An update! Wheeee!

Scary stuff.. an update in the same year as my last post... what is the world coming to? Just a short one this time, but possibly interesting.

I was looking for something to build my wife for Valentine's day, and came across the idea of a small chest of drawers (dresser) that she could store her yarn and crochet materials in. I ended up kidnapping the largest yarn package she had and what I came up with was a 7 drawer assembly, with the top drawer being much shallower than the others so it could be used to hold magazines and crochet hooks.

Material wise, it's a combination of spruce and fir. One of these days, Windsor plywood is going to have a big sale on hardwoods, and I'm going to get a trailer load of red oak, but for now, this will do. Since end grain doesn't absorb stain the same way the face grain does on a piece of wood, I always try to keep it concealed under something. This time I built a 1/2 x 1/2 veneer of fir and jointed it to the outer edges of all the spruce blanks to conceal the end grain. There's a 1 1/2 skirt at the bottom with a raised start for the first drawer. This gave me space to conceal a set of 4 heavy duty wheels that allow the unit to be rolled any direction with a gentle nudge. The drawer guides are made of 5/8" Ash (Canadian Tire for $2 per 3' believe it or not) with some very thin spruce shims to keep the drawers from slopping around.

Drawer construction was an amusing sort of procedure. I bought a dovetail kit specifically for the drawers, and despite the fact it was freezing outside the day I was working on it, the process went relatively smoothly. However I did run into one snag. When setting the depth guide on the dovetail plate that attaches to my router, the instructions say to set it at the thickness of the wood I'm working with. Easy enough I guessed, and dialed in 5/8ths. After cutting all of my joints I realized the problem however. The instructions fail to take one thing into account. when you cut a dovetail you get a set of grooves one one side, and the other has a set of cuts that look like the edges of a puzzle piece (hard to explain.. look up dovetailing if you want to see... they're tiny trapezoids). The catch is that the grooves are cut by a round bit, and the tip of that groove is round... ]]]]]]]]]]]) sort of like so... now, you try to slide the trapezoid into this, which has square edges by the way, and the furthest you can progress is the beginning of the curve at the end of the groove. Square pegs don't fit into round holes.. nuff said. The actual depth difference is about 3/16th of an inch, so it took a couple of hours with a very sharp chisel to alter all the dovetails to the point they would work. Very easy to put together however. They tend to naturally square themselves out when you assemble the drawers, so there was no trouble there. For the bottoms I threw a 3/8 rabbet bit into the router and cut a slot all the way around. A bit of tablesaw work with some 3/8ths plywood, and they dropped into place with a tiny bead of glue.

Finish wise I used the same stain as the sideboard (had some left anyways). What I wanted to do was the same sort of finish as was on the sideboard, done with the Tung oil, but I ran into a problem. Tung oil won't cure below 13 degrees Celsius. Working inside, that poses a problem because the fumes are also flammable as it's curing. So I have my wood room vented outside with a large fan and the duct to the furnace blocked off. Generally this suffices, especially since the room faces East and we have mostly West winds. With the sideboard it worked fine. However, we've had a primarily East wind for the last couple of weeks, and it caused all sorts of havoc. The temperature in the room at night was somewhere around 5 degrees, and while the first 2 coats cured fairly well, the third one was still a jelly after 36 hours. I warmed the room back up by closing the window, but the damage was done and the final coat never did cure fully. So the buffing with steel wool and paste wax became a sort of refinishing challenge. The third coat stripped off completely (Tung oil is a non stacking penetrating finish.. there should _never_ be a surface residue), but oh my God the time and elbow grease involved.. I was at it for 8 hours straight, and it would have been longer if Chris hadn't helped me with 2 of the drawers. But, in the end it had the same buttery soft finish the sideboard does, so it was worth the effort I think... Finally a bit of brass hardware, including 2 lion's head pulls Carrie salvaged from a piece of destroyed furniture (she really likes them), and some wax on the drawer guides, and we have a functional piece of furniture :) Next up, an entertainment stand (not what you're thinking I suspect.. you'll see :) )

Yech.. I really don't ever update.. ah well.. call me boring

The title says it all.. it's so true! Being completely busy doesn't really help that much.. too many things on the go and not really enough time to complete anything... File count of the "My Pictures" directory (this is where I store all of the shots I haven't even sorted, let alone edited. All of the sorted and tweaked files reside on an external drive) says 985 files dating back as far as July of 2009... Lots of good pictures, but no time to do anything with them yet... Soon though.. have to start thinking about photo competitions this summer, and I need to get a batch printed out as well. Carrie came across a very nice photo book, professionally made of photos you submit for a reasonable price. Not a bad way to display some of my work, but there comes the how to pick 50 shots from thousands of images.. talk about paring the excess away X_X. It can be done, but what a chore.. heh...

I don't really like posting my better shots online unless I've taken the time to heavily watermark them. It's far too easy for someone to right click or even screen capture and your photo wanders off into the hazy land of copyright violation. It's very common on chat sites, and I don't really want to see my work being copied thousands of times by random people. Maybe a website where if someone clicks "Save As" it deletes their hard drive.. hmmm.....

But.. I digress! Two projects this time. One of them is a bit premature in the posting because the people who need to come over and see it still haven't visited (*coughIanandWandacough*) :P but I'm sure they will eventually, so all is good. First project I have no photos of (go figure) and I can't for the life of me remember why I don't. Probably some good reason at the time but who knows.

Project #1 was a Christmas gift for my Mom. She wanted a cedar chest, so I obliged her. A trip to Home Depot for a trailer load of Western Red Cedar and an irritated clerk going "You can't put those boards there sir" (and me replying "Oh really, then turn *these* into firewood and sell the decent ones please" these being a chunk of cedar I dropped at his feet with a 4" bow in it and so saturated with water it was oozing onto the floor) and we're ready for business. I wanted to try something different this time, so the boards were planed and jointed into blanks, but I didn't do the same end caps. Instead, I stacked them all up and cut fingerjoints into the ends. Essentially, think the way the corners on a log cabin work. What you get is endgrain/face/endgrain/face in a continually repeating pattern. Huge amount of work though. Probably would have been faster with a dado blade on the table saw, but I need to make myself a sizable crosscut sled before I try that little trick. Just not stable enough for my liking. Once everything was assembled, I discovered a twist in the lid that needed some attention, so braces were attached to the underside. Now, Western Cedar is not a hardwood by any standards, so I needed to protect the surface but keep the cedar smell intact. The lid and the outside of the box were done with 8 coats of heavy varathane (think spar varnish.. about the same consistency). Inherently, the varathane is amber in colour, so add that to the red of the cedar and you get a beautiful reddish glow that brings the grain out nicely. Each coat was sanded with 400 grit sandpaper to knock off the nibs, and the entire project was finished with brass hinges, handles and corner guards. Inside of the chest is raw wood, and man, does it every smell of cedar.. not too shabby IMO :)

Next was a refinish project, rather than something built from scratch. Ian and Wanda gave us a sideboard/buffet that had belonged to Wanda's grandmother. Ian had begun the restoration, but lacking the space and time, decided to pass on the project, so it sat at my place for more than a few months pending my getting a better random orbit sander and shop vac. Timely Christmas gifts from my Mom-in-Law and Kyle/Cynthia filled this order nicely and we were off!

A few notes on this sideboard first though. Age wise, it's old. As in very old. Commercially applied dovetail joints were not in use until the 1920's. Before that, you get custom interlocked joints that could only be made with a plane (you can't cut a vertical groove, then cut a horizontal groove halfway down on _one side_ using power tools... it has to be done by hand) and that was how all the joints for the drawers were done. It's all plane work, without even a hint of power tool application. Next hint as to the age is in the saw marks left on the wood. Circular saws were used in mills starting in the 1820's. Before that, simply due to power demands, the saws were a combination of straight cut and circular blades. Leaving straight lines on one side of a board and arcs on the other. At the same time, double straight blades were used as well, leaving corresponding mill marks. This particular sideboard has rough cut boards (oak) for the drawer backs, internal bracing, and back bracing. The drawer glides inside the sideboard also have straight cut marks, without an arc to be found anywhere. Interesting eh?

