Wondering About the Shelf Gaps

The next step is either to glue the full carcase or shorten the long apron pieces to eliminate the shelf gap. I'm concerned about a gap between the shelf and the legs/side rails. So is Melissa. She thinks they will fill with crumbs and dog hair. The gaps were not intentional, but they probably lend themselves to better wood movement.

So I dry fit the shelf between the sides and attempted to set the length between the sides to be what it would actually be. My main purpose here was to see if the gaps on either side of the shelf are acceptable, or if I should shorten my long aprons to eliminate the shelf gaps.


I'll wait until after next weekend because I'll see my brother, Brek. I'll get his opinion before moving forward.

Glueing-Up The Sides

After some light sanding, I went ahead and glued-up the left side. I used Titebond III glue for the first time. Apparently, it has a longer workable time before it dries; perfect for these carcase glue-ups. The pieces went together well.


So I glued-up the right side as well.

To Chamfer or Not to Chamfer

I've never cut chamfers before. Instead, I usually sand the hell out of edges to soften them. But I've always like the modest chamfers on my brother's furniture. While reading the manual for my new Shopsmith jointer, I discovered I can set the jointer fence at 45 degrees and cut chamfers.

Seemed easy enough, so I decided to give it a try. I tried to keep the chamfers on most of the pieces less than 1/16". However, on the legs, I cut them a little deeper. I'm hoping it will give it a nice subtle elegance.

Finishing the First Shelf

After cutting the ends off with my circular saw, I used my orbital sander, with some 60 grit, to get the planks flat and even. I used my router to make a tongue on both ends. I'll have to remove about two inches of the tongue on all four corners so the shelf will fit within the legs. I know, it's weird but that's what I came up with.

I cut slots on the inside of these apron pieces to hold the shelf top in place. I'm already starting to think this may not work. Stuff is never going to fit right.

Clamping the First Shelf

I wanted to join the panels for the coffee table shelf and glue/clamp them together first for two reasons. One, it needs to be completed before I glue-up the carcase because it floats between the sides. Two, I wanted to practice before I tackle the coffee table top. The top has to look good! The shelf is fairly hidden so it doesn't really matter if I screw it up.

I had a problem finding a flat surface for the glue-up/clamping. Melissa suggested our dining room table. I took her up on her offer. The water jug and car battery (in the trash bag) are used as weight to hold the shelf slats down as the glue dries; two of the slats would not lay completly flat. I put down paper on the bottom of the slats as a glue barrier from the table. I know I can always sand off the glue that drips out and any paper stuck to it.

Making the Side Panels

Two sides will be frame and panel. I cut the tongues on the panels with my router. The router slots in the legs were too close to the mortise holes for the top and bottom frame pieces so I had to sand the tongue corners away. The disc sander did this in seconds. Love it!

The New Jointer!

Each new project deserves a new tool. This time, I finally added a jointer to my collection. I bought an old ShopSmith jointer off ebay. Utilizing my existing ShopSmith motor alowed me to get a pretty solid jointer, at about 25% the cost of new stand alone jointers. Plus it will save space this way.


I spent most of the day flipping through the manual, re-aligning all the blades, the fence, and several other pieces. Once it was all ready to go, I turned it on and passed a practice board through. The cuts were impecable. I grabbed another scrap board and passed it through. This one made a weird sound. When I completed the pass I took a look at the edge and discovered a huge staple cut in half. Dumb! I had paid attention to every operational and safety proceedure in the manual. But somehow I forgot to check the board edge for foreign objects. And just like that, I had ruined my perfect blades. Unbelievable.


Fortunatly, I was able to move the fence and use the other end of the blades becaue I only needed to edge join. Boy, did I feel stupid.

Making Panel Slots with Router

Each coffee table side will have a solid wood panel in a frame. I used the router to slot out the frame in the apron and legs. The slots in the legs were scary to cut because they were so close to the mortises. I also used the router to make the tongues on the two side panels.

I love the piles of router shavings and nothing beats the smell. Wonderful!

Careful Mortise Measurements

The mortises on the legs are trickier to cut (drill) than those on the apron pieces. But somehow I managed to get through them. I'm sure there is a mistake that just hasn't surfaced yet. In the end, I had to measure and drill out 48 different mortises...ridiculous!

Mortise and Tenon Depth Oversight

Most of my coffee table joinery will be floating mortise and tenons. But I'll cheat and make them using the BeadLOCK system. Today I made the easy mortises; on the apron pieces.

I discovered an oversight in my design. I had the aprons too close to the same corner of each leg. I had not accounted for the depth of each tenon. The only fix I could think of was to make my tenons shallower and move my front and rear aprons further from the corner. This little oversight may mean I don't have enough wood for the shelf. Right now, I'm too lazy to come up with a solution. Considering I don't really have a choice, I'll deal with it later. Worse case, I buy another board. More likely I'll just come up with another design for the shelf. Darn.

Examining the Grain

After picking out wood at the lumber yard based on how clean and straight it was, and cutting the pieces to maximize my purchase, there is still a challenging and important decision left to make. Now that I'm left with the pieces I cut out, I have to decide where to use them, which side to show to the humans who enjoy it, and how each piece will play nicely with each other piece.

Each piece has four choices by itself; two sides and two orientations. These four choices compound as I match each piece with each other piece. It all comes down to the grain. A woodworker with more experience can make these decisions better and with more criteria. I have a few basic things I look for.

I want my straight and tightest grained pieces used in areas I can't tolerate warping.

But the cosmetics are sometimes tougher. I want the curves of the grain to frame certain areas of the coffee table. I want the curves to help circle the outside of it, helping us look toward the center. This will have a large effect on how the finished table looks. The pieces of wood should help trick the eyes into thinking they fit together nicely.


Whatever choices I make now, I'll be stuck looking at for the rest of my life.

The Joys of Disc Sanding

Melissa got me a new 12" steel sanding disc for my Shopsmith. It was to replace the disc I bent last year during a screw up.

Man, what a great tool. I used a fence and the quill feed to duplicate exact lengths for all my apron pieces. If one piece is off it could make the whole glue-up a real nightmare.
The second thing I used the disc sander for was to remove all the saw blade marks from my ripping. I mounted the fence at a slight angle and passed the boards through so they would meet the sanding disc on its down turn. Two passes and no one would ever know how dull my rip blade is!

Wood

Melissa wanted dark wood to contrast with the couch. That means, either buy expensive wood or stain cheap wood. I hate stain, so I guess it's expensive wood. I went with walnut, which is beautiful IMHO and it's domestic so it's a little cheaper than most of the exotics (plus, it smells nice when you work with it).

The coffee table legs will come from these two pieces.

The wood for the legs was easy to pick out. The rest was horrible. I love lumber yards and I hate them. I love them because of all the beautiful wood which says "take me home and build something wonderful with me!". I hate them because it's so stressful trying to determine exactly how much wood to buy and which pieces to choose. You have to have a solid plan, you have to look for twisting, cupping, cracks, knots, grain pattern, colors, interesting markings, etc.

After picking through every piece of walnut, I found the best ones and hoped I had just enough. Walnut is not the kind of wood you want to buy too much of ($!). I felt good when one of the guys working there said, "Oh, you found it, I remember that piece when I put it out". It was not easy. Apparently, large clean pieces of walnut are not that easy to come by.

When I began cutting my pieces and making hard and fast decisions about which piece to use where, I realized there was less usable wood than I had planned for. But I was so close!!

After playing around with my plans, I determined if I shortened the depth of the coffee table by 2 inches and shortened six apron pieces by 1/8 inch, I could just make it. Yikes, I hope I don't mess any pieces up. If so, I'll be back at the lumber yard.

Here are my pieces after general ripping and cutting.

Coffee Table - The Design

Now that we have our new couch,


Melissa has been threatening to buy a coffee table. I, of course, insist that I can make one better and cheaper than anything she could find. So she showed me some pictures, we discussed, customizations, materials, dimensions, and now it's time to get started.

I used Google SketchUp to design it because 2D models just won't cut it. Here is what I came up with.

The top surface is based on an awesome dining room table my brother, Brek, built. His design is ingenious. The breadboard ends are actually attached to the legs. This allows the joined panels, between the breadboards, to expand/contract freely without an over-engineered way of attaching them.

The second shelf was trickier but I think I came up with something that will also allow for seasonal changes. The bottom storage area is an idea Melissa spotted in a picture. Instead of cabinet doors, or drawers, that would need a wide swing, I'll use doors with hinges on the bottom. This way, if the user is perched between the couch and the coffee table, they will still be able to open the coffee table doors and have full access to the storage space. I think this is the most practical way to conceal storage on a coffee table, which will obviously be right next to a couch.

Pepper Grinder Completion

Okay, I've been lazy with my posts to this blog. Yes, I finally completed the second pepper grinder. Here is a picture of main body, after sanding, on the lathe.


Here is the head. This is the part you twist to grind the pepper. You can see the little tiny piece of wood still attached to the top of the head. The trick is to get this as tiny as possible without breaking it. Then you just pop it off and sand down the area by hand.

The final step is to epoxy the grinder mechanism into the body and head.


Does it work. Yes, it works great. It has room for improvement though. I'm going to put the lathe projects on hold for a bit and start working on the next project, the coffee table. See next post.

Pepper Grinder Attempt #2 - Rounding the Block

The first step of any spindle woodturning project is to round the block. I started with a 3" x 3" x 12" block of Brazilian Rosewood.

To make the initial rounding easier, I used the Shopsmith's tablesaw to cut the corners off.

Next, I converted the Shopsmith to the lathe and rounded the block to a cylinder. This is a fun step. Wood shavings fly everywhere and you feel like you're getting somewhere. If the roughing gouge catches, no big deal, you'll have enough wood to correct it later.

I also used the parting tool to separate the grinder head from the body. These would later be cut completly apart to become two pieces.

After the previous, failed grinder attempt, I did learn an important lesson, however. It's important to get a consistant diameter across the entire cylinder. If not, when the block is clamped in place for boring, the holes will be crooked. More on this later. I used calipers to check the diameter.

Learning the Lathe

When my brother, Brek, gave me the Shopsmith last year, he also gave me all the lathe accesories it came with. I'm not sure what got me going but sometime recently, I realized it may be practical to make gifts for people with the lathe.

My friend, Aaron, recently invited Melissa and I to his wedding and I thought...this would be the perfect time to figure out how to use the lathe. I decided every newly married couple could use a pepper grinder. After some research, I ordered a crush/grinder mechanism and some forestner drill bits and signed up for the begining turning class at Highland Hardware. My instructor informed us that woodturing tools can lose their edge after about 3 seconds and stressed the importantance of sharpening. Shortly thereafter, I bought a grinder and built a woodturning tool sharpening jig.

The first attempt did not work. I ended up burning the wood because I pushed the drive center and cup center together too tightly. The challenge on these pepper mill projects is that you have to hold the center of both ends of the grinder body, and the grinder body has holes dilled out of the center of each side. So I tried turning little stopper-like pieces to shove into the drilled grinder body holes. Since my stopper pieces, alone, did not provide enough friction to spin the grinder body, I compensated by smashing the two centers together. It worked great until my soap on my cup center wore away and the wood started burning. And then the stopper started rotating inside the grinder body. Soon after I saw smoke and smelled the terrible burning that would later kick of a chain of other events making it worse.

Later I went online and ordered something called a "live center", which replaces the fixed cup center with one that spins on ball bearings. Problem solved! I don't understand why live centers are not standard on these Shopsmiths.

Lila Mae is Back

Last year Lila Mae, our 13-foot 1969 Boston Whaler, started dieing on us. Last week we got it out of the garage, hooked up the ear muffs to the hose, and started her up. She started, but I noticed the pee hole (or telltale) was not spitting water. Yikes. After the first bit of spoke came out of the motor we turned it off.

So today I changed the lower unit gear lube then took the little water intake filter off and poked around with a screw driver looking for debris. I also shoved a paper clip into the pee hole, as well as spraying water in the pee hole and flush intake.

All the messing around must have dislodged something because when Melissa cranked her up, she started peeing again! Woot! Looks like Lila Mae will be taking us out on the water next week.

Bathroom Rennovation Complete! (Almost)

A couple weeks ago we had 9 guests spend the night (Melissa's family), passing through to Florida. The bathroom was ready for its first customers and appeared to function properly! Here are some photos of what it currently looks like.


The truth is, we're not quite done. I still have to build my teak shower bench and shelf. We also need to hang the wrought iron Medusa head we bought on our recent visit up to Toledo, Ohio. It was too awkward to bring on our return flight so my parents will drive it down when they visit in October.

But other than that, we are done. And we love taking showers, craps, and washing our hands downstairs!

Polyurythane = Non-Sticky Shelves

Have you noticed shelves with latex paint tend to stick to objects placed on them? I used my left over Minwax Wipe-On Poly on all the shelves in the bathroom for extra protection against wet stuff and to remove the latex sticky factor.

Stoop Repair

During the bathroom renovation we probably neglected the rest of the house. But the kitchen door stoop could not wait any longer. The paint had peeled away in places and I could see cracks in the wood that were taking water. It was mushy too. So rather than just repainting, I decided to scrape it and remove the rotten wood.


I wish I could have replaced the whole board but it appeared to go under the entire door jamb and would probably affect our new kitchen tile. Forget that. When I removed enough wood to see under it, I found a nest of sweet ants that were a little surprised. After evicting them I coated everything left with rotten wood hardener. Several days later I found some scraps of mahagony (left over from vanity project) that fit perfectly. I screwed and liquid nailed the scraps in place.


