A new outfeed table...

Outfeed support: essential for crosscuts

For some time now, it's been clear that my over-stuffed studio needs a re-design.  Among the many changes due is the building of outfeed tables for my table saws (we have a 10" 1.75HP contractor saw and a 12" 5HP cabinet saw).  Outfeed tables are important for certain table saw operations, most notably ripping long stock, and crosscutting wide stock.  The inability to crosscut 4' x 8' plywood sheets has forced me to use my circular saw...never a good option for furniture building, even when using Festool's over-hyped guide rails (which I do use, reluctantly). 

But life goes on, and making an income has taken the front seat and put my improvement project on hold.  To that end, I have been making aquarium stands for the local aquarium installer/retailer. 

But when one of my stand went horribly wrong, I got a chance to take a step in the right direction and install an outfeed table for my 12" cabinet saw. 

DIY Open Baffle Speaker Project

Readers of this blog may remember a project I began a few months ago: my first loudspeaker.  Progress has been slow; as a personal project I have to fit in the work when I don't have anything better to do.  But my first pair of speakers is almost finished, and the project represents more than one "first" for me:

Lacquer: one tough cookie
My open baffle speakers use one Fostex FE207E 8" full-range driver in each tower, and are made from purple heart and curly maple.  Since I used such nice lumber for the project, I wanted to finish the baffles in the glossiest, deepest finish possible.  And that means good ole lacquer: the smelly, flammable, brain cell - killing gloss finish of yesteryear.  Lacquer is fast-drying, thick, and volatile, making its application a challenge.  But the result - a glossy, rich finish - is impossible to replicate.  I brushed on four coats of lacquer before rubbing it out.  But before I rubbed it out, I had to wait a full ten days after the last coat.  That's ten days after the lacquer was hard to the touch.  But lacquer isn't fully hardened until at least seven days after application, and a gloss finish isn't possible until full hardness is reached.

New Pages on the Blog

purple heart & mixed hardwood coffee table, made 12/20/2010

Blogger now offers "Pages" on its blogs.  This is an excellent feature of Blogger, as it allows users to easily create static pages and link to them from a navigation menu generated automatically by Blogger.  This can make a blog act much like a website.  Unlike most website hosting platforms, however, a Blogger blog is free.

I have made use of the new pages feature by creating two new pages: "Tools of the Trade" and "Custom Commissions".

"Tools of the Trade" is a description of the "big" tools we have in our shop, so visitors can get a sense of how furniture is made, and see for themselves the difference between furniture-making tools, and the tools used by a carpenter who comes to your house.

Have You Heard of a Manta Board?

I find few things in life more gratifying than discovery: learning, exploring, and even creating exciting new vistas.  It's no lofty concept: the new is always presenting itself to us.  Take, for example, a recent favor I did for my friend, an aquatic biologist: helping him create a manta board.

What's a manta board?  It's for scuba diving, of course!  But when my friend first asked me to help him make a manta board, for an upcoming trip to Haiti's coral reef, I thought he wanted it to scare predators (or attract them...).

Re-Saw Magic

By replacing the motor, I can re-saw 12" of maple

The band saw is regarded by many woodworkers as "the most important saw in the shop", due in no small part its unique capabilities.  Band saws can cut curves - unlike a table saw, chop saw, or hand saw - and with a thinner kerf than a router, and with no need for a special fence or guides.  Band saws can also perform the initial milling of raw timber: turning a tree trunk into boards.  And band saws can "re-saw".

Re-sawing is splitting a board in two...the hard way.  Take a look at the picture on the left and you'll see what I mean.  What you see in that pic is a piece of 3" thick hard curly maple, standing on edge roughly 12" high, and 20" long.  You also see a re-sawed slice.  The slice is 1/16" thick, and was peeled off of the block of maple on my band saw.

Unlike a table saw's disc-shaped blade, a band saw blade is a giant hoop, drawn tight between two cast-iron wheels.  And unlike a basic, 10" table saw blade, which can get bogged down trying to cut through 3" of hard maple, even a small band saw can easily go through 6" or 7" of the same hardwood.

