Jewellery Box - Part 5 completed so Santa can put it into his sleigh

The Jewellery Box is completed. I finished it today 24th Dec 2013 at 1600 local time here in the UK so now Santa can pick it up and put it into his sleigh for delivery to my wife.

Jewellery Box - Part 4 nearly at the finishing line

I'm almost at the finishing line and writing this on December 23rd - talk about close to the wire!! During final finishing Elly almost came in on the build and discovered what was happening behind closed doors. But I had thoughtfully locked the shop door from the inside. She had to knock and now knows something is being built in the shop and it might be a present.

Rear plywood panel and the lid with finish applied

Jewellery Box - Part 3

Do you know how difficult it is to make something surreptitiously and keep it hidden from the intended recipient? It's very hard.
I've had a few close calls this past week with Elly coming into the shop when you least expect it. I do have a warning buzzer on the door and I can lock it from the inside. She has been in on numerous occasions and has been stood very close to the casework. I have it hidden under a black plastic dustbin liner (a garbage bag for my North American viewers) with all manner of detritus scattered all around. She does suspect something is going on though occasionally asking "what you making?". I had to reply "I'm doing some practice dovetails to hone my skills" - big fib!
Anyway the carcase is complete, the drawers are complete, the lid is made, the coving is done on the decorative trim pieces covering the hidden drawer.
Jobs left to do are:

• attach the lower guide rails
• cut out the mortises for the hinges
• mitre the coving trim pieces
• cut the trim pieces with a fancy pattern
• make internal dividers
• apply finish to the whole
• fit the mirror
• fit the felt inlay

I've got less than a week now so I need to get my skates on.

The casework without its disguise. If you
leave the area suitably cluttered
it doesn't draw too much attention

Jewellery Box - Part 2

After gluing the carcase I found that (despite the fact all four feet were on the assembly table and level, the front being all square and the drawer dividers level to each other) the top two sides were not co-planer to each other. I can only imagine some error has crept in during making the two side parts. Anyway the cure was to remove the thin veneer from the left hand end grain face and glue on a thick one (about 2 mm thick or just over 1/16")
When the glue setup I took the block plane and planed a slight taper from front to back. This resulted in a 0.5 mm veneer at the front gently tapering to about 1.5 mm at the rear on the left hand side as shown in the picture.

This will only be seen by fellow woodworkers (and of course you dear reader) but it does now mean the lid will fit without any obvious gaps that would have been seen by everybody!

I then glued in a milled piece of walnut at the back that will become the hinge board. This too was planed down flush with the sides. Everything on the top surface is now co-planer so the lid will sit flat.

Jewellery Box - Part 1

I am in full swing at TMCWoodworks Towers at the moment making Christmas gifts. One of the projects is a jewellery box as a surprise for my fantastic wife Elly. She never reads my blog so I'm safe to post it here (I hope).
Anyway the box is based upon a Norm Abrams New Yankee Workshop project. I bought the plans from the NewYankee Workshop website and adapted them to my needs. As ever I re-drew it using Trimble Sketchup.

This is what it will look like when it's finished.

Box closed - drawer pulls not shown

Box open

Materials

Some time ago I bought a whole raft of lumber and in the pile were some really nice pieces of American Black Walnut. I didn't have enough to do the entire project but sufficient for the exterior details.
The drawer interior components will be made from oak with 1/4" plywood bases. The design also has a hidden drawer which is a fun item.
The hardware will be all Brusso brass components.

Stock prep

I set to work milling all the stock for the carcase to size and glueing the walnut facing on the oak drawer dividers. The sides are made from solid walnut in two pieces. I used Titebond II dark wood for the glue so I didn't get a light glue line. Next the sides were cut to shape with their tapered legs.

Sketchup view of the side panel

The stopped dados (stopped housings) were cut at the router table and I milled some tenons on the drawer dividers. To finesse the tenons into the dados I used a combination of my Record 078 rabbet plane and my Stanley 93 shoulder plane. Both planes are tuned to perfection and produced perfect fits.

Sketchup view of the inside of the side
panel showing dados and rabbets.
BTW I forgot to take pictures while
I was doing the actual work!

The dividers were glued into the side panels and clamped overnight. I also took the opportunity to cut a thin veneer of walnut and applied it to the the top exposed end-grain of the sides.

Carcase clamped up

Carcase revealed.

A lot of work left to do and I have to do this surreptitiously so don't let the cat out of the bag wood fans.

