And so it begins
One of my main goals in setting up a home woodshop has been to make heirloom quality furniture in the Mission and Arts & Crafts motifs. And after two hope chests, three sets of speakers and a platform bed, I'm finally ready to dive into my first real furniture piece, a Morris chair. After reviewing most of the plans out there, I decided that I liked the Wood Magazine plan best.
After much clean up and organization to reclaim the horizontal surfaces of the shop from junk collecting, I lugged in the boards from my lumber racks on the other side of the basement. I aquired a decent stash of 6/4 and 8/4 White Oak on the cheap several years ago. It's plain sawn, but there are some boards with verticle grain and nice flecking, which I'll try to put in the most visable framing members.
You'll notice that two of the widest boards have quite the bow in them. Rather than cut these up and fight that, I'm contemplating using these for the bowed arms. The plan calls for laminating three 3/8" layers on a bending form to make them, but these boards may be good to go as is. And if not, I may be able to steam them the remaining amount.
But first I picked out a straight 6/4×7x8' board for the legs and set about making them into S4S blanks that I can glue up into the final 2-1/4"x2-1/4" size. I cut the rough board into eight oversized blanks using the SCMS and TS. This is where a 3 HP TS really earns it's keep.
I normally run the TS with a 40T Frued Fusion blade, and even though this burning was mostly due to the rough boards having a little wobble in them, I decided to clean all of my 10" blades and switch over to the 24T rip blade.
Then it's:
Jointer (face) → Jointer (square edge) → TS (2nd edge square and parallel) → Planer (2nd face parallel)
The rip blade gave a better finish, but if I failed to keep a constant feed rate, I'd still get a little burn.
Here I use a precision ground straight edge and feeler gages to check my first face
And here I'm checking the first edge square with my trusty (though old) Craftsman square against the window light
I fanangled a smokin' deal and aquired a used PM15 planer last summer for $100, and after a pretty extensive clean, de-rust and tune-up, had it up and running. But I was getting snipe on all of my test cuts, so I had to dive back into the manual and figure out what was going on. I concluded that the instructions set the chip breaker way to low, such that it took a lot of force to spring it up atop of the board. So I raised the chip breaker and things improved substantially. The snipe is still very noticeable, but when I measure, it was ~ 0.005"
So I gave these faces one last light clean up pass on the jointer and had a stack of blanks ready to laminate.
I'm not yet ready to cut the parts to finish lenght, but I wanted to cut them to a uniform length to facilitate registering them together during the glue-up
A clean 60T cross cut blade was one of my first and best shop purchases.
As with any glue-up, thinking it through and getting everything staged and ready to go is key. I decided to laminate all four legs in one shot using my shop made clampling cauls.
But here's a new problem, the stock is to thick for the caul bolts.
F-clamps to the rescue
And more and more clamps
Glue cleanup is one of my least favorite tasks…. a wet rag, scraper and elbow grease did the trick.
Then it was time to really test both the TS and the newly cleaned blade, as I ripped the laminated leg blanks to finish size. The depth of cut was ~2-3/8", in bone dry white oak. The task went well, unless I had even the slightes pause feeding the stock… in which case I'd get a burn. I also noticed that I was more prone to get burn at the QS grain flecks. So I dusted off the pieces, removing the burn and the jointer/planer marks with a ROS.
And here's the fruit of my weekend. Some 7 hours in the shop Satureday and 2 on Sunday. That included planer tuning, saw blade cleaning, jointer fence checking, miter saw angle tweaking, making an extension block for the Gripper and another shop clean up when I was done.
As much as I love shop time, I was tired and ready to quit Sunday afternoon.
Next up, cutting the legs to finish length and cutting the mortices.
I've been hemming and hawing about the seat and arm height on the chair as they seem quite low at 14" and 23" respectively. My blanks are 2" longer than needed, so I may leave an extra 1" at the bottom and trim them on the finished chair if needed.
Thanks for looking in and Happy trails.
