Nothing Severed Yet

More koa than you can shake a stick at

Not completely off topic, but close...

I had dinner at Palisade last night with my mother-in-law. For those not in the know, Palisade is *the* place to take your out-of-town tourist guests when they're visiting Seattle. Great seafood, good everything else, with a vague allusion to an island theme present in the pu-pu platter naming scheme and guava wood-fired smokers. Mostly, though, it's just good, fresh, expensive seafood.

It earns its chops as a tourist's delight because of the panoramic view of the boats and the sound, plus a giant saltwater pond/stream running through the restaurant featuring live salmon, rockfish, wolf eels, and more. Unfortunately, they do not serve the residents. That's what I want, a fish-it-yourself restaurant. In any case, enough restaurant reviews--there's plenty of those elsewhere in blogland. Back to my point.

The restaurant is very beautifully decorated. I was trying to guess the wood and my closest guess was Koa, but since it's $30/bf, I discounted it and settled on some unusual type of mahogany. I was wrong.

The place is Koa. Everywhere. Tables, paneling, giant double doors, waitstands, everything. According to our server, the Maitre d' stand alone is $10k worth of lumber. He informed me that they found a private landowner on Hawaii (the only place Koa grows) who hooked them up with lumber for the whole place. Coincidentally, I'd just read an article about koa that day, so it was a real treat to see so much of it up close.

Check out Palisade--you'll thank me for it.

(Great seafood, but not quite perfect--a tiny bit dumbed-down for the masses. Perfect for tourists.)
(I've got a 2 bf bit of koa in my garage just waiting for a project...)
(my mother-in-law is a delightful person who I enjoy spending time with. No, I am not being sarcastic. No, she does not read this weblog. Yes, I am very, very lucky)

Get the lead out

Check out the Rechargable Battery Recycling Corporation, who will recycle your cordless power tool batteries and prevent the heavy metals inside from getting into the environment.

(your local forest, stream, creek, or spotted owl nest will thank me for it)

Wood of the Month

A magazine that you probably haven't read produces a site that you probably haven't found. It's iswonline, and they have a very cool "Wood of the Month" section (look over on the right side of the page) that I highly recommend. I picked up this magazine at the Grizzly Tent Sale, which I'll blog about sometime soon. It's very narrowly targeted at high-volume pros, and I found most of the articles to be not terribly relevant. But the Wood of the Month stuff is cool.

(you can sign up for a free subscription to one of the various flavors of magazine these guys publish--they have subtlely different versions for cabinetmakers/millwork, furniture producers, etc. They don't want to let you sign up for all of them, probably because they're all quite similar.)

Cheap plywood at Home Depot

Home Depot regularly carries 4x8 sheets of plywood that are maple on one side and birch on the other for about $35. Now this not super high-quality stuff; lots of internal voids, the veneer is medium quality, it's only 5 ply, etc. But if you compare to just about any other retail source, this is the cheapest you can find plywood with two presentable sides. It's great for use around the shop, jigs, and would even be respectable for the back of cabinets etc. And as a bonus, they'll cut it for you (cutting 4x8 panels is a pain in the neck in most home shops). They technically charge $0.50/cut after the first cut, but I just bat my lashes and they don't charge me a thing.

Buy a sheet for your next project. You'll thank me for it.

(for readers who don't know me personally--hello creative commoners!--I'm 6'3" 200lbs, so the "bat lashes" thing is a great big joke)

You got your slate in my coffee table, Part IV

Part IV in a 3-or-so part post describing how I made our coffee table.
Part I is here.
Part II is here.
Part III is here.

And finally, the best part of all... the pictures of the final product.

Corner detail
Iso view
If you're inspired by this project to try something similar, drop me a line and show me your results! (danieljshapiro at hotmail dot com).

(Also, if you're building this table and need more detailed pictures or instructions, drop me a line).

You got your slate in my coffee table, Part III

This is Part III in a 3-or-so part post describing how I made our coffee table.
Part I (with the blueprints) is here.
Part II is here.
Part IV (with pictures) is here.
When we last left our intrepid hero, he had a lovely tabletop sanded to 60 grit with three square 12"x12" indentations. Time to get our hero some legs, then finish the damn thing.

