Sawdust on the Floor

I don’t know what it’s like at your home, but in mine, at least 50% of the mail that arrives everyday is unsolicited catalogs covering everything from books to home improvement items. And almost 99% of those automatically goes into the recycling bin, but every once in a while there is a gem amongst the refuge.

The latest gem was from a company that sells clock parts for woodworkers and crafters. One of the kits that they offered was for a table top clock that also contained a couple of small drawers that could hold jewelry or other small items. Please don’t worry, I didn’t order the kit. But I did borrow the idea.

Here is my version of that table top clock/jewelry box. I made mine out of 4/4 cherry. The overall dimensions of the cabinet are 17” tall, 11” wide and 6” deep. I started this project the same way as I start every project, dressing the cherry to make sure that all of the lumber is dimensionally the same size. This process requires that you run two adjoining sides of all of your stock over the jointer. I have learned the hard way that you MUST do two sides, not one. I normally will clean up one of the edges of the stock first; this is done by holding the wide side of the stock against the fence of the jointer while passing the edge of the stock over the jointer knives. As the stock is passed over the knives, you can hear when the knives are making contact and when it’s not making contact with the stock. Continue to run the stock until you can hear the contact sound over the entire length of the stock.

Once you have the first side done, it’s time to dress to adjoining side of the stock. This time, take the edge you just dressed and hold it against the fence and run the adjoining side over the knives until you can hear contact over the entire width of the stock. Now you can run the wide sides of the stock through your thickness planer.

The reason that we jointed the second or wide side of the stock, prior to running it through the thickness planer, is that planers have a tendency to follow the profile of the stock. In other words, if your stock is warped or bowed, the thickness planer will not remove this, only make a thinner piece of stock that is warped or bowed.

The next step is to cut several dados into the sides. There are two horizontal dados, one is a divider between the two drawers, and the other serves as the bottom of the clock area. There are also vertical dados cut into the sides. One along the rear edge of the sides that holds the back panel and one near the front of the sides that holds the actual face of the clock. The clock face and mechanism are mounted on a piece of ¼” plywood that fits into this front vertical dado.

I normally use my shaper equipped with a straight router bit to cut dados. I have a dado blade for my tablesaw but rarely ever use it. I don’t like the cut that the blade produces. In my mind a dado needs to be straight along the sides and flat on the bottom, something that the dado blade can not produce. The blade always produces a curve bottom, so I stick with the shaper and router bit. As much as I like my shaper, it does have one fault, I have a very limited amount of travel on the fence adjustment, and this is true on most shapers.

It is this limited travel of the fence that made me make several decisions about cutting the dados. The two horizontal dados are too far from either end of the sides to be cut safely on the shaper. Sure I could have introduced an auxiliary fence to the shaper table and offset it far enough from the bit to cut these two dados, but I have not found a method of doing that that I would deem safe. So I was forced to take a different approach. I cut the two dados with a hand held router instead of using the shaper table.

With the stock dressed, I cut a length of stock that was 17″, long, and 12″ wide ( twice the width of the sides). When cutting dados in opposing sides of a cabinet, I like to cut the dado in both pieces at once. That way if the placement of the dado is off it is equally off on both sides. Or maybe a better way to say it is this. If I goof and am off by say 1/8″ then both sides are off by the same amount. Meaning that the piece that I insert into the dado will be square to both sides. So with the dados marked, I attached an all in one clamp as a guide and cut both through dados. Then I returned to my table saw and ripped the piece into two equal pieces, giving me the right and left hand sides.

The limited travel of the shaper fence also reared its ugly head when I went to cut the vertical front stopped dados. These dados are centered ¾” from the front edge of the sides and are made with a ¼” straight router bit set to a ¼” depth. Cutting the stopped dado on the left hand side board was easy. Just set the fence for the correct distance and run the stock over the knife. This dado extends from the top of the side to the first horizontal dado. To cut this stopped dado, I drew a line on the top of my shaper that indicated the far or outboard side of the router bit. I extended this mark out from the bit so I could see it as I passed the stock over the knife. I next marked the end of the dado on the stock and extended this mark to the edge of the stock. When I ran the stock over the knife, I advanced the stock only to the point that these two marks aligned, producing a stopped dado. Ideally I would have been able to adjust the fence, so that I could now cut the stopped dado on the right hand board, but again I don’t have that much travel on my shaper fence. So to cut this opposing dado, I decided to make a plunge cut dado.

To make the plunge cut dado, I again marked the end point of the dado on my stock. Only instead of this being the end point it will now become the starting point for the dado. With the shaper running, carefully hold the stock just above the spinning router bit with the end/start point aligned with the reference mark on the table. Now slowly lower the wood unto the spinning blade until the wood is completely in contact with the shaper table top. Once you have the dado started, simply continue the dado to the end of the stock. When you are lowering the stock, be sure that you have it secured and tight against the fence. If not, when the knife makes contact with the stock, it can rip it out of your hands. Also, since cherry is a relatively soft wood, I really didn’t have to worry about the bit binding as it is prone to do with a harder wood like maple. If I were making this same cut in a harder wood, I would have adjusted the height of the bit in increments, making several passes until I got to the desired height.

The next step is to cut the top and bottom of the tavle top clock. We’ll tackle this in the next post. See you back here then.

