Originally written Aug 8, 2020

After getting my third case glued up, and my second one finished and installed, I unpacked a box which held some of my big-ass art books and measured a few of them. Sixteen inches tall! That's not going to fit!

So I called an audible. Since all the lumber I bought was in four foot lengths (48 inches), and the cases are 30¼ inches wide on the outside, I can pretty easily make a case that's… carry the one… 17¾ inches tall on the outside, minus ¾ inch twice for the wood thickness, and I've got a case that'll hold a book that's 16¼ inches tall.

For back boards, a 1×12 and a 1×8 will add up to 18 inches and change, but I'll need to nail them to the back outside of the case instead of rabbeting them flush, so the big-ass art books won't hang out the front of the box. And because it's been a long day, I figured I'll work out all the math for those boards tomorrow. I should have enough width to overlap them by at least a half inch. ⅜ and ¾ are my fixed width rabbet saws, so one of those will hopefully do the trick.

Also of note, each box takes 2oz of shellac flakes in 13oz of denatured alcohol to finish (filling a Late July brand salsa jar). I'm going to have to order more shellac, and probably pretty soon. Guess I should've gone for the five pound discount last time.

Oh well. Another day, another two boxes (though the second one still needs a quick sanding and a final coat of shellac). I'll write up my finishing schedule another day.

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Jefferson Bookcases Contents #woodworking #bookcases #extraLarge

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Originally written Aug 7, 2020

Today it was time to start making boxes. The first step is to cut the pin boards. I start by transferring the tails to them and marking everything out.

On the front, I should draw the baseline to the second to last line I transferred from the tails.

On the back, I only need to mark the outermost two lines, as those will be part of the mitered corner, and I'll be sawing the top and back, but not the front.

After cutting the sides of the pins (the ones I marked on the front), I saw out the waste.

Then I saw down at a 45 degree angle, cutting where the side of the pin meets the miter. Do that on both sides, as these cases will have miters front and back.

After that, I turn the board in the vise so I can saw the miters.

Then I saw the miters on the tail board and test fit the corner. After I have two corners sawed on the pin board, I rabbet the back edge of the board using the kerfing plane (later I would switch to using my circular saw for this).

Then I rabbet the two back boards, and cut rabbets so I can shiplap them together. I actually need about 14 inches, and the boards are 7½ inches or so each, so I'll trim one of them to fit at this point rather than making a huge ship-lap.

There are multiple reasons for doing the backs like this, one of the biggest being that if the back-boards expand due to rising humidity, you want there to be room for them to move without pulling the case apart, so the ship-lap joint should have a small gap so the boards can both expand a bit. The other reason is that 14 inch wide boards are hard to get and expensive, and two 8 inch wide boards are a lot cheaper and easier to move around the shop.

Once everything fits, it's time to glue up the case and tack in the back boards with two finish nails on each side. Only glue the top and bottom of the back boards so they can move with the changing seasons. The sides of them are just tacked with the nails, closer to the edge than the middle (again, so the boards can expand or contract a little due to changing humidity).

Then it's time to let the glue set while I work on the next case. Next up, finishing!

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Jefferson Bookcases Contents #woodworking #bookcases #miteredDovetails

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Originally written August 4, 2020

First, some measurements. I spent the tail end of yesterday sawing all the boards for eleven of the largest cases to size. Here's the cut-list:

Two 1×12×30¼ – top & bottom Two 1×12×14½ – left & right Two 1×8×29⅝ – back boards

Today I spent the day making tail boards, which are the left and right sides of the cases.

Here are the steps for them.

1. Mark out a pair of boards on one end. I usually plan to make the outsides of this pair the inside of the case. The main reason this matters is that you probably want to mark the miters and rabbets on the board now so you don't forget what you're doing and miter them the wrong way. It happens.
2. Cut the tails you've marked. Note that I'm just using pencil lines. They're plenty accurate for sawing dovetails in pine, especially for the first cuts (tails in my case), as I measure the pins from the tails. That's where I need to be more accurate.
3. Mark the other end of the board. If your tails are asymmetrical (mine aren't, but if you're making smaller pins, you might want the rabbeted edge of the board to have a thicker tail on the end), make sure to flip the marks. Note my handy story stick. Using a template like this means I'll have all dozen cases looking fairly uniform.
4. Saw those tails.
5. Cut the rabbets on the back side of the board for the back boards to fit into.

If you're in mass-production mode, like I am, repeat. I've got a total of ten more pairs of tail boards to make. I bundle the pairs together with blue tape.

That's it for the tail boards. In a full day, making ten pairs of them is a pretty good goal for me. Whew!

