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

…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-

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-

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-

The latest project in the shop is a low sideboard that is going to be used as a TV stand for the client’s new flat screen.

Progress as of today (4/8/09)

It is the first piece that I am building for a client that has redesigned their downstairs and wants to update their furniture to suit their new look with this piece, a new dining room set, a sideboard, and a side table.

After some initial conversations with the clients, the general style, something that I would call “modern shaker” popularized by other furniture makers like Thomas Moser and Christian Becksvoort, and the material, cherry, were decided. So, I set off for one of my favorite vendors to find a flitch of cherry so that the set of new furniture would match in grain and color.

Besides being a gorgeous drive out to western Mass near Stockbridge, I love to go out to Berkshire Products for their amazing selection of lumber.

Enormous Lumber Packs

Huge Bubinga Slab

I call it a woodworker’s Shangri-la. They specialize in wide slabs, bookmatched sets, flitches, and exotic species. When I am out there I find myself wandering around each of their 4 barns staring up at all the enormous lumber with my mouth agape. (If anyone wants I live-edge dining room table out of bookmatched English Elm give me a call. I have been dying to make something out of this wood since I set eyes on it a few years ago.)

Bookmatched Elm Slab

After a few hours combing through the barns I settled on a cherry flitch with some nice color and interesting figure.

3-year old inserted for scale

Through some careful planning, resawing and design I should be able to get the majority of the primary wood for this client’s projects from these four boards, ensuring that the furniture will match in grain and color, as well as, in its design.

More about the design at a later date…

-CB-