Popular Woodworking Editors' Blog

The “Gluebo” has been put through its workholding paces lately as I’ve been working on a 33" x 84-1/2" screen door for my house. I stayed after work on Friday to rout a 1/2" x 1/2" rabbet in which the screen panels will seat, and my bench is plenty long enough to securely clamp the door between the end vise and a bench dog to hold it in place for routing. I did, I admit, have a frisson of trepidation about routing on my new bench before we get to show it off at Woodworking in America next week (routing is not my strong suit; I’m always fearful of tipping the router base and ruining my workpiece, the bench, my hands…). But, because the long edges of the door hung off the sides of the bench, I didn’t have too much fear until I got to the ends. But no problem – I just moved slowly and carefully, and all went well.

Also, while I’ve been vocal about wanting to move my bench against a wall (it would be nice to have easily accessible hanging tool storage), it was easy to walk around the bench as I routed; I didn't have to move the bench, or reposition my work. (Now that I’m done with that though, I’m eyeing a wall space again).

Then, I clamped the screen door into the leg vise with support from the board jack to trim the tenons and wedges flush at the through-mortises. Rock solid.

And as you can see, the large bench also came in handy for painting; I used Painter’s Pyramids to lift the door off the benchtop, and again was able to walk around the entire thing to easily get a coat on. Now it just needs a few more coats of paint to help it defy the elements.

When it came to attaching screen to my mitered frames, I was able to secure the interior of the frame across a bench dog and the adjustable “Wonder Pup” from Veritas, which allowed me to stretch the screen across the frame for stapling, without having to worry about flexing the frame as I pulled the screen snug.

All in all, I have nothing but love for my new LVL bench…except that it looks “pink” in a lot of photos. It’s actually a deep brown/red – the color of dried blood (I bloodied my knuckles on the “Pet Screen” – that stuff is seriously tough – and briefly thought about wiping it onto one of the legs. But I opted for a clean shop rag).

The bench will be featured in the November 2009 issue of Popular Woodworking (mailing to subscribers now, and on newsstands the second week of October). You can see a video tour of the bench here. Plus, we’ll be hauling it to Valley Forge for Woodworking in America: Hand Tools and Techniques, Oct 2-4 — and we've extended the "Early-Bird Discount through Sept. 27.

— Megan Fitzpatrick

Monday, September 21, 2009 1:30:55 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [10] 

If you look at the video I made about buying lumber, you can see how I approach that task. If the piece were more complicated, I would have had my cut list in hand. The most important part of the video is at the end. I have all the raw materials I need, I’ve checked them against my list to make sure I have enough and then I buy an extra board. That board is still kicking around the shop, but it was money well spent. Driving to the lumberyard in the middle of a project to get one more piece of wood isn’t an experience you want to repeat.

If I’m not picking the lumber piece by piece, I buy way too much, often two or three times as much as I think I need. I have a coffee table in my living room that I made about 25 years ago. I remember picking through 100BF of lumber to make a top that is about 5 square feet. I still enjoy this table because I did a great job matching the three pieces I glued together for the top. If I had put it together from mismatched pieces to save a buck, I wouldn’t feel the same way. As I pick pieces for specific parts, I mark them up with a lumber crayon or chalk to remind me where they go. I look for different grain patterns for tops and panels than I do for frame parts or legs. It would be nutty to think you could plot this out before you see the lumber you have to work with.

I cut things to rough lengths and widths before I head for the jointer and planer. I like to leave a lot of extra length, but I’ll come pretty close in width if I want a specific piece in a specific place. How much extra is entirely subjective and once again, it mostly depends on the character of the wood on hand. I usually mill in two steps, leaving everything too thick and too wide for a few days. When I do the final milling, I’m picky about thicknesses. Thickness has more of an effect on other parts than many people realize. If you buy lumber surfaced by someone else, you need to check the thickness and assess the impact on the size of other parts before you start complaining about an inaccurate cut list.

