No, you can't afford it.

:haha:

Ok, so what's next, Hmonkey?

Not sure yet. Perhaps back to the chair. Maybe a chest of drawers for my brother. I'll probably take a break for a while.

Bruce - Damn. That's pretty cool. I haven't done anything with glass yet, though my parents are replacing the windows on their weekend house in West Virginia.

Yeah HM, I thought you'd appreciate the wood and detail in that breakfront, especially considering they're using pretty much the same tools you are. Personally, I'd rather have your bookcase for myself. :)

how about this HM,

The third set of legs obviously needs to pee.

(looks like furniture that Alex, from A Clockwork Orange, would have, doesn't it?)

Nobody gets to sit at the head of the table.:)

Well, that takes a certain amount of... umm... technical skill.

Hard to think of a place to put it, though.

Or this HM,

HM, I apologize for being so late in congratulating you on such a beautiful peice of craftsmanship. I hold quality wood workers in extremely high esteem.

Wood Refinishing Advice
 

Noone answered my request for help with the Ashiko, so I would like to post it here.

I would like to sand and refinish the drum. I do not want to stain, I just want to clean and highlight the natural wood.

Should I just clean it and use furniture polish? Should I apply a polyurethane spray to it in addition?

Can anyone tell me what kind of wood is used in the Ashiko? All I can say for sure is that it is stave construction.

I included a picture in the thread

Thanks! http://www.cellar.org/images/newsmilies/rollhappy.gif

dunno Rich
 

Rich, I think you need to talk to somebody at a drum shop. I'd guess the wood is some kind of hardwood from the tropics, like a mahogany. If it were mine, I'd probably rub cut linseed oil into it to keep it from drying out and cracking but its not mine so I'd hate to have you mess it up. I don't know how goat skin would react to contact with the oil. My bodran came with a polyeuthene finish and I haven't altered it.

Thanks for trying. I searched on 'goat skin' and 'linseed' and found this:

I also found an Ashiko maker which lists Danish Oil, Linseed Oil, and Polyurethane as drum body finishes, although it is not specific if these are individual choices or in combination. I'm going to sand it, clean the inside with wood soap, rub on warm linseed oil, let it soak in for a few days, and finish the outer shell with Polyurethane. I do not want to mess with the inside of the drum besides cleaning it since it might affect the tone.

If you oil it, the polyurethane won't stick. Like trying to paint butter. The linseed oil never dries. Watco will dry, but I don't know if you can coat it. You have to talk to someone that's familiar with the wood in your drum, to find out the effects of the finish choices. You may have to do the same thing to the inside as you do to the outside in order to make the wood move evenly during changes in moisture content. ;)

Anybody looking for a woodworking project?

This is too cool a thread to let die. More wood projects, please. Not dick ones though. eww.

My dad's been making boxes and picture frames. I've got some plans for a box for my tapecraft supplies that we may make some time soon.

I'm going to try to start making some built in cabinets for my bathroom this week. I'll post the progress (or more likely the lack of progress) here.

I don't mean to hijack this thread, but it's kind of dead, and I figure I'll keep it alive with a project I'm working on.

The current project:

Our upstairs bathroom is one of the ugliest rooms in our house, and I've been meaning to address it for a long time. It has self adhesive vinyl floor tiles, and glued-on vinyl strips of "baseboard" trim. The fixtures are the cheapest money can buy, and they look it. The one good thing about this bathroom is that it is the largest bathroom I've ever had, so there is potential. I've been planning to build some cabinets into a nook in one corner. I've been sketching things for a few months, but this week is finally the week. I took this week off from work because I'm not allowed to carry too much leave over from year to year. So I'm forced to take a vacation and I might as well work on this bathroom.

You might notice that I'm posting this on a Tuesday. I didn't actually get any work done on the bathroom yesterday. It was the first nice day of the year in Arlington, Virginia, so I trimmed a tree that was too close to our electrical service entrance, and I washed our car. In my short-sleeve shirt! So Monday was a good day, but I made no progress.

Today, I planned to go to Home Depot, buy my lumber, and bring it home in a rental truck. Well, it started to snow on the way to Home Depot, which was a huge drag after hanging out in my short sleeve shirt yesterday. I got there, and checked with customer "Service" to find out about the truck rentals before I loaded up my cart with hundreds of pounds of lumber. Turns out the computer system is down, and they won't be renting any trucks today. So I drove home, and put the roof top rack on my car. I drove back, and bought two sheets of 3/4 inch birch plywood. It's about all the weight my roof rack can hold. As I was loading the plywood onto the roof of the car, the damn wind kept howling through the parking lot, trying to pick up the plywood and carry it away. The snow had stopped, but the parking lot was all iced over. I nearly ruined my back wrestling that plywood onto the roof of my car in the wind, and then down into my basement when I got home. I was originally planning to make another trip or two to get the rest of the lumber I needed, but called it off because of the wind.

