Upward Spiral - Part 1

I took on an interesting commission this year for a couple of good friends of mine and this

project is no small task. It's a spiral staircase for their beautiful log home that is currently under

construction. As a furniture maker, this is a much larger scale that I'm used to but in the end

it's woodworking. It's project like this that truly help me grow as a woodworker. If you don't

challenge yourself and your skills you can easily stagnate.

Fortunately I'm not arrogant enough to think that I have all answers, so I made a list of people

who I thought had the expertise to get me though this project. One of the key aspects to this

job was the layout of the stair treads. The stairs had to wrap around the log that was in situ

holding up the rest of the house. They needed to rotate through 270 degrees from the second

floor up to the third and I didn't even know where to begin. I love adding curved elements to

my furniture but this was something completely different.

My coworker Steve, a talented industrial designer and engineer made easy work of the layout for me and was even able to provide me with measured drawings that spec'd out the joinery locations and template for the tread shape and size. Steve did in a few hours what would have taken me days with my pencil and 47 erasers. Also, thanks to Steve, these will be the only stairs that fleam was taken into

consideration for.

Enter the next subject matter expert, Evan. Evan is a friend of mine who has many talents but

the one I was particularly interested in was his skills as a timber framer and heritage carpenter.

Evan uses wood as a structural material and understands the joinery required to make the stair

treads become one with the log. While I'm no joinery slouch, I had no experience working with

large-scale woodworking. Now, Evan is either a really nice guy or a complete loony because

he offered to help out with the build for free ... nothing ... nada. He just wanted to be part of a

cool build and to add it to the list of things he has done with wood. Truth is, this type of thing

used to happen a lot in the past. People would offer to help with jobs in order to gain more

experience and to just be part of something cool ... and this is definitely something cool. Evan

has been there from the beginning of this project and I've learned a lot from his experience as a

carpenter. He also plays guitar and drinks beer ... :-).

Any ways, here is where we are with things up to now. We took Steve's drawing and marked

out all of the locations of the mortises on the 5-foot diameter log. No easy task as we quickly

found out but after a bit of head scratching it dawned on us that a water level was the way to

go. It allowed us to wrap the lines around the log while keeping things on the level. ;-)

The next step was to make the stair treads. We started out in my friend and fellow woodworker

Karen's shop to use her beautiful Knapp 16" jointer/planer to get one face and edge jointed. I

like hand planes just as much as the next guy but I wasn't looking forward to jointing a face and

edge on 13 stair treads...thanks Karen.

 

Evan driving 12/4 pine over the jointer

We then had to laminate pieces together to come out with a pie-shaped set of treads that

would come together to wrap the 270 degrees we needed. For this job we used a Festool

track saw - the largest they have available in North America which we borrowed from Karen. It

worked like a charm and in most cases the cut was so fine that we went straight to glue up off of

the saw.

 

Tough work made easy thanks to the track saw

No light here - Perfect surfaces that are ready for glue

You know how woodworkers always say 'you can never have enough clamps'? Well this was the

first time I was forced to stop work because I ran out of clamps. Evan and I had things under

control and only had to go to Home Depot twice for biscuits (alignment not structure) and more

glue.

Now I have a shop filled (literally) with pie-shaped stair treads that are waiting for this weekend

to be shaped and installed. Evan and I will load up my vehicle with treads, tools (hand and

power) and a workbench and make our way out to Rosetta to start the real work....installation.

 

No room to move in my little shop

Stay tuned....

V

Wrong again...

I know, I know...it's been awhile. What can I say? Life gets in the way and my writing took a hit. Let's move on shall we?

Recently I was reading an article that was singing the praises of WD-40 as a Godsend for woodworking hand tool maintenance. Whoa! Hold the phone! WD-40 in the woodshop? Are you kidding me? Everybody knows that WD-40 will ruin any chance of having finish stick to wood. Follow my thinking here - you're spraying down your hand plane after using it and some over-spray makes onto a component you've been lovingly preparing for finish. The WD-40 over-spray wicks into the wood and makes it impossible for any finish to stand a hope in hell of sticking to the wood.

Picture it, finish flows onto the wood, finish runs for the hills leaving fish eyes everywhere, your work is ruined, you start drinking and next thing you know, it's 20 years later and you're still drinking while living in a van down by a river.

OK. Hyperbole right?

Fine. It's a sub-compact, but the point is you can't use WD-40 in the wood shop. The writer even went on to claim that he had tested the theory by spraying WD-40 on a board letting it dry there and then having no trouble getting finish to stick.

Liar!

Now I'm on a mission to prove this wrong because ever since I starting woodworking over 10 years ago I was told that WD-40 is the devil of the wood finishing world. A can has never been in my shop in fact it has been relegated to the shed to help maintain things like shovels, rakes and other garden tools.

