Working Projcet

Well, today shall prove to be a good day, the weather is pretty mild for Wisconsin this time of year, hovering around the 20 degree mark, and so its fairly tolerable within the shop. was able to take the handles that I roughed out last night and start to form them into something comfortable and ergonomic. I got an early start even, :)  thats around 11 am here :) and within about an hour and a half I had the open handle done. I longed to straighten the edges by using a belt sander. but there is always set up time when dealing with a piece like this. I opted to stick with the path I already set last night and keep to the hand tools.


I used a large woodwrights rasp, and a couple of smaller profile rasps I picked up a few years ago, to even out the areas where the coping saw did not cut square, Which was actually quite a bit. . . nothing more than a few degrees of tip and I wonder if this is the nature of the tool a bit, or if its more my technique. I guess well see over time but at the moment Im gonna call it fifty-fifty. Christopher Schwartz over at popular woodworking magazine has been beating on coping saws in his recent blogs and Im afraid my coping saws are guilty of the same faults he was finding unsatisfactory in his, mostly not being able to place enough tension on the blade to keep it directly in line, they all seem to waiver. For now my take is thats how its gonna be . . . and sometimes youve just gotta play the course, sand traps, water hazards and all. Im confident things will improve over time, could be things like a bandsaw have just spoiled me a wee bit. (naw, not possible!)

After rasping everything to rough shapes and curves like I wanted,, I then smoothed over the work with a card scraper and some sandpaper for areas difficult to work the scraper in. One of those small profile rasps has a smoothing file side to it and that worked awesome to sharpen up some of the valleys between curves.

Anyways, today is just a matter of settling in and doing the work, the open handle is done with shaping, ready for the kerf cut to accept the saw and the irvets to hold the sawblade in place. The "D" handle is in the vice right now. I touched on it a bit before deciding to take a break, come inside, eat lunch, warm up, and knock out a post of the progress. Just to finish out a couple "action" pics of me working away, I really like the one using the card scraper, its neat to see the reflection bounce off the scraper and get captured by the camera.

I will probably post more later today, until then . . .

When last I left, I had assembled a door frame and was letting the panel glue-up dry:

Next I trimmed it to the dimensions I needed. The idea behind frame-and-panel construction is that the panel "floats" within the frame, thus eliminating a major cause of warping and other sorts of distortion. Thats not really a concern for this project because these are small little doors and they arent actually going to be fitted within a rigid frame...but still I wanted to practice doing things right so I tried to cut them so theyd have maybe 1/16" of play in the vertical and horizontal axis.

Now for the fun part: fielding the panels. Growing up I remember wondering how the bevel was but on panels before electric routers were around. Heres how:
Heres my trusty skew rabbet plane with the normal 90 degree fence replaced with an angled fence. This keeps the plane at a consistent angle producing a nice bevel. Notice how the edge of the panel thats being worked is aligned with the edge of the workbench; this provides additional support for the plane fence and helps keep everything aligned. Then its just a matter of removing stock:

Heres the plane setup:

The process actually goes really quickly; Id estimate that I can field one edge in about a minute. The one thing to look out for is the depth of cut. This plane doesnt have a depth stop on it, so I sort of have to go by eye.

After fielding one side, I raised the other. This is simply a matter of putting a shallow rabbet around the edges. For this I used another new toy: a Sweetheart-era Stanley 78.

I got it off eBay in immaculate condition...I was really pleased. Yes, the skew rabbet plane wouldve also worked for this, but that wouldve meant taking it all apart and losing all my setting on it. Its nice to be able to set the fence only one time per tool per project.

And thats that:
The 78 has a depth stop too so its pretty nice for raising panels where you have intersecting rabbets that need to come together at the same height.

Then I just slid the panel into the frame:

...and repeated the whole process:

So thats two down, three to go. The last three are going to be made assembly-line style with me doing each step for all three doors at the same time.

Then its drawer time.

PS: Heres the bookcase in situ: