Going to Build

Good Evening Everyone,

Well, I had a long day to day and by the time I got home around 4 pm I was in serious need of some wood turning time. I have several projects going at the moment and here are some project updates:

Purple Heart Tea Box for Jim

Ive constructed a lid for the box and here are some photos:

I looked through my hickory wood stack and found exactly what I wanted for the lid: a 1 inch thick piece of butter yellow hickory and so I marked off the lid and the wood for the knob on top for cutting on the bandsaw:



Here is the blank after cutting. Ive established the center of both pieces and I am about to drill a hole in both pieces in order to peg them together. The square portion also acts as the attachment point for the lid to the lathe-more about that tomorrow.  I decided to use CA glue to glue them together and it ran all over the place.


Between the above and below photos I managed to glue the small block to one of my fingers. I always keep a can of acetone around just in case I do something stupid like that. You should have seen me walking around with a piece of wood stuck to my hand....

Here is a photo of the two pieces glued together with no fingers attached:


I like to get a very fine joint between laminated pieces of wood so you cant see the glue line and Ive managed to accomplish that with this in spite of myself. Im going to leave this and come back to it tomorrow.

Next-laminated hickory and walnut bowl

You may remember from about a month ago I laminated several turning blocks out of hickory and walnut. The first blank became the nut bowl and this blank is going to become a medium-sized hickory bowl with a walnut rim. I was worried about this blank because the walnut began to crack down the middle while I was clamping it and I was beginning to worry that I might have to cut off the rim. So I decided to at least get it roughly shaped today and take a close look at the walnut rim as I was turning it.

This first photo shows the blank very roughly cut out from the laminated block. As its heavy and rather unbalanced at this time, Im going to use the 6 inch faceplate and 1 1/2 inch wood screws to mount it:



Here is a photo of the blank on the lathe. Im going to turn it between centers for safetys sake. You know this is a very heavy block of wood turning hundreds of time per minute a few inches away from my head--crazy way to make a living when you think about it. But the wood bug bit me early in life and Ive never regretted working in wood. Ive never seriously injured myself either.


Here you can see the blank being shaped from the bottom to the top. Cutting at a diagonal insures that the wood fibers are cut cleanly with a minimum of tear out:




Here is a photo after about 2 hours of turning. There was a lot of wood to remove and the block is probably much lighter in weight now and certainly is is well balanced at this point in time. Im going to deepen the shaping of the layers of wood tomorrow. And Ive added a foot to this bowl as well:


This is good quality wood and because of that, this bowl is going to work out nicely.

Its getting late and Im covered with wood chips from head to toe so its time to stop. Ill be working tomorrow so grab some coffee and Ill do the same and well see how the lid to the tea box works out.

Thanks for dropping by,
VW

Its been so long since Ive posted that I think the pageviews counter on the blog has started going backwards.  Basically Ive had this post going for a while now and just havent finished it off.  This post was actually started over a month ago...TONIGHT, I SHALL FINISH AND POST IT SO I CAN MOVE ON TO OTHER PROJECTS!!!

I last left off with a single cabinet door not quite finished. Since then Ive knocked out the other four, plus three new drawers. Heres the breakdown:

I had a big problem with tearout when I was fielding the panels for the doors.  There were a few panels with sections of sappy, knotty bits that just wouldnt plane nicely and left a really rough surface.

For those I just took a little putty and smoothed out the bad parts.

A few of the joints also had some unsightly gaps which required wood filler:

Soon I had finished constructed the necessary five doors:

Then it was off to the sander:
This setup is great: Ive got the Shop Vac hooked up the sander, but Ive also got a switch from Sears that turns the vacuum on automatically when I turn on the sander.  Having the hoses and wires hanging from the ceiling also makes sanding a lot easier.

One last touch on the doors was a little ogee around the perimeter:
Looks nice, right?

Well, I certainly screwed up one of them pretty bad: whats wrong here?
Yep, I routed the ogee on the wrong side of the door...time for some surgery.

First I had to cut the screwed-up piece off:
Thats my new saw in the foreground.  Its a Bridge City Tool Works Kataba Meiko.  It has an unusual tooth pattern that lets it make crosscuts extremely fast.  I got it on sale and am really pleased with it.  Yeah, I said I was getting away from Japanese saws...oh well.

Then I had to clean up the saw cuts so that the new frame member would seat correctly; for this I used a shooting board.  I dont think Ive demonstrated this before on the blog, but the shooting board is extremely useful:
Essentially, the shooting board lets you use a bench plane to trim ends very precisely and accurately.  It holds the piece at 90 degrees to the path of the plane.  Here Im using it to clean up the saw cut so that the new frame member will seat squarely.

I suppose I could have gone to a lot of trouble and created loose tenon joints for the repair, but that would have been a ton of trouble (unless someone wants to buy me a Festool Domino...Any takers? Anyone?)

So I ended up using the old through-dowel method.  It gets the job done:

Paint em and done: