Working Projcet

Its been so long since Ive posted that I think the pageviews counter on the blog has started going backwards.  Basically Ive had this post going for a while now and just havent finished it off.  This post was actually started over a month ago...TONIGHT, I SHALL FINISH AND POST IT SO I CAN MOVE ON TO OTHER PROJECTS!!!

I last left off with a single cabinet door not quite finished. Since then Ive knocked out the other four, plus three new drawers. Heres the breakdown:

I had a big problem with tearout when I was fielding the panels for the doors.  There were a few panels with sections of sappy, knotty bits that just wouldnt plane nicely and left a really rough surface.

For those I just took a little putty and smoothed out the bad parts.

A few of the joints also had some unsightly gaps which required wood filler:

Soon I had finished constructed the necessary five doors:

Then it was off to the sander:
This setup is great: Ive got the Shop Vac hooked up the sander, but Ive also got a switch from Sears that turns the vacuum on automatically when I turn on the sander.  Having the hoses and wires hanging from the ceiling also makes sanding a lot easier.

One last touch on the doors was a little ogee around the perimeter:
Looks nice, right?

Well, I certainly screwed up one of them pretty bad: whats wrong here?
Yep, I routed the ogee on the wrong side of the door...time for some surgery.

First I had to cut the screwed-up piece off:
Thats my new saw in the foreground.  Its a Bridge City Tool Works Kataba Meiko.  It has an unusual tooth pattern that lets it make crosscuts extremely fast.  I got it on sale and am really pleased with it.  Yeah, I said I was getting away from Japanese saws...oh well.

Then I had to clean up the saw cuts so that the new frame member would seat correctly; for this I used a shooting board.  I dont think Ive demonstrated this before on the blog, but the shooting board is extremely useful:
Essentially, the shooting board lets you use a bench plane to trim ends very precisely and accurately.  It holds the piece at 90 degrees to the path of the plane.  Here Im using it to clean up the saw cut so that the new frame member will seat squarely.

I suppose I could have gone to a lot of trouble and created loose tenon joints for the repair, but that would have been a ton of trouble (unless someone wants to buy me a Festool Domino...Any takers? Anyone?)

So I ended up using the old through-dowel method.  It gets the job done:

Paint em and done:

With all the shaping finally done for the Quilt Rack, it was time to sand. I used a combination of random orbit sanders and 3M Sandblaster sanding pads. I like the sanding pads because the foam backing keeps the pad rounded and prevents gouging or flattening the curves of the work piece. The sanding began with 80 grit and progressed to 180.

My finish sample board.

After sanding, I began experimenting with finishes. I took a scrap of Flame Yellow Birch which I had milled and sanded along with the quilt rack pieces. I ran blue tape down the middle and applied boiled linseed oil to one half and General Finishes Merlot Dye Stain to the other.

It was somewhere around this point that I was corrected regarding the due date. It turned out I only had one week until my mother-in-law’s birthday party, not two. I immediately abandoned my finish samples and got back to the business of assembling the quilt rack.

The cross members assembled to one leg.

I assembled the rack on my table saw so that I could rest in on a flat surface and ensure that it was square and wouldn’t rock. First I glued the cross members to one leg/foot assembly, then the other. As I was trying to push the second leg/foot assembly on, one of the Dominos gave me a hard time and wouldn’t slide into the cross member enough. Mid glue-up I pulled out a small pull saw and cut then end off the Domino. The leg/foot then fit on properly and I had an assembled quilt rack.

By sheer dumb luck, I was able to assemble the quilt rack square on the first try with no tweaking.

I clamped the rack with one parallel clamp for each cross member. I had a few extra clamps ready to run diagonally across the quilt rack to counteract and racking, but all four foot points sat perfectly on the table saw with no racking present at all.

With the assembly done, I next moved on to finishing the quilt rack.

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: