Entry Hall Mirror - WIP

**Rookie** · 30th August 2010, 10:43 PM

My brother in law and his wife had a hall stand in their front entrance which was a little too big. It was similar to the one in Pic 1 but with a couple more coat hooks. They sold that and bought a small walnut chest to put on the floor in the entrance to keep the kids shoes etc in. He asked me if I could do a mirror with coat hooks on the side to hang on the wall where the hall stand had been. He had no idea what design he wanted, left that up to me, but it would be a bit more modern than the hall stand because the box he bought was fairly modern with rounded over edges on the lid

Pic 2. The design that I came up with. It would be American Walnut with brass tubing joining the wings to the mirror. It would also have 3 brass coat hooks down each wing but they are not shown due to my absolute rookieness when it comes to Google Sketch-up. That's why I haven't shown the edges rounded over as well. Must do more of those tutorials.

Pic 3 The mortises and tenons were cut before I remembered to get the camera and do a WIP. The walnut was bought from Matthews in Mitcham already dressed and squared because I don't have a buzzer. I bought it slightly oversize and trimmed it once I was sure of the dimensions. I cut my mortises using a hand held router, spiral bit, and by clamping the timber in my bench vise. The bench vise jaws are 35 mm hardwood and very square. I use the router fence along the front jaw to get the centres right, and rout the length out by sight. Works for me. I cut the tenon shoulders on the router table then trim up with a japanese hand saw. Had to plan the M&T's so that when I cut the curved top and bottom (pics 11 and 12) I didn't cut through and expose a tenon.

Pic 4 and 5. Drilled the holes in the side rails and the sides of the frame to 30 mm depth to take the 11.59 mm OD (whatever that is in imperial, 15/32 I think) brass tubing I got from the hobby section of the hardware store.

Pics 6, 7 and 8. Brass tube needed to be cut to size. I wanted 30 cmm between rails and mirror, so cut 87 mm to have slightly less than 30 mm go into each side. I made up a sleeve for the cutting simply by drilling a 12 mm hole in a piece of scrap. This is to make sure I don't squash the tube into an oval while cutting them, because the fit was very tight in the 12 mm holes.

**Rookie** · 30th August 2010, 10:45 PM

Pics 9 and 10. Dry fit to ensure it was looking like I wanted it to, and then taped everything up so I could rout the curves in the end.

Pics 11 and 12. I made up a trammel arm out of some scrap ply and hardwood blocks to cut the curves in the end. Spiral but was used and made multiple passes at increasing depths. I inserted 30 mm hardwood spacers between mirror frame and rails to both get the curve right, and also avoid chip out on the end grain of the rails. I also had sacrificial pieces on the outside of the rails at one end to avoid chip out as well, but forgot to put them on the other end. Lucky, no chip out. In retrospect I should have glued up the mirror frame prior to doing this cutting because there was the tiniest bit of racking as I swung the arm back and forth. It didn't make more than a mm or so difference in the varying depth cuts, but it made the clean up of the curves a bit more tiresome than it should have been.

Before anyone asks, yes that is the table saw with the insert removed, and no, I wasn't using it like that. I used the TS for some of the dry assembly and routing because it was flat. As the riving knife sits slightly proud of the top, even with the blade right down, I removed it and just didn't put the insert back in.

Pic 13 Coming along nicely,

Pic 14 ..so I pulled it all apart again and cut the rebates on the back of the mirror frame. Two rebates. One for the mirror and one for the backing board. Both 3 mm deep and 10 mm wide. I had already decided 3 mm thickness for the mirror would be fine. These were done on the router table routing through on the short top and bottom pieces and using stop blocks for the sides of the frame.

Pic 15 is the glue up of the mirror frame. I used epoxy just in case there were gaps inside I didn't know about, and one of the tenons was a touch loose. I inserted some scrap ply in the rebate to keep it squared up as it dried.

Forgot to take a photo for this bit, but after the glue up I put the spacers back in, and the sacrificial bits on the sides, for the same chip out reason, and taped it all up again before I ran it across the router table table to round over the top and the bottom of the frame and rails. I rounded over the outside of the rails last. I didn't want to round over the sides of the frame or the insides of the rails as I didn't think that look was right.

Pic 16 Sanding... and sanding.. and sanding.... and sanding. 180 to 400 grit going up in the grades. I took my time on this going back to the start on a couple of places and then up the grades again because I wasn't quite happy. Spent about 3 or 4 hours on this, not a small amount of that time resting the right arm. I did this by hand for two reasons. One was to pay attention to it slowly. The other was that I think a ROS or finishing sander could build up too much heat on the one surface and I didn't want the frame warping or twisting at this stage. Not sure if that's a valid concern. Would be interested in feedback on that.

**Rookie** · 30th August 2010, 10:47 PM

Pic 17 and 18 - Made up a rack to hold the sides and frame while I applied the finish. You can see little bent nails in middle ready to take the mirror frame. The ends of the nails were taped up with masking tape and they went into the holes in the side of the frame to suspend the frame above the rack while it dried.

This is the part where I would like to say that 10 coats of pure tung oil went on over time. I had a PM exchange with Skew on using the tung oil, just to get some advice and check I was on the right track. The fact is that I ran out of time as I had already arranged to go to Sydney weekend of the 28th to deliver it and this was still happening the two weeks before. I know I said I didn't want to do it Skew, but I ended up with three coats of WOP on top of three coats of tung oil. Next time I'll do all tung oil, but it needs to be summer, and I need to have another couple of weeks. With more time the tung oil would have built up to a nice hard coating, which I wanted as they would be hanging coats on the side hooks and keys on hooks at the bottom. The WOP will have to provide that hardness for this one.I did the finish inside the house because of the low temperatures and high humidity in the workshop outside. I haven't got the gas bill yet but but the ducted heating was on pretty much 24 x 7 at 20 degrees, and lower through the night. Bit messy too. Lucky SWMBO is in Sydney for all this.

Pics 19, 20 and 21. Assembly. I drilled bleeder holes in the metal tubes so they would end up just inside the holes in the frame and the rails. I did this because as the tubes were a really tight fit I wanted the air to bleed out through the holes as I pushed the tubes in, rather than have it bleed out between the tube and the frame and spit epoxy out the sides of the tubes all over my work.

Pic 22. All done and hanging in it's new home. Pretty happy with it actually

Comments, criticisms, and other feedback always welcome. It's the first of this sort of thing I've done so it was fun making it up as I went along.

**Christos** · 31st August 2010, 04:59 PM

Very nicely done.

Looking very smart indeed.

**Peter36** · 31st August 2010, 10:59 PM

I like that . Very elegant

**munruben** · 31st August 2010, 11:12 PM

I agree. very well done from the drawing board to the finished product. Congratulations.

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