Bed Project: Footboard

Here's the completed footboard, it still needs come shellac, but it's otherwise good to go. These are my first drawbored joints, even with a crazy slightly misaligned offset on the one side the pegs drove all the way in. These joints are tight, I'm a huge fan of this.

I'm also very pleased with the color.

Staining with WD Lockwood Dyes

The bed that I'm working on needs to look older. A few coats of shellac and a waxing wasn't going to cut it on this project. I also didn't want to get into the smelly gel stains and varnish combinations that look really awesome on oak, seeing as I'm locked in the apartment with this stuff now that the weather is cold.

While milling the lumber I spoke with a guy by the name of Les Katz, who is a really imaginative woodworker, and he suggested water based dyes. Some of the reasons for were inexpense, ease of use, water based, available in a wide array of colors, and the ability to layer and mix them for really cool coloring effects. I got on the phone with Lockwood and placed an order, which shipped and arrived Monday by the way.

Here's what I came up with...


Here are the two short legs, one is finished with the dye the other only has the base coat of yellow.

Pembroke Table-Leaf Support Aprons

Here follows the next phase of the Pembroke Table class at the Philadelphia Furniture Workshop. It's been a long 7 weeks so far, I'm itching to get this thing home, but really enjoyable. I get to leave a day of teaching to practice the craft and get taught myself. It's a nice change of pace, not being the one everyone looks to for an answer like my day job can be.


Fairing out the curves on the leaf support with a rasp, a card scraper followed and removed the tool marks.


Alan's fixture for sanding the finger pulls, I think it would have been fun(er) to carve them with a gouge, but I've been catching enough hand-tool flack from some of the class that I'll make this exception.


I forget what I was telling Mario at this point, but I'm sure it was really important.


Aside from being a cool shot of hands, this is an important step for me. I'm going to cut the dadoes by hand, in this step I'm measuring the range of motion the corner of the leaf moves about. This is so I can make the dado deep enough so as not to bind.


Cutting the dado sidewalls with a gorgeous old backsaw.


What a nice reveal? The three knuckle hinge board is not the right one though, the grain doesn't match.


Well it opens, and it stops at 90 degrees to the apron. How sexy is that?


Action planing.


I'm sighting down the apron to see if the leaf support sticks out proud of the sides, it does a little bit, I think the inside of the hinge needs to be relieved a plane stroke or two.


The finished sides awaiting the next step. That's the wonderful #604C with a Hock iron I used to do my smoothing. I love this plane, it's fantastic.

Yeah, I got oak. What's it to you? This board has some of the last pieces I need for the bed build. I did some color sampling today, I'll post tomorrow about that, glorious fun those W.D. Lockwood dyes.

Building More of a Bed

Here's where my day started, I've got a test tenon here to layout the knockdown fasteners and check how the riven pins fit the bit I'm intending to bore.

If I was an "ar-tiste" I'd call this Transformation of a Riven Peg. I'm not, so this is the steps in making really strong pegs for drawboring. On an artsy note I really like how the Swiss Army Knife came out it's color and wear.


View of the cramped quarters occupied by the knockdowns.

And the plate used to rive the pegstock. it's a piece of 5/16 mild steel with a 3/16" 1/4" 5/16" 3/8" and 7/16" diameter holes. It can't be hardened, because it's mild steel (insert drivel about chemistry) but that's no matter. It's attached to a chunk of D.Fir 4x4 with 5/8 holes bored under the cutting holes.

A mockup of the bed, I've still got work to do before I drawbore the short sides together, namely breaking the edges, smoothing and dying the parts.

All packed up and ready to take home. Good thing this project is almost over, I've been tiring of carrying one stick of lumber into and out of my apartment for the last few weekends. After moving the lumber for the workbench two or three more times I'll be ecstatic to work on smaller items like the molding planes and kumiko.

Building a Bed

Sleeping on a futon is an excellent motivator for building a bed, doubly so when your girlfriend keeps asking when the bed will be finished, triply so when you have a pile of wood begging to become a workbench.

So here's the progress.


Here you can see some of the marks telling me where different depth morti go and which faces are the show faces.

The Veritas knockdown fasteners I ordered came today, along with some other goodies you'll learn about soon.

Pembroke Table-Long Aprons with Leaf Supports

Here are the two boards for the long aprons, in the upper left there's a 7/16ths Nurse mortising chisel I brought for show and tell, and a print for a batch of hinges I've been asked to make.


Alan instructing on the finer points of setup blocks, here one sled setting and various blocks allow repeatable cuts for the two-knuckle leaf support and three-knuckle fixed apron.


Freeing the waste in preparation for pairing.