So instead, I went up into the bathroom, and cut up the vinyl flooring where the cabinet will sit. The bare floor shows where the cabinet will contact the floor. The cabinets will actually be larger than this, the toe kicks are 2.5 inches deep.

After I figured out what the shape of the base will be, I needed to actually make the base. I have plenty of scrap 2x4 material lying around, so picked through the pile the best I could to find straight pieces, and I cut them all to length.

I have a huge box of leftover 2" drywall screws. They will be perfect for screwing the base frame to the floor. Only problem is the base frame is 3.5 inches tall. So I drilled all the pieces to create pocket holes for the screws. The screw will have about an inch of material in the 2x4, and then another inch of the screw shank will penetrate the plywood subfloor to hold the base down.

I put all the pieces in the bathroom to see if they fit. The kids are in bed now, so I'm not going to do any more work right outside their rooms. Tomorrow, I need to shim the base as needed to make it level, then I will screw it down to the floor. Another trip to Home Depot if the weather is better, and I can start making the cases.

No worries! It's no hijack. The more the merrier! Especially more than zero...

You guys would laugh your asses off at my dog stairs project, the goal of which was to give the older dog a step-stair to make it into bed at night. I fitted together thin plywood "any which way", with just enough thought to making it sturdy enough for a 12 pound dog, and then attached spare carpet to it with little brass screws.

At the time I was proud that I pre-drilled the screw holes. I only sanded it down enough that it wouldn't give me splinters or mess up the carpet.

I'm happy to see how these sorts of things are done right. There are many other projects that could stand doin'.

Any project that does what you intended it to do is a success. It doesn't have to be elegant, clever or pretty to be a success, all that stuff is a bonus. ;)

Wow, whose bed is it? For women?

Billy, it's a cabinet, which is a piece of furniture with doors, about as high as your waist, where you can put dishes or towels.

Like this:

(I think he was referring to that sexy four-poster bed earlier in the thread.)

D'oh. That's what I get for not scrolling up.

Wednesday, I ran back over to Home Depot. The weather was nicer, so loading up the roof rack on the car was a better experience. I got several sheets of plywood, and a bunch of solid pine for the face frames.

That afternoon, I shimmed the base frame. It helps the installation a lot if the frame is flat and level. It turns out that the bathroom floor is out of level by about a quarter inch over the four feet of the cabinet base. So I had to use a lot of shims. I screwed the base down as I shimmed each piece. The result was this nice level flat platform for the cabinets.

Wednesday evening, I cut the sheets of plywood into more manageable sizes using a hand held circular saw. A little oversize for each panel. I finished up each panel on the table saw, which produces cleaner results. Then I used a router to cut grooves (dadoes, actually) into the sides of the first cabinet to accept a shelf. Here, I'm setting up to cut a rabbet, which is a lip that accepts the top of the cabinet. I'll also put a rabbet on the bottom.

Before I called it quits for the night on Wednesday, I finished cutting all the parts to the cabinet case, and stacked them up all pretty for a picture.

Thursday morning, today, I drilled holes along the rabbets and dadoes so I could screw the case together. I spread glue on each joint, and screwed everything together. It wasn't quite square when I was done, so I loosened a few screws and smacked it with a big hammer. Then I tightened the screws again. Now that it was square, I nailed a thin panel of plywood onto the back. It will help hold it all together and keep it square.

Here is the case in the bathroom. It was a pain getting it upstairs, because it's taller than all the doorways, and there were lots of tight corners to get around. I'm taking a break right now. This afternoon, I'll secure it to the base, and start working on the face frame.

Cool!

I'd love to do something like that. My bathroom is falling apart, and it wasn't particularly nice to begin with...

I finished screwing the plywood case to the base frame. It was time to turn my attention to the face frame that will cover the ugly plywood edge.

I plan to paint the cabinet face, so I planned to simply nail the face frame to the cabinets instead of using some hidden fastener. This will be much easier. The face frame will be made up of pine and the joints will be mortise and tenon joints. The side of the frame that butts up against the wall will be made 1/4 larger than I need, so I can scribe it to the wall.

The tenons are made on the table saw with a stacked dado blade raised 1/4 inch. This takes 1/4 inch off each face of the piece of wood, and leaves 1/4 inch of wood in the middle to be the tenon. For ease of operation, I also have the tenons 1/4 inch from the edges of the piece. That way I don't have to adjust the table saw once I set it up.

