Projects Archives - The Wireless Woodworker

Mission Table – Part 2 – Mortise and Tenons

December 1, 2020December 1, 2020
by Tim

Last time we covered the initial design and milling, so let’s get started cutting some joinery! The arts and crafts and mission style furniture is known for its mortise and tenon joints and there are almost 30 of them in just this small table. I’m certainly not going to show you all of them, considering they’re all cut pretty much the same way, but I will mention a few tricks.

The first trick to make things a little easier on yourself is mainly for hand tool users – it’s to size your tenons to your chisels. I used just two mortise chisels for this whole table, a ¼” and a ⅛”, and I set my marking gauge to the chisels size and used it for everything. This makes cutting the mortises a lot easier.

There are a thousand ways to cut a tenon and almost as many tutorials out there, so I won’t get into the specifics of how I saw them, but one of the things I like to do is use deep marking lines and make knife walls. This helps guide the saw and gives me a nice crisp line to pare down to with the chisel at the end.

For the small dovetail on the top rail I just cut the rough shape with a chisel, don’t worry about the saw – nobody is going to see this joint anyway.

I use the same marking gauge to mark my mortises, so I know they’ll be consistent. Again, I won’t go into specifics about the mortising process, there are plenty of tutorials out there that do a better job explaining it than I can, but one thing I like to do is to make a few shallow chisel grooves at first, just to create a little well to help guide you lining up the chisel when you start hammering.

I should also mention my setup – it’s never a good idea to hammer directly in the vise, so I clamp a piece of scrap wood in the vise, then clamp my piece to that, so that the workpiece is over a leg and held tight. I also use the scrap piece as a vertical guide for the chisel to make sure I’m straight up and down.

As I hammer across the length of the mortise I’ll leave about an ⅛” of an inch on both sides so that when I pry out the waste I don’t bruise the ends too much. This isn’t such a big deal on this piece because they’ll be hidden under the shoulders of the tenon, but it’s a good habit. I also have a sharpie mark on the chisel to know when I’m down to the correct depth.

During the test fit – one of the joints was a little bit too tight and a few swipes with a block plane fixed that. If it was a larger tenon I may use a shoulder plane to thin it down some.

And there we go for most of the joinery – I think 28 mortise and tenon joints total and then a single dovetail for the top rail on the front. This should hopefully keep the front from bowing out at all. The tenons on the aprons did overlap a little, so with a block plane I mitered those ends just a little bit.

Now I’m getting ready for pre-finishing with some smooth plane work – notice that I’ve taped over the glue surfaces so no finish gets in the way of the joints.

The next step is the panel joint for the top. If you plane both pieces at the same time it makes this joint super simple – this edge doesn’t even have to be square to the faces since any error will be off-set by the mirrored piece.

To check the fit, just “un-fold” the two pieces and see how they line up. I aim for a very slight spring to the joint that’ll close up with clamps.

I’m going to go ahead and glue up everything before I build the drawer, just because I want that fit to be right. But before I glue everything up, I’m going to pre-finish everything. This is a three step, super easy recipe from Bob Lang. The first coat is Varathane “Special Walnut” stain to darken everything.

The second step is a coat of Watco “Dark Walnut” danish oil to give it a little more tint.

The last step is a coat of amber shellac to warm everything up a bit.

Next time we’ll add some of the internal pieces and finally do the drawer. So that’s it for this time!

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Mission Table – Part 1

October 16, 2018December 1, 2020
by Tim

Today we are going to be starting a mission style end table build. I’m going to try doing things a little differently this time by doing a multi-part video, rather than cramming everything into one, so hopefully you like the format. If so, or not, let me know down in the comments. I hope that this gives a little better insight into the whole design and build process.

The first step is the initial planning and design.

I actually have fairly specific parameters and dimensions for this build because I’m making it mainly to hold a dollhouse for my daughter. My grandfather actually made this dollhouse a number of years ago before he passed away with the intention of giving it to my children, so I think it deserves something special to sit on.

I don’t have a whole lot of criteria for the overall style, the room that it’s going in is fairly non-descript, so I thought this would be a good chance to do a mission style – arts and crafts piece. My goal is to do a Morris chair eventually, so this should be a good introduction.

I use Blender just because it’s what I’m familiar with, but you could use Sketchup or any other modeling program. Obviously this step isn’t necessary if you’re already working off a plan, but I’m putting my own design together, so wanted to try to get the dimensions correct before cutting the wood.

