Leg Vise Complete - Part 10

At the close of the last post, I had just started in on the guide wheel brackets.  This week was all about finishing the last piece to the leg vise.  Because of what I wanted to do with the brackets, there needed to be a specific sequence to the process.  After cutting the slot for the wheels, I cut the curves for the wheels and a 1/4" slice off the front of the brackets.  I then cut the front profile.

After that, I adhered the off-cut back on and that allowed me to cut the side profiles.  Again, I repeated the "chevron" pattern.  Some time spent with my 2 inch chisel and some of my rasps and files and the brackets were cleaned up.

Next I tapped for the set screws for the wheel pins, installed the Orange Osage pins I'd made and put a slight bevel on the round.

When I went to tap for the bolts that hold the brackets to the legs, I spaced and used the wrong tap.  I went too big and messed up the holes.  Luckily, the world makes a product called PC Lumber that set up in about an hour and let me re-tap for the bolts.

From here is was a matter of assembling the vise and adjusting the glide for smooth movement.  After I'd achieved a fairly smooth action on the leg vise, I mounted the leg vise's screw bushing.  This fits the screw like a glove and keeps everything precisely tuned.  I used my router plane to inlay the bushing and it is purposefully not a tight fit to allow adjustment.  Sorry, but I didn't get any photos of this procedure.  I always have too much fun using the router.
Here are a few photographs of the completed leg vise.

I'm extremely excited to know that this week I'll finally be getting rid of the sawhorses I've been working on as a bench for the last couple years!

TWW Roubo Build - Part 8: Builder's Block

I'd like to say I just haven't had any time in the shop this week, but the truth is I hit a wall.  Earlier this week I milled the stock for my leg vise, deadman and parallel glide.  All was going extremely well.  I had routed the groove that the deadman needs in the bottom of the top of the bench.  As you can see, I even had a knot explode on me.

No problem.  These things happen.  It wasn't catastrophic, just an annoyance.  No one is ever going to look under the bench and I believe the leg will cover the transgression.  I proceeded to figure out the design I wanted to incorporate into the leg vise and the parallel glide.  I cut the design out on the bandsaw for the parallel glide, cleaned everything up with my chisels
 and then proceeded to layout and drill the holes that are used to keep the leg vise from racking.  CATASTROPHE!!!

  I had horrible tear out.  Luckily, I have many friends on Twitter and other social media sites and I ran the situation by them.  Some felt I should just be OK with it and move forward.  "It's just a bench!".  My buddy Chris Wong of Flair Woodworks and Time Warp Tools thought I could simply do another, thicker glide and plane off the offending tear out.  My Hand Tool School teacher, Shannon Rogers, explained the forces that the glide encounters doing it's job and suggested that maybe Fir was a bit too soft to handle the situation.  My first reaction was to follow Chris' suggestion to go thicker and stay with the Fir.  A little background might help here.  I'm a bit obsessive compulsive in certain things of my life.  I really wanted to build the entire bench out of Fir.  If I was to introduce a contrasting wood, I would have done the end cap of the wagon vise in that wood.  I envisioned me sawing apart the end cap from the bench, which is now glued in place, simply to appease a compulsion that would gnaw at me endlessly until I succumbed to the somewhat psychotic demand.  Ultimately, I am choosing to move forward with the glide being made from some Osage Orange I have on hand, which over time will fade, but is fairly close in color to the old growth Fir I've used on the rest of the bench.
While I had the part dimensioned and the mortise fit, I laid out the cuts I need to make on the leg.  
I will wait to do those until I have the new part, just in case the dimensions change a bit.  Only time will tell if I have to start tearing things apart to make them either match or properly contrast.  YES, I'm weird, but I'm OK with that.