Finally, I covered them with Bondo, primed a few coats, painted a few coats, and caulked. Someday, I would love to add a little roof over this door to deflect the rain. But until then, this should hold.

Shower Valve Roughed Too Far Forward!

Now that all the painting and caulking is done, it was finally time to attach the shower trim plate and hot/cold lever. The wall trim plate attached fine but the lever was about an inch out away from the trim plate. After a deep breath and closer examination, I concluded that my plumber had roughed in the valve too far forward. All I could think about was what a huge pain in the ass it was going to be to rip the finished wall off to move the valve.


Clinging to the notion that everything has a workaround, I googled the problem and found someone else with the same exact situation. They even had a Moen valve and handle. In their case the plumber was also responsible for the finished wall, which is even more embarrassing. In my case, I had stuck with my detailed plans for finishing the wall so I am still blaming my plumber. Apparently, the Moen valve installation instructions must confuse plumbers. Either that or plumbers are too cocky to use the instructions. I assume it is the later.

Anyway, the other couple had posted their problem on the Terry Love plumbing forum and managed to solve it by using Moen's valve stop extension piece. The extension is actually provided for valves that are set back too far into the wall, but I guess it can also be used for the opposite. And despite the fact that Moen says to correct the valve in-wall depth instead, several Terry Love moderators seemed to think correcting the problem by using the extension was acceptable. In fact, some argue that the rough-in is still technically accurate because the trim plate fits.


Since bringing my plumber back was about the last thing in the world I wanted to do, I studied the valve and lever parts to determine if said workaround was sound. I came up with a few modifications to help improve it. Since two screws would now be exposed, I added rubber washers between the screws and the trim plate. Then I filled the extension with plumber's putty in case water dripped into it (to prevent it from flowing into the valve from the lever). Finally, despite a rubber gasket where the extension passes through the trim, I had Melissa seal it with black caulk. The caulk looks a little out of place but I prefer to error on the side of function over style.


Well, it looks a little weird but the damn thing seems to work and as far as I can tell, it should be a suitable workaround. In the end, I'm disappointed and I can't help hearing the phrase, "If you want it done right, do it yourself". Next time, I'll rough in the plumbing myself!

Roll-Away Dumpster and Old Washer Removal

Or...saying goodbye to our old bathroom for good!

We've had this pile,

the guts of the bathroom we removed, sitting in our driveway since December. I guess my plan to slowly dispose of the pile, piece by piece, via our weekly trash pick-up, was not a success. So Melissa put her foot down and rented a roll-away dumpster.


With the dumpster sitting in our driveway, we also decided it would be a good time to get rid of the old washing machine sitting in our basement. It came with the house and when we replaced it, the Sears delivery guys acted like there was no way they were going to get the thing up, out of our basement. It weighed a lot. So at the time, I said "just leave it in the basement. Some day I'll take it apart and move it upstairs in pieces. " Some day was this weekend...and it sucked. I had to cut through a one inch thick solid steele rod with a hacksaw because we couldn't get the solid metal spinning thingy detached from the base. I'm glad it's over.

Water Proof Window Trim

We had a rough time trying to figure out how to frame our glass block window to have a water tight seal. It wasn't set back far enough to frame it with tiles set back into the wall. Yet, it was set back too far to have a huge grout line. We finally decided to use rot free vinyl exterior PVC molding. I attached it with some kind of outdoor caulk adhesive. After it dried, Melissa applied grout colored caulk between the trim and the tile. Then she applied white caulk between the trim and the glass.

Threshold, Toilet Paper Holder, Shower Head

Now we're getting down to the easy cosmetic stuff. Mom and Dad bought us the toilet paper holder for Christmas.


They also got us the Shower head. This was scary to attach because I had to attach the pipe feeding the shower head. If the pipe leaks where it connects to the elbow in the wall, it will be difficult to detect. The other complication is that the thing basically screws on. Sounds easy, right? Well, it has to screw on such that it aims down on the final tightening. This proved very tricky so I wrapped the threads about 6 times with thread tape and applied a little rector seal for some extra piece of mind. I have a plan to check for leaks from a small access point behind this wall...

This is the fourth threshold I've added in this house and each gets easier. I buy the oak threshold from the flooring section at Lowes, router out any necessary areas on the bottom, cut to length, apply stain and polyurethane to match the adjacent oak floor and countersink four screws. This one is rock solid and except for all the dog hair in this photo, looks fairly good IMHO.