Ready, Sand, Glue!
There are a couple milestones that I always look forward to on projects. The first is after I’ve completed all the milling and have a big stack of parts piled up on the workbench waiting for the joinery to commence. The straight and square edges and uniform dimensions are a huge transformation from the rough sawn boards that I started with, and after all the noise, dust and physical effort that went into the milling process, it feels good to take a step back and admire what has been accomplished.
My mood changes a bit as I move on to the joinery. Joinery requires a lot of care and concentration to make sure everything is measured and fit correctly, it can become a bit tedious (fitting the 36 mortise and tenon joints in this table, for example) and if I’m going to make mistakes, this is where it tends to happen. Finishing the joinery is certainly a milestone, but the predominant feeling after it is complete is a sense of relief.
Surface preparation is something to be suffered through—I don’t know how else to describe it. The dust mask is hot and uncomfortable, the sanders are loud, sanding the edges and corners makes my hands hurt, dust gets everywhere, I curse myself for not buying that Festool sander and vacuum I keep eying up at Woodcraft, it is tempting to take shortcuts. Luckily, it goes pretty quickly, and I have the next step to look forward to.
Glue-ups can be nerve-wracking experiences, but the results are immensely rewarding. Once the sub-assemblies are glued up, and the sub-assemblies are glued into assemblies, the project starts to take shape in three dimensions, and it starts to feel safe to call some aspects of it “done”. At the end of the glue-up, it feels like I’ve made some real progress.
There are of course other milestones in most projects—applying the finish is an obvious one, and usually there are some doors, drawers, tops, shelves or other parts that need to be made—but getting through the surface prep and glue-up usually make me feel like I’ve made it to the home stretch, and everything is a downhill coast from there. Not coincidentally, that’s the topic of today’s video: surface prep, glue-up and attaching the shelf. I’m glad you’ve made it along this far. Thanks for sticking around.
- Rory (rory@woodclips.com)
Arts and Crafts Tile Top Side Table - Surface Prep and Assembly
Sanding, glue-up and attaching the shelf.
Sliding Dovetails
When I was planning the Bathroom Wall Cabinets, I spent a good deal of time debating how I was going to join the cabinet pieces together. I prefer traditional joinery that offers a lot of mechanical strength without relying on glue or fasteners, but I also have two cabinets to assemble and I was looking for something that was quick and easy to put together.
Dovetails would be the traditional solution to cabinets like these, but they seemed like overkill on painted cabinets, one of which won’t even be visible from the exterior because it will be recessed in the wall. I ruled out rabbets and dados because they don’t offer much glue surface or strength in an application like this, and although it was tempting to screw the medicine cabinet together because the outside is going hidden in the wall, I fought off the urge because something about using screws seemed kind of dirty.
I ended up settling on sliding dovetails for holding the case pieces together as well as holding the shelves in. Sliding dovetails can seem a little intimidating the first time, but they mainly boil down to making a lot of test pieces to test your setup. Once everything is dialed in, they are pretty efficient to cut, and the resulting joint offers a ton of mechanical strength with only a minimal amount of glue.
I didn’t spend much time on this point in the video, but one thing to keep in mind with sliding dovetails is that there is a certain width where straight sliding dovetails are no longer practical and you need to cut tapered sliding dovetails. The six inch wide medicine cabinet joints went together just fine, but the seven and a half inch wide wall cabinet sides were starting to push it, and required a bit of persuasion to get them assembled and a good deal more to get them apart. Tapered sliding dovetails are a bit of a different animal as far as how they are cut and fit, and now I’m looking forward to the challenge of figuring them out on a future project.
With the sliding dovetails cut, it is just a matter of sliding everything together and a couple hammer taps for some instant gratification. An added bonus is that once assembled, the case does a pretty good job of staying together without any clamps, and we’ll use the assembled cases to take measurements for the doors. Hopefully the glue-up won’t prove me wrong, but so far these look like they were a good choice for this project.
- Rory (rory@woodclips.com)
Bathroom Wall Cabinets - Sliding Dovetails
Sliding dovetails hold everything together.
Bathroom Wall Cabinets
The Bathroom Wall Cabinet project was inspired by The Wood Whisper wall hanging cabinet guild build (found over at www.thewoodwhisperer.com). Marc is building a pair of wall-hanging cabinets—one out of solid wood, the other out of ply—as part of his Wood Whisperer Guild. I wanted to build along, but of course I altered a few details to adapt the project to my particular tastes.
