Built In Wall Unit - Part III

Today was a day of planing and jointing one edge of the pine boards straight. Its too awkward to use my old Craftsman 6" jointer to joint the edge of these 10" and wider boards. So I had to resort to using a straightedge and router to joint one edge of the boards. I had to jump through some hoops to get the first board jointed as my straightedge was only 8' long and the boards 10'. After completing that I used the first board as the straightedge for router jointing the remaining 26 boards. It took pretty much the whole day to finish planing the last 10 boards and jointing on edge of all of the boards.

I still haven't planed all the boards to final thickness.. My focus was getting them cleaned up and then I'll take them to final thickness in a few days. I actually want to keep them thick while I do the glue-ups for the base cabinet. The base cabinet being 20" wide will require at least 2-3 boards edge glued. Once these boards have been glued up, I plan on planing them to final thickness using a friend's thickness sander. The sander will accommodate up to 24". Once I've established the final thickness for the boards for the base cabinet, I'll match the rest of the boards to that thickness. I was hoping to be a little thicker then 3/4" figuring it will give the bookcases a little more strength.

At the end of the day I got a pile of boards, planed flat and one edge jointed.

Built In Wall Unit - Part II

Tonight was back out to the garage and planing more of the rough pine lumber. Because I need the garage door open while doing it I have to quit around 9pm. When I can't work on the physical aspects of the project I've been working on the virtual aspects of the project - attempting to draw it in 3D using the free Google SketchUp. While I'm a long long ways from being any sort of expert with Google SketchUp - it takes me forever to do the simplest tasks.

Here are some of the exported images of what I'm building. There is still a long way to go and a lot of things to figure out. The entire project needs to have a face frame added to it. These would cover the joints where the units meet. Doors need to be added to the lower cabinet after the face frame is added and in the lower right case, there will be a grid of small drawers 3 columns x 4 rows.

By taking time and drawing it in 3D I'm hoping it will give me a chance to experiment with some of the joinery and design aspects before I start cutting things up.

From the design you can see that its divided into 5 cases:

Bottom Case - 5 doors with moveable shelves behind them
Right case that is about 9.5" deep with fixed shelves on 10" centers and a lower 3x4 grid of drawers.
Middle right case, one fixed shelf (2nd shelf from bottom) and 3 moveable shelves.
Middle left case, while currently its drawn as a single fixed shelf, this case will have 2 fixed shelves with a a pair of doors with stain glass in them in front of the shelves
Far left case with a few moveable shelves. The case is attached only on the right side and to the wall behind.

Built In Wall Unit - Part I

I'm starting to embark on my next project - a built in wall unit that will include multiple bookshelves, a section of small drawers and a base cabinet. The project will be built out of Southern Yellow Pine. Last Friday I took a drive to Fishersville with a U-Haul trailer and picked up about 450 board feet of 10" and wider southern yellow pine boards for a $1.17 a board foot. The wood is a bit of a mix. There are some really clear boards and some that have a lot of knots. The goal is to use the clear boards for the shelves and cabinet top. The less then clear boards will be used for some of the smaller parts, and narrow strips, working around the knots. Where we can't work around the knots and the knots are still tight, I plan on using those boards either as shelves inside the cabinet or on the dividers inside the cabinet.

Currently I have boards stacked all over the garage. I started planing some tonight. Overall its amazing the grain and the look of the boards. However, the boards seem to be taking a major toll on my planer blades. I want to at least rough plane the boards before switching blades.

There are two headaches that have shown up. In the image below, you can see a few light grey streaks in the planed lumber. They appear to be discoloration in the actual wood itself. These don't show on all boards and some are on only one face of a board.

The other headache involves the grain structure on these boards. Where the grain forms a "circle" the planer is having a very difficult time. I'm experiencing tear out on either one side or the other side of the "circles". Sometimes the tear out is very light and can be sanded out, others are quite deep. I've left the boards at a fairly thick size, figuring that the best way to deal with the tear out issue is to use new blades. By using the older blades it should get rid of the worst issues such as dirt and "candied" resin that I think is probably dulling the existing knives.



Receptionist Desk - Part V

Thought I'd post some pictures of the completed desk. I finished it up several weeks ago.

Receptionist Desk Part IV

Its been over a month since my last post. A combination of a lot of overtime in July and then a lot of concentrated effort to get this desk done. But I'm finally closing in on the finish line on the desk. It seems like the last week or so has been a hard uphill battle. Last week it seemed like every night I had to make yet another trip to Lowes to get something or other. Perhaps sometimes its best to stop, sit down and think vs. running off right away :-(

This week has gone much smoother though a tad slower then I'd have liked. I had hoped to be putting on the second coat of polyurethane this evening but instead I just finished the first coat. My "helper" seems to have disappeared this evening - claiming exhaustion. She's been up the last two nights late helping me get the desk done. We were up till 1am last night staining and she went out there a couple of times today to wipe off any stain bleeding out of the pores. Oak is nasty that way, red more so then white oak, but they both will "swallow" up stain into their pores only to push it back out over the subsequent day or so.