When I have my parts edged and surfaced, I rip parts to width, but generally leave pieces about 1/4" too wide and several inches too long. I wait as long as I can to cut to a finished width. I like to run one edge over the jointer before ripping. I set the depth of cut on the joiner to remove 1/32", so if I have a part that needs to be 3" wide I run one edge over the joiner, rip at the table saw to 3 1/32", then remove the saw marks with one last pass on the joiner. If I have a large number of parts, I’ll send them as a bunch on edge through the planer. That removes the table saw marks and makes them all exactly the same size. This takes some extra work, but it assures me that I have parts that are really straight and accurately sized.

The extra length also stays as long as possible. I usually make a practice joint or two, and I like to use stock the exact thickness and width of my finished parts. This is where I use the extra length, and often I’ll cut an extra piece or two for testing or emergencies. Most of the time the distance between joints is more important than the overall length of the pieces. I usually make a storyboard and after I’ve rough-cut the stock I refer to that rather than measure, or I mark directly from the work as it progresses.

The cut list is an important tool in the process of making a piece of furniture, but like most tools it should be used at the right time and in the right way. When I made kitchen cabinets, I went ahead and cut all the parts ahead of time. In that situation, that procedure made sense; the bugs were worked out of the process and I was making something over and over again. When I’m building a piece of furniture, I’m essentially making a prototype and I get better results when I leave my options open for as long as possible.

--Robert W. Lang

Monday, September 21, 2009 6:45:28 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [0] 

The major effort involved in building a piece of furniture is problem solving and establishing a sequence for the work. After that, it’s almost all cutting to a line and repairing the places where I missed cutting to the line. I like to plan my work because I don’t always make good design or engineering decisions at the workbench, and my skills at adding and subtracting seem to disappear when I step into the shop. My approach is colored by years of trying to make a profit, but I think building efficiently is still a worthy goal even when I’m building something just for fun.

I almost always draw a plan and develop a cut list, but what I draw for my own use is a lot less developed than what I draw and detail for publication. Drawing and planning are problem-solving tools, and when I have the problem solved I can start building. Figuring out what size to make the parts is one of the most important steps to understanding how a piece of furniture goes together, and I don’t think we make the best use of available space in the magazine when we publish a cut list. We’re serving up frozen fish sticks for dinner instead of letting our readers learn how to cook a rainbow trout. Of course if you want the rainbow trout you also need to learn how to catch, gut and clean the thing.

A cut list isn’t the statement of facts it appears to be, it is a series of if/then statements. If the sides of a box are really 3/4" thick, then the length of the pieces in between will be X. If the width of the stiles is what is called for in the plan, then the rails in between will be the distance named in the drawing. If you miss the mark on one of these numbers early on, then you set off a chain reaction, and turn the remaining parts into a row of falling dominoes. It’s easy to think that a bunch of little errors will cancel each other out, but the opposite is true. All those little errors will congregate at the most visible place on the finished piece they can find. Once there, they will hold a party to mock you.

Making a cut list is rather tedious, but it isn’t that difficult, and it’s an opportunity to build a piece mentally before you begin building it for real. I look at the drawing, and start with the largest parts or sub assemblies and work my way down. I compare distances in the drawing with sizes of parts and make sure that these numbers agree. I consider the joints that hold the parts together and how that will affect the overall sizes of the pieces.

One of the advantages of making your own cut list is that you can adapt it to the way you work. When you use a cut list from a book or magazine, parts that fit inside other parts, like doors or drawers, are sized the way the guy who made the list works. There could be gaps you could drive a truck through at the end, or everything might be too big so you can trim it down. These aren’t necessarily errors; they are different ways of approaching a task.

And there is the matter of fractions and human errors. Publishers don’t like to see anything smaller than 1/16" in print; so in many drawings and lists numbers are rounded off. That’s OK if you’re the one doing the rounding and you know what’s going on. It’s frustrating if you’re following another person's plan and you end up long or short. There are also many ways for errors to sneak into a published drawing or list. Cut lists don’t automatically appear, generated by an infallible computer. This is the work of human beings, and the process to get from an accurate CAD drawing to the printed page is more complicated than it appears.