Tools of the Trade

Four Belt sanders?  Yes, for Wine Wings

There are thousands of traditional and modern tools used in woodworking.  For many trained and formally educated woodworkers, traditional hand tools are sufficient to build nearly any piece of furniture.  But for those of us who want to spend more time bringing designs to life than training their muscle memory to wield hand tools perfectly, modern power tools represent the road to happiness.  Power tools provide unmatched accuracy in the hands of woodworkers-in-training.  They can also get the job done faster and better than hand tools in many applications.  This can be important to clients, keeping the time it takes to complete a project (and henceforth, costs) to a minimum.

Band Saw Upgrade: From light-duty to medium duty

I haven't yet learned much about the band saw, which is considered by many furniture-makers to be "the most important saw in the shop".  Still, I do own a band saw: I was given one by a friend a few months ago.  It languished in storage until yesterday, when I bit the bullet and pulled it out in order to cut a curve in a thick lamination of Purple Heart and Maple.

My band saw, a Delta 14" from 1990, is low-powered by any standard of stationary (floor-standing) band saw.  Its motor was rated at only 1/2 HP.  By comparison, Delta's current 14" band saw has a 3/4 HP motor, which is still small, but appropriate for a 14" band saw, which is the smallest of the floor-standing saws.  Strangely, the previous owner of the saw had installed a riser block, which increases the vertical capacity of the saw by 5 inches.  I say this is strange because with a 1/2 HP motor no blade would be able to cut through stock as thick as the maximum capacity of a regular 14" band saw, let alone as thick as the riser block allows.    

Sketchup v. Sketchup Pro v. AutoCad 2011

For a couple of months now, I have been using the free version of Google's Sketchup 3D modeling software to design my furniture.  It was easy to learn (once I bought a instructional book), but in just a few weeks I ran up against the free version's major limitation: it can't show and hide elements of the drawing.  So I decided to upgrade.  But to which CAD software?  I chose to take a look at Sketchup Pro ($400 retail) and AutoCad 2011 for Mac ($4,000 retail, or $400 for students). 

Downloading a free trial of AutoCad was easy enough.  And once I bought an instructional book on mastering AutoCad, learning it was also easy.  As for Sketchup Pro, I wasn't able to find a trial, so I used a friend's computer which had Sketchup Pro 7.1 installed.  So, how did Sketchup Pro compare to AutoCad 2011 for Mac?  Read on...

Stripe Coffee Table

Just before Christmas, I built a simple coffee table for my girlfriend's mother.  The top was made from a board of scrap I had made up a month previous, and the leg assembly was of birch, stained black and with a waterborne urethane topcoat.  I didn't have time to take pics of the building process, but here are pics of the finished piece (click "read more" below for more pics)

"Melting Clocks" coffee table project

Among the many projects I have going on at any given time is one involving two striped table tops, which I made from off-cut scrap from my early Wine Wing development days.  I had made two identical table tops (see "rubbing out a satin finish"), plus one more long one.  The long one was made into a coffee table for my girlfriend's mother (pics coming soon!), and one of the other two tables was made into a small end table. 


I had planned to give the end table to my parents for Christmas, but my design left much to be desired.  Compared to the coffee table I gave to my putative mother-in-law, the end table looked under-designed and amateurish.  So I decided to make a coffee table for my parents, using both striped tops.  My plan was to cut the tops and create a draping effect over the coffee table, as if the two striped tops were cloths laid out over the table's top, as in the sketch at the top of this post.

Bamboo Chest: Finished Pics

Here are some pics of the completed four-drawer chest (see my recent blog posts for history on this project).  It is made from 3/4" 3-ply bamboo plywood and MDF.  The tall drawers slide out from their flush-mounted resting places, revealing shelves for DVDs and CDs.  Click "more" to see whole post and more pics (below)

Finshing Techniques: Oil ON TOP OF urethane?