I'm pretty much exhausted myself, so I'm going to post some pictures of the desk in various stages over the past three weeks and leave it at that.

Receptionist Desk - Part III - Initial Dry Fitting

Its been quite a while since I last made a post. In that time we've managed to finished milling up up all the rails and stiles and panels. Most of the rails and stiles were cut to length and the tongue and groove cut using a combination of tablesaw and/or router (curved rail on the sides). Yesterday and today gave me the opportunity to finish fitting all the panels and gave me to the opportunity to actually dry fit the desk together. For the first time I got to see what the finished desk will look like. There is still a long ways to go, especially since I only really get to work on it one day a week.

Keep in mind when looking at the picture that the only thing that is glued together right now is the 5 boards that make up the desk top. I have yet to trim the top to length and final width. The top surround sits on top of the desktop. Almost all of the rails and stiles are held together using 1/4" width by 3/8" deep tongue and grooves cut using a dado blade on the tablesaw. The grooves run from end to end on the rails and stiles and the tongues on the end of each rail were cut with a slightly wider setup on the tablesaw using a sacrificial fence on the tablesaw. Panels are all 1/4" solid oak resawn from wider stock. It was a bit of a challenge to get some of the 10" wide boards resawn in half on bandsaw - the 3/4 hp motor really is only designed for resawing up to 6".

The sides are tongue and grooved to the front using a matched tongue and groove set from Sommerfeld. I was actually quite surprised how well the router bits work together. It is one thing to watch them demonstrate the router bits at shows and talk about having them matched length so that you can switch out one bit with the other without needing to adjust height. My Porter Cable router needed 5 of those rubber grommets that Sommerfeld uses below the router bit to let them bottom out. They only provided 2 grommets with the set so I had to go over to Lowes and buy 4 more. Unfortunately Lowes didn't have 1/2" grommets so I had to borrow the pen turning mandrel and put the 9/16" OD grommets and sand them down to 1/2". But after getting them working, it was a very fast setup and amazing results. I'm actually quite happy with the set. I could have perhaps used them to to all the tongue and groove work but honestly they are more designed to join cabinet sides to fronts and are designed to run offset vs. centered on the workpiece.  Plus they only cut 1/4" deep grooves while I wanted a deeper tongue and groove for the rails and stiles and panels.

As can be seen from the last picture I still need to setup for the drawers on the left and the wide keyboard drawer below the main part of the desktop. The botom will have a "baseboard" around it to hide the gap that is currently visible at the bottom.  I hope to put in the framing for the drawers over a couple of evenings this week. And cut and plane the sides for the drawers. I'll have to do some glueup on that sides for the file drawer on the bottom left. I also need to cut the "counter top" that will sit on that top "skirt". The wood is all planed and ready for the counter top, it just needs to be cut to length.

Lots of finishing details as well. But at least its starting to look like a desk. That's all for today.

Receptionist Desk Part II - Milling the rough lumber

It has been awhile since I've done a post. I had to work a significant amount of overtime at work and the amount of time I had available to putter out in the garage was significantly reduced. A couple of weeks ago, my sons and I started sorting through our stock pile of wood. Since the desk has a great deal of narrow and reasonably short pieces we decided to begin by utilizing some of the less desireable boards in the pile. By desireable I mean that these pieces had a lot of defects that would prevent longer and wider pieces from being utilized but would yield a good number of decent pieces for the rails and stiles required to build this desk.

We spent awhile sorting through the boards and estimating the various cuts to try and see what we can come up with. We chose a couple of really clear boards for the counter top around the top and a couple of boards that looked really clean for the desktop.

Over the past couple of Saturdays we've been working through the cut list and jointing and planing the boards required leaving them slightly oversized in all 3 dimensions to allow for some tension release. Tonight Johannes and I finished cutting them to width and thickness. I had hoped to use 7/8" thick material but a few stubborn boards would not cleanup until we reached 3/4". There are quite a few boards that are showing significant rayflake so the desk should really turn out very nicely.

We also began working on the desktop. We began with 4 boards approximately 9" to 9.5" in width. After jointing and trimming the outside edges and removing most of the sapwood and as many defects as possible, we were left with a 33" wide top. The final top is supposed to be about 32" in width. We will lose a bit more as we cut the glue joints. So the final dimension will probably be reduced to closer to the final dimension of 32".

The hardest part about working with rough lumber is that there are times that you can't really see all the defects until after you begin to plane the lumber. I chose two boards that had clearly come from the same tree in hopes that they would match up in color and characteristics. The tree must have had a mineral streak or discoloration in the wood. I wound up with a bookmatched dark streak in two of the boards. You can see the defect in the upper right of the image. The other dark areas especially in the foreground of the image are the result of the beginning of a crotch in the tree. There are a couple of other defects, one knot near the top center of the image and one in the foreground left. The foreground left will be removed when we trim the top to length (its a few inches over length right now). The other is removeable only if I narrow the desktop by an extra inch. The other option is to leave it, perhaps fill it with epoxy to level it to the desktop. I've done this a few times - once on my daughter's pencil post bed and again on the sofa.

Well that's it for tonight.