Making my bench lighter

Yes I know we always strive to make workbenches as heavy as we can but just have a think about this:
Everytime we flatten our benches we remove stock to do so. Stock in the form of shavings has mass. Hence we make the bench have less mass!
Anyway in my email inbox today was one from Megan Fitzpatrick from Popular Woodworking. Apparently they were having problems with the electronic distribution of Oct 2013 edition so she sent me the url of where I could download it.
In the magazine was an interesting letter from a reader and a reply from Megan asking how to flatten a workbench. This set me thinking:

• How long have I had my commercially bought workbench? - 5 years or so
• When did you last flatten it? - Er never!

I looked at it and the front and rear aprons had warped slightly making the bench concave from edge to edge. End to end was still relatively straight and there wasn't any twist (using my winding sticks to make sure). The storing of it outside in the yard last autumn (in a tent) while my shop was being rebuilt had soaked up humidity from the air and it hadn't been too kind to the bench.

As I'm nearing completion of the baritone guitar and it has now left the shop to go inside to my studio for tweaking I thought I would spend 10 to 20 minutes flattening my bench with the Veritas bevel up jointer.
Sure enough it did only take 20 minutes with a final light cleaning pass followed by a very light pass of my #4.

The bench being flattened
with a Veritas BU Jointer

A big pile of shavings.
This probably weighs about
1 pound

Flattened benchtop awaiting Danish Oil

I was rewarded with a flat bench. The question now is - why didn't I do it before? It really was quick to do the jointer making light work of the beech top. Two coats of an exterior Danish oil and I'll be all set to go for the next project. But that's another story.

Table Saw Blade Storage

I'd had enough of hanging blades on nails driven into the walls of the shop. I got a pdf as part of Popular Woodworking subscription called Workshop Storage Solutions. In there is an article by Steve Shanesy on making an open fronted box to store your table saw blades.

As I had just bought a few more blades I decided to make the box. It comprises 4 sides of 3/4" ply and I made the back from 1/2" ply. The shelves are just 1/4" thick ply and the box is intended for 10" diameter blades.

The finished size is 8" high x 11 3/4" wide x 11 1/4" deep.
The box is very simple rabbeted construction just glued with some yellow glue (no brads ;) .
The shelves are around 11/16" apart in dados cut in the sides. They have shaped front edges with a cut-out so you can grasp the desired blade.
The front is cut at an angle at 70 degrees and there is an internal partition of 1/4" ply also at 70 degrees.
I can't publish the plans as they are probably copyrighted but I can show you some photos of the results.

Do you think I put enough clamps on?

Modifying theatrical scenery

The guitar is on hold while I tackle an important job. My wife is a member of an amateur dramatics group called Barton Theatre Company. They are just in the stages of moving from their old rehearsal venue of 25 years to a new, much better, venue above Smiths Restaurant.
They have a lot of scenery made from soft wood with a canvas cover for lightness. When they got to the new venue they had to negotiate a stairwell to move all their costume store and scenery store. All was OK until they got to the 5 foot wide "flats". Essentially they would go through the door but they couldn't turn them to get enough height to get them up the stairs due to the internal layout of the stairwell.
Then somebody came up with the idea of cutting them down the middle (making the flats 2 foot 6 wide by 10 feet high) and hinging them. This would mean not cutting the canvas.
I got the call "Terry can you come up with a solution?". Then next thing I knew I had a delivery of 8 flats into my shop.

My solution was to make some timber stiles that were hinged closest the canvas side. I would secure these to the existing framework using pocket screws. Then using a Japanese saw cut the timber cross-members enabling the two halves to hinge inwards. The canvas would fold face to face and this would be enough so they could manoeuvre the flat through the door and have enough room to angle them up the stairs.

I first made a hinge mortise routing jig.

Top of mortising jig.
Made from 1/2" plywood

Display Cabinet Part 4 - Completed and delivered

I completed the display cabinet and delivered it to my customer.
I had already worked out that the cabinet should fit in the car but when we tried to get it in we found that due to the curved shape it would hit on the underside of the boot/trunk compartment. My wife had the brilliant idea of using her convertible sportscar to put it on the back seat. We opened the hood and lifted it over onto the back seat. It was a little like the Antiques Roadshow where you see the ancient French 2CV convertible with a huge grandfather clock on the back seat.

The cabinet fitted in with no problems...I knew that sportscar would be useful as a load lugger one day!

Here are a few pictures of the finished article in situ.

I really must change my car for a truck!

Display Cabinet Part 3 - Blue tape is your best friend

I had assembled the carcase of the display cabinet and did a rough fit for the shelves. These simply sit on metal pegs that are in a series of holes with metal liners inside.

Cupping after glue up

Obviously wood being organic it had decided it was going to move after the glue up (doesn't it always?). The centre upright decided it was going to cup near to the rear edge midway up the board. This meant the nicely straight edged shelves had a big gap at the rear on the right hand bay and wouldn't go in on the left hand bay.
Out came the pencil and I traced the form onto the shelves and cut out the now slightly bent shapes. I then glued a thin 1/16" 1.6 mm veneer of oak to the end grain on all of the shelves.
When dry I trimmed with a block plane. Then out came the random orbit sander and the shelves were sanded to 320 grit.

