How I Make Posts

Posted on September 4, 2016 by Jef

(Formerly titled “How Posts Are Made” but I have no Earthly idea what that is. I don’t know how professional postmakers make their posts, and I don’t know what the correct postmaking techniques are or what the appropriate post-making tools are. All I know is how I make posts.)

The only stock I had available was all milled to 3/4, so I had to join a bunch together to make that middle part. See, I don’t even know what post parts are called. Whatever that middle part is called, that’s what I made. Oh, and I made some strips on the router, and they’ll go around the, um, the other post parts. Whatever they’re called.

Laying out the joinery took some very careful planning.

This kind of joint is a lot stronger than just doing a simple mitered joint, and it fits together very squarely. In fact, it’s hard to make it not square. These will be for those things at the top and the bottom of the post.

Everything’s going together very nicely.

Just because there were a lot of pieces being glued, I used tape to hold them all together, then clamped them. And then I remembered what happened the last time I left clamps on tape overnight (the glue from the tape pressed into the wood and made areas that didn’t take stain very well) so I had to remove all the clamps and take off the tape and put the clamps back on. Live and learn, and forget, and re-learn.

It’s a clamp bonanza! Not to mention a tripping hazard.

The top part thing (maybe it’s called the cap?) was a little more difficult than I wanted it to be. Took a few tries to get it correct. Plus, that wood’s just a bit too big for the saw, and there were cuts where the saw couldn’t cut all the way through. The end result looks good, though.

In the end it all came together. These are going on my stairs and they’ll support the handrail at the top and bottom.

There’s one block I didn’t glue on, and that’s so I could bolt it into place and affix it with a couple of pocket screws. I’ve done this a couple times before on other projects, and it can get a little tricky to get them standing perfectly straight and tightly fitted to the floor. I’ll have to be ready for anything.

Here’s our newest toy, something to keep us toasty warm when it gets cold out. A pity I can’t use it in my shop, it would be lovely to have that kind of heat in there, but it’s an outdoor toy.

So, now I need a closet door

Posted on August 21, 2016 by Jef

Don’t ask what happened to the old closet door. It was one of those cheap, crooked hollow-core doors, the kind that I hate. Really hate. And I have a lot of martial arts weaponry in this house. Let’s just say the old door is no longer in one piece, and we’ll leave it at that

I seem to have made a few doors since I got here. I’d actually prefer to restore old salvaged doors (yeah, I’m weird. I know. No need to tell me that.) but around here that’s not easy to obtain, so I’ve just made my own. I just use construction lumber, a little distressed and more than a little imperfect. It’s knotty. It’s naughty! It’s bent and twisted. But I like the look of it when it all comes together. On this door, the sandpaper I went through cost me more than the actual lumber.

Dry fit. Yup, it’s a door.

Glue-up went really easy and the door seems like it’s going to be flat, straight, and square. Not a lot of huge defects on this, despite all the knots there weren’t a whole lot of fissures or cracks. All the cuts went well, nothing split and there were no huge splinters to impale my hand on. I foresee a little shrinkage in its future, as its final resting place is right next to the wood burning stove, so it’s going to dry out like a bone in the desert. But I can handle that. As long as it opens and closes without having to use a fireman’s axe I think I’ll be happy.

Speaking of doors…

Hole in the Wall

Posted on July 17, 2016 by Jef

You know that space in the way back of the closet that you can’t ever get to? We have a space like that, and it’s really inconvenient. It’s near the base of the stairs so the only way to get there is to crouch and crawl, and remove the boxes and baskets and whatever else got put in the way. It was to the point that if I knew something was stored way back under there, I’d rather go buy a new one than crawl in there and retrieve it.

I thought this would be a great place for some built-in cabinetry.

The logistics of this was actually a little tougher than I thought. The little heating thing down there meant I couldn’t make these cabinets all the way to the floor, they’d need about a foot of clearance, so that right there eliminated 12 cubic feet of storage space that I’ll never get back.

But still I was determined to make this thing work. The final cut list would consume exactly one sheet of plywood, which I took to be a sign that this was meant to be.

