Sign Making 101

This past weekend my 15yr old son promised a lady that he could make a sign for her parents front yard by this Wednesday (tomorrow). Course it would have been nice if he had checked with me first to see if I had anything planned. He decided it would be out of Eastern Red Cedar - at least the sign would be. When I asked where he would get the wood he casually pointed at my lumber stack and said - there are three cedar boards buried in the back that you were going to use to make my daughter Shae a blanket chest some day (the cedar would be used as a lining to a cherry chest). Somehow it seems I lost the argument even before it began.

So we dug out the first board, cut a couple of pieces off the one end then jointed and planed the boards and edge glued them together. Having never made a sign myself we went over several options - go out and buy a letter template set for the router ~$55, thereby eliminating all profit - okay he'd have twisted that around so I bought the templates and he pockets the cash. Go freehand using the router a v-bit and follow a sheet with the words printed on it and glued to the face of the board. And finally using the small router and a 1/8" bit, trace the outside of the letters and then take out the background about a 1/4" to 3/8" using the router working out from the letters and leaving a border. The last would take the most time but make one awesome sign. He decided to go with #2, printout then follow the letters with the router basically centering the bit on the stroke of the letters.

I set up the router and test cut on a piece of scrap till we were happy with the depth for the smaller letters then he practiced a bit then cut the smallest letters with it and the tails on the apostrophes and quotes. Then we dropped the bit a bit more, tested then he cut the next set of words. And finally one more drop and then he cut the last set. He did all the routing I just showed him how and got him going on a scrap piece. 

Then yesterday (Monday night) we trimmed up the board centering the words left and right and top and bottom. Then came the fun - the sign posts. He wanted to use pressure treated 4x4 but fankly I thought that 4x4 was too heavy for the sign itself - out of proportion and second I hate working with pressure treated lumber especially if I have to resaw it to smaller dimensions. I wanted to use Western Red Cedar instead. Off to Lowes - well our local Lowes doesn't stock much in the way of cedar except a few rough boards in the dimensional lumber section (1x2, 1x4, 1x6, etc). So then I thought maybe in landscaping. Well we struck out there as well - except that they had cedar split rail fencing. We found one rail that was very roughly split as a 3x3. We bought it, cut it in half and knocked off the tenons, jointed 2 sides square to each other then planed it down till we got it looking square ~ 2-1/4" square. We left it as long as possible figuring the people can shorten the posts when they install it if needed - hard to add more once its cut off.

I routed some mortises for the sign to sit in and Johannes drilled three holes per side to pin the sign into the mortise. But only through the back of the posts and the sign and into but not through the front of the posts. Then he spent the rest of today sanding and applying Cabott Spar Varnish - interior/exterior to the sign. He did the first coat unassembled so that all parts could get coated. Then we assembled and glued the pins in place. Some glue squeezed out into the mortise but with a coat of varnish inside the mortise and on the sign itself hopefully it won't create a situation where the sign can't expand. I had Johannes elongate the top and bottom holes in the sign itself while leaving the center hole alone. This was intended to allow the sign board to expand and contract seasonally while remaining centered in the mortise.

  

He just put on another coat of varnish. I told him to lightly sand with synthetic steel wool tomorrow morning and put on a 3rd coat. Hopefully then he can deliver late in the afternoon.

My New Toys

I thought I'd do a quick post showing off some of my new toys that I've acquired thus far this year.

We got rid of a few of the older tools: 1960's Craftsman Wood Lathe, 1960's Craftsman 6" Jointer and my Delta 14" Bandsaw with riser and Carter guides.

We added:

Delta DJ-20 8" Jointer with 76" (I think) bed. I picked this baby up at an auction sale for $400. We discovered that the casting assembly that holds the fence in position had been busted in half and very carefully epoxied back together. The auctioneer had stated that the machine was in full working order and when we showed him the casting he immediately offered to replace it. Completely blew me away that he would do that. We replaced the casting and brought the jointer into service a few months ago.

In May we went to Grizzly's Tent Sale in Muncy, PA. We ditched the kids and had the weekend to ourselves. Who ever said I wasn't a romantic - what could be more romantic then celebrating your eighteenth wedding anniversay with the bride of my youth and a tool sale. Anyhow the scratch and dent part wasn't that great though we picked up a 1.5hp electric motor reasonably cheap and an air filtration system to help get the dust out of the air. We got it over 50% off - perhaps a bit small for the size of the garage but we've done other things to reduce the dust in the air.