The first of the two cabinets I’m building is a medicine cabinet that is designed to be recessed into the wall to increase its depth. It is a simple cabinet with a mirrored door and a pair of shelves inside. The second cabinet is designed to hang on the wall and offer storage behind a pair of doors as well as a shelf for items that are meant to be easily accessible or on display.
My cabinets are designed to go in the bathroom, but the plan can easily be adapted to a variety of configuration to provide storage or display space anywhere in the house. Add some drawers, change the proportions, add some molding… the variations are almost endless.
I’m anticipating that building two cabinets at once is going to be a bit of a handful, so I’ve made an effort to use common dimensions and joinery where possible. The doors and face frames will go together with mortise and tenon joints, and the cases and shelves with sliding dovetails.
My cabinets are going to be painted to match my bathroom, and I decided to use hardware store poplar because it was convenient to pick up. This first episode introduces the project and goes over the selection, layout and milling of the stock.
- Rory (rory@woodclips.com)
Bathroom Wall Cabinets
Two simple wall cabinets for the bathroom or any room in the house.
Wood Moves
At first glance, the shelf on the bottom of the Arts and Crafts side table looks pretty simple, but figuring out how incorporate it into the design was actually a bit of a challenge. The problem is that the shelf is going to expand and contract over its length, but the spacing between the legs is constant. So how do we give it room to move, hold the bottom of the legs together firmly and find a way to attach it? The answer, of course, is in the video.
- Rory (rory@woodclips.com)
Arts and Crafts Tile Top Side Table - Shelf Details
Mounting the shelf and accommodating wood movement.
Panel Preparation
The shelf on the bottom of the Arts and Crafts Side Table isn’t much more than a glued-up panel, and the steps I went through to create it are similar to what you’d do to create a table top, case side or any component that needs to be made from multiple glued-up pieces. This video will take you through stock selection and matching, edge preparation using a hand plane, glue-up, flattening using scrapers and finally squaring it up to size.
- Rory (rory@woodclips.com)
Arts and Crafts Tile Top Side Table - Shelf
Gluing up and flattening the bottom shelf.
Cutting and Fitting Tenons
Just like mortises, there are a lot of different ways to cut and fit tenons. I’ve come to prefer a hybrid method using the table saw to cut the shoulders, the band saw to cut the cheeks and a chisel and rabbet block plane for the final fitting.
The table saw really excels at cutting the shoulders. It is easy to setup a stop block so all your cuts are consistent, the blade height isn’t terribly critical so it doesn’t take a whole bunch of test cuts to get right, and it is a relatively safe operation. The alternatives, namely paring to a line with a chisel or shoulder plane, don’t really appeal to me.
The decision about how to cut the rest of the tenon is more complicated. Some people will take several passes over a dado stack (several test pieces required) and others will take a series of passes with a standard table saw blade (slow, dusty and a lot of time with your fingers near the blade). A purchased or shop-made tenon jig is another option (something else to buy/make and store, and some test cuts required). All of these are valid options, but I prefer using the band saw.
Choosing to use the band saw instead of the table saw is a personal preference along the lines of choosing power tools or hand tools when both will do the job. I prefer the safety and relaxed attitude of the bandsaw even if it is a little slower and requires a couple passes with a hand plane to clean up the faces afterwards.
The technique I use with the band saw is something I picked up from Tim Rousseau, an instructor at the Center for Furniture Craftsmanship. Before cutting the faces, I make a spacer that is the thickness of the mortise plus the band saw blade. This is arrived at by starting with an oversized piece and taking successive passes through the planer and making test cuts until the resulting tenon has the fit I am looking for. Once I have the thickness dialed in, I then adjust the fence to center the tenon in the middle of the piece.
The tenons are cut by making one pass with the workpiece up against the fence, and then a second pass with the spacer inserted between the workpiece and the fence (no flipping of the workpiece required). The beauty of the system is that the tenon thickness (and therefore fit in the mortise) is independent of the dimensions of the workpiece. Once you have the spacer made up, you can cut as many mortises as you want using the same router bit and band saw blade without having to make any more test cuts. It is a slick system that is particularly handy when your project has pieces of varying thickness.
After the tenons are rough cut on the band saw, I finish up with a chisel and rabbet block plane. This sounds like an extra step, but I like having the ability to fine tune all the joints by hand, even if I was using a more precise method of cutting tenons on the table saw. I chose the rabbet block plane over the shoulder plane because it is wide enough to trim the entire length of the tenon in one pass, but I admit I miss the heft of the should plane sometimes when it comes to making cross-grain cuts through harder woods. The chisels are used to pare away the bits that are left in the corners and adjust the width of the tenon if necessary.