Even if I’m working from a cut list I’ve made, on a project I designed, I compare the completed list to the drawing once or twice before I begin. If the project is complex, I make a story pole, to use a both as a reference while I work and as one more place to double-check the numbers. Lately I’ve been using SketchUp to make combination detail drawings and parts lists like this. It would take far too long to do that in another program, and we don’t have room to do it in print, but it’s a nice way to organize information you will need to build.

The cut list by itself doesn’t have much value. Paired with a drawing it is incredibly valuable. The exercise of making your own, or at least checking a published list against a drawing is that it makes you go through the building process before you get to the shop. You have to examine the parts and consider how they go together, and what you need to do to each part to make it fit in the whole. When you get to the shop and start building for real you can do so confidently. If you depend on someone else to make the list, you're missing an opportunity to learn, understand and develop your skills and confidence.

--Robert W. Lang

Sunday, September 20, 2009 11:10:53 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [6] 

I've been (slowly) working on a mortise-and-tenon screen door for the front of my Victorian house; I wrote a few days ago about the construction. Late on Friday afternoon, I routed a 1/2" x 1/2" rabbet in which to seat the screen inserts, and I put together the screen frames. The plan is to go into the office/shop tomorrow and paint the frames, then tack on the screening (I've no idea how to do that – I'm leaning toward wire staples, but if you have suggestions...).

First, however, I thought I'd best pull off the existing aluminum screen door and framing, and see what horrors were hidden underneath. The last few owners of this house did some, uh, interesting installation and repair jobs; I'm always bemused/shocked/terrified/disheartened by what I uncover when I pull up carpets, replace trim, etc. Under the screen-door framing, I fully expected to find rotting and/or missing trim; terrible, multiple attempts at hinge mortises; and who knows what else. I was prepared to spend at least a day prepping and repairing the jamb before I could even think about fitting and installing my new door.

A former owner, the guy who installed the aluminum screen door, is a bonehead (and Steve B., If you're reading this, I'd say the same to your face). Down one side, he used nails instead of screws, and in the intervening years, said nails got covered with eleventy billion layers of caulk. Ugh. But once I scraped off the caulk and levered the nails out from the backside of the framing, I was able to get at them with nail pullers. That, however, is going to be the worst part of the job. 

The original trim is in remarkably good shape; I won't have to match or repair any moulding at all. And, on the decorative moulding there's only a layer of two of...shellac? varnish? so the lines are still crisp; a gentle scraping is all it will take before I'm ready to paint.

Now I'm just hoping the new door goes in with as little trouble as the old one came out.

— Megan Fitzpatrick

Saturday, September 19, 2009 1:02:44 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [1] 

Sometimes, great woodworking tools come in very small packages – and at a very small price.

We just received a few samples of the “GripSharp,” a combination pencil grip and pencil sharpener that slides over the business end of any common pencil. With just a few twists, the sharpener removes wood from the pencil, but the blade doesn’t touch the graphite. While this leaves a long bit of the graphite extending past the supporting wood, you leave the GripSharp in place, and it supports the graphite.

If you pull the GripSharp off of the pencil, the marking end will look strange (and snap off easily), but why would you? The GripSharp provides a comfortable, ergonomic grip, and you’ll always have a sharpener handy – literally at your fingertips.

However, because the GripSharp removes only wood, it doesn’t provide a sharp pencil point on the graphite. So if you use a pencil for, say, marking out dovetails, you’ll still want a mechanical pencil (we like .5 mm, high-polymer graphite) on hand. But because it produces a thick point, the GripSharp is the ideal tool for turning any pencil into a marker for rough cuts.

It’s available in a range of colors, for only $2.89 each. For more information, visit the company’s web site (gripsharpco.com).

— Megan Fitzpatrick

Friday, September 18, 2009 1:52:49 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [5] 

Last year at a class I taught at the Marc Adams School of Woodworking (MASW), I was amazed at the different mallets class participants brought with them. I couldn’t believe the choices were so varied, so I posted a photo and blog entry (click here to read that entry). What surprises me even more is that a few of those same mallets were in this year’s class – I’m not sure if those woodworkers were repeat offenders paying their debt to society or simply crazy enough to take another class under my tutelage.
 
This year at MASW what caught my eye, mallets aside, were the different dovetail saws being used. The samples shown above are just a few of the different saws woodworkers dragged into the class. It’s not all the examples; I just gathered up the different tools within reach.
 
