Sometimes, it starts with a sketch.  Sometimes it starts with a phone call.  Sometimes, it starts with a board; you aren’t sure what exactly you are going to do with it, but you know that something needs to get made out of that board, and and all will not be right in the jungle until that board becomes a piece of furniture.

Such was the case with a board I found last spring.  I drove up to Smithville, Tx after answering a Craigslist ad for “EXOTIC WOOD.”  I spent the afternoon talking shop with the gentleman who listed the ad, poking through his diner-turned-lumber-room, playing with his one-eyed (or was it three-legged?) dog, and chitchatting with the neighbors, most of whom seemed happy enough drinking wine in beach chairs on the sidewalk.  Looking back now, the entire day seemed surreal.  I’m pretty sure if I ever tried to go back, I wouldn’t be able to find it, and no one would know what I was talking about.  The entire town will have vanished like The Island from “Lost.”

Anyway, I found an epic plank of teak during my search: a curl I had never seen before, and orange and green and black streaks running through the entire board.  I payed the man, thanked him (I think he was sad to see it go), drove it home, and got busy staring at it for the next four months.

Above, the initial sketch for the sideboard.  Originally, the piece would have three storage spaces below, and a bank of three drawers above. The middle storage space would have two (or maybe just one) frame-and-glass door. After playing around with the scale, I decided that I didn’t like the large, single drawer in the middle, and that the glass door in the lower section would turn into a black, square hole on a piece this deep.

A later sketch of the sideboard. Slightly lower to the ground, with two large compartments below, instead of two small and one large.  If you look closely, you can see a “break” in the legs where the lower section transitions into the upper/drawer section. This seemed like an terrific idea on paper.  I had no idea what sort of dead-end rabbit hole it would eventually lead me to.

Routing the “break” in a test leg. I used a 1/2″ bearing-bit to establish a flat surface on the top section of the leg. I thought that routing might make things a little easier than bandsawing the face off, then coming back with a scraper and sandpaper to clean things up.

Test-leg, out of the routing jig.  I still need to chop the little spikes off that are left from the router.  The double-lines running across the faces of the leg indicate where to cut the chamfer, which will (hopefully) serve as a sort of transition from the lower, heavier leg section to the lighter section above.

Behold: Kellogg Furniture Design’s multi-billion-dollar state-of-the-art rapid-prototyping equipment. It consists of the following: utility knife, a large roll of single-sided corrugated cardboard, a straightedge, English-Metric measuring tape, a pencil, and a hot glue gun.  We used this equipment to develop and manufacture the new kPhone.  Look for it in stores this holiday season.

The first (or maybe second) full-scale mockup. Disappointing This is exactly why I build mockups instead of relying solely on drawings.  On paper, the little break in the legs, which would serve as a transition between the upper and lower portions of the cabinet, seemed like a great idea, a sweet little detail.  Really, it was maybe what I was most excited about when I first started thinking about this piece.  I could picture it perfectly: dark wood, with a nice, soft, oil-and-wax luster.  Move past the cabinet, and light catches the facet on the break.  Yes!  But: it was not meant to be.  At least not for me, not on this piece.  Staring at the mockup, the little break, which seemed like a great idea on paper, now seems arbitrary, pointless, and distracting.  It is a detail which, rather than complement, detracts from the whole. Like being passed on the road by a truck with plastic testicles hanging from its rear bumper, I have to ask, “What are those for?”  In any case, time for a new mockup:

A smaller version (somewhere around 48″, instead of the original 60″) starts to come together.  Straight-post legs, no break.

An even smaller version of the sideboard starts to take shape.  A baby bear to the aforementioned mama bear.  It was fun to make, but ended up bordering on the dinky-side.  I had the feeling that for this sort of piece, and with this rare teak, the piece should have a real presence.  Also, it seemed like it should, you know, actually be able to hold stuff.