But once it started coming together full scale, it made me realize there were still problems to overcome. Those small boxes seemed a lot bigger in my head, but now it was clear that I had to make these long, narrow drawers, or they’d be useless.

Not to mention the problem of how to get polyurethane in there. I should have finished everything before I assembled it.

I did find an unused electrical outlet in there, and it works and tested out okay, so I decided to move it to the front of the cabinet. Make it a little more useful. Please consider that it was 100% useless before, so anything would be more useful.

Once the carcass was assembled, it was time to make and fit the frame. Nothing fancy, just a bit of hemlock I had lying around.

The doors came out looking really good. And they were flat this time too. And square. I’m getting better at making doors, I think.

I think the hinges cost about as much as the plywood and the hemlock put together. I like good hinges, though. Makes the install go a lot smoother.

And here it is stained and finished and hardware installed and fitted into its hole. Still some adjustments to make before final install, but I think I’ll wait until I have the rest of that paneling knocked out and I’m ready to drywall. I just pinned it in place so I don’t have to look at the hole in the wall anymore.

Not sure if that storage is anything good except for ninja throwing stars and nunchucks but I could make that work.

Saw this heron out fishing at low tide. If he seems a little annoyed at all the tourists, well, he is, I assure you.

The Pirate Crate & Box Company

Posted on June 5, 2016 by Jef

I’m really enjoying making these boxes out of scrap plywood! These are all storage/organizer boxes for places like under the kitchen sink and some small tool boxes for in the shop. I’m feeling a lot less disorganized now. Anyway, I’m enjoying making these so much that this may be what I (eventually) do for a living!

I’ll call it The Pirate Box & Crate Company, and I’ll make boxes for organization, for storage, and custom boxes of whatever size someone would need. We invest so much into plastic boxes and storage containers, and all that plastic either sits in a landfill or floats around in the sea and washes up on a beach somewhere. I think it’s a good idea to get back to some basic wooden boxes like this. They’re easy to make, and would be fairly quick once the process is streamlined.

Here’s a chest I made for our hammock, when it’s not in use.

And here I am assembling more boxes. These things are a cinch to make! This box will replace a cardboard shoe box that housed odd and specialty drill bits and replacement blades, and has been falling apart rapidly for years. It barely holds together anymore. This box here will last decades.

And it’s all made out of scrap plywood and some 1x2s that I had laying around.

I designed the lids to these guys from the traditional Japanese toolbox, with a lid that slides into place. You can make them so the lid locks into place with a tapered piece of wood, but I didn’t see the need. Both boxes are going to be for things I access regularly, and they won’t really need to travel anywhere, so I can leave the lids loose on top of them.

I’m enjoying this process more than I probably should be. These things are quick and fun to build.

To the right is my old box of gardening gloves. To the left is the new glove box. How awesome is that?

And I have got LOTS of scrap plywood left over to make more boxes. Going to make some bigger ones next. This is so fun! And yes, I totally get that my non-woodworker readers out there completely don’t understand any of this.

Not a box, but a toothpick holder. Before this, I kept my shop toothpicks in a box made out of duct tape.

The low tide today was 3 feet below sea level. It was surreal just to go down there and walk around on ground that is underwater for the vast majority of the year. All manner of birds and critters were about, enjoying the newly exposed seafood menu.

Built in Bookshelf

Posted on May 15, 2016 by Jef

Please ignore that ridiculous handrail and those spindled balusters. They’re going soon. They’re going next. In fact, as soon as I hit ‘publish’ on this blog post I may start tearing them out. In their background is the finished loft, all done now. I just completed the built in bookshelf and all the finish trim that goes around it.

I made the bookshelf out of the leftovers from the kitchen cabinet project. I literally had just enough to do all this. My pile of leftover scrap could fit in a lunch bag. That didn’t leave a lot of room for error, if I screwed something up (which never ever happens) I couldn’t re-make any piece.

The bookshelf it replaces was half its size, and not only that, this built-in is double sided! It can store about four times as many books as the last one. Maybe after this house is all done, I’ll have time to read books. For now, I’ll just have to collect them.