So I bring the WD-40 into my shop, carrying it like its nuclear waste, and spray down a piece of cherry. I left the cherry to dry and soak up the WD-40 for a few days and then started apply polyurethane just as I would to any other piece of wood I would finish. I applied three coats, sanded the third and put on a final.

Today was the reckoning. Today I show my woodworking knowledge and prove the goof to be dead wrong.

Well holy sh*t! The finish was perfect. Well, as perfect as I get finish. No bare spots, no fisheyes...just a smooth piece of finished cherry. Well.

Turns out you can use WD-40 in your woodshop. Turns out what I thought to be true wasn't. Hmmm...Just goes to show you that no matter how much you think you know, there is still more to learn. I don't mind being wrong, which is good because it happens often. I'm glad that I took the time to test this out because there really isn't anything better for rust removal than WD-40.

So all this time I've been searching out something to take care of minor rust when all I needed was good ol' WD-40....

V.

To understand, you must do.

The Proof is in the Pudding

This is my idea of time well spent in the shop.

Today in my shop, I realized that I was proving the point that I made yesterday about when I choose to use power tools over hand tools and vice versa. Today I was preparing legs and aprons for finish and I chose to do this with hand tools rather than power. 

Here is what I did:

• removed all the machining marks with a smoothing plane
• removed the arrises on the corners - effectively applying a 1/16" round over
• applied the first coat of linseed oil to all the parts

Parts are oiled and waiting for more. 

All of this took 90 minutes to complete. Now had I decided to do this with power tools things would have been different. The sanding alone would have taken 1.5 hours and I would have filled the shop with dust and noise. Not to mention the challenge of sanding narrow surfaces like the tapered legs without ruining the facets by rounding them over. If I used the router to put a round over on all of the edges, I would have had to set the router up, did some test cuts and then shape the edges - the whole time hoping that the router bit didn't rip out a huge chunk of wood that could ruin the piece. 

The legs are made from cherry with an edge band of hard maple seen in the shavings. Ever seen someone taking pictures of sanding dust?

This is why I do the last 40% of the work at the bench with hand tools instead of with power. It's faster and the surfaces are superior, letting the chatoyance of the cherry through - not to mention the lack of dust in the shop and the only noise was 'The Black Keys' coming from the stereo. 

 - To understand, you must do.

V

Workbenches - they're not just for hand tools you know?

I know...I know. The last thing we need right now is more written word on workbenches. I mean, aren't two volumes and a bi-monthly magazine full enough? ;-) I promise not to discuss the origin of benches through the ages and I certainly won't try to convince you that 17th and 18th century technology is the way to go. In fact, I want to shed a bit of light on using a workbench with power tools, specifically a router. 

There is no doubt that the router is one of the most versatile power tools in the modern shop. Today I was using one to cut floating tenons in a set of legs and aprons for a display table that I'm working on. As far as I'm concerned, chopping out mortises by hand is right up there with thicknessing a board with a jack plane. If you have the power tools to do it why wouldn't you? As my friend Ron has always said "If the Shakers had plywood you would have seen it in the bottom of their boxes". Don't get me wrong, some people enjoy working solely by hand. In some cases like my freind Tom, you have no choice but to only use hand tools because your shop is 12' x 12'. Personally I think you can be much more efficient and accurate if you blend a little from the power side and a little from the hand side.

Every solid-wood project from my shop gets surfaced with a hand plane and the joinery will have been tuned by hand. You will never see me sanding solid wood. Why? Because it doesn't make sense to take the long way with a sander when I can get a superior surface in less time with my trusty bevel-up smoother. 

Ooops...went on a bit of rant there....I apologize.

Anyhow...instead of buying an expensive jig or worse yet, making one, I use my bench to hold the work. Check out the photos below to see what I'm talking about.

The router is guided by the fence and the two Bessey clamps are acting as stops.

I always want to reference the same side of the apron, in this case the outside. Note the registration mark on the bench that I use to center the apron between the stops.

No fancy fence system here - just a piece of Baltic birch hot glued to the router base. It doesn't get any simpler than that.

I've never been a huge fan of jigs. I tend to prefer making temporary work holders that are held together with hot glue and brads. In this case, the tear down was simple: remove the fence from the router and put the clamps away. It took me about three minutes to set it up and about five minute to cut all the mortises. Perfect. Nothing worse that spending more time setting up for a cut than actually making the cut. 

 All that is left is to hand plane all the surfaces, apply an oil finish and do the glue-up.

I use my machines for the grunt work which adds up to about 60% of the work. The remaining 40% gets done at the bench with hand tools. Even though building furniture is a hobby now, I still don't enjoy wasting time. For me the work is a means to an end...after all, my calling card says 'Furniture Designer/Maker' not 'User of Tools'.

V

Oooops!

Just wanted to apologize for the almost imposible to read text on my last entry. It's fixed now so give it another try. 

Woodworker I am...tech savy?...it's hit or miss.

V