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In response to a few questions, I later added the following:

I cut the ends of the boards using my circular saw track guide with a hybrid saw blade in my little cordless circular saw. They're mostly straight off that, but if the two boards in a pair are slightly different in length, or one is rougher, I'll use a finely set block plane to even things out.

I'm cutting everything using a 1:4 dovetail marker I made. They're getting more uniform, and my most common failure is cutting below the baseline when taking out the waste with the turning saw. But I'm getting better and faster with that. Also, when cutting tails, I do all the cuts that slant to the right first, working left to right, then do the cuts that slant to the left, working right to left. Not sure why that exact pattern, but it works for me. I'm also cutting them while sitting on a rolling mechanics stool so I'm sawing only slightly below eye level.

When gang-cutting the tails in ¾ inch stock, I drop the handle of the saw to get started on the line. Two strokes get the line established all the way across, then I raise the handle and three or four more strokes take me down to the baseline. One final stroke, looking in the mirror behind the work to make sure that I'm to the line on the back side of the board, and it's on to the next cut. I think it was a Rob Cosman video I learned from. The turning saw for waste removal is from Chris Schwarz. And then I use a rasp to clean up the bottom of the tail, which is my own fault. Especially in pine, I have too many tear-out issues with a chisel. A rasp lets me clean things up quickly with the tail board still in the vise.

I'm also happy I have my kerfing plane handy. The ⅜ inch fixed fence is perfect for almost all of the rabbets I'm cutting, plus for the shiplap on the two back boards.

My honey commented the other day that she's happy I finally got started on this project, and I haven't said anything, but I realized that almost half the tools I'm using on this project are ones I made myself, and I don't think things would be going as smoothly as they are without them. I've developed a number of tools that work well for me, and I built the prototype box using them and have added where necessary. Plus I have two block planes sitting on my bench. One set super fine for touching up the end grain before cutting dovetails (if needed), and one set fairly heavy, so eight passes on the edge of the board gives me a 3/16 wide chamfer.

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Jefferson Bookcases Contents #woodworking #bookcases

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Originally written May 9, 2021

I bought a beat up dovetail saw on eBay. Put a fairly minimal bid on it (it was $25 with free shipping) and won. It's shown below. My goal was to have a saw I could practice sharpening and other saw maintenance tasks on, and not feel too bad if I screwed it up.

When it arrived, almost a year ago, the handle was even worse than it had looked in the photos, and was just too small for my hands, so I set the saw aside for a while and got on with other projects. Recently, I got “stuck” during my build for the plane swap and needed to work on something else while I thought about how to get past the problem I had created for myself.

I sat down and tried to unscrew the saw nuts on the saw I'd bought. Turned out they were rivets. I ended up destroying the handle I order to get it off, and the holes in the plate were pretty nasty looking. I filed the holes flat (they looked like they'd been punched through the metal, rather than drilled) and started shaping a new handle.

I traced the handle on a Bad Axe saw I bought, which fits me pretty well, onto a piece of 5/4 curly cherry I had. There was a knot in it, but I put that in the section that would end up “inside” the handle.

Then I did some shaping with files and such while I waited for new steel saw nuts to arrive in the mail, and then again while I waited for a 3/16 carbide drill bit to arrive after I'd mistakenly ordered a 3/32 bit.

I also pulled the back off the saw plate and cleaned up both the back and the plate. There was a fairly generic “Warranted Superior, Sheffield” etch that was almost gone (or had been etched lightly to begin with). I sanded it away, rather than trying to preserve it. I'm pretty sure this was a post-WWII saw, and nothing special, given the red plastic washer in place of a medallion and the riveted saw nuts.

I got the handle mostly shaped by the time the new saw nuts and drill bit arrived, so I was excited to get things put together. But I'd finished the handle at about an inch thick, which fits my big hands pretty well, but didn't fit the ⅞” long saw nuts I'd bought. D'Ohh!

So I took the handle to the belt sander and thinned it up a little. Which turned out to be good, since when I sawed the slot in it, I'd gotten it a little bit off, and it was off-center and aimed the blade a little to the right. Sanding the handle down let me fix that.

Then I had to reshape and re-oil the handle, but I did that with it on the saw. That let me test it as I went, making sure that it pointed straight and felt right. Last step was cutting chamfers at the top of the handle where the back went into the wood.

A couple coats of BLO later, and the saw is in use in my collection. And I learned quite a bit along the way, and have a saw I can practice sharpening on without worrying about destroying an expensive saw.

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Handy Tools #woodworking #saw #handyTools #tools

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Originally written August 20, 2017

Back when I got my Roubo Frame saw kit from Bad Axe Toolworks, I also got the kerfing plane kit. I finally got around to finishing that this morning, and have put it to use.