The Woodwhisper Guild Roubo Build-Part 7

It seems some parts of this build go quite fast and others, not so much.  The fitting of the tenons is something you really want to sneak up on.  So, I tend to cut everything a little fat, then pare, test, pare, test, pare.  Except for the haunch for the long stretcher that was cut deep enough to accommodate the extruded "V" shape that the deadman runs on, all the joinery was originally cut using my Excalibur for the tablesaw.  That particular cut was going to take me outside of my comfort zone on the tablesaw and the litmus test on anything you do on power tools should be, "if it doesn't seem safe, DON'T DO IT!"  There are many ways to accomplish the same thing. In this case, I got to use my Doc Holliday saw from Bad Axe Toolworks.

In this first shot, you can see I used a flip-stop to enable repeatable cuts and I drew a line on the fence to make it easier judge to where I needed to cut after the initial shoulder. 

           

This next shot is the view of the nibbling out of the waste.  Again, I didn't find the time savings of installing the dado blade to be worth it.  I'd rather cut the shoulders of the tenon with my Freud Fusion blade and so made a series of cuts, broke off the waste and pared with my 2 inch chisel. 

Although I don't want to fill the splits in the legs with epoxy, you can see here that it may prove inevitable.  When I go to glue the ends with the short stretchers, I will use the West System epoxy and make sure they are set to dry with the split upward.  I'll also use some blue tape to keep any epoxy from coming out of the split.  After the glue up, I'll reassess whether I need to fill the cracks.  Most of what I'll be concerned with is the aesthetics.  If I get too much epoxy visible in the crack, I will fill it completely.

Once all the short stretchers were cut and were a snug "slip fit", I did a dry fit and squared them up to enable me to take the measurements of the long stretchers directly from the piece.  

If you are a follower of Marc Spagnuolo's The Woodwhisperer, you'll be familiar with this process known as relative dimensioning.  

These two final shots are a couple views of the base dry fitted.  Although the entire project is built to be "knock down", it is quite the feat to both assemble and disassemble.  The mortise and tenon joints on the long stretchers will be mechanical held together with hardware that came in my Benchcrafted kit.  Therefore, these joints were slightly more loose than a "slip fit".  

After the first assembly, I checked for square and found I needed to slightly move the position of the tenons that let the top sit on the base by about 1/16 of an inch.  To do this, I had to get on the bench and lift each end out of the mortises and carefully slide each long stretcher from the legs, all the while trying to avoid letting anything crash to the floor.

After seeing the piece as a whole, it seemed to me to be beefy enough to not need a fifth leg.  Luckily, there is the The Sagulator.  I entered the dimensions of the bench with 200lbs of dead weight in the center.  Even with that, the bench should only deflect by .003" and the threshold on The Sagulator is .020", so I'm well within engineering tolerances.

A Beefy Base - TWW Roubo Build Part 6

Welcome back for the sixth installment of my build for The Woodwhisperer Guild Roubo bench build.  Upfront, I apologize for not capturing and subsequently glossing over some of this process. I'm still not great at remembering to always document.  I get caught up in the process and totally forget.

The first up was laying out the mortises for the top to land on to the base.  Again, the Sketch Up model that Aaron Marshall did for Guild was open and constantly referenced.  Using Aaron's model has convinced me that Sketch Up is a must for me to learn.  Any questions I've had during this build have been easy to answer by referencing the exploded views.  I am always tailoring some of the measurements due to my bench being both 10 feet long and only having a 3 inch laminate top.  

I had been planning on routing the mortises, but wasn't really looking forward to it because of all the dust it would be creating.  More on dust later.  Through discussion on Twitter and an earlier recommendation by Rob Bois of The Bois Shop (A VERY excellent podcaster), I decided to buy the Triton 2 1/4 HP plunge router.  While, according to all the input, the Triton did not have the 5 star rating of the Festool routers, it did have really good dust collection and at a much lower price point.  Luckily, Milne Power Tools, which is conveniently right across the street from my office, carries the Triton brand.  When I got the router home, I made a few modifications with foam tape to help the dust collection to be a bit more effective and set up what I like to call my white trash boom arm.  

