Thread: WIP Shaker Sister's Sewing Desk

I had to glue up the main desktop from three pieces. The widest doesn't fit through any of my machinery so it was a matter of bringing things to size with hand planes. The large piece was somewhat wedge shaped and fun was had with the scrub plane. It removes wood fast but it would be ever so easy to get over enthusiastic and take off too much too quickly!
scrub.jpg

I decided to support the rear of the top by adding a tongue to the filler piece in the original drawings. The drawings just has this fillet squared off and dropped in and glued to fill between the uprights. With a groove in the desktop the fillet now does something structural and supports the rear of the top. I decided to skip the glue and use a screw to hold down the fillet. It was a bit tricky drilling the hole now, but I'm getting used to screws in awkward locations on this piece.
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That's about it for the cabinet. There are a few chips and dents to fix and a final sand before applying a finish.
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Yes Arthur, it's now time to start on the drawers.

Nice to see that kauri put to good use. It's a great timber to work with, even with some age on it.

Looking forward to the drawers - dovetailed of course!!

The drawers are all overlay. 12 x half blind dovetailed, lipped on three sides. Should keep me occupied for a couple of weeks.

Oh... and then there are the turned drawer pulls.

A nice job your doing there Fuzzie

Rob

There are a lot of drawers.

Firstly I had to make the stuff for the drawer side. I had a couple of hoop pine floor boards and a couple of lengths of F8 Araucaria structural beam which I've resawed to make enough 3/8" boards for the drawers.

drawerStuff.jpg

I was wrong above, the drawers are lipped on 4 sides.

I can't seem to find much in the way of description for building double lapped half blind dovetail drawers, so I'm making up my own process as I go along. I guess a drawer lipped on 4 sides doesn't have to be very well fitted and I guess the original makers whipped out drawers in no time flat, but I'm trying to get my head around the process.

2/3rds of the thickness of the drawer front needs to be inset with the rest overlayed. Sounds like a simple job to cut a rectangle and run a rebate around the outside. However since the top drawer gallery ended up a bit sloppy with that odd tenon layout, there are minor variations in all my drawer openings. (BTW, I'm now convinced the drawing was wrong and the stub tenon is drawn on the wrong side of the drawer rail.) I decided to use the pieces intended to be the drawer backs as templates for the drawer fronts, which I will subsequently cut down. I fitted the drawer backs into the openings and used them to accurately mark out the rebates on the real fronts.

drawerBacks.jpgdrawerFront.jpg

The drawer fronts now need to be profiled around the outside edges with a 3/16" round over. Unfortunately I don't have a plane with a suitable profile and routing looks like it might be a bit dangerous, even if I had a suitable router bit, which I don't. Perhaps it would have been best to do the profile before cutting the rebate? Maybe it should be cut after the drawer is fully constructed? I'm going to look at making a scratch stock for the required profile. I'm not sure how that will work on the Silkwood, it is pretty soft, trial and error will tell....

I'm just adding a bit of offline discussion here as I think it's worthwhile to add to the record here as I don't have any other sort of blog running. It might be of interest to others some day.

Post #19 was really just an off topic remark on finding a cheap suitable workshop pencil. I don't want to sound like a smart a***e as I really am just a retired computer programmer doing this as a hobby. Believe me I'm more than aware of a number of shortcomings in this build.

There's a lot of markings going on in this project. Up to post #19 it was mainly rough dimensioning going on. Cutting out rough pieces and taking things down to approximate thickness. I use a chalk and pencil for making most of those marks. The other problem I have is keeping track of all the pieces. I'm a bit pressed for space and don't have the luxury of a large layout or assembly area. Things basically get piled on and off the rolling sheet of plywood so I tend to identify pieces with 4B pencil marks which rub off easily. I even resorted to additional blue painters tape this time to get things oriented correctly during glue up.

When it comes to laying out joints I've got a couple of different types of marking gauge and I scribe shoulder lines with a knife. I have one of those marking scribes with a flared blade at one end and scribe point at the other but have never got comfortable using it. I recently picked up a small Stanley folding knife that Paul Sellars advocates and have done most shoulder lines with that on this job. I like it but I sometimes wander off with the grain even with that. Unfortunatley either my marking or sawing is not perfect as some joints are still not really tight.