End grain exposed on curved uprights

I also had a problem with the unsightly change of grain direction grain showing on the curved front of one of the uprights. As they were made by glueing 2 boards together and then shaping the curve on the bandsaw/router table it had exposed the end grain but there was a portion where the glue up met where the grain showing was not nice. Unfortunately I don't have any clear photos of this to show just this photo with the veneer attached. I have enhanced the contrast of the picture so you can see the glue line.

You can see where the two boards making up the end
upright are glued up. I was unable to hide this split
when I cut the profile as I had to cut bad
timber from the rear edge (in this shot) away moving
the split line into the path of the curve.

So I found the scrap strips that I had cut off when cutting the boards to width. I then run them through the planer to get them down to 1/16" thickness or less. To do this I used some double side tape on a piece of scrap ply and stuck the cut-offs to it. I produced 6 veneers (1 spare in case I broke one) all the same thickness and about 1-1/4" wide by 48" long.

These I glued to the front edge of each of the components making up the carcase.
I didn't have any clamps that could cope with the slight taper on the top and bottom of the case so I used blue tape as a clamp. I didn't think it would work very well but it did.

Have you met my friend Blue Tape?

Veneered front edges

Pre-finishing

The next job after all the veneering was completed was to fill a few minor gaps that were left by glue voids. I try not to use any filler in my work but I have found a product that was recommended to me by a retired cabinet maker.

It is Artists Paste which is a colourless, acrylic modelling paste used by artists to thicken paints 

I used this artists paste mixed with a little oak sawdust for colour to fill the voids.

It truly is wonderful stuff and I can't recommend it enough.

Then out came the random orbit sander and I sanded this to 320 grit. Next I filled the pores with some pore/grain filler as the material is French Oak. The filler used was transparent Jenkins Jecofil thixotropic grain filler. This is applied with a soft cloth with the grain and any excess wiped off across the grain. It is left to dry for 12 hours or more and then sanded back with 320 grit.

This does take some time to do and you may need to do it more than once but you are rewarded with a beautifully smooth surface ready for finish.

Finishing

The finish on this piece is a colourless, sprayed General Finishes waterbased PolyAcrylic top coat. The first application raises the grain and you have to knock it back using 320 and then another two coats were put onto the carcase knocking back with 400 and then 800 between coats. The top and top surface of the base were given an extra coat.

The entire piece was left a couple of days to harden off before hitting it with 2000 grit to remove dust nibs.

I have the shelves left to finesse fit and finish so that will be in the next post.

Blue Tape

I almost forgot! Blue tape can be used for a multitude of tasks and won't leave a sticky residue on surfaces (if you remove it in time):

• Mask off an area before painting (its default task)
• Used in place of clamps
• Tie up your pants if your belt snaps
• Cover a wound if you have run out of field dressings
• Repair cuts or holes in your shop dust extraction collection bags
• Stick engineering/woodworking drawings/photographs to the wall
• Use on the base of a power tool (jigsaw) to prevent scratching the surface of what you are cutting
• Use around a drill shank as a visual depth gauge.

If you know of any other uses leave a message below.

Display Cabinet Part 2

The build of the display cabinet is going really well at the moment.
A template was made with the curve of the front. From this the side panels were cut out and then routed with a pattern following bit.
I have routed the mortises in the top and bottom panels. I also made full length tenons on the side and centre panels.

mortise and tenon detail from
Sketchup model

As the customer has asked for adjustable shelves I made a jig to make the holes in all the side and centre panels. Essentially all this is a piece of 3/4" scrap plywood with a hole pattern drilled in relative to two squared and jointed datum edges.

Drill jig turned on its side

The holes in the drill jig are on 32mm centres and are 35mm in from the long edge. The second set of 3 holes are 50mm further in from the first set. The reason for these is because the lower shelves are deeper than the upper shelves so the supports are on different centres. The shelves will follow the graceful lines of the curve of the front so the support holes are changed accordingly.

Shelf support holes

The jig holes are 5/8" diameter and are used for the router guide bush.
The holes in the side panels and centre panel are 8mm x 8mm deep and are transferred through using the router.
The front of the lower and upper panels were then run through the table saw with the blade set at corresponding angles to follow the curve. I have left about 1/16" to remove with a plane after the glue up.

Glue Up

The final job prior to glue up was to sand all internal surfaces to 220 grit. I wouldn't get much opportunity to do sanding properly if everything was already glued up.