Resizing the first mockup, with further help from our state-of-the-art prototyping equipment.  Pictured here: two towels which have been banished forever from the house.  I bought the towel on the left at a Wal-Mart in rural Vermont over a decade ago for $2.50.  It says “Christina Aguilera” in purple letters and has a huge picture of some woman (not Christina Aguilera)’s face on it.  I’ve been told on separate occasions  that it is either “creepy” or “super creepy.”  I have argued on separate occasions that it is either “awesome” or “super awesome.”

I was kind of excited about this: a photo-stitch of the the second and third (aka Mama Bear and Baby Bear) mockups.

Finally, figuring out what goes where: laying out planks of teak (really, they were just 2×4′s of teak, but still) against the veneer (which was cut six months ago to allow the color to mellow a little), which will be used for the doors and panels.

Go

Very exciting – the door is almost finished.

Now all that’s left is finishing it. And installing the hardware. And hanging it. And wrapping it. And delivering it. I just need to straighten my bowtie, brush the biker-bar/door-making dust off my suit, and I’m ready to hit the open road:

They say the last 90% of a project takes 50% of your time. Sounds about right. Below is the door, with two (out of eight) coats of varnish applied. On the advice of my friend and teacher Ejler Hjorth Westh, I opted for a wiping varnish, a 50/50 mix of Epifanes Clear Varnish and mineral spirits. Each coat consisted of brushing a coat on one small section at a time, waiting a minute (I timed it), and wiping off until the finish was dry to the touch. I did this for several reasons: 1)I prefer the look and feel of a rubbed, semi-gloss finish over a full-thickness, top-coat gloss finish. (I think thick, glossy coats feel like plastic, and actually “distance” the user from the piece.) 2)As a practical issue in the shop, dust wasn’t as much of an issue between coats. I applied one coat a day, sanding very lightly between coats, then wiping down with naptha. Eight coats later I applied several coats of TFB’s Table Top Wax.

With both the door and the frame completely finished, it is time to mount the door. I wanted to make sure that everything fit correctly, and the door itself actually swung in its case, before it left the shop. Below, the frame is clamped to an I-beam that runs through the shop.

Building the hinge-mortising jig. The jig has a lip that hangs over the edge of the door (thus registering the hinges on its back edge), and a removable piece that hooks onto the bottom of the door. The jig itself was built around each hinge to make sure each mortise was correctly sized.

Planing the top surface of the jig flush so there are no “steps” when the router runs over it.

Clamping the jig to the door. The key is to make sure the hinges go on the right, no, correct side of the door. The small vertical piece on the left side of the photo is the registration/stop block, which locates the mortises along the door’s length. This piece will be removed when mortising the hinges in the frame (thus registering the bottom edge of the door with the top surface of the threshold.

The hinge mortises are cut. I used a laminate trimmed with a small short bearing-guided bit. I still need to chop out the corners to square them up.

I was excited to see that the through-tenon still looked good beneath the surface. (Although I was sad to have to cover it up with a hinge.)

Two hinges leaves installed.

Clamping the mortising jig to the frame. This procedure is pretty much the same as for the door: rout the mortises, chop the corners, install the mating hinge leaves.

Installing the bronze weatherstripping. This part of (surprisingly) kind of fun. The arched section gets snipped at 2″ intervals along one half of the V-section to allow it bend, then drilled and tacked into place.

Weatherstripping installed.

Installing the door latch. We outsource all our door latch-installation to a local gang of street toughs. This was who they sent.

The leaded window and the tiny door are in place. This is the first time they have actually been set into the door. (Bonus: they work!)

This door is pretty much ready to go. (Except for the lockset, which won’t be installed until the door itself is installed.) Right now the door is supported by a pair of 2×6′s screwed to the floor and clamped to the I-beam.

Wrapped, crated, and ready for delivery. Tequila!

Hey everybody – I’m happy to announce that my writeup for the Sideboard will be an ongoing feature on FineWoodworking.com’s “The Woodworking Life”. My hope is to document every aspect of the project, from initial sketches to crating and delivery, and to discuss some of the dead ends, failures, and frustrations (along with -hopefully- a few successes) that are in inevitable part of any project Once the project (and writeup) is complete, I will most likely post everything to this site; until then, you can follow the project here. While you’re there, please feel free to drop me a line or post your own comments on the project. In the meantime, I will be posting other projects here as they come up.

