As much as I love my power tools, sometimes the hand tools are just a little easier to use. In this case I was trimming a walnut strip that I put on the front of a drawer runner. Granted once I got it dialed in it was over to the wide belt sander to get all of the runners cleaned up and the same thickness. The walnut might be overkill, but I don’t want the maple to show when the drawers are shut.
Part of the way through a dry fit on a cabinet. The primary woods in this piece will be cherry with some nice looking dark streaks running through the wood. There will be some walnut used as a secondary accent wood in the piece. Between the through dovetails, dados for shelves, resawn lumber glued on edge for doors and the back, and then an intentional gap running around the perimeter of the piece; the dry fit will be crucial to get all of the measurements right.
Rather uneventful day in the shop. Turned a few styluses to get started and then spent the rest of the day planing, jointing, resawing, sanding and generally creating a mess. The pile in the picture below is a mixture of cherry, maple and poplar shavings coming out of my planer.
I absolutely hate painting with a passion. I will pay obscene amounts of money to never do it again. But painter’s (painters’ ?) tape might be my favorite shop tool. The only other thing close is my glue stick (an old dowel rod that I use to apply glue). Here I’m using the tape on the inside of a buffet to clamp some decorative pieces to inside of the cabinet. If I’m applying decorative pieces, I must be close to finishing this one. Right?
My big pile of cherry lumber. Finally starting to work my way through it. In its rough cut state it certainly doesn’t look like much. Shockingly the retail price for that stack would be way over a thousand dollars. Thank god for Craigslist and people that have trees fall down… To give you a sense of what it looks like after going through the planer, take a look at the second picture which has a before and after piece side by side.
Just finished a quick test of the lamp before final assembly (in my head I said “assembly” in my best Norm Abram impression). Looks like everything is working as expected. Time to insert the final 4 screws and call this one finished.
I decided to class up the living room stereo a little bit. In the picture is the partial dry fit of the woodwork. It’s only partial, because I still need to figure out how to pull apart the small box that I put together to test fit and dimensions… In front of those pieces are the individual parts of the two boxes that I’m hoping will fit together. Through dovetails all around on these pieces.
Today’s projects are a random mixture of items. The walnut box with all of the clamps will be the base for an Edison lamp. The poster frame is sitting in my sled to cut slots for the splines in the miter joints. Fortunately these are both small projects so hopefully they will move to the finished furniture category next weekend.
Well it’s taken a lot of sanding but the drawers are taking shape. Sorry if the picture is a little blurry. Combination of still shaking from sanding and using an iPhone doesn’t always make for the best picture quality. Up next is the carcass of the cabinet and then fitting the drawers to the opening…
There’s an old adage that you can never have enough clamps. Personally I’ve never been fond of adages; I generally find them to be a shortcut to actually thinking. I almost uttered “you can never have enough clamps” when finishing this glue up. But I have plenty of clamps left over so that can’t be a true statement. Instead I was left wondering why I seem to have no more than 4 clamps of any size or length that match. Good news is that the drawers are almost done and I can start on fit and finish shortly.
Claremont Designs 