I started with the top because I knew the dimensions I needed to match the dollhouse. I also knew how high I wanted it, so adding the legs was easy, but getting the proportions looking right was tricky. I played around with different leg thicknesses until I got something that I think should look nice, then started adding some other elements.

I knew that I wanted to add a drawer, but with the short table I didn’t want it too tall, so I played around a little bit with the apron height. Then finally, because this is a mission style piece, I added in the slats on the sides and played around with the number and width of them.

Once I was happy with the overall proportions, I cleaned up the mesh a little bit off camera and did a few renders to show off the final design. Overall I think it looks nice and should fit the need well – it’s always interesting to see how 3D models look in real life, so I’m excited to get started building.

With all the pieces cut to rough size, I work on planing everything down to their final dimensions. This step is quite tedious, so I typically don’t do this all at once, but rather as I need the pieces. This part is in real time so you can see how long it takes to get a couple of flat faces and a square edge. For this small piece, which is one of the front rails, it takes about 4 or 5 minutes to get close enough.

I normally start with a couple swipes of the jack plane with a cambered iron to get rid of the saw marks, then switch to the jointer plane to get a nice flat face. If you listen to the sound that the plane makes and also look at the shaving to make sure I have a full length, full width shaving, then I know I have a flat face.

Once that’s established I mark the thickness with a marking gauge and flip it over to plane it down to final thickness. I actually don’t need a 4-squared board for this piece, so don’t really bother checking the squareness at this point – it’s fairly close, which is all I really care about.

As I plane down to the right thickness you can see that I’m constantly checking the marks both by eye and by feel. Sometimes the marks can be hard to see, but as you get close to the marks you can typically feel the gauge line. You know you’re pretty much done when you get little strings on the corners of the face.

After a quick square check, I mark the flat faces and move on to the next one.

That’s it for the first part and if you found this section a little slow, hopefully the joinery and assembly in the next part will be a little more exciting.

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The Shaker Side Table

August 9, 2017August 9, 2017
by Tim

One of the quintessential first woodworking projects seems to be a small side table. Some call these side tables, some call them end tables, plant stands, night tables… I have no idea what’s correct, but I’m sticking with side. Feel free to disagree. I’ve never made one so I think it’s about time.

I decided on a classic shaker design, mainly because it fits in with the style of our house, but also because the Schwarz did a great DVD for Lie-Nielsen a few years ago showing the build process step by step. His design has nice elegant lines and should last a lifetime – even with those tiny legs.

The basic side table form is such a great project for the novice woodworker because there are so many different options. As I was building it, all of the different joinery options became apparent. I went with mortise and tenons for the leg-to-apron joint, but you could easily do pegs, dominoes, or pocket holes. The same thing for the drawer construction – I went with dovetails all the way around, but you could do any number of different options. If you want to work on your turning you could make round legs, you could carve them if you want to get crazy, or add fancy moldings. The relatively small scale also makes it approachable from a hand tool perspective. This wood didn’t touch a machine until I turned the knob on the lathe.

Shaker designs generally look nice in most domestic hardwoods – Chris made his out of Maple… I’m going with Cherry – pine may also be a nice choice.

Selecting the right stock for the different pieces actually makes a big difference to the final look of the piece – I had no idea. For the legs you want nice straight grain lines on all four sides – Chris calls this bastard sawn, I call it rift sawn – I’m not sure if there’s a difference. The main thing is that you don’t want cathedrals on any of the leg’s sides interrupting the flow. On the other hand, these cathedrals add some nice interest to the aprons, so if you’re using plain sawn lumber like I am, save these center sections for the aprons and drawer front.

The 18” square top requires some more thought. I don’t have any 18″ wide cherry, but do have some 10” wide stock that I’ll use in a panel – you may have to use 3 pieces. To avoid a harsh line in the panel you want to aim for straight grain to straight grain along the edge. You could also do a bookmatch here if there was something interesting going on.

I didn’t film a lot of the finishing process – mainly because if I think if it’s boring to do it must be really dull to watch – but I did a few tests on some scrap cherry and decided on a thin coat of medium walnut danish oil with a shellac polish – my preferred top coat. I finish everything off with some paste wax.

I’m really happy with how everything came out. The cherry is maybe a little splotchy, but nobody except me will ever notice. It fits in with the house really well and is something I’m happy to take credit for when people comment.

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The Step Stool

August 25, 2016December 18, 2016
by Tim

There were a few things I wanted to accomplish with this project and I found a perfect design in an old Popular Woodworking book by Glen Huey. My daughter is just about 18 months old now and loves to ‘help’ out in the kitchen, but isn’t quite tall enough to reach the sink or counter, so she was in need of a step stool. We also encourage her to read her books or play with dolls when we’re preparing for dinner, so thought she may enjoy a place to sit when she’s not helping. Finally, I just installed some 42″ cabinets and the top shelves are too high for my wife and I to reach, so ideally we are in need of a step stool as well. This nice little step stool converts into a cute toddler bench, perfect for small children wanting to help in the kitchen.

I used all hand tools for this little project and it turned out quite nice. This is a nice short project that allowed me to practice some basic hand tool skills and use up some scrap wood. You can take a look at the build process here:

The wood used is all cherry finished with a coat of boiled linseed oil and a few coats of shellac. I’m using these beautiful wrought heads nails from Tremont to hold everything together, but you could use anything you’d like (the plans call for plugged screws). I also found some decorative carriage bolts for the ‘axle’.

It works really well actually. My daughter loves flipping the step up and down and uses it as both a bench and step stool. She’s still a little small to reach everything on the counter, but she can at least see what’s going on up there and put some things in the sink. She definitely knows that it’s her piece of furniture, so my wife and I have trouble using it when she’s around, but I think it serves it’s purpose very well and I can see it being in use for a long time.

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The Frame Saw

June 28, 2016October 16, 2018
by Tim

I love nearly every part of working in a wireless wood shop and that includes most of the initial milling of rough lumber. The one part of hand work I don’t enjoy so much is re-sawing. I typically buy most of my lumber in 8/4 thickness, so for any projects requiring thinner stock I need to resaw it down to the correct thickness. I enjoy scrub planing rough lumber, and even like flattening boards by hand, but when it comes to re-sawing I find it mind numbing and boring. Maybe it’s because while planing I’m constantly thinking about the grain direction, but when sawing all I’m doing is trying to keep saw between the lines – boring. What I would like to do is get this process out of the way as soon as possible, but with only an 8 tpi hand saw, it tends to take quite a lot of time – not any more! Enter the frame saw:

The saw plate and hardware is the 31.5″ frame saw kit from Bad Axe Tool Works and the design is based on Tom Fidgen’s frame saw from The Unplugged Woodshop just elongated to fit the lengthened saw plate. The wood is 8/4 Ash that I had leftover from the Workbench build just quickly finished with an oil varnish blend (equal parts satin varnish, BLO, and mineral spirits).

Construction was pretty straightforward and is just like you see in the pictures. The two side supports are connected to the top and bottom with a dual mortise and tenon joint. No glue was used (the tension on the saw plate gives the strength needed), so I can tear it down and store it flat if need be. I spent quite a lot of time on shaping the handles, which angle backwards and downwards, because I wanted it to be comfortable. I used a plane tote as a template and set out with a few rasps to shape it.

I’ve only used it a few times since completion, but I’m really happy with the way it turned out. The handles turned out great and as much as I want to get through this part of milling quickly, I could comfortably use this for hours. It just eats through wood and makes fairly short work of smaller re-sawing tasks. I’m still practicing sawing in a straight line – it is very difficult to steer once the kerf is set, but adding a shallow kerf with a hand saw (I’ll be adding a kerfing plane at some point) makes this much easier. I also don’t plan on sawing veneer with this saw, so for coarse re-sawing tasks the accuracy isn’t completely necessary.

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The Workbench – Finishing Touches

February 29, 2016August 9, 2017
by Tim

After the last post I was left with a mostly complete workbench and certainly use-able. All that was left was to install the vises and a few other odds and ends. I started with installing the shoulder vise, which was simple because I had already bored all the holes and installed the nut. This is a Veritas Shoulder Vise screw and is a little long for my small vise opening, but bearable for the time being. I may try to cut the screw length down eventually.

The total opening capacity is about 4″, which is fine for probably 90% of what I typically clamp in there. I can always use the large leg vise on the other bench if I have something bigger than that. The chop is 1 1/2″ thick red oak and is maybe a little overkill. I could probably thin that down to 1″ and get a little more opening capacity, but we’ll see how this works out for now.

Up next was the tail vise. I’ve never had a tail vise before and typically just use battens and planing stops, so I didn’t want to go all out with this. The main thing that I wanted a tail vise for was fenced plane work (plow planes, rabbet planes, etc.), so I wanted something that could put the front row of dog holes as close as possible to the front of the bench. The Veritas Inset Vise fit the bill nicely and was really simple to install. I just had to bore out the cavity for the vise and drop it in.

The front row of dog holes is about an inch and a half from the front of the bench and I made a simple little jig to help me bore them out and to make sure they were all in line.

For the back row of dog holes I added 4 holes, spaced roughly 2x the reach of my Lie-Nielsen hold fasts apart. The furthest left front and back dog holes are inline with each other.

Other little finishing touches were a tongue and groove pine bottom shelf:

An oak tool rack across the back, which is really handy. I prefer a tool rack like this to a tool well, but that’s just personal preference:

And finally a cheap $9 Ikea work lamp. The Tertial Ikea lamp comes with a screw type mounting base, but I just screwed it to a scrap piece and stuck a 3/4″ dowel on the underside so I can move it around in different dog holes.

It’s a great little lamp actually and reaches right across my smaller sized bench.

The only things left were to cut the top to length and do some final shaping of the shoulder vise. I may add a light finish to the top, but as of right now I’m enjoying the raw look. Have a look here for all the final pictures and the very first The Wireless Woodworker video!

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The Workbench

February 29, 2016December 18, 2016
by Tim

The workbench build is complete! See my first ever video and some final pictures of the bench. Links to the construction blog posts are at the bottom of the page.

Completed Workbench

Shoulder Vise

Front Dog Holes

Top and Tool Rack

Shoulder Vise

Bottom Shelf and Joinery

Reinforced Front Leg

Workbench Side View

The Workbench Build – Part 1 – Initial Planning

The Workbench Build – Part 2 – Design

The Workbench Build – Part 3 – Rough Construction

The Workbench Build – Part 4 – Joinery

The Workbench Build – Part 5 – Finishing Touches

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The Workbench – Joinery

February 15, 2016
by Tim

Now that all the rough milling, sizing, and laminating is completed we can finally get started on some of the joinery and assembly for the workbench. All the main joints are drawbored mortise and tenon construction, so let’s get started sawing and chopping!

If you remember from last time, I made all the legs and stretchers the same size. To make life easy on myself, I’m going to do the same thing for all the mortise and tenon joints. With my legs and stretchers all cut to size, I marked out the 12 tenons needed ( 1 x each of the 4 legs, 2 x each of the 4 stretchers). I used my 1″ chisel to set my mortise marking gauge, then roughly found the center of one of the legs, and marked my gauge lines referencing the marked reference face. The tenon cheeks are pretty much the same size, but it shouldn’t matter as long as I always reference the same face.

Now I get started sawing, cutting the two vertical lines first, then working in from each side. I did all of these cuts with the Lie-Nielsen rip tenon saw.

When the lines were all cut, I check for squareness, then trim up the tenon as needed with either a shoulder plane, rabbeting block plane, or chisel.

After all the tenons were cut, I had a nice set of 24 blocks for my daughter. She loves them!

Now it’s on to the mortises, which took quite a bit more effort than the tenons. I used the same mortise gauge to mark all the mortises towards the bottom of each leg (again, referencing the correct face). The bulk of the waste was removed with the brace and 1″ bit, then everything was cleaned up with that same 1″ chisel.

As you can see from the below picture, my mortises meet in the middle. No problem really, just means I’m going to have to miter the ends of my tenons a bit.

With the base sub-assembly complete and test fit, I clamped it all together, the flipped it over to mark the mortises on the underside of the top. It’s not a perfect size, it’s actually a little bit narrower than the top, but the important thing here is to get the front legs in line with the front of the top. I don’t really care if the back legs are flush with the back of the top.

Same procedure as before – bore out most of the waste…

then clean up with a chisel.

Now for a test fit!

It looks great, so I’m going to go ahead and drawbore the leg sub-assembly together. The pegs are about 1/2″ in diameter, with a healthy 1/8″ of drawbore action. This seemed to cinch everything up nice and tight. I’m using glue for these joints, but won’t for the top joints. If I ever want to take it apart I should just be able to drill out the top pegs to remove the legs.

Before I flipped everything over for the final time, I added a little support for the shoulder vise. I’m not sure if this is really necessary, but makes me feel better if I ever want to put something heavy on that section.

There we have it – flipped over and almost ready to go!

It was a bear to flip over, so I’m hoping I only have to do that once. The top of the top is obviously a bit messy with glue squeeze out, but a quick flattening did the trick there.

At this point I have a perfectly use-able workbench and I’ve got to say it’s a great size. It fits exactly where I was planning, and isn’t too large that I can’t move it around when I need too, or too small that it moves around when doing heavy planing. Now all that’s left is to finish up the vises, add some dog holes, and do some final finishing touches. Until then, I’m enjoying the bench so far!

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The Workbench – Rough Construction

February 3, 2016
by Tim

Last post we finally decided on a final design for the workbench. There are tons of resources out there showing you how to build a workbench, most of which are excellent, so I’m going to try to keep this section relatively short (we’ll see how that works out!). There is nothing new with the process that I’ll be going through, so this is going to be basically just documenting the process. I’ll try not to go into too much detail about any one step, but feel free to let me know if you have any questions on any step.

The lumber for the bench has been sitting in the shop for a couple months now, so has had plenty of time to acclimate. I have about 80 board feet of 8/4 ash material, of which the board widths vary between about 7″ and 8″.

To make all the dimension-ing easy, I’ll take the narrowest board and make that the width for all of the stock. This will limit the amount of material lost and will make rough cutting all the lumber a snap. In my case the narrowest board is about 7″, so I’ll rip all the boards to 3.5″ widths.

I did do all of this ripping on the table saw. Just like having the lumber yard do the S3S-ing, I enjoy working with hand tools, but I’d like to have this done in a reasonable amount of time. All of that ripping would have taken me ages to do by hand and I have no problem using power tools. I did do the cross cutting by hand, if that makes up for it!

I grabbed all the top pieces and laid them out, then marked the grain direction on each one to help with flattening the bench later. I tried to pick the straightest grain sections for the top, but it looks likely there there will be a couple places with reversing grain.

Once all the pieces were rough sized, marked for grain direction, and laid out in order, it was time to start laminating the top. Pretty straightforward here, just lots of clamps and lots of glue.

To ensure that the joint goes together without any gaps I took a few swipes with a block plane on each mating face. This gives just a slight hollow to each face, making sure that they mate up nicely.

I added one piece at a time just to make it easier on myself. It took a bit longer that way (the main section of the top is 11 boards wide), but once the glue goes on the pieces are really slippery, so trying to line up more than one piece is tricky. Even with just one piece I found lining them up difficult, so I used some f-clamps directly on the joint line to make sure they stay in line when tightening the rest of the clamps.

The shoulder vise actually helped out quite a bit in terms of lining up the top pieces. Just like a normal shoulder vise, my small one also requires a threaded rod be inserted through the entire depth of the top. I talked about this previously, but it essentially helps to counteract the clamping force and not let the vise tear itself apart. Since I don’t have a drill bit that’s 24″ long, I needed to bore this hole as I went. What I did was actually drill this hole in each piece separately, then use it to align each top piece as I laminated them together (I just stuck an old drill bit through the hole to line them up, then removed it after all the clamps were on – don’t want it glued in place!). I had some clean-up work to do when the glue squeezed into the hole after each piece was added, but it was no problem boring 3-4″ in to get rid of that.

The legs and stretchers are also laminated together (and the shoulder vise components). These were a bit easier to deal with because they weren’t so long, but still…more glue…more clamps.

Finally, after all the glue and clamps, it was time to prepare everything for joinery. There was obviously quite a bit of glue residue along all the joints, but most of this scraped off pretty easily with a few swipes of the No 80 cabinet scraper. Once I could see what I was working with, I got started on planing everything down. For the legs and stretchers I picked out one face and edge to use as my reference surfaces and made sure that both were as flat as I could get them and perpendicular to each other. This was fairly quick work with the Stanley 5c jack plane, which is sharpened with a pretty hefty 8″ camber. To clean up all the awesome hand plane texture of the jack plane, I used the Millers Falls No 22 jointer plane. The other two surfaces don’t matter so much, but they will be the show surfaces, so I cleaned them all up nicely.

The procedure for the top was pretty much the same, just quite a bit bigger! I’m not sure what the top assembly weighed, but it was tough to move around by myself. I wrestled it upside down (the bottom is the reference face for the legs) on a couple of sawbenches and got to work.

Same deal as the other pieces – started with the jack plane and finished up with the jointer. It should be noted that I did add the shoulder vise section before flattening using the same laminating procedure as before. After an hour or so of back breaking work (planing at sawbench height is not recommended!), I had a nice crunchy pile of shavings, and a nice flat top (albeit the bottom of the top).

At this point I’m all set to start attaching the legs. It’s not worth flattening the top of the top yet, because nothing is being referenced from that, so I left it rough. It was also helpful not flipping the top over yet, it weighs a ton! Everything will be attached with drawbored mortise and tenons, but that is a story for next time. The workbench is done at the moment, it’s just a matter of getting the pictures and posts all sorted, so I promise to be quicker with the next post!