Getting Christmas Done, with (Almost) Two Whole Hours to Spare!

Ever since I started woodworking, I have tried to make my girls something every year for Christmas.  This would be an easy feat if I were an Elf, with nimble fingers and a quick mind that would make me a natural at making toys (even though I have yet to make any toys).  But having recently started a new job, and barely surviving the time demands created by parenting multiple teenage girls, I did what I could.

My initial plans were grandiose, and as the weeks to Christmas flew by, and I was staring at piles of rough cut lumber, I altered those plans and ended up with a reasonable lot.  The last coat of shellac was dry and all projects done at 10:25pm on December 24th.  Here is what I came up with, listed from youngest to oldest: 

For Tave, my 4 year old, I made here a music box that plays Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.  It is patterned after the 10-year anniversary box I made for Cass a few years ago.  Just in case there is anyone who actually reads this blog, you will recall that I made music boxes for my other girls two years ago, but Tave's was eaten by the table saw.  This is making up for that.  It's Maple and Purpleheart.  

Next is Emry, my 10 year old.  She is my fellow woodworker, so I went a different route.  I want to make here a tool cabinet, and a cabinet for the cups and plates she collects, but I figured those would be great projects for her to help with.  So I decided to make her a tool instead.  I used a chuck of Hard Maple and a Lie-Nielsen iron I got on clearance at Woodcraft a few years ago and I made her a single iron smoothing plane.  The wedge is Mahogany.  

For Quinn, my 15 year old, I made her a nightstand.  Quinn (and all of the other girls, too) is an avid reader.  So my wife suggested that I make here a 'reader's nightstand'.  I got an idea of how to take that concept to new and interesting levels.  This project was one of the most complex glue-ups I have ever done, but it came out great.  Quinn will be painting it to match her favorite books, so it is yet unfinished.  

Dash is my 17 year old.  I wanted to make her a desk organizer and I started making it out of solid Maple.  but while I was cutting the stop datos by hand, I realized that there was no possible way with the design I had made to keep the base flat 

So I changed the plan (with only one week until Christmas) and just made a small drawer.  I will in the coming weeks turn this into a bookend, and making a complimentary other half to it.  The drawer has purpleheart veneer over the pine substrate, so I had to get creative to get it clamped down.

Here is the finished drawer.  I finished it with Watco Wipe on Poly, applied with a rag, and let it sit for 4 hours between coats, then sanded with 320 grit and added another coat.  There are three coats.  

And that is Christmas 2013.  I learned a few things to do differently, a few things that work well, and had some interesting experiences.  Gluing up the nightstand was an adventure, and I have now made my first ever handplane.   The girls all seem to like it and I had fun.  I am excited to get back into the shop now without a pressing deadline.  

A Shop Tour

I've got my shop set up for the Minnesota winter, and am about to start several major Christmas projects that I will probably struggle to finish on time, so I figured I would have Emry (my 10-year-old) help me film a quick tour of my shop before the chaos starts.  Enjoy.

A Thank You to a Very Kind Man.

At the onset of my venture into woodworking, I have relied heavily on the wonderful people at WoodCentral.com.  This is, by far, the best woodworking forum on the internet.  There is an actual community, and just genuinely good people.  Although I owe thanks to a lot of people, recently Wiley Horne has delivered my daughter Emry (the one of my four girls who is interested in woodworking) and I an unbelievable act of kindness.

A few weeks ago, Wiley contacted me and asked if I had any need of a Stanley 45 or a cutting gauge.  I have actually been looking at getting my hands on both for some time now, so I asked him how much he wanted for them.  He responded that he wanted to give them to us.  Tonight, the box arrived, and Emry, Tave and I opened it.  I had Dash, my 16 year old, photograph it.  This is what was in the box:

I really need to lay off the cookies.  That belly is getting quite rotund.  In nautical terms, I am growing a bulbous bow.  

In total, Wiley sent us the Stanley 45, 23 cutters for it, a morticing gauge, a cutting gauge, a ten inch brace and an eight inch brace.  They are all beautiful tools, and I can't say enough how appreciative we are for them.  The only way I know to repay Wiley is to promise him that these tools will be loved and used for generations to come.  Thank you, my friend, thank you.  

While Dash was photographing us opening the box, she took this gem of a self portrait as a joke.  The least I could do to reward her magnificent sense of humor is to immortalize her joke on the internet.  Bon Appetit!  

With Mallets Towards None

Dan Smith is my blacksmith friend.  Everybody, by the way, needs a blacksmith friend.  Shortly before I got out of the Coast Guard and moved away from the Tidewater region, Dan asked me if I could make a mallet for him.  He was having a problem when be was doing fancy work, he would sometimes have to do some minor bending after he had put detail in a piece, and his steel hammer would damage his work, so commissioned me to make him a wooden mallet.  The mallet could be ugly, because it was going to be used to beat on red hot metal and is essentially sacrificial.

Well, the saga of the past year has prevented me from completing the mallet, until this past weekend.  I am not sure exactly what design he wanted, so I put these together for him, and we'll see if they work.  The heads are Southern Yellow Pine, and the handles are red oak, morticed in about 3/4 of the way into the head, then pinned with dowels.

We'll see how they work.  He should get them in next week.  If there are any blacksmiths out there who can advise me about wooden mallets for fancy work, by all means....

While I was making these mallets, my two youngest daughters, Emry (10) and Tave (4) were in the shop with me.  Emry is making a small box right now and was trying to clean up her joinery with a chisel and I realized that she needs a mallet, too.  (her box build will be featured in a future post).

Additionally, Tave has been carrying around a short piece of poplar dowel I used to practice threading wood saying it was her "hammer" and that with it she can fix anything.  So, she needed a mallet, too.

I had a chunk of white oak I had glued up about two years ago with the intent of making it into a bandsaw box, but quickly discovered that it would make a better mallet than box.  After squaring up the block of oak, I cut it into two mallet heads, chopped a mortice into each one, then glued in a red oak handle.  I shaped the handles with a spokeshave, then pegged the handle in with dowels.  My 14 year old, Quinn, wanted to burn their names into the mallets, and this is the final result:

Some happy girls with some pretty snappy mallets.  Emry has been using hers to work on her box, and Tave has been 'fixing' everything by tapping on them.  Luckily, she can't swing too hard yet.  

Workshop....Unplugged (for a while)

So, as my family and I were moving out of our house in North Carolina, nestled snugly between the swamps of hell and the fields of desperation, I received a job offer in Minnesota.  I took the job and moved up to St. Paul while my wife and daughters stayed in Atlanta with inlaws.  I found a little room to rent and figured it wold only be a month or two until my family moved up.  Long story short, it was almost 9 months.  So I set up shop in my little room.  I used the workbench I made for Emry, my 10 year old, and by force I finally went cold turkey into an unplugged work shop.  Here is what it looked like:

Not a whole lot of room, but with hand tools only, I didn't need much.  This forced me to get a lot better at the basics of woodworking.  Ripping a 12' board by hand forces you to get pretty good at sawing to a line (and helps you learn new and interesting cuss words).  Here are a few of the projects I made using all hand tools:

My roommates were pretty tolerant of my strange noises and piles of lumber, but didn't appreciate it when I was chopping mortices before bed.  After nine months of living apart, my wife and I bought our first house.  It's our dream house, really.  My wife loves the house, but for me, the insulated and walled in third garage stall workshop is a dream.  I moved all my tools in on the cement floor until we could figure out our budget for a better floor.

As you can see, I got the lumber rack hung, my daughter's workbench set up (complete with her personal tools above it, and her list of projects to build on yellow sticky notes-so cute).  But the cement floor was a drag, and I have to admit, I would cringe every time I saw a handplane sitting on the edge of a bench. We were able to scrape up a little extra money in the budget and decided to put a floor in.  I went with Dricore flooring.  It is a floating subfloor designed to go directly over concrete.  It allows the cement to breathe, and helps control moisture, plus it was pretty easy to install and only costs about $1.30/sqft.  Here is the installation:  

I liked that it only added about 7/8" to the concrete, so all the doors in the shop still work correctly.  If the floor were any thicker, I would have had to cut doors.  Well, 55 tiles later, my 220 sqft shop was done.  Behold, my happy place!

So, as you can see, my shop is no longer unplugged.  I still prefer hand tools, and all my joinery is by hand, but rough cutting stock by hand just sucks, so I'll cheat on that part.  The attentive reader may note that the table saw is NOT plugged in.  The shop does not have a 220v outlet, so it remains in hibernation, and I sleep well at night (until my friend helps me run the 220V to the shop, then I'll once again sleep in fear of the man-eating table saw).

So my journey has gone from all power tools, to all hand tools, to a hybrid but mostly hand tool woodshop.  I've learned a lot on the journey, and I'm happy with where I am.  So is Emry:

Now, it's time to start some Christmas projects...

