Friday, May 25, 2018

Colgate EALL (9)

With the benches out of the way, I have a couple of items to finish up for the Japanese room before turning to the Chinese room and its woodwork.

One task that presented itself was to create the crossbeam which supports the alcove post, toko-bashira, and serves double duty as the upper sliding track, or kamo-i for a pair of sliding doors below. For those door, a sill, or shiki-i, also needed to be fabricated.

I cannot obtain avodire, at least not in the US, in the thickness required, so laminated some pieces together:


There’s more than meets the eye here, as the lower portion of the beam is in fact a piece of black cherry:


You may wonder, why is he doing this? As mentioned in the video which accompanied the preceding blog post, I find avodire to have a quality of having rather high surface friction when you are fitting things together. It is not a wood which slides around easily, so I think it would be a poor choice for the sliding tracks and the frames for the sliding doors. Black cherry, on the other hand has much more suitable characteristics, and is beautiful to boot, however this aspect will be largely out of view.

I used my portable grooving machine to rough out the tracks in the beam:


And with a change in the depth setting, the sill-piece was similarly roughed out:


Then I used a router with edge guide to trim the grooves to a more exact width:


The top of the beam is formed into a tongue which will carry some spacing pieces that support both the alcove floor panel, toko-ita, as well as the floor panel under the staggered shelf assembly. I roughed out the tongue on the table saw, then cleaned up on the shaper:


The result:


A few more steps remain on this beam, however my attention next turned to the spacing pieces which attach to that newly-formed tongue on the topside:


The alcove post, toko-bashira, will sit on the beam in the divide between the two spacers. The fit of the t&g joints, though not too tight, is sufficiently snug that with the high sliding friction of avodire I am disinclined to fully put the parts together at this time, not wanting disassembly struggles.

Another view:


All for this round - thanks for tuning it to my site. Comments most welcome.

via Tumblr https://davidpires578.tumblr.com/post/174227192884

Saturday, May 19, 2018

Colgate EALL (8)

A bit of water has flowed under that proverbial bridge since the last posting, and in the interim, I’ve made good progress on the project, specifically the benches, which are now complete.

A stray pic from last time, showing the use of a chisel to clean up a trimmed through tenon:


Another stray - a look at one of the leg assemblies after the lower stretcher tenon has been wedged, prior to trimming:


The wedges are in avodire, in an attempt to make the through tenons, which are numerous, a less overt design element. The wedge stock is prepared from flat-sawn stock, then the wedges are cut out on the sliding chop saw:


The medium bench after the two leg sets have been fitted:


And a little further along, the two smaller benches are nearing completion:


Then came the larger bench, the assembly of which i decided to video tape - the editing and publication of the video that followed is the primary reason why the 8th post in this thread was slow to eventuate.

Here’s a video I put together showing the assembly of the long bench:



There were some additional pics which didn’t make it into the video, for various reasons. I had intended to show more of the finish planing, however on that day my camera’s video card became full just as I got into some of the planing, and a video of planing which I thought I had taken ended up only being a 5 second recording of nothing. I did manage to snap a couple of pics from one of the shorter benches however:


Here’s one where you can see the portion of end grain and wedge within the wider shaving, which I think looks kinda neat:


I find avodire very pleasant to work in general, save for the dust, which if I breathe in any significant amount, say while cross-cutting on the table saw, I find my lung capacity becomes a bit diminished for 24 hours. Like a short term asthmatic reaction. Maybe some people would have a worse reaction to this wood, so if you tend to have reactions to wood dust (which I don’t, knock on wood), then caution would be in order with this species. I’ve found simply paying attention to having the dust collection going even when doing minor tasks seems to take care of the issue.

A final step, not shown in the video as the hardware arrived on the scene only in the past couple of days, was the fitting of some decorative nails, or tacks (termed byō in Japanese). I put these in because they are somewhat common on the Japanese benches that I have come across. I decided however not to use these tacks in any way as an actual fastener, but purely for their decorative effect alone. The tacks I obtained are only as long as the boards are thick, so they perform no mechanical attachment function.

Here you can see a bunch fitted to the mid-size bench:
 

I think fitting nails to board in such a fashion, if they were to actually go all the way through and fasten into the supporting crosspiece below, is not the best idea given that the bench seat boards will tend to widen and narrow with seasonal moisture swings. Now, in this case, the bench seat boards are vertical grain material, and the bench is an indoor item in a conditioned space, however I stick to the principal of designing around wood movement all the same.

The budget for this project did not allow for more elaborate all-wood joinery solutions, so I instead fastened the middle of each board to the supporting crosspieces with a trim-head screw, as you can see in the above picture. Of course, in no way did I want these screw heads to be visible, so I came up with a way to cover them with the decorative head tacks, which were only a bit larger in diameter than the screw heads.