For each leg, I used six pieces of 6/4 stock (not 4/4 as the plans show). Gluing up in two directions (faces and edges) is a little sketchy, but the glue surface is huge so I decided not to sweat it. Start by gluing up pairs of leg stock face-to-face, so you wind up with six pieces of the correct thickness. Once these dry and you remove the glue that's squeezed out, give them a quick pass on the jointer so your glue surfaces are true, and finish gluing them up. I actually did each glueup in one swell foop, glueing all six at the same time, but I don't recommend that; it was a pain in the rear. You can use biscuits for some or all of this to add strength and help with alignment. Finish with a small piece of 4/4 stock on the bottom; this keeps the exposed endgrain to a minimum and looks nice. You may be tempted to joint the bottom before you glue that 4/4 piece on, but resist! As you finish your jointing pass you're nearly guaranteed to break a chunk off the edge and send it flying unless you're very careful (sharp blades, small passes, and a piece of backing). Remember, jointing endgrain is one of the sketchiest jointing tasks. Instead, use sandpaper and a level to take care of any protrusions. Or just glue carefully and get it all lined up right the first time. In either case, prep it the same way as you did the table top--liquid walnut and 60-grit. In fact, it's not a bad idea to go all the way to 220-grit now, since it's trickier to do once the legs are attached. Ditto for the underside of the tabletop, while I'm thinking about it.

Time to affix the legs. This is easy. Put them in place, glue, and clamp them to the top. The easiest way to clamp them is to put a long piece of 2x4 or other material under them and clamp to that instead, since they're not quite as wide as the tabletop. Don't forget to put something between the clamps and your beautiful tabletop. Finally, you'll notice that the legs are aligned with the slate cutouts. This is handy, since the slate will cover the screws you're about to sink (not shown in the plans). Drill some holes in the cutouts, making TRIPLE SURE that you're going to be drilling into the table leg on the other side! Countersink them so the screw heads don't stick up, and drive some good 2" woodworking screws in there to cement the legs to the top. Once this dries up, nothing short of a flaming jackhammer will cause your table distress.

OK, this thing's starting to look pretty good. Next up, slate prep. This was easy. I got three 12" "Autumn Slate" tiles from Home Depot ($1.98 each) and picked out three of about the right thickness (a little on the thin side). These tiles are ungagued, meaning they have lots of ridges and varying thickness; make sure the thickest point is thinner than your cutout. Wash them thoroughly and let them dry; they're dusty as heck. Coat them with Minwax Polycrylic (three coats or so) and set them aside to dry.

Time to finish the table itself. I'll do a full article on shellac later; this will be the short-short version. I'd suggest a little background reading before you jump in, though.

If you haven't already, sand the whole thing with ever-increasing grits until you get to at least 220 (but I recommend 400). Get yourself some dewaxed garnet shellac and denatured (NOT isopropyl!) alcohol. Put about 2 oz of shellac flakes into a coffee grinder and blend well (this step is optional but makes the next one go much faster). Pour the shellac powder into a jar with about 8 oz of alcohol and shake well once every 30 min until it's all dissolved (1-2 hours, or just leave it overnight). Note that shellac is foodsafe, so technically you can return the grinder to directly to coffee use, although the spouse might not appreciate you contaminating his/her coffee with bug excretions. Ironically, the only toxic thing about shellac is the methyl alcohol deliberately added to de-tipple the otherwise potable ethyl alcohol. If you have a source of 100% pure ethanol, you can use that instead of denatured alcohol for a great finish (and a hell of a party). But I digress.

Dilute a bit of this shellac 3:1 with more alcohol and paint on two thin coats. Get some powdered pumice, and sprinkle it *very lightly* on a clean cloth. Drip some more alcohol on the cloth and mix around the pumice so it's thoroughly wetted, then rub it into the pores of the wood. The goal here is to fill the tiny pores, leaving a glossy-smooth surface. Do this for the entirety of the top and sides, but skip the bottom and legs--who's going to see it. Actually, use the bottom for practice until you get the hang of it so you don't screw up your top.