My analysis of the main problem with my joints is that my hand planed components are fractionally off square. Since I used the internal faces of most pieces as the reference face and edges when laying out, the discrepancies usually then shown up in the show faces of the joints.

I'm eager to hear any hints for improving layout technique to improve things.

As for grooving for the panels I have a Stanley #50 which is missing some parts and isn't really any good for doing 1/4" grooves. I also have a little Record grooving plane that is fairly good at doing 1/4" grooves, but I admit when doing the grooves on this case, it was getting very hot and uncomfortable to handle and I eventually succumbed to temptation and used a 6mm bit in the router to run most of the grooves, but it was awkward.

Flattening the panels was far from easy with the grain tearout. I tried and tried but had to resort to a sander. I tried scraping but the scraper got too hot to hold and I think I am of the age that I'm starting to get arthritis in the thumbs so pushing the blade wasn't much fun. Even though I worked my way down through the grits to 240, when I got around to oiling there are unfortunatly still a couple of swirl marks just visible. I'm currently working on the drawer fronts and tried a new approach. In this case I just sanded at #60grit rather like using a toothing plane and then moved directly to the scraper and scraped until all swirl mark disappeared. This seemed to be far quicker and produced a better outcome in my opinion.

I'm pretty much self taught from Walton's and Robert Wearing's books. All hand tool oriented and pretty much layout joints as described.

For this particular project I'm aiming for a reasonably faithful reproduction and am following these drawings at http://woodtools.nov.ru/projects2/Wo...wing-table.pdf

As you can see there are a lot of different sizes involved in the frame but 3/4" is the main common dimension, so 1/4" tenons and panels fit the joint layout well, although the panels are nominally 3/8" and only reduced to 1/4" for the groove. In my case the panels vary somewhat in thickness with the inside faces just planed roughly to take off saw marks, not worrying too much about tearout.

The piece has quite a delicate style to it and I think the thin panels and drawer elements complement it. I must admit though that I'm not overly fond of wasteing away thickness just to match exact dimensions so most of my 3/4" members end up more like 21mm rather than 19.

My machinery is all pretty basic and only used for rough dimensioning. No professional for instance would put up with the time it takes me to set my saw fence with it's bodgied up clamping system, however for the handful of pieces of furniture I'm ever likely to make, I couldn't justify going for newer high tolerance equipment. Rough sizing by machinery and finishing with handtools is likely to remain my modus operandi.

Cheers, Franklin

Before getting into the fiddly bits I decided I could possibly save myself some frustrations down the track by starting out making a dovetailing vice. This one is made from scrap Ironbark joist, a piece of reclaimed Brushbox flooring and M12 threaded rod.

vice.jpg

Not the prettiest piece but I hope it's functional.

Nice one , is this for sawing and removing waste with the router?

Originally Posted by auscab

Nice one , is this for sawing and removing waste with the router?

There seem to be a number of suggestions as to how to use these style of vice. I've made mine both for the positive clamping function while sawing, since it has a twin screw arrangement and my face vice tends to wrack somewhat. Also in the case of my current drawer fronts with the double lapped layout I'm thinking it will be almost impossible to saw much of the pins and therefore having the thick front jaw will be a valuable guide for removing the waste by hand with a chisel.

I've built mine based on the Robert Wearings description in his Woodworking Devices book . Derek Cohen has written up how he uses his here.

Originally Posted by Fuzzie

.......with the double lapped layout I'm thinking it will be almost impossible to saw much of the pins and therefore having the thick front jaw will be a valuable guide for removing the waste by hand with a chisel.....

Hi Fuzzie, it's coming along nicely, so far.

Dovetail sockets inside a lip like this are certainly more of a challenge than cutting them on a square edge. As you say, you are restricted in how much you can saw the socket edges. It's bad enough with half-blind sockets on a square edge, but that lip adds an obstruction limiting the depth of the cut even more. You could have cheated, & made through-dovetails in a thin front, then glued on false fronts to create the lips. Done carefully, no one would know but you. However, doing it that way wouldn't seem right when you are trying to work in the spirit of the piece that inspired your desk, would it?