If you’re a dovetail saw aficionado, you should be able to name the saws from right to left or left to right. But I’m willing to bet that the one with the big blue handle gives some of you fits. If you blow up the photo to get a closer look, you’ll see the name Marples (manufactured by Irwin Industrial Tool Company) printed on the saw. Most of us know that name for chisels, but this saw proves there’s more to Marple’s than plastic-handled chisels.
 
If you do an Internet search for a Marple’s Pull Saw (in shopping mode with Google), you’ll find dozens of listings with as many prices to match. In fact, would you be surprised to find that saw priced at $79? I was. Especially because you can find it priced elsewhere at below $20. (But then I saw that the higher price was a four-pack of saws!).
 
I couldn’t resist giving the saw a turn, so I laid out a couple dovetails and took it for a spin. It worked fine. As a former dozuki user who appreciates a pull-stroke cut, I enjoyed having a more-stout handle to work with. I doubt you'll find the Marple's saw at the Woodworking in America: Hand Tools and Techniques Conference, but you will find a number of the other saws available at the free Marketplace.

— Glen D. Huey

Monday, September 14, 2009 12:30:39 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [4] 

In the Sept. 9 e-mail newsletter, I included a small picture of my new LVL bench (featured in the upcoming November issue). On top of it was a wooden screen door I’m making to replace the nasty aluminum one I now have. I’m just excited that after four years with the magazine, I finally have a bench large enough, and with great workholding solutions, on which to make a 33" wide x 84" tall project. (I’m the smallest person in our shop, yet I habitually build the largest projects). Anyway, I got a surprising number of questions about the door – so here are the answers (and now I’m sorry I didn’t bother to take step photos).

First, I measured my door opening, then added a 1/4" or so to accommodate fitting the finished project – I expect that to be the most difficult part of the project, because in my 1895 house, nothing is square (or level, for that matter).

I decided to go with poplar, because I plan to paint the door with several coats of exterior-grade latex. Were I using a clear finish, I might have opted for teak, cedar or cypress, because they hold up well in exterior applications – though I’d have added a few layers of spar varnish for good measure. But poplar is cheap…and so am I, which is why I decided to make the door myself instead of ordering a custom one. But I did troll a lot of custom door sites for design inspiration.

I had to balance my plan decisions with the tooling available to me. I knew I wanted to use traditional wedged through-mortise construction, and we don’t have any 1/4" bits for the mortiser that can cut much beyond 2" deep. So I decided on 4" wide stiles. For visual balance, I also opted for 4" wide rails for the top and center, and a 6" bottom rail. Not only do the extra 2" at the bottom visually ground the door, the wider rail adds strength – and will hopefully discourage the cats (at least 2" worth of discouragement, anyway) from trying to jump through the screen to get at the many stray cats that hang around my porch (anyone want a cat? I have a few to spare – and they’re already altered. Seriously – I’ll even throw in a bag of free cat food).

So $38 later, I had a pile of 5/4 straight-grained poplar, ready to work. I milled it flat on the jointer and planer, cut the two stiles to length at 84" strong (yes, I’ve just slipped into carpenter jargon) and all the rails to length at 33" strong. I marked out the three mortises on each stile with a 3/4" shoulder at the top of the top rail and a 1" shoulder at the bottom of the bottom rail, and 1/2" shoulders for the rest. I really don’t know why – it just seems sensible that the two places at the outside edges that will bang hardest against the frame should have a stronger shoulder.

Then I set up the mortiser with a 1/4" bit, did my best to center it perfectly across the edge of my stock, and started plunging. I cut all three mortises on the first stile a little better than 2" deep, the flipped it end for end and cut them again – that way, if you don’t get the bit perfectly centered, the mortise still ends up in the center (if a little larger than you intended). Then I flipped it edge for edge, and followed the same procedure on the other side. The holes met in the middle (after I cleared the dust out with a screwdriver). Then I cut the mortises in the other stile, and took an ibuprofen break. (I have a bad right shoulder – mortising hurts. Wah.)