Now it's time to get crazy with the lac bug shells. Paint the undiluted shellac on heavily, using many coats. Once you get a good base on, you can apply it with a pad made of wool wrapped in cotton, as in the traditional french polish method. I wanted a bit of red in my finish, so in a moment of bizarre experimentation, I decided to apply the shellac with a red wool sock wrapped in an old T-shirt. It worked, but my table smells like an old foot. Oh well.

Last step is to attach the slate. The trick here is to take some high quality clear caulk and make five golfball-sized piles of it; one in the center and one 1" from each corner. Set the slate in its recess and gently, carefully nudge it down until each corner is flush with the surface (squishing down the caulk). Once you get it to the right height, LEAVE IT ALONE until it dries. You can scrape off squeezeout more easily once it's hardened, but if you push the slate down too far accidentally, you're out of luck. The nice thing about this method is that if you need to replace the slate, you can crack it with a chisel and pull the pieces out, since the caulk comes off without too much difficulty.

(I spent forever messing around with shellac techniques on the bottom and legs before I was happy with it and moved on to the table top.)
(people are zelots about the whole "french polishing" thing; it's basically just applying dilute shellac in many, many layers so you get a pretty built-up finish. The paint-then-pad method I used is pretty much just a shortcut that looks just about as good.)

You got your slate in my coffee table, Part II

This is Part II in a 3-or-so part post describing how I made our coffee table.
Part I (with the blueprints) is here.
Part III is here.
Part IV (with pictures) is here.

So you saw my blueprints in Part I--how do you make a table from it? Here's how I went about doing it.

First, I got four 8-ft 4/4 walnut (or your favorite hardwood) boards totalling 32 inches in width. When buying, here's some things to remember.
-- Try to handpick your lumber so you get boards that look similar. If you're working with a local sawyer, you may get boards from the same tree, or even a flitch matched set, which would be quite excellent.
-- If you buy rough lumber, try to get lumber that will plane up to at least 13/16. 3/4 is pushing it aesthetically.
-- Walnut grades differently from many other species. I used Select lumber, which is required to have only pinholes or small tight knots. The catch is, in Walnut (unlike many other species), is graded on its best side, not its worst side. That means one side may have significantly more "character" than you intended. Woodworkers call that side the "bottom". Of course, if you're going for more character, by all means spec #1 common instead and save yourself a bunch of money. Or go the other way and buy boards with crotch flame. Actually, if you do that, can I have your scraps?
-- If you can find 6' boards boards, definitely do. These should cost less than 8" 8' boards, but that's all my supplier carried. I paid twice for the waste--once when they charged me the higher bf price since it was a long board, and again when I cut off the excess.

Next, joint and plane the boards as necessary. Remember that you only have to plane one side to a glossy flat surface. You can leave the bottom with some rough patches and clean them up with your Sander of Wonderous Delight. Don't forget that all boards have to end up the same thickness, so every time you take a pass on one, take a pass on all. If you've already got a side you like and you have to take another pass, take it from the bottom. You never know when you might plane down and uncover a nasty knot inside your board, so don't mess with a good side.

Now lay down your boards, good side up. Try to arrange them so the grain patterns on the edge match up nicely. If you can match the grain well, the seams will be nearly invisible. Note that you haven't cut your boards to length yet, so you can shift them up and down slightly to line up the patterns. You can also move them around, and even turn them over if you planed both sides. Now is the time to draw your cutlines on both ends and mark the order of the boards.

Crosscut the boards to length. At some point you'll need the 4" piece for the ends; this may come from scrap, or you may need to buy wood for the purpose. Keep it in mind if your boards are too wide; you may be able to use a 12" board for both a main 8" plank and both pieces of 4" endcap.