Cleaning Out my Dad's Shop

After my father passed away last summer, I decided to start woodworking in earnest, something I had wanted to do for years.  In the days after his funeral I selected a few of what I thought were the most important tools:  The table saw, band saw, drill press, planer, a few clamps, one hand plane (a Lie-Nielsen #3), and a dovetail saw.  I thought this was a pretty good start.  It didn't take long to realize that I took too many power tools, and too few hand tools.  As I have learned more about woodworking over this past year, I am now at a point where I can identify most tools by sight, know what they are for, and approximately how much they are worth.  

Last month, my mother asked if I would come out and go through the rest of my dad's tools, so that she could have here garage back, and I could get some more of my dad's tools.  All the stars aligned when my father in law wanted to give us a car, and I had a chance to take a few weeks of leave.  The plan was to fly out to Seattle, pick up the car from my father in law, drive it to my mom's house, help her clean out the garage, load what I wanted to take into the car and drive it back to North Carolina.  Easy day.  I bought the plane ticket, took my leave, and realized that the car is a 1981 Honda Accord hatchback.  Ok, so the trip is a little crazy.  The car did make it from Seattle to my mom's house in Vancouver, WA (with the assistance of a tow truck), and after some minor repairs (a new water pump) I was ready to put this plan into action.  

Standing in my dad's shop was a surreal experience.  Knowing what I know about woodworking and what you can learn about a person's journey in life by the tools they own and the tools they use.  Here is what the shop looked like when I got there:  

It was pretty obvious that my dad had not used the router table, or jointer for quite some time.  This didn't surprise me, as he was more interested in hand tools for the last several years of his life.  The lathe got more use.  Then I opened the cabinet that housed his most often used tools:  

Here I found several Lie-Nielsen dovetail saws, hand plane parts, every type of sharpening system I have ever heard of (Scary sharp, oil stones, water stones, shapton stones, and a wide variety of strops.  Oddly though, there were no diamond stones).  This cabinet also had all his marking knives and gauges, angle gauges, inlay tools, pen kits, and a few special pieces of wood.  Next I opened the cabinet that housed his planes:  

Now, over the past year, I have developed a wish-list of hand tools.  Things that I felt like I needed to be able to work better.  There was not a single tool on my list that my dad did not have.  The one thing I can't figure out is why he had a Lie-Nielsen #1 in his most often used plane drawer.  It's cool and all, but I don't see too much usefulness.  

Going through my dad's shop, I learned that he loved fine tools, and I could see parts of his personality in his progression.  For example, in the plane drawer was a small router plane that he made, using a sharpened allen key for the iron.  It worked, but was pretty limited.  My guess is that he needed one for a project, didn't have one, made one, then decided to buy one.  You will note the Veritas router plane.  This was the way my dad was.  He would use what he had on hand to solve the immediate problem, but if the problem was recurrent, he would invest in the proper tool for the job.  He was a practical man, and a problem solver, but as an engineer, he also appreciated the tool just as much as the work it performed (I can't say I am much different.  Hand tools are beautiful).  He also loved fully functional miniatures:  

He had several like this, as well a several of the miniature Veritas planes and clamps.  They were all sharpened, and set up to cut.  I don't know if he ever used them, but they were ready to work.  I feel like I got to know my dad a little better, and that as I take and use his tools, I can add to his legacy a little.  Buried in the back of his cabinet, I found his first dovetail joint.  It is signed by both he and Frank Klautz.  His first dovetail turned out a lot better than mine, but he did have a better teacher...

While there, my mom asked me to make some flower boxes for the house, and a shelf for the fireplace. For both projects, I used lumber left over from making my dad's casket.  I also made a small toy knife for my brothers kids while I was waiting for glue to dry:  

On the fireplace, you can see a bowsaw made my Stephen Shepherd that my mom really likes, and on the desk behind my nieces and nephew is a flag case made by Dale Lenz.  Both are cherished by my mother.  On my last day there, my mom, brother and I posed for this picture (note my WoodCentral shirt), and visited my dad's grave:  

And I started the drive across the country.  In the 1981 Accord, I had my dad's lathe, dust collector, hand planes, chisels, saws, clamps, turning tools, hide glue, special pieces of wood, and other miscellaneous tools.  All told it was about 900 pounds worth of tools. I actually had to put blocks in the rear springs to prevent them from bottoming out.  

Miraculously, the car made it to Utah, where I had a wonderful visit with Stephen Shepherd:  

It was nice to meet him, see his shop, and enjoy his hospitality.  He was kind enough to give me the parts to make a bowsaw like the one he made for my dad, I will blog about that when I get it done.  

Well, the car made it all the way home, 3188 miles, and just to make sure that I knew it was a miracle, the morning after I got home, the car wouldn't start.