One of my main goals in setting up a home woodshop has been to make heirloom quality furniture in the Mission and Arts & Crafts motifs. And after two hope chests, three sets of speakers and a platform bed, I'm finally ready to dive into my first real furniture piece, a Morris chair. After reviewing most of the plans out there, I decided that I liked the Wood Magazine plan best.
After much clean up and organization to reclaim the horizontal surfaces of the shop from junk collecting, I lugged in the boards from my lumber racks on the other side of the basement. I aquired a decent stash of 6/4 and 8/4 White Oak on the cheap several years ago. It's plain sawn, but there are some boards with verticle grain and nice flecking, which I'll try to put in the most visable framing members.
You'll notice that two of the widest boards have quite the bow in them. Rather than cut these up and fight that, I'm contemplating using these for the bowed arms. The plan calls for laminating three 3/8" layers on a bending form to make them, but these boards may be good to go as is. And if not, I may be able to steam them the remaining amount.
But first I picked out a straight 6/4×7x8' board for the legs and set about making them into S4S blanks that I can glue up into the final 2-1/4"x2-1/4" size. I cut the rough board into eight oversized blanks using the SCMS and TS. This is where a 3 HP TS really earns it's keep.
I normally run the TS with a 40T Frued Fusion blade, and even though this burning was mostly due to the rough boards having a little wobble in them, I decided to clean all of my 10" blades and switch over to the 24T rip blade.
Then it's:
Jointer (face) → Jointer (square edge) → TS (2nd edge square and parallel) → Planer (2nd face parallel)
The rip blade gave a better finish, but if I failed to keep a constant feed rate, I'd still get a little burn.
Here I use a precision ground straight edge and feeler gages to check my first face
And here I'm checking the first edge square with my trusty (though old) Craftsman square against the window light
I fanangled a smokin' deal and aquired a used PM15 planer last summer for $100, and after a pretty extensive clean, de-rust and tune-up, had it up and running. But I was getting snipe on all of my test cuts, so I had to dive back into the manual and figure out what was going on. I concluded that the instructions set the chip breaker way to low, such that it took a lot of force to spring it up atop of the board. So I raised the chip breaker and things improved substantially. The snipe is still very noticeable, but when I measure, it was ~ 0.005"
So I gave these faces one last light clean up pass on the jointer and had a stack of blanks ready to laminate.
I'm not yet ready to cut the parts to finish lenght, but I wanted to cut them to a uniform length to facilitate registering them together during the glue-up
A clean 60T cross cut blade was one of my first and best shop purchases.
As with any glue-up, thinking it through and getting everything staged and ready to go is key. I decided to laminate all four legs in one shot using my shop made clampling cauls.
But here's a new problem, the stock is to thick for the caul bolts.
F-clamps to the rescue
And more and more clamps
Glue cleanup is one of my least favorite tasks…. a wet rag, scraper and elbow grease did the trick.
Then it was time to really test both the TS and the newly cleaned blade, as I ripped the laminated leg blanks to finish size. The depth of cut was ~2-3/8", in bone dry white oak. The task went well, unless I had even the slightes pause feeding the stock… in which case I'd get a burn. I also noticed that I was more prone to get burn at the QS grain flecks. So I dusted off the pieces, removing the burn and the jointer/planer marks with a ROS.
And here's the fruit of my weekend. Some 7 hours in the shop Satureday and 2 on Sunday. That included planer tuning, saw blade cleaning, jointer fence checking, miter saw angle tweaking, making an extension block for the Gripper and another shop clean up when I was done.
As much as I love shop time, I was tired and ready to quit Sunday afternoon.
Next up, cutting the legs to finish length and cutting the mortices.
I've been hemming and hawing about the seat and arm height on the chair as they seem quite low at 14" and 23" respectively. My blanks are 2" longer than needed, so I may leave an extra 1" at the bottom and trim them on the finished chair if needed.
Thanks for looking in and Happy trails.