Now comes the sneaky part. Take your middle two boards and rip them to 6" width, saving the scrap. Slap a dado blade on your saw and make multiple passes to cut 12" wide recesses in three places. You'll do this for both your center boards--see the diagram in Part I for details. When you put both boards together and glue the 2" cutoff back on, this will hold your 12"x12" slate tiles. It may look tricky, but it's actually pretty straightforward. A crosscut sled helps though if you're table sawing. And be careful if you do it on a radial arm saw--the travel of the bottom of the blade is not necessarily parallel to the table, so you may not get a consistant depth of cut.

The trick here is that when you glue the 2" cuttoff back on, the seam will be virtually invisible. It'll look like you carefully chiseled out the opening with handtools and got 12 perfectly square corners, but you actually did the whole thing in an hour with your table saw.

So it's glueup time. First step, make sure you've got enough clamps--one per 18" or so. I glued up in many small steps, adding one board at a time. This gives you lots of time to perfect each joint, and I recommend it. Or if you the swashbuckling, daring, buy-lots-of-lumber-because-you-screwed-it-up-the-first-time type, just glue the whole sucker up at once. Whatever floats your boat. In any case, I recommend reinforcing the joing with dowels, biscuits, or a long spline. Although I did do a quick beam bounce on this: I didn't cut the table to size until after the glueup, so I had some cutoffs that were glued together with the same strength as the actual table. I whacked the seam with a hammer, and the wood broke away from the seam--as advertised, the (unreinforced) glue joint was stronger than the wood itself. So you may not need reinforcement. Still, I'll be damned if I was going to let an opportunity to use my new biscuit joiner pass me by. Most important caution in this step is to be sure that you keep the surface of the boards flat as you glue them up--it's easy for unequal clamp pressure to cause the boards to be glued at a slight angle to each other..

Once you're all glued up the real fun starts: making it look pretty. If the boards are cut to size, run a router with a cutoff bit along the edge to get it straight. If not, cut them now with a circular saw.

After the glueup you no doubt have glue squeezeout all over the place (don't be shy with your glue), so this is an excellent time to repair any minor problems in the finish. Mix yourself a pastry bag of the finest liquid walnut and start gooping it in every nook and cranny you can find. Pile it high, because it shrinks when it dries.

Once that's all dried, it's time to hit it with the Sander of Everlasting Joy and Wisdom at about a 60 grit. You might take a look at all my naggings on the subject before you get started. When you've sanded it down to roughly flat, you'll probably notice a bunch more little dips and divots, so hit it with more liquid walnut and repeat.

That's enough for now, more on making the legs, finishing, the slate, etc to come.

(I'm sure I'm forgetting several steps here... finished this project months ago, so if you see some detail that isn't explained well, mail me (danieljshapiro at hotmail dot com) and I'll make it up.)
(I don't think I'm going to get this done in three parts...)
(If I wasn't on the NetNanny hitlist before, the "crotch flame" thing whould put me over the top)

You got your slate in my coffee table, Part I

Part I in a 3-or-so part post describing how I made our coffee table.
Part II is here.
Part III is here.
Part IV (with pictures) is here.

Here are the blueprints for my first major furniture project, our living room coffee table. This will be broken out over several posts. Yes, my drawings are horrible. The profs who taught me proper GD&T will kick my ass when they see it. Still, it was good enough to print out, scatter copies of around the shop, spill shellac on, and ultimately produce a table from.

Later posts will talk about construction, assembly, and finishing.

Note that you're free to use this, share it, and produce tables for use or for sale from it. But you can't sell or modify the plans without getting permission from me first. See the license for more details:


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

(Yeah, I'm being uptight about the license thing. I've seen too many people have their free work relabeled and resold for me to act otherwise.)
(This was done in TurboCAD v8, a great software package I'll post more information about soon.)

Hurling chunks

And now, a question from the audience. Kate in Toronto wrote in to ask:

So, it's 8am Wednesday and I'm trying to find out why the planer, in the shop I use, keeps taking 1 inch square chunks from the corner (face) of my perfectly jointed boards - when your site popped up...