The mortices are made at the drill press. I have a vice at the drill press to hold the wood, but these side pieces are really long, so I have to rig up a support for the other end of the piece. I use a regular drill bit - nothing fancy, and take my time drilling these out. Then to clean it up, I slowly slide the piece back and forth with the drill bit down in the mortice all the way. It's kind of like a milling machine this way. It's not the proper way to do it. You can break a drill bit if you aren't careful, but I am slow and only do a little depth at a time.

I end up with mortices that are round on the ends and tenons that are square on the ends. Rather than go through the trouble of squaring up the mortice, which is the traditional way, I use a utility knife to knock off the corners of the tenons. The joint is still super strong, and the whole frame will be supported by nails anyway, so the joint doesn't have to do very much.

I glue and assemble the pieces. They are perfectly square and require no adjustment before putting the clamps on.

The next day, after the glue dries, I take the face frame to the cabinet box and temporarily support it on a few blocks of wood. I get it plumb, and butted up against the wall. The frame is straight where it meets the wall, but the wall, like most walls, is slightly curved in places. To get the frame to fit the wall, I have to cut it to the same curve as the wall. I figure out how much wood to remove by looking at how the face frame fits against the plywood box, and then I set a compass to that width. I drag the compass up along the wall with the pencil side on the wood. This scribes a line on the wood that is the exact shape as the wall's curvature.

I take the face frame back down to the shop. I need to remove all the wood from the edge of the frame up to the line I just scribed. A hand plane is perfect for this kind of job, but I have a lot of material to remove. The table saw is still set up with the dado blade, so I take advantage of it. I remove 2/3s of the material on the underside or back of the face frame, making a rabbet about half an inch wide. This leaves me with only a quart inch wide board to plane, and should save me a few minutes of planing time. So I plane the material down to the line.

I sand the face frame for good measure, so it will take paint well, and then I head back upstairs. I test fit it too the wall. Not bad. There are a few places with a gap as wide as a thick piece of paper, but those spots will be filled in with paint when I paint this thing.

This morning I nailed the face frame to the cabinet case. Now it's starting to look more like a finished cabinet. I'll make the doors later. First I'll turn my attention to the stacked cabinet that will fit next to this one.

wow. i am absolutely mystified by the abilities displayed here. i couldn't even begin to plan this project, let alone see it to a successful completion. :thumbsup:

Thanks. I'm always reading woodworking magazines. So I'm constantly absorbing this stuff, without actually building anything. Then when I go to build it, I have a lot more confidence.

I'm still far from being a pro. I am not fast enough. If I charged a fair hourly rate for my time, and added it to the materials cost, with a little profit thrown in, I'd have to charge like five times the going market price for a cabinet. I would starve.

But it's fun to make this stuff.

There's one bit that always mystifies me, that all woodworkers know. How do you put two planks together to make one big plank? Like two 1x8s together to make a 1x16?

That's actually a challange to me. You need the edges of each plank to be very straight, otherwise they won't fit tightly and the glue joint will not be strong. Sometimes you can get away with an edge left by a table saw or that is already on the board when you buy it, but often you have to plane one edge of each board until they are nice and straight. You can then just glue them together.

Or if you want the joint to be extra strong, you can cut a slot into each edge and fit a long thin strip of wood called a spline into that slot to support things a little more. And glue them together.

More common today is a specialty tool called a biscuit cutter. It cuts little slots in the edge and you stick a little football shaped disk into those slots when you glue it up. You have to make sure the slots line up. I don't have one of those, but most pros and factories do.

For me, the challange is when you are trying to put together a whole table top, because you have multiple pieces, and the glue starts to dry on you before you can get them all together properly.

Clamps hold the joint together, and aligned while you wait for the glue to dry.

my neighbor is a professional cabinet maker. he does some absolutely extraordinary things that i just don't get. i hang out in his shop while he and his crew build some things and i have to leave after only 10-15 minutes because i just can't understand how they do what they do.

This thread is too cool. I idolize Norm Abrams, but can't personally operate a power tool to save my life.

This is the only power tool I know of that can save your life. All the others hunger for fresh meat. I watched a fella shorten his right index finger by one knuckle on a bandsaw once. Those machines care nothing for the length of your life, unless it means they get fed something besides wood wood wood, day after day.

Although, this machine operates so well, that I find it hard to believe. A strictly vegetarian table saw. Whooda thunkit?

A joiner (power tool) can make a good edge, but my dad uses a hand plane and a straight edge. Use a long straight edge to find bumps and valleys, and plane them down.
Here's a cross section example.
You just have to get it all ready before starting to apply the glue. Or you can do one joint at a time.