With the kit you get a saw plate and a cherry board. Step one is cutting a hand-hold in the board. A couple different spade bits, some connect-the-dots with a coping saw, and some smoothing with rasps and files and I had that done.

Next was cutting a rabbet for the fence. Two saw cuts, and a little cleanup with a rabbet plane, and that was done.

Since I'm mostly after ¼ to ⅜ thick stock at the moment, I decided to make my fixed fence with a ⅜” kerf. So I clamped a couple ⅜×3/16 brass bars to the fence, and sawed right next to them with my pull saw. As it's just barely long enough, I had to start the kerf on one end, other, and then bring down the middle until it was level.

Drill a few holes, and put in the saw plate with the provided saw nuts (much easier said than done), and I had a completed kerfing plane, as shown in the first picture. The final picture shows a ½” deep kerf I cut in a poplar board to test things out. Looks pretty good!

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Contents #woodworking #handyTools #tools

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Originally written August 2, 2020 – Note that this is long, and covers how I cut #dovetails in what might be excruciating detail if you already know how to hand-cut dovetails. I won't be offended if you skip ahead.

For this style of bookcase, there is a plinth, which serves as a base, supporting the stack of boxes. Since the plinths are mostly hidden, and the weight is mostly carried by the four glue blocks in the corners, I figured they were a good place to start. Half of the dovetails will be hidden, and only one of the four boards is very visible.

Here's my checklist for building the plinths, along with some pictures of the intermediate steps:

1. Cut all the boards to length. There are three different lengths of pine 1×4 and two lengths of ash 1×1 glue blocks. Two 1×4×12, two 1×4×31, one 1×4×29½, two 1×1×3⅜, and two 1×1×2⅝.
2. Mark out and cut tails on side boards (no miters yet).
3. Cut rabbets on side boards, using my kerfing plane with a fixed ⅜ inch fence, and clean them up with a chisel
4. Mark and cut pins on front board, including miter. If you cut the miter on the tail board before marking this, you won't have a full tail to transfer the mark to the pin from, and you'll have to guess where the pin edge should be. That's not a killer, but it'll make for a sloppy joint.
5. Cut miter on matching corner of side (pin) board.
6. Test fit.
7. Cut other corner pins on front board, including miter.
8. Cut miter on matching corner of side board.
9. Test fit and adjust.
10. Cut rabbet on front board.
11. Cut curved cutout on front board.
12. Smooth cutout with knife and spokeshave.
13. Cut pins on rear board, including miter.
14. Cut miter on matching corner.
15. Test fit and adjust.
16. Cut pins on final corner, plus miter.
17. Cut miter on final corner of side (pin) board.
18. Test fit and adjust.
19. Check for square.
20. Glue up, making sure to glue the front cross-brace to the front board before clamping. The cross-brace's purpose is to reinforce the front board, which has material removed for decorative purposes. It's probably not necessary, as I made a smaller cutout than Schwarz did in his version, but it won't hurt anything, and it helps me ensure that the plinth remains square when clamped up. Plus, as I'm going to be stacking the cases 6 high at a minimum, there will be a fair amount of weight. I'd rather not find out I under built in the middle of some night as books and lumber come crashing to the floor. Thus, the brace.
21. Double-check for square.
22. Unclamp after the glue has dried overnight.
23. Glue ash glue-blocks into corners, short ones underneath the cross-brace board. Note the spacers set in the rabbets so that the glue blocks will be flush with the rabbets, giving good support to the cases.
24. Plane smooth with a smoother plane, and chamfer the top-outside corners of the boards with a block-plane such that the chamfer is 3/16 inch wide. This should make the top edges more durable as they inevitably get dinged by the cases being set into them.
25. Three coats of shellac, brushed on. I'm using a 1½ pound cut of blonde shellac.
26. Sand lightly with 320 grit sandpaper to remove raised grain, dust nibs, etc.
27. Apply final coat of shellac.

Here's a stack of three of the finished plinths. The middle one is my prototype and doesn't have the mitered dovetails, so doesn't look as nice as the others. I'll hide it in the corner or something.

And note that while I'm working, I keep all the pieces on my benchtop laid out in order so I can more easily keep track of where I am.

And here's a photo of a completed plinth with the first case sitting on it.

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Jefferson Bookcases Contents #woodworking #bookcases #plinth #cutList

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A while back I saw a guide that MaFe had made for his circular saw at his allotment house. I thought it was a pretty neat idea and now that I have a bunch of cross-cutting coming when I start on my bookcases, I decided I needed one.