This isn’t really fine woodworking, though I used traditional joinery for the cabinet door and frame, and for the little end cap. One of these days I’ll make a nice piece of furniture, but right now I’m in a hurry to get this stupid house done. Check out those crazy hinges on the cabinet! They’re pretty solid too, I’m quite happy with them.

The shelves look a little bare now, but trust me, this house abhors a vacuum. They’ll get filled up soon.

Haven’t posted a critter pic in a while, so here’s a mink at the beach.

It’s the detail work

Posted on April 9, 2016 by Jef

When I opened up the kitchen wall, I made this little half-wall between the kitchen and living room. I capped the half-wall with this 2×6 that I planed down and smoothed out and stained until it was passable. Nothing fancy, as you can see, which fits in well with this “nothing fancy” house. But now that the kitchen is getting a little fancier, I thought this piece might need to go.

The backsplash over the new countertop will be something pretty cool, so to replace this cap I wanted to use something nice. Hardwoods can be hard to find on this island, but I did find this piece of milled oak that was just long enough (seriously, within one inch) to do what I needed it to do.

Measurements are very carefully marked out before I start making sawdust out of it.

Making the band that goes around the edge is a little tricky, as the kind of banding I use in this house takes at least four passes over the router, and some of those oak 1×2’s were 12 feet long. My shop isn’t set up to rout lengths of wood that big, so I had to move the router table out into the middle of the garage, and carefully feed each piece through featherboards to clamp it down against the fence and the router bit securely. That length of wood tends to get a little springy and unwieldy unless it’s adequately supported, and I don’t have the bench length to do that… anyway, enough boring woodworker talk.

Too Long; Didn’t Read: It was a really tricky cut.

The successfully routed bands fit well against the cut cap.

Shaping the edge is a little tricky too. You can shape the length of it on the router, but against the grain it needs to be sawn by hand. However, since most of the routs are circular, I could use a drill to make those circular cuts against the grain, and then just cut it on the miter saw.

TL; DR: Another tricky cut.

I then clean up the edges by clamping two sides together to ensure symmetry. I use sharp scrapers, files, x-acto knives and a little bit of sandpaper wrapped around a wine bottle cork. Got plenty of them laying around the shop.

TL; DR: Just stop reading and look at the pretty pictures.

Even after shaping the edge, each piece had to be further cut and fitted very precisely to fit along the wall nice and flush. The devil was in the details on this one, and she was one really mean devil.

This is a roll of 36 gauge copper. One side has been specially pigmented with an interesting pattern along its length. We’re going to use it for the backsplash. I told you we were doing something cool in here!

I had to lay this thing out on a nice flat board, some of the leftover birch from the cabinet extension project.

It cuts pretty easily. Once you get the cut going you can just pull a utility knife across it and slice it in a straight line.

Cutting the holes for the electrical outlets was also tricky.

So, a little contact cement, a lot of work with a roller, and some carefully cut trim pieces, and the copper backsplash is now installed! The copper is adding some very unique character to our kitchen and everything is coming together very nicely, even if we’re over budget and it’s taking several weeks longer than I wanted it to. Hey, this is our kitchen. We cook in here every day. I want it to be nice.

The new cap is installed and looks great.

I did take one shortcut in this whole kitchen. I didn’t move this electrical outlet, and just installed the trim banding over it. Call it laziness, call it what you will, but I took a quick look at that box in there and it was in such a tight space that I didn’t want to mess with it. So, I apologize to the future owners of this house, this kind of stuff drives me crazy too. But I’ve been busting my ass in this kitchen for weeks now and I have attained the point at which I just don’t care anymore. Be glad you can still plug two things into it, for I’ve seen worse in this house by whoever did the prior work.

And if you don’t think it looks cool, well, you’re in the wrong house. Go away.

Inky went to the beach, of all places.

The Cabinet Butcher

Posted on March 20, 2016 by Jef

The cabinets directly under the sink have recessed doors, so you can comfortably stand at the sink all day long washing dishes or doing laundry or performing whatever task Island Life has in mind for you, and there’s plenty of room for your knees and shins and feet. However, the new kitchen sink that we selected is too big to allow for this recess. There won’t be enough room to install it unless the cabinet doors are made flush with the front surface.

That’s where I come in. The Cabinet Butcher. I can take that recessed frame and reconstruct it so that the doors are flush and there is room for the sink, at the obvious expense of one’s comfort while standing there doing dishes. Since that’s usually me, well, who cares if I’m inconvenienced. We have a new sink to install, after all.

Now, the new configuration of the cabinet doors down there makes the opening wider, by a total of six inches. So, we need a strip of wood 6″ x 24″ to put in there between the doors. This is a pretty good opportunity to go down to a salvage store and find some odd scrap of carved wood that I can integrate into the cabinetry!

“Pick me!” squealed these two pieces. No, you’re both the wrong size, and you’re both ugly.

“Pick me! Pick me!” Okay, you’re the correct size but you’re still ugly. No dice. I’ll keep looking.

Yeah, well, while I ponder my newest conundrum, I must pry the remaining cabinet doors off their hinges so I can replace the hinges (with less-ugly hinges) and resurface them and stain them and make them pretty.

I did replace all the cabinet shelves with melamine. I’m no fan of melamine, but I am a fan of sanitary kitchens, and the melamine shelves were far cleaner than the greasy, sticky, cigarette-smoke infused cabinet shelves that we had.

Aprupt change of topics, but Inky is a mountain climber. Here she is atop a rock that’s about 30′ above the road below.

The Farmhouse Table

Posted on March 12, 2016 by Jef

We found an old dropleaf farm table at an antique store. It is rumored to be from Ireland. Or made by someone from Ireland. Or owned by someone who drank a lot of Bushmills. Anyway, we saw it and we had to have it.

Antique wood furniture can teach us a lot about woodworking. You can see exactly how things were made, and more importantly, how these techniques stood up to the test of time and use. What worked, and what didn’t.

In this case, it has taught me that we have been doing everything wrong. We spend so much time making sure everything is straight and flat, that table legs are plumb and solid, that pieces join at right angles. We cut tenons and mortises and dovetails, wasting precious time in a useless endeavor. We buy expensive table saw fences for accurate cuts, but there is no reason for them.

You see, all you need to do is split some lumber with an ax and nail it together with some tenpenny nails, and you’re done. That’s it.

Why make sure your table is flat? It doesn’t need to be. And is mortise and tenon joinery really superior to a few clipped-head steel nails? This table is like a hundred years old, and it’s still getting used.

Should you protect the surface from burning pots and pans? What the heck would you do that for? Just set the frying pan right down on the table, the wood will absorb the heat. No biggie. And if the legs get loose, just twist those screws a turn or so to tighten them.

And there’s always room for more nails, just pound them in!

And don’t bother finishing it to a nice flat even surface, when the pens of children doing homework will simply indent the table top with a strange cuneiform. This table is riddled with overlapping pen strokes, and it adds to the character. In fact, I think it even inflated the price a little bit.

The table legs are made out of oak, and judging by all those crisscross cuts were probably used to parry the broadswords of viking invaders. No effort was made to remove the splinters on the exit side of all those nails.

All I had to do was slather on some polyurethane, just trying to make it a little more sanitary, that’s all. This table is now in its final resting place.

You can’t get this at Restoration Hardware. No sir.

It’s a Great Day to Make Sawdust

Posted on February 14, 2016 by Jef

It was a gray weekend outside. Nothing but rain, and more rain, and when that was done, it rained again. A nice day to get in the shop and make some sawdust.

All the pieces to make the kitchen cabinet extension are cut and ready to be put together. Here they are posing for a picture. Like a bunch of little jigsaw puzzle pieces.

These beams are going to hold the weight of a stone countertop, a portion of which will be cantilevered so we can put some stools there and have a new seating area. I over-engineered them deliberately, wanting them to be very, very strong.

Oh yeah, that will be a strong joint.

I assembled the base cabinet upside down, it was a little easier that way since I had these support rails that had to stay nice and flat with the top of the cabinet. In fact, I even made the joke “oh no, I glued it together upside down!”, acutely aware that no one else on Earth would get the humor but me.

And here it’s all fitted together. So far this project is going very well. I’ve screwed up very few things on it, and nothing I couldn’t fix, so I’m kind of anticipating some major catastrophe.

As much as I love Festool, it can be such a pain in the ass. I have to find a bunch of scrap pieces of wood to support the piece I’m cutting, as well as other scrap to support the rail, and then I have to clamp down the rail, and sand-bag down the other side since a clamp won’t fit, and I have to cut it in three passes since it’s such an acute angle and the wood is so thick that it would bind and try to explode if I just made one pass. And don’t even remind me about the stupid hose that keeps getting underfoot and trying to trip me.

But that’s what it takes to make brackets. A nice bracket is a complicated piece of wood that takes about a dozen precision cuts. When I have to make multiple brackets all the exact same shape, I make a template out of 1/4″ MDF so I can shape it and smooth it out on the router table.

I promised sawdust. And sawdust there shall be.

Several hours later I finally have nice brackets made and installed, slender enough to not be an eyesore and sturdy enough to hold a crap-ton of weight.

Really happy with the way this project is coming along so far. Well, I’m not happy with the pace, as this is taking forever and I still need to install hardware / make doors / make shelves / cut the back board / put on some trim pieces to conceal the plywood edges / find a way to carry this inside / hope it fits / install it / etc. But the overall quality of the cabinet, I am very happy with.

A Small House Abhors a Vacuum

Posted on January 31, 2016 by Jef

Small houses have to make good use of their spaces. The space in the pic up above just looks like it’s missing something. It’s a void, dead space, and small houses abhor a vacuum. You can fill the void with trash cans and cat food and old woodworking projects but is that really the best use of that space? Why don’t the kitchen countertops extend all the way down that wall? I don’t know why they didn’t just do it that way, but I also don’t know what used to be there when they originally built those cabinets. Maybe that’s where they put the washer and drier. Maybe they kept dead bodies there in boxes. I don’t know, but for some reason they didn’t see fit to build out the kitchen cabinets for more countertop space and more storage.

That’s where all this lumber comes in. I can use this to make more cabinetry in that space and then we can extend the kitchen countertop so it runs the full length of the wall. I got some solid planks of birch and a couple sheets of high grade birch plywood. Birch is the most boring wood on the planet. It is bereft of character, does not like to be stained, and as hardwoods go it is one of the softer ones. But the existing cabinets are birch and if I want to match them (part of me does, and part of me doesn’t) then I have to use boring ol’ birch.

I started with the base, so I have a nice foundation to set everything on. There will be three cabinet areas, two of which will house the garbage and recycling containers and one will be New Storage which we can put New Things into. That’s very exciting to me. And I’ve made these with room to sit at the countertop like a bar. It faces the tv, so you can grab some snacks and a cold beer and watch hockey all in one place. Life doesn’t get much better than that.

The wood chopped up readily enough. A little burning but I kind of have a crappy saw so that’s to be expected. My last project was made with 2×6 beams so it is nice to work with a wood that’s flat and square and doesn’t have a bunch of knots in it.

And here’s a really preliminary dry fit of all the pieces I’ve cut so far. It’s so important to me to fit everything together as soon as possible just so I can see the scale of it. Sometimes when you look at something in a live, 3 dimensional scale, you miss things that you didn’t see when you drew it on paper, and it really helps me figure out exactly how all this needs to come together and how the pieces need to be joined. I consider where the force goes, what holds weight, and what joints need to be stronger than others.

The existing cabinets were plywood boxes nailed together with solid wood frames pinned to the fronts and plywood doors. These will be similar, except that the joinery will be mortise and tenon on the solid frames and good fasteners instead of nails. I fully expect it to last longer than the house.

Diary of an Orcas Island Homeowner

Category Archives: Woodworking