Nice work, glatt. :thumbsup: The "footballs" are beech, I think. They're pressed and dried so they expand to hold tight when they come in contact with the glue. If you clamp them up with an overlap then saw down the length, through the overlap, the pieces will match. Same as matching wallpaper without a pattern. They do it one step at a time. To understand how, you have to break it down into those steps. To understand why, you have to do it wrong at least once. :biggrin: Your Dad is extrordinary. Most people would spend years developing that skill and some could never get it right. Knowing exactly what your hand and that plane are going to do before they do it, on every stroke, is damn near witchcraft. :lol:

Tell me about it. I never got the hang of hand planing. Whenever I try, I get chips and skitters everywhere. I put it down to some combination of two factors: 1) I'm left handed while many planes are right handed, and 2) I never practice. http://www.cellar.org/images/smilies/yelsick.gif

hey glatt, did you stain your cabinet yet?

I'm not sure which thread to put this in so, as I'm now using flickr, I'll go ahead and put it in both!

My dad just finished making me a cool box to store my markers and tape in. Here it is, closed, empty, and full:

http://photos7.flickr.com/9354936_1176e256f0.jpg

http://photos5.flickr.com/9354937_c6c542d1f3.jpg

http://photos7.flickr.com/9354939_332b75c869.jpg

We're starting a new project, a chest of drawers for my sister. It starts with a trip to the lumberyard.

http://static.flickr.com/27/64955734_8058a8e418.jpg

It's a pretty nice lumberyard, with good variety and quality wood. This view was substantiated during this trip when we ran into one of my dad's woodworking inspirations, Peter Kramer. If he's willing to drive an hour to get wood there, it's good stuff.

http://static.flickr.com/31/64956301_a3ad483e6b.jpg

We picked out three cherry boards, eight feet long, an inch and a half thick, and six to eight inches wide. These will be the sides of piece.

http://static.flickr.com/33/64956761_74d5b37437.jpg

We bought the boards rough, so we put them through the planer until the faces were clean.

http://static.flickr.com/33/67305743_f88bc98fe0.jpg

This creates a lot of sawdust.

http://static.flickr.com/34/67306801_4a8cd20805.jpg

And here are the boards with the large faces even. Now for the edges.

http://static.flickr.com/26/67307651_159720b9bb.jpg

The chest will be about four feet high, so we cut the boards in half.

http://static.flickr.com/31/67308648_7eca5de916.jpg

Ready for edging.

http://static.flickr.com/24/67309411_2332a3781d.jpg

We have a very nice tool that lets you run a router along a track in a straight line. Our previous efforts without this router trolley have been much more labor intensive.

http://static.flickr.com/30/67351252_ce36f4ad63.jpg

An action shot, from the side.

http://static.flickr.com/27/67351953_feb4e9b9f6.jpg

With the edges squared using the router and trolley, the gluing went extremely smoothly. Next up, squaring the ends.

http://static.flickr.com/34/67352579_9ba6f8e44d.jpg

Router trolley?
You jumped from the 19th to 21st century. :eek:
Is this a git-r-done by Christmas project?

Wait till you see the next picture...

The sides are going to be tapered; thinner at the top than the bottom. My dad is doing this with hand planes. (How's that, Bruce?)

<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/happymonkey/68170862/" title="Photo Sharing"><img src="http://static.flickr.com/20/68170862_931d7e8e8a.jpg" width="500" height="375" alt="Glued" /></a>

The pencil mark shows how far down we have to get at this end. Click on the photo (or, indeed, any of them) for the flickr page, then click "All Sizes" to see the line clearer.

<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/happymonkey/68171614/" title="Photo Sharing"><img src="http://static.flickr.com/30/68171614_5a3d880754.jpg" width="500" height="375" alt="The Goal" /></a>

And these are the planes he's using to do the tapering.

<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/happymonkey/68172811/" title="Photo Sharing"><img src="http://static.flickr.com/9/68172811_f96fb1886d.jpg" width="500" height="375" alt="Planes" /></a>

Hey, I wasn't being critical, it just seemed like a philosophy shift which made me wonder if there was time constraints.

btw- I got a nice email from Peter Kramer. :thumb:

No worries, I wasn't being defensive, just making a segue into the next phase.

It wasn't so much a philosophy shift as a new tool availability (we got it in August, and hadn't tried it out yet. It works great). Our power tools pre-trolley were too imprecise to get a result better than a hand plane, and power tool imperfections are harder to deal with than hand tool imperfections. Additionally, this wood is thicker than some of the handplane blades are wide, and would have been much harder to work with.

Why'd you get the Peter Kramer email?