We also bought a brand new bandsaw, one that should work much better for the resawing that we do and the large blanks that Mattheus cuts for woodturning. We got the Grizzly 19" bandsaw. It can resaw ~ 12" height. The power it has makes the old 14" bandsaw look like a toy. Mattheus found out the hard way that you have to make fewer errors. He tried to cut up a large 10" tall chunk of maple log, and then cut a bowl blank out of one of the pieces. He was using the wrong blade for the job (perhaps partially my fault) and when going got a bit slow, he pushed a little harder. The blade flexed inside the cut but the motor didn't even slow down and kept pulling it through until it got so hot it melted the "tires" on the bandsaw. Only had the saw a few days :-(

Finally I've been working on building a surface sander for the last couple of weeks. Unfortunately I didn't document the build process. Its uses a 30" drum and the 1.5 hp motor we got at Grizzly. Its not completely built yet but what is left is cosmetic and accessories. The core part is built and functionaly. Here are a few pictures:

I still need to a door to the front left side, a drawer in the right open section, end panel and a drawer to catch the sawdust. I also plan to add a longer outfeed table as well that will fold down. I bought the drum and bearings from my father who also gave me the plans.

I have a few other toys that I will share in a future post.

Pine Bedroom Built-in - Part IV

In the beginning there was a pile of rough sawn yellow pine.. and then there was a pile of planed and jointed pine boards and imbetween was a lot of work (and slivers). On Saturday I pulled out the rough sawn pine boards for this project and set them out against the garage wall and gave them a once over and sorted through them and determined roughly where each would be used and to make sure I had enough boards. Then we began to plane them this aft.

After 5 hrs of work and about 7 garbage cans full of wood shavings we have all the boards rough planed and jointed. By rough planing, I mean taking the boards and jointing both edges just to get rid of some of the slivers and hopefully straightening them enough to be able to start ripping pieces from them later. Then planing the boards on both faces in order to reveal the true surface of the board - basically making them smooth on both sides but not bringing them to a final thickness. The boards still vary in thickness between about 7/8" and 1".

Later this week I'll line the boards up against the wall, make final decision on where the boards will be used - the planing revealed a few cracks in what was one of the best boards that had been destined for the dresser top. It may simply require ripping the board on the crack and then gluing back together or it may mean readjusting and using a different board in the top. That's it for this post.

Pine Bedroom Built-in - Part III

I'm struggling a bit tonight with the design of the dresser cabinet - primarily with how to handle seasonal wood movements. The cabinet is about 22" deep with the top and 4 sides and 2 small shelves made from solid southern yellow pine. I don't know the exact seasonal movement amount for southern yellow pine - according to one site (http://woodgears.ca/wood_grain/shrinkage.html) the tangential movement is about 0.84% for pine. This would would equate to about 0.1848" on 22" width or ~3/16". Assuming the sides and shelves expand at the same rate or approximately thereof, the issue that concerns me most is the framing that I need to support the drawers. The plan currently is not to buy drawer slides but rather just make runners and kickers to allow the drawers to run in. The issue comes in that the kickers and runners will have the grain orientated 90 degrees to the sides and wood doesn't expand very much longitudinally, but rather in its width. The top of the dresser will be free floating - held in place with screws. Framing across the width of the unit shouldn't be an issue.

Maybe I'm overcomplicating it, but I hate to see it self destruct. I'm thinking that the smartest route here may be to create a system where I glue and screw the kicker/runner set to the front of the cabinet say first 3 inches, then place a screw at the back with a elongated hole?? Then the sides can expand and contract and the kicker/runner will stay tight at the front but as the sides expand it will move forward and back along the elongated screw hole at the back. Anyone have any thoughts?

On another note I modified the upper shelving unit just a bit tonight moving the bottom 3 shelves closer together to 11" vertical spacing from 12" vertical spacing and then instead of a constant 8" for the final 2 I sort of split the difference a bit and stepped down to 10" and then 7-1/2" (viewed under the face frame - 8 -1/4" if you remove the face frame). I may need to bring that top shelf down just a tad more but it looks more pleasing to the eye now.