Thanks, and happy woodworking!

Clark

Now that the door is glued up, cleaned up, sanded, and detailed, it is time to cut a big hole in the middle of it. The original design criteria for the door called for no glass whatsoever, but after some discussion we agreed that having at least some sort of peephole would actually be more secure than having to open the door “blind.” The solution was to build a speakeasy door into the interior face of the door, with a leaded glass window on the exterior face. This is actually the part of the project that I’ve been most looking forward to; big stuff is fun for a while, but I love doing tiny stuff.

It might have been easier to cut each half of the window-hole into the door planks before glue-up, but I was worried about things shifting around during glueup, and I wanted to make sure that the opening was completely square, with no “steps.” Hence, glue up the door, then cut a hole in it. I wanted to leave as little to chance as possible (what David Pye would call “workmanship of risk”), so I ended up spending a fair amount of time getting the routing template just right. Really it’s not that far off from cutting a hole to drop a sink into a countertop, except, you know, this is a really nice countertop.

These two pieces were left over from cutting the hole. They will be resawn and joined to make the panel for the speakeasy door.

Gluing up the exterior frame, which will form the rabbet for the leaded glass to fit against. (The frame itself actually sits in its own rabbet in the door’s face.) I used bridal joints to join the relatively thin frame members.

Gluing the window-frame into the exterior face.

Meanwhile…
Making the leaded glass window has been its own mini-adventure. After reading Michael Pekovich’s article on leaded glass in Fine Woodworking, I sort of figured “why not?” A week and a half-dozen trips to the glass shop later, I managed to get the window together. Two lessons (among many others) learned the hard way: 1) Get a soldering iron made specifically for leaded glass. I wasted an entire day trying to make my crummy iron from Radio Shack (which is made for soldering electronics) do what I needed it to, to no avail. Larger irons are expensive, but well worth it. 2) Get the special double-edged scissors made specifically for cutting out lead patterns. I thought maybe I could just measure to account for the web that runs through the lead came (and in between each piece of glass). No. No. No. Anyway, below is the partially-assembled window…

And the fully-assembled window, ready for soldering.

Scrubbing the window with glass cement. I’m told that the vile mess is actually supposed to clean the window as well as secure all the pieces.

The window, cemented and polished, ready for a patina and some wax.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch…

The two window-hole cutouts are resawn and joined, and I wanted to cut a little V-groove in the middle of the panel to match the chamfers on the two door planks which contain the window. (Thus maintaining the shadow line running up the middle of the door.) I ground the blade of my smallest shoulder plane into a V and clamped a fence to the panel. This worked tolerably at best; I still needed to clean up and define the groove with the corner of a tiny scraper after using the plane. Really I just should have a made a V-shaped molding plane in the first place. Lesson not so much learned as reinforced: making a tool from scratch is almost always going to work better than to try and modify an old one.

Applying the first coat of varnish to the speakeasy door panel. The first coat of finish is always one of may favorite parts of a project.

Gluing up the door frame around the prefinished panel.

Mortising the hinges for the Tiny Door. I love working with Sanderson hinges: beautiful to look at, a dream to install.

And finally, fitting the Tiny Door into the Tiny Frame (which will eventually be get into a rabbet on the interior face of the door.

