Drawer pulls for the chest of drawers

During a period of ongoing illness I got a little down with lack of shop time. My wife suggested I go out and finish off the drawer pulls for the chest of drawers and just do what I can without over exerting myself.

I went out and spent a few hours over a weekend with the bandsaw and the oscillating spindle sander and made 10 drawer pulls. They are made from oak and sapele and finished off with General Finishes Enduro Var. I was pleased with the results. I also spent another night making a drill jig/fixture ready to hold the parts for the pilot holes. Then I will transfer the holes to the drawers and screw them in place. Here are a few pictures.

Original Sketchup design

Pulls waiting to be fitted

Pulls temporarily fitted with Blutack

The stepped rear face on the original Sketchup drawing didn't quite work on a test piece I made so on the final pieces that feature has been omitted. The lump on the very front of the pull has come out well as per the specification I got from my client and I'm pleased with it.

It doesn't show very well on these photographs but the contrasting sapele against the face of the drawer makes the entire drawer pull seem slimmer.

I also retained the template I made so I can reproduce these again should I need to. The pieces are much too small to be made safely on the router table, I know as I broke a couple early on in manufacture using the router, hence I went down the band saw and sanding to a line route. I then finished off most of the radii with a round over bit and a little hand sanding. They feel right in the hand and a friend said they look organic as if they had been taken straight from a tree branch.

Pre-remodel shop tour.

I have done a short film showing the untidy, tired shop as it stands late August 2012 before any building work starts.
One of the guard kittens was having a sleep in the shop at the time and she is called Anna.

Apologies for the cheesy jazz music but it was a decent piece of royalty free muzak I found on the tinter.
Yes I know this is really absolutely boring, much too long, even for fellow woodworkers, but you never know somebody might be interested. The whole idea about it was to give me a record about how it looked before. Hopefully the new shop (and its corresponding tour) will be a little more interesting.

Setting up shop

There was an interesting question posted on Woodtalk online recently. It was along the lines of "If you had $5000 to spend on equipping a shop what would you spend it on?"

I have to emphasise that whatever tools you buy you really do need decent cutters/blades or you will become very frustrated.

As I live in the UK I guess you could say "how much would you spend £5000 on?" It's slightly more in real terms than the US or Canadian equivalent but for our purposes it would do.
I know that £5000 is a lot of money but in real terms the purchase of 1 or 2 high end tools could seriously erode that budget.

If you look at it this way you have to decide what sort of woodworking do you do?
If somebody makes items exclusively using hand tools, euphemistically called the Neanderthals (Woodtalk  online "speak" - not me!), you may be able to buy the best hand tools that money can buy like a kid in a sweetshop (not sure what the North American equivalent is).
However if you are like me, a hybrid wood worker, about 2/3rds of the budget would be spent on power tools and the other on hand tools and you may well come up with a list like mine below:

Sketchup models

I have created a few Sketchup models that you can use in your own shop design drawings. Simply load up Sketchup and open 3d warehouse. Click onto advanced search and enter terrymck or tmcwoodworks in the Search by Author field and you will see a load of RecordPower and Startrite models I have created.
At the moment these comprise:

• Record Power (Startrite) MDE-HCE dust/chip extractor
• Record Power DX1000 dust extractor
• Record Power CX3000 dust/chip extractor
• Record Power TS200C table saw
• Record Power BBS100 oscillating spindle sander
• Record Power AC400 air cleaner

I don't work for Record Power but have been using some of their great products. I'll add more models in the future.