Pine Bedroom Built-in - Part II

I've sketched up the remaining parts of this project in 3D to get a visual of how it will look. The doors and drawers are inset 3/8" and overlap on the face frame 3/8". Where possible, the face frame is 1-1/2" in width. The box in front of the window seat is the baseboard heater and must be in that location. The rectangular box in the middle of the dresser section represents the 2 outlets that we needed to work around in the design.

I'm at a loss as what to do with the face frame on the shelves above the dresser. Specifically the left one, it needs an extra half inch for wall factor. The face frame below it on the dresser must be extra wide to accomodate a window sill sticking into the room from the left edge by 2-5/8".

Having talked with my friend and reviewed the images on the blog, I'm going to attempt to rearrange the spacing on the shelves on the upper left - hopefully giving it a better transition from wide spacing to narrow. The abrupt spacing change that currently exists really detracts from the piece (in my opinion).

I also need to add two vertical dividers in the window bench seat. Basically going with a 2 - 1 - 2 so the dividers will be to the left and right of the center door. Then I need to work out the framing for the dresser. I held off framing it properly in the 3D rendering until I could present it and get feedback on whether the 2 shelves in the middle of the dresser were going to stay - since the shelves dicate needing solid dividers as well.

I'm starting to get much more comfortable with Google Sketch-Up. The last time around the bulk of the time was figuring out how to use the program - living room units, this time the bulk of the time spent is in figuring out the framing and how the parts will go together.

Pine Bedroom Built-in - Part I

I'm starting a new project for a friend - building a built-in dresser - book shelf and window seat unit out of southern yellow pine. I've been procrastinating a bit on starting this project but yesterday I started to dig into it more seriously. I went out and remeasured a few things in the room to make sure I had clear in my head the gotchas before I started modelling it.

There are a few pain points - the corner this will be sitting in is not square - at 22" depth it is already a 1/2" out of square > 90 degrees. On the same side, there is a window that will be just in front of the unit - sitting maybe 3" in front of the unit and the sill protrudes 2-5/8" into the room from the wall. I almost missed that little point. I had the unit all drawn up with a 1-1/2" face frame and then I remembered the sill. A quick call confirmed my worst fears. I had to change the left most stile of the face frame would have to increase from 1-1/2" to 3-1/8" (2-5/8" + 3/8" (draw front overlap) + 1/8" clearance).

I finished modeling the bottom - dresser unit. The two missing drawers is a design decision by my friend. There is an electrical outlet and a phone jack behind the center spot. She didn't want to block access to either of these. So instead of drawers there are two fixed shelves.

Here is the initial rendering showing the bottom dresser unit. The white block on top is a set of shelves that extend up to the ceiling. The block size is  a bit too wide at the moment. The block to the right is where the window seat will be. There is another window that will butt up tight to the right side of the dresser unit. So we are working around two windows, the one on the right along the back wall and one on the left wall just in front of the dresser unit.

I will see about modelling the other two units tomorrow. The shelf unit above should be easy, the window seat has the potential to be a bit more problematic. There is a base board heater that will sit directly in front of the window seat part. I can't build directly above it because of heat. But I'm concerned that someone sitting or laying on the window seat will constantly bash their heals against it. I'm thinking that I might try modelling it with the actual seat part at the very top extenting out about 3 inches so that it forces the knee and legs ought from the heater. But I don't know if I can get that to work or look decent.

Portable Saw Mill

For the last month or so, as time permitted on either a Saturday or occassionally during an evening, the boys and I would go out and cut down a few trees. The trees where on the future drain field of our church's building site. Going out and running a chain saw or just moving limbs was a good stress relief from a very hectic and trying project at work. I think from Feb 1st till April 11th I averaged 70 hr work weeks. So getting out and away from a computer was a huge relief. All that work also kept me from going out in the shop and playing and hence the completely lack of posts on this blog.

Part of the deal with cutting down the trees involved cutting all the trees on the drain field and making sure that all the branches/trunks 2" or larger were set aside for firewood, smaller branches were disposed of in piles around the perimeter of the field. In total we wound up with 20 logs - ~11 ft in length and ranging in diameter from 14" to 24+". With the gracious help of two friends from church we moved the logs from the church site to our "milling site". The milling site was about 2 miles away in an open area of another woodlot. The effort to move the logs was almost herculean, 11 of the logs were loaded with a loader the remainder were loaded manually using chain falls, winches and jacks. The mill site looked like this after we got all the logs there. These were primarily oak - mostly white, a few red oak logs. In addition there were 4 soft maple logs - these logs have ambrosia beetle damage to them, making the boards interesting.