It's pretty simple. A 2×2 foot piece of ¾” plywood, two 2-foot tubafors, two 2-foot pieces of angle iron, and a few pieces of quarter-inch MDF.

I glued and screwed the tubafors to the plywood. Next, I screwed the angle iron to the tubafors, making sure I had right angles (probably the most important bit). Covered the screws with some MDF I glued down, and then added a couple more layers of MDF so the motor housing on the saw can't hit the angle iron, no matter how deep I adjust the saw.

The only snag is that this means the saw blade can't quite reach all the way to the plywood base, so I'll likely add one more piece of MDF on top of the base to raise the piece of wood I'm cutting. But I want to figure out the stop I'm going to add before I raise the base.

I also added a few stops. They're basically a scrap piece of pine screwed down to the base, with marks on the far 2x4 to show me where to align each stop. Simple, and fairly fool-proof. I cut board for 70 cases and a dozen plinths, and the biggest variance I could find as I was stacking up the cases was 1/16 inch.

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Contents #woodworking #jig #handyTools

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This is a #buildBlog of the process of building the bookcases that hold my books in Santa Fe. I built them myself, and learned a lot about #woodworking along the way, and hopefully can share some of that knowledge in these articles.

1. Introduction, including a photo of how I set up my workbench for building the bookcases. Having my mise en place consistent made building 70 cases possible.
2. Building the Plinths, which describes and shows the method I use for cutting mitered dovetail corners while constructing the plinths, on which stacks of bookcases rest.
3. Large Case Tail Boards (sides), which covers cutting the tails on the side boards of the largest (at this point) cases. I also included answers to some questions people had asked me about the construction process, and linked to some of my Handy Tools I used while building the cases.
4. Large Case Pin Boards and Backs walks through the rest of the construction of a case. When this finishes, the case is in the clamps with the glue drying.
5. Winging it with Big Cases talks about how I discovered that the largest cases I had designed weren't large enough for some of my very large art books. So I had to change the design a bit. This is one of the many nice things about building the cases myself. Had I ordered them from a builder, the discovery of the extra-large books would've blown up the cost quite a bit.
6. A Back for the Oversized Case shows details of the ship-lap joint between two back-boards and puts a back on the oversized case. It also shows how to square up a case which was slightly out of square.
7. Smoothing and Prep for Shellac in which the hand planes come out.
8. Cleaning up a Dovetail shows how I cut out the waste between pins (it's a similar process for tails) and then clean up a little using a rasp until the joint goes together smoothly.
9. First Shellac sees me applying the first two coats of shellac to a case.
10. Second Shellac gets the third (and final) coat of shellac on a case.
11. Back Boards discusses one of my first big “performance optimizations” building the bookcases. I cut the time per pair of back boards for a case to a quarter of the time it previously took, from about an hour to about 15 minutes per pair of boards.
12. Interlude and Medium Bookcases talks about the size of the medium-sized cases to hold hardcovers and shows the cut-list for the lumber. It also has a guest appearance by my Lava Lamp.
13. More Plinths, Different Sizes covers a couple more sizes of plinths (one for the art books, which will have a deeper case, and four for stacks with a medium case as the base, and smaller paperback cases atop that).
14. Art Books Case has another cut-list, this time for a larger case to hold art-books. It also describes making 1x16 boards out of narrower pieces by edge-jointing them and gluing them together.
15. The Littlest Case has the cut-list for the smallest case for very small hardbacks or standard (5¼×7¼ inch) paperbacks.
16. Three Sizes of Plinths has cut-lists for all three different sizes of plinths I ended up building to accommodate the different-sized cases.
17. The Little Things covers some tips and tricks I've learned along the way, and has a progress update showing 37 cases in 8 stacks.
18. A Periodic Update gets the total up to 47 cases in 8 stacks and shows some other numbers in the months of making boxes.
19. The End of January Update didn't have a lot of progress, but that seems to be how Januarys go around here.
20. The Home Stretch? is another progress update. Up to 57 cases at this point.
21. The Wrap-up is a completed project post. The grand total was 70 cases in just about 18 months.

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#Contents #bookcases #buildBlog

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Originally written August 1, 2020

When we moved to Santa Fe last year, I had planned to build new bookcases for the house. In my old house in Minneapolis, I had built-in bookcases, and the house here in the Southwest needs a different look.

So I looked around a little, and decided to build the Jefferson Bookcases that Chris Schwarz wrote about for Pop Wood (and later on his own blog).

Given that I'm in Santa Fe, and getting nice hardwood is tougher here than I'm used to from Minnesota, I decided to build them in pine. I can get nice clear pine from Alpine Builders Supply here in town, and while it's not cheap, it's not going to break the bank.