It's not snipe - it's chunks. It happens on the ends of the boards BUT ONLY, it seems, when I get down to my final thickness and not before! It (the planer) is some kind of Italian job with disposable knives.

Thank you for your question, Kate! As someone who's owned a planer for nearly four months and planed literally dozens of board-feet of lumber, I feel fully qualified to answer your question.

Here's my theory.

As you probably know, lumber absorbs moisture more quickly at the ends. That's why when you go to a sawyer, you see all their logs are painted at the ends. If they don't paint them, they absorb moisture more quickly than the rest of the log, swell, and split. I'm theorizing that something similar is happening with your lumber, and the last few inches of each side are weakened, possibly from a recent moisture change.

Now, every time I joint or plane something, I'm prone to getting some small splinters flying out when I reach the end of the board. That's because the blades are whacking into the wood and pushing backwards, and by the time you're at the end of the board, you don't have half a tree of lumber behind you to hold the whole thing in place. So instead of staying in place until the blade completes its cut and shears the bits off, they go flying rearword (don't stand directly behind your planer when it's running for this reason).

So my theory is that your wood is weakened, so instead of splinters of wood making their final departure into the great beyond of your floor, you've got whole chunks.

There's another possibility--you're a lucky bastard. That is, if you're working with heavily figured wood, I'm jealous. But you'll also be more prone to tearout. That's because in figured wood the grain looks like misbehaving spaghetti; it actually undulates back and forth. When you cut a straight slice, you cut the grain in _two_ places (since it's zigzagging back and forth), leaving it poorly secured. This leads to the common problem of tearout, common when you're jointing or planing figured woods, where your gorgeous piece of curly lumber starts resembling a lunar landscape after a (very noisy) pass through the machine.

As to why it's happening on the last pass? That's got me stumped. Perhaps just a tribute to Mr. Murphy. Alternately, if the weak area is near the middle of the wood, then as it gets thinner on later passes it's more prone to break bits free.

But for a solution, I recommend trying the following:

1) Tack a piece of scrap lumber securely to the back of the wood. If the first theory is right, this will be the "sacrificial" piece and will splinter instead of your valuable lumber. Make sure that the planer blades don't hit whatever you use to tack it in place (e.g. finishing nails)!

2) Dull blades will cause/exacerbate both of these problems, since you're whacking more and cutting less.

3) Ditto for taking a thick pass, although it sounds like you're not.

Hope this helps!

--dan

(Your questions are welcome (danieljshapiro at hotmail dot com), as long as you don't mind an incorrect answer)
(Yes, I asked her permission before I posted her mail)

Death Stick EX-9: The Exhumer

Yup, I'm serious. I've got one, and you should too. This is a great "cat's paw" style nail puller. The idea is that you stick the two prongs on each side of the nail and smack the back with a hammer. It digs into the wood and under the nail. Ridges on either side of the prongs dig into the nail, and the lever arm rips the whole thing out with ease.

Pick up an Exhumer. You'll thank me for it.

(There are probably lots of other cat's paw nail pullers that are just as good, but none have such a cool name. Or a built-in bottle opener.)
(They have them at Lowes too, if I remember correctly.)

I got a non-crappy bandsaw

Great stuff. I picked up a new-to-me bandsaw this week, a Jet 12" Open Stand Band Saw, along with four timberwolf sawblades and an upgraded fence. I get to use it to build the Japanese-styled table I've been thinking about. The curves I have planned will be tricky, but I suppose there's no better way to learn than to try it out.

I really don't know much about bandsaws, so I've been reading lots. The secret seems to be in the blades. There's two critical dimensions: the thickness of the blade, and the set of the teeth. A "thick" blade tracks straighter, which is good if you're cutting straight lines but bad if you're cutting narrow curves. Teeth that are set widely (meaning that they're bent in opposite directions) cut a wider swath, making turning easier and resulting in less rubbing against the wood you're cutting through. Good for making turns or for cuts through thick wood (where you need to cut widely so you the blade doesn't rub), but bad if you're worried about wood waste.

(At some point I'm going to post the draft plans I have for that table...)