A project that began last week is almost finished.  The four-drawer chest, made of bamboo plywood, was commissioned by a friend.  As of this writing - the night before the chest is due to be picked up from my Allston studio - the chest is curing after being brushed one last time with super-fine, 00000 steel wool.

4-Drawer Chest, Day 2

My last post was about a project brought to me by a friend, who wanted to salvage a neat 4-drawer chest from her lab.  The unique drawers of this piece - which was custom-made to hold VHS tapes in the 1980s - were saved intact, while the case was destroyed in the move.  My task is to re-build the case, re-fit the drawers, and re-face the drawers with the same attractive bamboo plywood I'm to using build the case.

Reverse-engineering a 4-drawer chest

A friend of mine brought me this challenging job: re-building the case of a 4-drawer chest, which had been destroyed during a move.  Since the drawers were intact, and complicated to build, my friend wanted to keep them, and only wanted the case rebuilt.  This is backwards: usually drawers are made to fit the case.  Nevertheless, I welcomed the challenge, the $$, and the chance to work with a new product I've been dying to try: bamboo plywood. 

I purchased 3/4" bamboo plywood from Cali Bamboo.  In spite of the hefty freight fee, it was still cheaper than buying locally.  Bamboo plywood isn't cheap, though: at just over $200/sheet, including shipping, mistakes with this material are expensive!

Decimal inches to fractional inches calculator

Need to convert decimal inches to fractional inches, rounded to your choice of any denominator from 2 to 1000? Go here: http://www2.whidbey.net/ohmsmath/webwork/javascript/decin2fr.html

When designing wooden furniture, most people in the U.S. use fractional inches as their metric.  There are plenty of reasons: we're used to the Imperial system, most of our tools use Imperial, fractional graduations, and much of the lumber we buy - most of all sheet goods - is measured in fractions of an inch.

This causes a problem for designers who like to adhere to certain ratios - such as the Golden Ratio - in their work.  I'm among those who often

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Rubbing out a satin finish

Right: sanded flat to 220; Left: rubbed with pumice & oil

Thank god I purchased Michael Dresdner's "The New Wood Finishing Book"!  As a self-taught woodworker, I rely on books and practice to learn the ropes of this ancient and expansive art.  My first finishing book, called simply "Finishes", was a collection of articles from a woodworking magazine.  It covered the basics, but in a haphazard way, and it was filled with conflicting information between the different chapters, which were written by different authors. 

Compound You, Angles!

It was bound to happen.  Sure, most furniture is made exclusively with right-angles.  But I knew that some day I would have to face compound angles.  I thought it might be while fitting crown molding, or cutting raised-panel frames.  Turns out, my first experience with compound angles was tougher and more complicated than either of these two brain-busting tasks.  What's a compound angle, you ask?  Take a look at this image:

Notice how the piece of purple heart on the left has slanted edges, AND is shaped roughly like a trapezoid?  Those are compound angles. 

Kris V: The Casemaster

My friend Kris is a seasoned carpenter who has also been joining me on my joinery journey.  I'm sure he won't be embarrassed or angry if I publish some pictures of him here.... ;-)

In these photos, Kris is putting glue into a groove, as we go through the tense and time-sensitive process of "gluing-up" a cabinet case.   This particular case was a seven-foot long terrarium stand for a mutual friend of ours.

Although many furniture makers work alone, there are some cases where an extra pair of hands is helpful or even absolutely necessary.  With Kris, I benefit from the extra eyes and brain as well.  Sure, I have to split the money, but I make half the mistakes, so it works out well in the end.

90 Gallon Aquarium Stand Doing its Thing!

Supporting nearly 1400 pounds of rock and water, one of my aquarium stands is home to a 90-gallon reef aquarium that's just getting started.  It's a snug fit in a small room, but the owner of the tank is moving in a couple of months, where the 90 gallon tank will be in an appropriately-sized viewing room.