My friend Steve, who is the land owner at the mill site also had a few logs that he needed milled.

We were only able to do some of them as the maples in the middle were spalted and a few were too small in diameter to make it worth while to mill. However we did do the majority of them - cherry and walnut.

I hired Jim Hart - Brookside Farm Sawmill to bring in his portable sawmill. He was scheduled to arrive at 8:30am, I got there a half hour early figuring on standing by the road ready to stop traffic while he turned into the site. But I barely got the van parked and he was already pulling in.  He had the mill setup and ready to go within 10-15 min of getting to the site. It was amazing to watch him in action as he set up the saw mill - extremely efficient. We parked the mini-van and the U-Haul trailer off behind the mill to make it readily available to load the boards onto. We could only hold about 1/4 of the boards in the trailer as the mini-van would not have handled all the weight.

Here we have the first log onto the mill. This was one of two logs that I had sitting next to my driveway since last spring when I cut down two trees in my yard.  Hence the reason for the bark falling off. Despite its outer looks, the wood it produced was beautiful.

The first cut:

The first boards:

The mill in action on the 3rd log. You can begin to see the trail of sawdust collecting on the ground. By the time we got done that pile was about 30 inches high along the length of the mill.

As the morning wore on out came the umbrella. The sawdust is already starting to stack up on the left. The basic process of sawing the log depended somewhat on the size of the log. Once loaded on the mill and levelled so that the pith was approximately level front to back. the first cut was made to remove a slab containing the bark and a majority of the sapwood and generally any imperfections such as curvature, limb stumps etc. On larger diameters, often a second cut was made before turning the log to get the next adjacent face. The second cut was not discarded but rather any second cuts before the log was squared were set aside on the log lift. When the log was complete, these were brought back up on the mill set on edge and squared up removign any bark and sapwood. Yielding more boards.  The initial slabs were discarded for later recycling into firewood.

It was interesting to watch the mechanics of flipping the log over to get to the next adjoining face. Here you can see the hydrolic arm with a mechanical hand starting to lift the log:

Ready to begin cutting the next face.

After 8 hrs, we had cut all 20 logs that I had as well as 8 logs from Steve. We had to cut some of Steve's logs due to large crooks in the trees and previous saw marks. When you have a severely twisted log it may be better to cut the log into two shorter sections in order to maximize the output vs. attempting to cut the longer log with a bend or crook in it. There is a tradeoff - longer effort to handle 2 logs vs. 1, but some of that is offset by the amount of work to deal with the crooked log as well as the higher yield. Its amazing how much wood gets lost when dealing with a crooked log. I got to see it first hand when doing one of the red oak logs.

We moved one load home on Saturday night and setup the first base for stacking the wood and unloaded the trailer and returned it to Charlottesville. We were exhausted - 8 am till10pm with only a short lunch and supper break. My frient James volunteered to bring the remainder of the wood on his flat bed trailer pulled by his 4x4. Where my van and U-Haul trailer we could only get 1/4 of the load, with his trailer we managed the rest of my wood and we brought Steve's wood as well since he hadn't really put much thought into where to stack it after it was milled. I didn't want to leave the cherry and walnut just sitting out and we had room in our stacks.

 Here are the stacks with Johannes standing next to give perspective. The stack bases are 4"x6" x 12' pressure treated boards with 5 - 4"x4"x48" pressure treated boards going across between them. We laid plastic under the long runners. Then levelled everything off front to back and side to side. Then laid a sticker board on each cross piece and then the first layer. The tarps are temporary. I need to get some corrugated roofing material and make a small frame to act as a roof over each pile and hopefully run shade cloth around the pile to basically hide it and allow it to blend more into the evironment. This also will help in air circulation.

Steve wanted a nice walnut mantle cut from one of the boards and Jim Hart did a fantastic job of creatively cutting the log to give a remarkable mantle. Its difficult to see but one side is natural edged with semi-symetrical bulges at either end.

Well thats all for this post.