This allowed me to route without dealing with the weight of the vacuum hose, which I fed over the top of the only interior wall and suspended with a rope.  If I had only had some baling wire!

Once the mortises were cut, I set up the Excalibur sliding table with the miter fence and cut the legs to length and also cut the tenons.  

I'm essentially a lazy person, so I just nibbled the material away rather than deal with changing out my everyday blade with the dado set. It really didn't take up any time and the cheeks cleaned up quickly with my 2 inch chisel.

  

I spent quite a while perfecting the fit of the legs to the top, but I'm finding more and more I actually love hand work.  I can lose all track of time while I'm playing with a sharp blade on wood.  The size of these tenons was a real joy to work with the 2 inch chisel.  The angle is set rather shallow to be a really great paring blade.

Once I was happy with the fit of the legs to the top, I stopped and milled all the stretcher parts.  This is a process that I forgot to document.  I still use, and sure I always will, power tools for any of the processes that would be labor intensive with hand tools.

Since I plan to first assemble the ends, I made sure the legs were dead square and marked the shoulders of the tenons.  I then laid out the mortise on the legs that will house the stretchers.  Again, I extensively used Aaron's Sketch Up model.  

The next part, which I know some are interested in, was again missed in photo documentation.  The Woodrat, a machine that I really love, is also a machine I really hate. I have not come up with a good solution for dust collection while using it.  I couldn't cut the tenons with the Triton because they were too deep for the Triton plunge capacity.  The Woodrat really excels at rather quickly cutting mortises, although I don't have mine set up to easily handle this size of timber.  You can get a pretty good overview of what the Woodrat is capable of on the Woodrat Site.  I don't remember the name of the guy, but before he died, he reviewed tools and showed how to use them in great detail.  He always had some young lady helping him out.  If you remember his name, please post it in the comments.

Tonight I finished up the mortises and will start the stretchers tomorrow.  If there are any processes you have a question about or frankly advise on a better way to do a process, please let me know in the comments.

Thanks again for following the build!

Here's to Another Hundred Years

 Finally, summer is gone, my winterizing chores are done and I get to build something.  First up, I'm going to be building a Roubo Split Top Bench from the BenchCrafted plans via The Woodwhisperer Guild winter build.  I have some phenomenal hardware on the way, also from BenchCrafted.  Today, I went over to the warehouse and brought home some very old friends.  

These old joists and timber frame members were bought over 15 years ago from a guy that had already been storing them for about twenty years.  They were taken during a deconstruction of a 100 plus year old barn in eastern Oregon.  I'm thinking they might be dry enough to work already.  As you can see, old growth red fir has some very tight growth rings!  I can't wait to clean these ladies up!!

Stay tuned for updates!!  THIS is gonna be fun!

Woodworkers Fighting Cancer - Shaker Table Build Part II

A few issues have come up during the rough dimensioning that have steered my design in a new direction. Originally, I planned to have the entire table made of the Cherry board from the first post, with a small Mahogany band running up the outside of all the legs and terminating to the Mahogany breadboard ends for the top. Either because I'm fairly new to this or just an oversight (probably both), I found I didn't have enough Cherry to also do the top.

I also found one of my legs had a check running much higher than I originally anticipated. Due to these challenges, I decided to rethink my approach. During Wednesday night's The Woodwhisper Guild meeting, I was able to bounce the idea off of Shannon Rogers of The Renaissance Woodworker, Rob Bois from The Bois Shop and Nabil, who is a prolific woodworker from The Woodwhisperer Chatroom. Thanks to their advice and encouragement, I've decided to go with this approach: From the floor up; Mahogany feet will be attached to the bottom of the Cherry legs to reach the length the legs need to be; I will still be banding the outside of all the legs up to the top of the piece; The top will now be veneered with the Canoe Birch on the bottom, a "breadboard" border of Mahogany and a "sunburst" cut from a piece of Osage I recently picked up at Jensen Hardwoods in Walla Walla, WA for the top.