I measured the width of the mortise carefully, and set up the dado stack on the table saw to cut the 4"-long tenon faces (with repeated passes). Because the shoulders are inconsistent, I cut them by hand with a carcase saw, and cleaned up after my cuts with a chisel (I simply must work on my hand saw skills). A test fit revealed that two of my tenons were a wee bit fat, so I cleaned those up with a float (a shoulder plane would work, too). Once everything fit well with hand pressure, I eyeballed the middle of each tenon and cut a kerf.

Then it was over to the band saw to cut some long, narrow wedges from my poplar offcuts. I used an old toothbrush to spread glue on all surfaces of both the mortise and the  tenon, then fit all the joints together, and quickly moved on to the wedges. As I mentioned, I did a poor job of cutting the tenon shoulders by hand. So while the plan was to wedge the center of each tenon, the reality was that I had to wedge some of them at the top and/or bottom as well. I’m told this is actually a traditional approach…so yeah, I meant to do that. I checked for square then clamped it up to dry and went home for the day. The next day, I stopped in to take it out of the clamps and used Jameel Abraham’s new carbide-tipped "Skraper" to remove the squeeze-out. That little tool works like a champ (and for the moment, it’s available only at the Benchcrafted booth at the Oct. 2-4 Woodworking in America in Valley Forge, Pa. – admission to the marketplace is free, so come by and check it out).

Now, the door is stored against the back of my workbench. This weekend, I hope to find time to rout a rabbet for the screen inserts, make the screen frames, and decide on the hardware (which will be by far the most expensive part of the project).

— Megan Fitzpatrick

Friday, September 11, 2009 3:04:51 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [5] 

If you ask most woodworkers what a block plane is good for, the usual response is trimming end grain. While this is true, there are many other chores that it performs well. One of my favorites is shaping edges. A block plane can chamfer or round over an edge in less time than it takes to find the wrenches and install a router bit. And no, you don't need an attachment to make a nice chamfer.

I'm currently working on a three-legged stool for the next issue of Woodworking magazine, and the shape of the legs is an example of where a block plane can do something a router can't-round an edge with a varying radius. These legs taper, and at the wider bottom end of the leg, the outside edge has a radius of about half an inch. At the top the radius is about an eighth of an inch.  Here's how I go about making this edge.


This is a two-stage process. There is a lot of material to be removed, and then the edge needs to be refined. The first thing I do is open up the mouth of the plane, and skew the blade as much as I can. On one side I can take a thick shaving, and on the other end I can take a finer one. This lets me work from coarse to medium simply by shifting the position of the plane side-to side relative to the edge I'm working on. This is also a place where the inexpensive high angle block plane with the gaping maw I bought before I knew better works pretty well.


Putting a radius on an edge begins with making a chamfer, then planing off the sharp points.It's easy to do because you're only removing the point, then removing the two points you just created. In short order you have so many facets that the edge is essentially a curve.  If the radius were constant, I would chamfer the entire edge. Because this one will taper, I raise the back of the plane, knock off the corner and chamfer back from the end a few inches.

Then I back up about six inches and continue the chamfer until I have a continuous edge to the end of the leg. I repeat this until the entire edge is chamfered, tapering from very little at one end to relatively wide at the other. All it takes is to balance the sole of the plane on the pointy part of the edge. Don't worry about the exact angle. If you do this a few times you get a sense of where 45 degrees is. If a chamfer is your goal, you can check with a square if you feel the need, but I think a soft chamfer and an inexact angle look better. If you want it to look like you used a router, you should probably put down the block plane and use one.

When the edge is chamfered the entire length of the leg, I begin to remove the corners between the faces of the leg and the chamfer. Again, this is done by balancing the plane on the sharp corner between the two flat surfaces. I can control how much material is removed with each pass of the plane by shifting it slightly sideways with each pass. At the start, I want the maximum depth of cut to flatten out the point. As the chamfer widens, I shift over so that the effort of pushing the plane stays relatively constant and tear out is minimized.

It doesn't take long to go from a corner with two sides to four, eight, sixteen and so on. Each time you knock the corners off it gets closer to being round, and the facets get narrower. When the curve begins to take shape, it's time to retract the blade to take a finer shaving and close down the mouth. The shavings on the left in this picture are the finishing cuts, much thinner and narrower than the initial cuts in the upper right.