When cutting sockets on a lipped drawer front, I use a small, short, saw to accurately define the edges of the sockets on the flat surface, and as far down the end-grain edge as is safe to do. The surface cuts, at an angle to the grain, are the more important, to eliminate or greatly reduce any tendency to split out as you chisel out the waste. With care, you can cut down to within a couple of mm of the lip, but 'care' is the operative word, you don't want to mark the edge of the lip, which will be visible on the finished piece. Once these edges are defined, I do the bulk of the work with the piece flat on the bench top, returning it to the 'dovetail vise' at the end, to square off the back & bottoms of the socket, & clean up those tight corners. Cleaning the inside corners is a job where a pair of small skews is invaluable. I've got a pair made from a couple of old 1/4" chisels picked up for a few dollars each at a flea market, & given matching handles. The best return on a small investment I've ever had! small skews.jpg

I hope the old Kauri you're using cuts crisply - some of the old recycled pine I've used tends to be a bit crumbly, and breaks out when you make the end-grain cuts on the sockets. A very sharp, low-angled chisel, and many shallow cuts is the go, I find.....

Cheers,

<deep base voice> BOOM....Yes you can </deep base voice>

I've seen a couple references to chopping on the saw line to remove the waste from pins. Tim Rousseau gives a demo in his video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAlIM0dzrUg

So I figure I'm not going to get my saw anywhere near the bottom of the layout lines for these pins, or much near the top for that matter, so why not give it a go? I decided to jump in and start the first drawer. I laid out the first lot of dovetails according to the drawings, but changed my mind halfway through. The original layout has a pin at the bottom of the front which means the groove for the bottom will show on the side. I tried to rearrange the dovetails on the fly to have a half tail at the bottom of the front, but I still don't think I got it quite right. I'll take more care on the next drawer.

I took a $1.50 paint scraper and cut the ears off it so I had something vaguely rectangular, I then cut the tails on the side boards and laid the sides in the lap rebate and marked through the saw cut with the marking knife. I then proceeded to cut down the pin waste lines on the front with a hammer!
scraper.jpgscraperCut.jpg

I then worked on the face flat on the bench but found with the thick benchtop I didn't have a really good clamping arrangement. I had broken the jaw on one of my quick clamps a while ago (I take a long time to throw junk away) and I had the thought that I might be able to use it as a holddown. So I broke off the rest of the back jaw and pinned a toggle on the end so the bar could drop down through a dog hole. I used this to hold the board for the rest of the work. It's not ideal but does work. I then started work on chiseling out the rest of the waste.
irwinHoldDown.jpgcleanout.jpg

Ian, It was only the sliding desktop that is Kauri. I didn't have any problem working it but was a bit disappointed that the Danish Oil darkened it quite a lot and I lost a lot of figure. No real problem though as it is hidden.

The drawers are being made from Hoop, and yes I've had crumbling problems with dry Hoop before on the last cabinet.

Cheers, Franklin

The Hoop Pine is proving to be a bit of a challenge. There is no way I could use a chisel to simply chop out the tails. I tried sharpening, stropping, grinding a bevel at 20°, all to no avail as the chisels just pulled out chunks from the end grain. In the end the best result came with using the coping saw to cut as close to the line as I could, then paring to the line by nibbling away with an 1/8" chisel.

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Fitting the lipped drawers has been another learning exercise. No simple solution to just plane down the sides. The drawers have to be made undersize from the start.

This will certainly be a tedious but interesting part of the build Fuzzie.

I'm a bit suprised that the hoop is proving difficult to deal with.

Originally Posted by artme

I'm a bit suprised that the hoop is proving difficult to deal with.

The Araucaria I resawed for the drawers came from my neighbour and were offcuts of the floor joists when their house was built 30+ year ago. No residual moisture left, I guess it is related to some sort of cellular collapse.