had my trusty Little Giant ladder to help access the different levels that the bookcases were located on. Also dealing with the different pitches of the roof and the fact that it was horribly out of square in places, as this was a typical New England barn that has gone through many transformations, helped add to the install excitement.

I used 3/4″ plywood for the bookcase sides, tops and bottoms and 1/2″ for the backs. This gives the cases extra strength and ensures they remain square, even if the barn doesn’t. The client was not sure if he wanted to paint the bookcases or finish them natural so I used a simple face frame construction out of maple, which costs a little more than poplar but looks much nicer painted, if the client decided to go that route in the end.

Overall, the install job went quickly over the course of two days, and, most importantly, the customer was extremely pleased with the transformation of his space.

-CB-