So that's the back-story. I'm planning to write up the build process as I go, though likely I'll be behind on writing it up (I have four plinths and one case built as I write this), in part because I'm not great at taking all the photos I need as I'm building. But luckily there are enough repeated parts that I've been able to go back and get photos of every step of the way. That means this will be a lot longer than the Pop Wood article I linked above, but will also include a lot of the wrong turns I took along the way, and tricks I figured out to make the build go smoother.

As for parts, there are going to be at least six plinths, holding a stack of cases a minimum of five cases high on each stack. And that won't even get the paperbacks – I think I'm going to put those in cases that'll hang on a cleat on the wall above the stacks of cases.

Did I mention that I have a lot of books?

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Based on questions when I initially wrote this, I had the following additions: * Tom asked about tolerances and trying to keep the stacks of cases looking uniform. I built a circular saw track guide with stops to cut the long (horizontal) boards of each case to the same length with my circular saw. A miter box with a stop would also work. * I posted some teaser photos. First shows three plinths which will support the cases. The middle one is my prototype which did not have mitered corners on the top dovetails, so the rabbets for carrying the cases show on the front and look bad. * Second sneak-peek is a prototype case, 11½ inches deep, 13 inches high, and 30 inches wide (all the cases will be 30 inches wide). The only change required was taking about 1/32 inch off the back edge of the bottom board so the case would sit better in the plinth. * Third sneak-peek is my workbench, set up for building these cases.

The tools on my workbench, from left to right are: * clamp rack on the wall * planes, mostly used for finishing. Also knife and spokeshave, which are used for the curves on the plinths. * chisel and rebate saw / kerfing plane, used for cutting the rabbets in the boards (at the beginning). * glue, note sheet with cut-list, and paper towels for cleaning up. * mirror, used to see the back of dovetails when I'm sawing. * twin-screw vise for workholding * shellac and brush for finishing, mallets for aiding in assembly * marking tools for laying everything out. pencils. * rasps, dovetail saw, and turning saw for cutting dovetails * stack of completed parts (none there at the moment) * (on the floor) stacks of lumber cut to length for the current case

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Contents #woodworking #bookcases

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I have a Mujingfang Plough Plane I bought a few years ago, but it was only recently that I found the blades other than the ⅛ inch blade which I had left in it when we moved to NM (three and a half years ago). Having all the pieces in one place again, I decided it was time to build a storage box for it. This is the result.

The box is just about the minimum size to store the plane, fence, and blades securely. I'm getting enough storage boxes in my shop that I'm going to need to build more shelves. Plus I've discovered that the arms for the plane are tapered enough that I can slide them into the plane body as far as they go, and they'll stay securely without having the factory screws in place to hold them. This avoids one of my bigger objections to this sort of plane, which is that they take up a lot of room when not in use.

As you can see from the picture, with the arms and fence removed, the plane doesn't take up much space at all. And if I do have problems with the arms not staying wedged in place, I can always replace the factory screws with wooden pegs to hold the arms in place.

The plane came with five blades, but I figure I only need storage slots for four of them, as I can leave one in the plane.

To keep the blades from flopping around in the box (and to keep from needlessly making the box an inch taller to fit them upright), I placed a retaining block in the lid of the box. It's made from pine, so having the blades bump into it is unlikely to dull the blades much. And it's held in place with a wooden peg. If I think of a better solution, I figure I can replace it fairly easily.

When everything is closed up, the wooden peg does protrude a bit, but only a little, and I can make the knob on it even smaller if I decide I need to. Or I can recess the knob into the side of the lid, so it takes up much less space. But none of that is a project for today.

The box uses some cheap brass hardware I had on hand. The latch and hinges mostly work fine, but the hinges stuck up about 3/64 inch above the top of the box when I aligned them properly with the lid. So I took a little off with the belt sander. They don't look great now, but they still function fine.

The box is mostly pine. The ends are ¾ inch thick, and the sides are ½ inch thick (it didn't seem worth it to make the ends any thinner given how small they are). The bottom is a piece of aromatic cedar I scavenged from an old cedar chest I got from my mom. Between her cats and her basement which had flooded multiple times, it wasn't worth trying to repair, but I did get a few boards of cedar from it. This was an offcut that had screw-holes spaced just about the right distance apart so I could cut them off and make the box bottom. The top of the box is a piece of thick ash veneer (⅛ inch thick) which I bought to use as splines in boxes with mitered corners, but it's plenty sturdy for this lid.

I think that's about it. Thanks for looking!

#woodworking #storage #shopFurniture

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