Pairing to the scored baselines in the new Moxon Vise, these will be sold through Tools for Working Wood I hear. They use the same hardware as the TFWW bench on bench, are make of laminated maple, and are very nice to use. The movable jaw is cambered which grips work amazingly, I think suede would be an even better addition to these. Keeo you're eyes out for these, they are awesome. If I've goofed and spoken too soon, my apologies Joel.

A closeup of the baseline pairing. Mahogany works very sweetly.



More of the same here.



Teaching my girlfriend how we pair to baselines at PFW, the same technique is used for dovetails as well.


Once again doing things the harder way, instead of mitering the corners for hinge clearance, I'm rounding them. This is done to the front side of the fixed (three knuckle) portion.


First a chamfer is chiseled in at 45 degrees just outside the circle line. Then about 4 more chamfers are made on the resulting arii, this is most of the waste. Following that a little file work and sanding results in something like this.

Thanks Mario, for taking pictures again, interestingly enough he's got a bunch of experience shooting work as well as tools, it clearly shows.

Setting up the New Home Shop

It's been a long time coming, but the day is finally here. I'm building a workbench, and I have a space to keep it that has a window and hardwood floors. My girlfriend an I just moved to a new place, and we agreed that using the master bedroom as a sewing and woodworking room i.e. our craft room. Why do you need a big room to sleep in? We debated, momentarily about making the living room our studio, there was more space, three glorious windows that get morning sun; however if we had company if would be odd to shuffle them all into the back bedroom to hang out.


This is a pile of Radiata pine, purchased from Atlas Wood Products, their website is really minimal, but they are great people and they have a huge assortment of wood. All of it is reclaimed from pallets. These particular pieces were once large ties for industrial pallets, ulgy sounding, but there are some gorgeous beans in there. We started surfacing some of the boards for the top, I'll post a picture of the top soon as I can get to it. I was in a rush to load all this wood upstairs before it got totally soaked by the rain.

This is wood enough for tops and legs, perhaps some stretchers for myself and a friend of mine, built like a Rubo/Holzappfel hybrid. Stay tuned, we will be reglazing some really cool diamond pane windows in the next week or two, putting the workbenches on hold. Would that be of interest to anyone?

This is a shot of the tool corner of the room, which is also project lumber storage for three different pieces so far. Tomorrow I'm going to the LN event, I'll also be picking up bed oak, so add another project to the list.

Pembroke Table-Leg Work

Here are my legs, nice huh? I've marked the locations of the morti as per Alan's request, so there are no goofs while boring out the morti.




Here I am using the horizontal boring machine, with and solid carbide slot drill to bore the waste, this is a piece of tooling from the metalworking field. It's so named because unlike most other metal cutting endmills it can cut all the way to the center of the cutter, most can not. Thusly, it can cut slots, because it only has two flutes it also has more chip clearance.


The slot drill leaves a fantastic surface, however it also leaves a half-round at the top and bottom of the morti, April was in attendance and we spent a few minutes squaring the ends. What?! you round your tenons? Shame on you. (It doesn't matter, I just like square better, sharp corners not looking like they were made by machines you know.)

One guy in the class (with whom I banter about the judicial use of electrons with) brought a lovely (well looks lovely) LN #212 scraper plane with him. He couldn't get it to work, after some fussing and lack of regard to "the instructions" Mario got it singing pretty sweetly on a piece of gnarly Sapelle.

This weekend will be a busy one, I'm gathering materials for the bed build, a workbench, a kitchen table and traveling to Hearne Hardwoods for another LN handtool event, I'll be talking to Raney of Daed Toolworks about a plane, and I'm tickled.

Stay tuned for lumber haul photos and notes about the bed design.

Pembroke Table-Finished with the Top

This past week was number four, meaning we are halfway through the process, by the end of class my top was pattern routed, the spurs were carved in, and the edges were scraped smooth. I have a little tweaking to do on the rule joint, so that it closes all the way.

Drawing in the intersection lines for the spurs, the router leaves a 3/8" radius that will be carved into a sharp corner.


Pairing the curve with my lovely sharp 1" TH. Witherby, I like mahogany.


Careful cuts here, any f-ups will be painfully visible on the piece any time the leaves are up. We don't want that.


Finished spur, details like these tell you than this table has handwork in it, there is just no way to do a sharp inside corner like this with powered machinery.


Scraping the edges down, there is a bit of tearout that even the spiral downshear bit couldn't deal with. This will clean all of that up.

Here we are after about 12 hours of work, not bad. The surface is pretty good, sanded to 320, though there is a spot where an errant glue drop or chip dented the surface. I might try steaming it out. I've seen that done with good success.

On a completely separate note, one of my students recognized a picture I have of a Mike Dunbar double Windsor I have in my office (I have a lot of machinery prints, etchings from the Centennial Exhibition, and furniture photographs about), apparently her friend took a class with Dunbar in Philadelphia a few years ago and loved it. Damn, missed the boat on that one.