The lower tenons are glued into the base using West Systems epoxy quick set. This has quite low viscosity when it has just been mixed. So for the upper tenons I just used regular yellow glue to avoid any drips from squeeze out eminating from above.
The epoxy takes about 7 hours to setup and 48 hours to reach full cure whereas the yellow glue takes about 24 hours to reach full strength. The rear panels are not glued in just slid into their grooves.

The whole assembly was then clamped making sure that everything was square and put aside for a couple of days. Even after taking care not to put too much epoxy on the joints there is still a little squeeze out that will be removed with a chisel plane.

Front view of clamp-up
The grain runs from left to right
as per the original cabinet

Rear view 

Side view showing graceful curve

On the Bench - A Display Cabinet

As mentioned in a previous post I had to buy a new jointer plane because the old one broke during a jointing operation. I was actually making boards up for this project.
A customer has an existing commercial European white oak cabinet with 4 drawers and a sliding door. The front of the cabinet, including the drawers and door, has a gentle curve. The client wants a matching display cabinet to go on top of the existing cabinet.
The cabinet had to follow the curve of the front and have 4 open shelves separated by a vertical divider.

Existing cabinet

Existing cabinet in situ

 I used Sketchup to come up with a number of designs and came up with this.

Sketchup visualization

Upper Cabinet

The new cabinet is to be made from 25mm (1") thick boards on the top and bottom. The sides and centre divider are made from boards 22mm (7/8") thick. The shelves are made from boards 14mm (9/16") thick.

In the design I have made the base about 10mm (3/8") from the front and side edges. The rear of the base lines up with the existing lower cabinet. The sides will be fixed to the top and bottom using mortise and tenon joints. The rear of the cabinet will have oak ply panels. The orientation of the grain will be left right instead of the usual up down direction. This is because the existing cabinet has its drawers and sliding door with a left right grain orientation.

Top and Bottom

I have milled the top and bottom boards already and cut them to size.

• Bottom is 1020 x 450 x 25 thick (40" x 17-3/4" x 1" ). Made from two 10" wide x 5/4 white oak boards.
• Top is 1020 x 250 x 25 thick (40" x 10" x 1"). Made from one 10" wide x 5/4 white oak board.

They are now awaiting routing for the mortises.

I am using a metric 8mm routing cutter with an 8mm shank that I bought to cut the mortises. However I don't have an 8mm collet for my router. Amazon to the rescue again and the collet is on its way to me as I type. All my routers are 1/4" or 1/2". I can't remember why I ordered a router cutter with an odd 8mm shank! It must have been a senior moment.

The top and bottom front edges will be angled to match the curve of the sides. This will give a pleasing transition between cabinets. 

Sides and Centre

I have already glued up the boards making the sides. They are now awaiting being cut down to size.

A template for the curve has been made and will be used to rough cut with the band saw and then routed to the pattern.

Shelves

The shelves are made from some 6/4 oak. I'd actually ordered 5/4 but it came thicker which was beneficial.

My bandsaw only has a 6" capacity and the boards are 10" wide. I cut them to 5" boards and then resawed these boards down the thickness making bookmatched boards of around 3/4" (19mm) thick rough sawn.

The shelves are to be able to be repositioned by the client and they have specified a socket and flattened pin system.

What's on the bench? - A straight-edge storage box

I bought a pre-used 24" Veritas straight edge last week. This had seen very little use and will be great for setting up machinery, checking the flatness of hand tools, checking planed stock for flatness etc etc. However it came wrapped in plastic bubble wrap. This is great for transportation but not great for long term storage in a workshop.

The straight edge is made from aluminium and needs protection from being knocked and chipped.

Hanging it on a nail was not an option so I decided to make a simple box for it, no fancy joints, as my start to Get Woodworking Week 2013.

I started out with some 1/4" ply scrap stock I had left over and ripped a 26" long section x 3.11/32" (85mm wide).
I then found some scrap mahogany strips that I had on my shelves and jointed them and planed them to thickness. Then I cut a 1/4" groove down the length of each strip on the router table.

Over to the table saw I cut them to length and mitred each of the ends. Next, in good old Norm fashion, I glued and nailed one the strips to the plywood. Next I placed the straight-edge into position and positioned the other strip into place with a little clearance for wiggle room. The brads and glue came out again.
Finally I cut an end section to length with mitred ends and put that into position.
At the other end I ripped some of the height off the other end piece and put that into position. I trimmed the oversize ply flush with the walls of the box.

I then made a sliding lid from some more 1/4" ply and glued an opening strip made from a mitred piece of mahogany and glued it into position. Then I applied my branding stamp (you really need to get one of these!)

Then it was sanded to 220 grit before finishing with Briwax shellac sanding sealer and 2 coats of General Finishes Arm R Seal wipe on finish.

It literally is on my bench

Finished box