Firstly, I forgot to take before pics again (duh!) but the finish isn't too hard to picture. Take a piece of furniture, toss it in the La Brea tar pits for a week, remove, and there you go. It was _black_. And not consistently either. The black crud had been rubbed in at some point, but the person doing it missed huge areas underneath, left fingerprints, blotched inside of the drawers and generally did a horrible job. Please don't argue that it was an "original finish" and I screwed it up by refinishing it... Period craftsmen did _not_ leave slimy black fingerprints on their work, and they also didn't do half of a unit and call it a day. It was done right, and mistakes were corrected. This black crap was something slapped on at some point in the past, possibly to protect the wood, and it was _not_ original finish. And to top that off, Ian told me that one of his relatives has been "protecting" the finish with... bleh.. baby oil.. for the last however many years. Talk about incorrect information. Oil maybe, but baby oil isn't a mineral base. When it dries it goes sticky, and collects crud, that that's exactly what happened.

Initial sanding was done with a random orbit sander and 100 grit paper. Whatever that black crud was was murder on sanding discs. They fouled after a half hour sanding and it was even worse using a mouse sander or detail sander. After I finally managed to get the worst of it off, the entire project was rubbed with very hot water on a damp cloth and allowed to dry so the grain would raise, then sanded again with 150 grit discs and finally 220 grit. The end result of all the sanding was the majority of the black crud lifted out of the grain, and what I ended up was a beautiful, buttery coloured wood that I'm certain is maple (especially after comparing it online). The drawers I had to basically deconstruct then glue back together. The original glue was dried to nothing, and instead of regluing the drawers, a previous owner decided to resort to nails. >.< I hate nails.. I really do.. they're a mechanical fastener that gives moisture a chance to penetrate your project. And if they start to rust they stain the wood. That being said, one drawer had more than 30 of the little bastards holding it together... and they weren't even ring nails.. they were straight nails, so of course they just pulled out, and someone kept adding more.. Morons :/ Glue, wood filler and clamps and we're back in business.

Now, for the finish, I went with a completely different option this time. Varathane is considered a stacking finish. Each coat adds progressively to the last and you get an increase in thickness. When you're trying to fit doors and drawers, this is not a good option. So I went with a different plan.. There is a product out there called Tung oil.. granted, modern Tung oil doesn't have very much of the actual oil in it, but the idea is the same. It's a non stacking penetrating finish. Up to 5mm actually, and on a hardwood it makes the surface go incredibly hard once it dries. Also, it's easily fixed if scratched. Apply more tung oil, allow to dry and then re-wax. First some colour as the amber oil on yellow finish would have made it look like a giant pat of butter. The stain I chose was Ipswitch Pine. Very traditional, and it looks good with almost anything, so I hand rubbed it to get a light, consistent stain for the entire piece. 48 hours later came the first coat of tung oil thinned 50% with mineral spirits for maximum penetration. Then every 24 hours after that came another coat until I had a total of 4 in place. Now came the hard work. The final finish is a very, very old technique that worked incredibly well. It's simple enough too, just lots of elbow grease involved. Paste wax applied with 0000 steel wool. You buff like crazy, and the steel wool creates a very fine slurry on the surface of all the dust nibs and helps fill in any spots and holes. A final buff with a clean dry cloth and the surface is incredible. It feels like silk... if it were possible to describe wood as feeling soft, this would be a prime example of it. You just can't resist touching it. There's a few deep scratches in the top that I didn't want to try and sand out completely, so I'm counting them in the character of the piece, and put a slab of 6mm glass on top to protect it.

Overall I'm very pleased with the results (and I think Ian and Wanda will be too :) )
Project tally - Cost : $~100 (sandpaper, finish, brushes, rags, etc)
- Time : ~90 hours (that black finish was truly unreal.. whoever put that on deserves a swift kick in the head) (and I just noticed in the pics I have 2 of the drawers in wrong.. whoops :P I'll just go fix that now....)