This leg is almost done. With the long edges complete, I've started to round over the bottoms. The curve isn't quite finished, but it's pretty close. A few swipes with #150 grit Abranet will remove the tiny remaining high points and my leg will be ready to assemble.

--Robert W. Lang

Friday, September 11, 2009 2:32:01 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [1] 

Few writers or teachers can be given credit for influencing an entire generation. That takes someone special, in the right place at the right time. James Krenov made a generation of woodworkers stop and think about their work, their tools and their material. After Krenov's first book, A Cabinetmaker's Notebook appeared, we all looked at these things a little differently. James Krenov died Wednesday evening in Fort Bragg, California.

His legacy will live on for several generations of woodworkers, due to his involvement with the Fine Woodworking program at the College of the Redwoods. The program was founded in 1981 specifically to give Krenov a place to teach his philosophy and methods. Hundreds of woodworkers have passed through the school, as will hundreds more in the years to come.

Krenov was just short of his 89th birthday, and funeral services will be private. His family asks that those wishing to make contributions in his donate to The James Krenov Scholarship Fund at the College of the
Redwoods. The man will be missed, but his influence will carry on.

--Robert. W. Lang

Thursday, September 10, 2009 3:27:07 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [1] 

It is my opinion that a cut list is one of the most useless additions to woodworking project articles. Yes, these charts, or pages in some cases, do contain beneficial information, but many woodworkers rely solely on the lengths, widths and thicknesses of the cut list when they mill project parts. And they shouldn’t.

There are sizes given that are correct, but a small adjustment at the start of a project changes the figures as you move further into the build. And sometimes these figures are completely wrong (take a look at the published cut list below and see if it’s possible to build the project. We continue to get calls asking if this list is correct.) My favorite cut list question deals with the secretary in “The Illustrated Guide to Building Period Furniture” (Popular Woodworking books). The case bottom is listed at 3-5/8" thick (oops). I get a few messages per year asking me to confirm or deny! (Just so you know, the thickness should read 5/8".)
 
This past week I taught a class at the Marc Adams School of Woodworking just outside Indianapolis. As I began the class, I handed out a simple line drawing of the front and side elevations. I suggested to those in the class that the cut list (sent out as they registered for the class) and the plan differ and everyone would need to work through the project as they proceeded. (Real life is a great teaching method!)
 
The variation between the drawing figures and the cut list numbers was the major difference. If you followed the plan, you cut the case side rails at one length, but the cut sheet had a different set of figures. Almost everyone in the class used the cut sheet to begin the chest of drawers, which was fine. However, most class attendees also used the cut sheet to move two or three steps ahead while waiting to get to one of five mortise machines set up for the class (there are many, many mortise-and-tenon joints in this chest).
 
Herein is the problem. The cut sheet dimension for the raised panel of the bottom unit was incorrect if you chose to use the cut sheet for the rails on the sides. But it was correct if you followed the plan. All but a few class participants came to me when their bottom units did not fit the case sides after the backboard rabbet was in place. When asked if they worked through the plan or simply relied on the cut sheet, most confessed to using the cut sheet. At that point, they had to work through the plan to come up with a solution.
 
So how do you use a cut sheet effectively? The best use of a cut list is to find the board footage of the project and to line up the parts as you select lumber. Also, use the cut list to determine the size of the case. Once that assembly is finalized, all the measurements are taken from that case. Use the cut sheet only where you know you can gain accurate information because the size is not dependent on earlier work. There’s no problem if you use the cut sheet to get the width of your drawer dividers, but if you vary that width from the cut list, make sure you check the lengths of the drawer runners before blindly cutting to the cut list length.
 
So how do you use the cut list on projects? I’ve known woodworkers who cut every part to the cut list before they begin to assemble the project. (I cannot see how they complete a piece.) Do you follow the list religiously? Use part of the information? Or do you find cut list totally void of useful information? Leave a comment to let us know.

— Glen D. Huey

Tuesday, September 08, 2009 10:36:32 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Comments [40]