I cut a notch in the side of the screw head using a thin cut off wheel with my portable 4.5" disc grinder:


Another view:


As you can see, these are torx drive trim screws. My though was that this form of drive would exert at most only modest forces into the screw head (trying to split it), and thus, even with the head slitted like that, the screw head would be tough enough to withstand re-insertion in the hole, and such proved to be the case:


Then the tack can thereby be driven nearly straight over top of the screw:


The result is a concealed screw head which, if need be, could be accessed again in the future:


I found this approach worked really well, and only had a couple of tacks out of the total which didn’t work out on the initial try and had to be replaced.

The mid-size bench complete, with all the tacks in place:


A view from a bit further back:


The small bench was the quickest to nail:


The avodire has some nice figure and chatoyance which my pics do not do justice.

And nailing the long bench took a while:


That’s all for this round. Look for a follow-up post in the near future, and thanks for visiting the Carpentry Way.

via Tumblr https://davidpires578.tumblr.com/post/174048408534

Thursday, May 17, 2018

My Journey As A Creative Designer - Woodworking and Beyond #1859: Our Goals Regarding Creating

I have a new blog post regarding our goals and creating! Come and read! (and like and share if you like it!) :D https://sheilalandrydesigns.wordpress.com/2018/05/17/our-goals-regarding-creating/



via Tumblr https://davidpires578.tumblr.com/post/173990544799

Wednesday, May 16, 2018

My Journey As A Creative Designer - Woodworking and Beyond #1858: Mid-Week Update

I have a new blog post on my Wordpress account. :) I hope you come and visit there.

https://wordpress.com/post/sheilalandrydesigns.wordpress.com/643

Sheila



via Tumblr https://davidpires578.tumblr.com/post/173962023204

Saturday, May 5, 2018

Colgate EALL (7)

Work continues on the three benches for the Japanese room at Colgate University’s East Asian Language Lab (EALL). I am a chronic under-estimator of time - what I thought I could wrap up in a day and a half ended up taking three, ah, well four, but at least the work went without any glitches, so it’s all good.

Some more avodire showed up, quartersawn 4/4 and 8/4 material I had ordered up from M Bohlke in Ohio:


Where staples were sticking out enough to gain purchase, I found duck bill pliers helpful, though with cases where the staples were driven in flush I simply lopped the last inch of the board off:


Back to the long bench, where mortises were added for supporting the bench seat via 6 blind-mortised crosspieces:


Here the housings have been trimmed square and central mortises have been punched in, and, oh yeah, the dadoes for the floor panels have been done:


Another view:


The crosspieces have what could be termed a simplified tusk tenon, sans sloped haunch:


Nearly there:


Down:


All the joints I am fitting here are a tight friction fit, with grain compression required via hammer. I chose to rely upon the joinery alone, and these joints will not be glued.

Another view:


A while later all 6 crosspieces have been fitted, to both rails:


Next up is the fitting of the end rails and the three intermediate through-twin-tenoned rails:


Once the long bench was through the fitting stage, I set the parts aside and could at last get into final assembly, starting with the small bench. I jointed and planed the floorboards for all three benches, then processed tongues on the boards.

Here the three seat boards have been fitted to one of the end rails:


The middle board is only tongued on the ends, not the sides, and there will be a space between the sides of the middle boards and the two boards which flank it.

A while later, assembly is slowly being realized:


I found some 1/8" (3mm) shims were needed to keep the boards at the spacing I wanted. After the frame joints were drawn up tight, I fabricated the wedges, also in avodire, and got ready to fit them:


The only glue here is on the wedges:



As soon as the last wedge was driven, and the squareness re-checked, the painter’s tape was removed and the protruding wedges summarily hacked off with the dozuki:


Though through tenons could be described, especially if they stick out proud, as a somewhat ‘loud’ design aspect, in this case the tenons will be trimmed flush, and the wedges will be hard to spot, so hopefully this will strike some sort of middle ground in the 'loud vs quiet’ tug of war:


Another view:


I will trim the protruding tenon ends next time, and after that the 'horns’ on the ends of the frame rails will also be trimmed.

The top was flipped over and a check of the leg assemblies was made, just to be sure all the effort to hit my numbers in cut out was worth the trouble:


Everything was lining up as it should so it’s not too much more work until the leg assemblies are installed and wedged:


That bit of fun will wait until the start of next week. The weekend is here and Saturday will be a nice day so I will make hay, as they say, outside of the shop while the sun shines. Gardening season is just getting going.

Thanks for dropping by the Carpentry Way. Comments always welcome. Have a great weekend!

via Tumblr https://davidpires578.tumblr.com/post/173591858279