I went into the Doorframe-phase of this project thinking “Well, the door’s built. The frame shouldn’t be too bad.” Dumb. I should also mention that I’ve said “Well, the [blank] is built, so the [blank-blank] shouldn’t be too bad” every single time I have ever built anything. But this time, I’m sure, will be different. Yes, sir. Anyway, below is a full-scale drawing of the top of the doorframe arch:

It took me a little while to figure out how the frame was going to go together; I’ve been thinking about the door itself (which is essentially a 2-D object) for so long, it was difficult to switch back to more three-dimensional thinking. The head-scratcher was how to make a 2″ rabbet in a 7″ frame? Gluing up an oversize frame and rabbeting everything with a router seemed wasteful (and potentially disastrous.) The solution (or at least as best as I could tell) was to build two frames: one that was the thickness of the door, and would fit around the door (and would serve as the interior part of the door frame), and a double-thickness frame which was slightly smaller than the door (which would be the exterior side of the frame.) Gluing the two frames together would form a rabbet for the door to shut against. But I think I am getting ahead of myself – below, the exterior threshold is being planed and detailed before glue up:

Gluing up the exterior frame. Unlike gluing the arched door, where the two halves of the arched top came together from the sides, the arch of the frame was glued up as one unit (making a kind of “hat.”) Then the arch, threshold, and sides were glued together to form the frame.

Cutting out the arch with a router/trammel jig. The trick was locating the exact center of the arch in space (hence the clamped-on support beam.) The dust collector seems to be sleeping in this morning.

Cleaning up and detailing the exterior frame.

Clamping the two frames together. The temporary cross-pieces helped keep everything square and registered.

So… the insides of the box, as well as both sides of the top and bottom panels, are finished and waxed. The box is ready for glue up. One of the nice things about doing a box this size is that you can tap the dovetails home and basically be done with it, rather than fussing with clamps and cauls.

After the glue is dried, the sides are cleaned up and and planed. At this point the box is still one closed unit. The next step is to saw apart the lid and body. I prefer to use a handsaw for this operation (as opposed to a tablesaw or bandsaw) because it leaves a much thinner kerf. This means that the grain will have less of a “jump” from one section to the other, and more importantly, I can saw through the middle one of the dovetail pins (which was intentionally cut wider than the other pins), leaving a half-pin on both sections. I make the cuts themselves very slowly, rotating the box to a new face every few strokes.

Here is a detail of the split-line separating the lid and bottom of the box:

The box is split open. It is hard to tell from this picture, but there is a shallow groove cut into the inside of the box. The groove was spaced to correspond with the split-line, so that when the lower half of the box receives that lip, there will be a matching rabbet in the lid to accept the lip. This is all much, much less complicated than it sounds.

Gluing the lip into place.

The first coat of oil on the exterior of the box.

Three coats of oil and two coats of wax later, the box is ready to be packed up and shipped off to its new home.

I recently received an order for a Stationery Box similar to this one, but in Honduran rosewood instead of narra. I’m pretty excited about it (I’m pretty excited about every project), but doing tiny stuff is always a nice break from moving gigantic stuff for weeks on end. Anyway, below is the rosewood billet with a little bit of shellac on it:

What will be the sides of the box, resawn and stickered.

A few days later, the sides are milled and cut to length and width. After that, I can lay out, saw, chop, and pare the dovetails. This is always my favorite part of a project – no machines for hours, and about the only time I can actually sit down while working. Always good to have a few episodes of Radio Lab & This American Life on hand…

Box sides, dry-fit together. Next up is routing the grooves for the top and bottom panels, (usually with a 1/8″ slot-cutter), and the wide, shallow groove to fit the lip once the box is split into two parts.

The stock I had wasn’t quite wide enough for the panels, so I cut two thick slices on the bandsaw (each one long enough to make two panels with). Once the pieces are dried and milled, I can slip-match them to make one wider panel. Hopefully, the wood will be dark and “stripey” enough so that the seam will disappear.

Gluing up the top/bottom panel…

Bottom panel, cut to size. After scraping I’ll take both sides down to 400-grit. Rosewood is sort of a pretty princess wood, and every little spot you missed during surface prep will definitely show up once you have some finish on it.

Pre-finishing the parts. Shellac on the insides of the sides and panels, Liberon oil on the outsides of the panels. After both the oil and shellac is dry, everything will get taken down with 0000 steel wool, then buffed with two coats of TFB Tabletop Wax.

Up next… Glue up, fitting the top, and finishing the outside.