This is a tale of what sounded like a really good idea, but went really badly. My wife and I had been talking about adding some decorative features to our living room; we had an open wall behind the television that was begging for some decoration. Being normal, rational thinking people we proposed and dismissed all of the normal items that are used to decorate a wall, and some how latched on the idea of floating shelves.

Once we had locked onto that idea, all we had to do was find the shelves that would look right. And guess what, during one of my weekly trips to the big orange DIY store, I found the two floating shelves pictured at the right. And even better they were on sale. This is the point that this thing started going wrong. After carefully following the instructions (well I really didn’t read them, but I looked at the pictures) for mounting the shelves, I put them on the wall. And they looked good for about a week, and then we noticed that they were starting to droop, soon followed by them delaminating. The reason that they were coming apart is that they were made of a product called hard board, which in my option is nothing more then pressed cardboard.

I took them back off the wall and tried to shim up the mounting bracket, the keep the shelves from drooping. And you guessed it, it didn’t work. So now we had a new problem, we agreed that the floating shelves were a good idea, but the product we choose were the wrong thing. We wanted to take them off the wall, but when I installed them, I mounted them into the studs with pre drilled screw holes. Removing the floating shelves would leave holes in the wall that would need to be filled and then re painted. And of course we knew that would really mean repainting the entire wall, as the patched holes would not blend. A better idea had to be found.

This is the fix we came up with. Borrowing an idea from an old woodworking magazine, I decided to make my own floating shelves. I know, why didn’t I try this in the first place? That’s a really good question and I wish I had a really good answer for that, but I don’t.

The biggest problem in making these shelves was to find the proper wood for the floating shelves. I normally work in solid oak, but oak is a very dense wood which also makes it a very heavy wood. I was searching for a good looking wood that was also very light weight. I wanted to keep the weight down because I didn’t want the shelves to droop or pull away from the wall. I settled on using mahogany for many reasons. Mahogany finishes very nicely and is much lighter then oak.

My floating shelves are 42” long, 8 “wide and 2” tall. I started by first cross cutting a piece of 9” wide 4/4 mahogany, to approximately 54”. Then I ran one edge over the jointer to square up one edge. Then before ripping the wood into 2” wide pieces, I ran the entire board through the thickness paner.  After ripping the stock to the 2” width, I took it to my miter saw and cut 10” off the end of each one the four pieces. The 10” pieces were to become the ends and the remaining 44” inch pieces were for the front and back of each of shelves.

The next step was to add a decorative edge to the front and both sides of the floating shelves. For this I turned to my shaper table, which I equipped with a fluting bit like the one shown here on the far right. I experimented with a scrap piece of stock until I got the right height of the bit. I also equipped the shaper table with hold downs and a feather board. The hold downs are used the keep the stock from rising up, and the feather boards are used to keep the stock in contact with the bit. Even with the use of feather boards, I found some dips or rough edges in the pattern. I suspect that the stock jumped away from the bit at this point. I corrected these by running the stock over the router bit again.

Once I had all of the decorative edges cut, I turned the stock over and created a ¼” x ¼” dado along the length of all of the pieces, front, sides and the back piece. The dado was placed at ¾” of the top of each piece. I cut the dado using my tablesaw. In the original plans the dado was for a piece of ¼” plywood, I choose to use some re claimed lumber for this instead. Even though the wood would not show, plywood just doesn’t stain very well, and even if no one else ever saw it, I would know it was there.

After a quick visit to my miter saw, where I cut miters for the front corners of the shelves. I considered also cutting miters into the rear corners, but decided to go with a simple rabbit joint along the back edge of the floating shelve.

I applied glue along all of the joints. I used my small nail gun to insert small brads on the rabbit joint in the rear. To hold the miter joints together while the glue sat up, I used a couple of spring clamps. These ingenious clamps do a great job on miters; the only draw back is that when used on softwood like Mahogany they do mar the surface of the wood. This was followed by a couple of hours of down time while the glue cured.

I used a mahogany tinted wood filler to repair the marks caused by the spring clamps. Then did a light sanding of the entire piece and then applied a coat of an oil based mahogany stain.

This is where the project took a down turn. Over the past couple of years we have used General Finishes to stain and seal our projects. This time, we were in a hurry to get this project finished and up on the wall so we went to our local DIY store and picked up a brand of stain that we gave up on using when we found General since General is not available anywhere close to our home. Well, that was a mistake. The stain never really dried well enough to put polyurethane on and the color was very muddy. My wife and I were both very unhappy with the results. Luckily, I had enough extra lumber to rebuild the shelves. So we began the entire building process over again.

My wife is in the process of sanding down the original set and if she is able to remove all of the stain in those tiny decorative beads, we will then have two sets of shelves to decide how we are going to finish. As I said earlier, normally mahogany finishes easily. I may have to revise that statement with this project! We’ll keep you posted on what we decide to do with the shelves and post a picture of the finished project.

The lessons learned here: as a woodworker I should have realized that I would never be happy with a piece of furniture that was not made out of real wood, no matter the price. Also, before using a stain on a project, finish a scrap piece of wood to see how it takes the stain before you finish your entire project. We knew that but we all make mistakes especially when we’re in a hurry.  Hopefully, we’ve learned a valuable lesson.

For more information regarding the woodworking tools used in this project, click on the highlighted links above.