I’ve tried a number of different methods for cutting tenons over the years, and so far this hybrid method is my favorite. If you are still shopping around for the ultimate tenon cutting formula, I’d recommend giving it a try.
- Rory (rory@woodclips.com)
Arts and Crafts Tile Top Side Table - Tenons
Cutting and fitting tenons.
Cutting Mortises
When I’m reading an article on case piece construction, I always scour the pictures for clues about how the author cut their mortises. Dovetails get all the credit, but mortise and tenons are the real workhorse of solid furniture construction—you’ll use them for doors, face frames, legs, frame and panels, attaching drawer runners and kickers... the list is almost endless. Finding an efficient and accurate way of cutting them is an essential skill you need to master if you want to construct fine furniture.
There are a lot of different methods for cutting mortises, and the options can be a little overwhelming. Should you clear out the waste with a drill press, a router, or maybe a hollow chisel mortiser? If there was one method that was superior to all others, people probably would have settled on it a long time ago and we wouldn’t see the variety of methods that we do. So don’t be afraid to experiment.
For the Arts and Crafts Tile Top Table, I decided to try a jig I saw in a recent issue of Fine Woodworking magazine. The jig is constructed from a thin piece of sheet material with a block of wood attached to one side of it. The block is clamped to the workpiece and the router is guided by a guide bushing that rides in a groove in the top of the jig. I’ve used variations of this jig before, but what appealed to me in this case was the simplicity of a jig constructed from only two pieces.
As it turned out, the version of the jig that I constructed had a fatal flaw—the groove that the template guide rode in became clogged with shavings, and I had to remove the router after every pass and clear it out with a screw driver. I eventually built a new version of the jig using a larger template guide, and that pretty much solved the problem. I also suspect that dust collection would have helped significantly.
The tinkerer in me will probably always be on the lookout for novel ways to cut mortises and tenons, but ultimately, success for this skill, as with many woodworking skills, usually boils down to picking one way of doing something and getting a lot of practice with it. So, I think I’ll refine my jigs a bit more and use this on a couple more projects to see how it works out over time.
- Rory (rory@woodclips.com)
Arts and Crafts Tile Top Side Table - Mortises
Cutting mortises on the legs and rails.
A Big Pile of Parts
Creating a pile of flat, straight and square pieces is more difficult than one would think. Take too much stock off one side of a board and you end up with a bow. Run the board over the jointer in the wrong direction and you get massive tear out. Rip a board in half and watch as the two pieces veer off in opposite directions. Fail to cut pieces to a consistent length and you end up with an assembly that won’t come out square. The list goes on…
Just like any other step of the project, care and attention to detail is required during milling and final dimensioning. Check your machines for square before you begin. Leave extra material to account for bowing as you remove material. Take the pieces down to their final dimensions in two steps, with time in between to acclimate. Give them room to breathe. There is a lot you can do to influence the quality of the final results.
In this episode of The Arts and Crafts Tile Top Side Table, we’ll be transforming our rough material into a pile of dimensioned parts by jointing, planing, ripping and finally cross-cutting them to size.
- Rory (rory@woodclips.com)
Arts and Crafts Tile Top Side Table - Final Dimensioning
Creating a pile of parts--four square and cut to length.
Putting Your Best Face Forward
I have a book about bungalow kitchens that I enjoy flipping through to admire the cabinetry and custom woodwork. One of the kitchens featured in the book has a large cabinet across the front of an island that sits in the center of the kitchen. I’d guess the dimensions are about eight feet wide by four feet high. The cabinet is topped with a sturdy looking wood countertop, and the front has three glass doors that display a colorful collection of dinnerware inside. It looks like the cabinet was custom built for the space, and it matches the other cabinets in the kitchen.
Every time I turn a page and see a picture of this cabinet, I cringe. One of the door stiles on the front of the cabinet is made entirely out of light sapwood, while the rest of the cabinet is dark heartwood. When I look at the picture, the light stile jumps off the page at me and I can’t seem to ignore it. To my eye, the piece is totally ruined.
Selecting stock and deciding how the parts will be cut from it can have a tremendous impact on the resulting piece of furniture. Carelessness at this stage can be just as fatal as an erroneously placed mortise or a saw cut on the wrong side of the line.
With this in mind, I spent a lot of time sorting through my lumber rack to find the best pieces for the Arts and Crafts Tile Top Table. Once I had some candidates in mind, I spent time deciding how I was going to lay the pieces out to try to match visually-connected pieces and put the best boards in the most prominent locations.
Even with a lot of careful planning, you don’t always know what you are going to end up with until you start milling up the boards. You might think you have a piece of nice solid heartwood that turns out to have a streak of sapwood running through one side of it. When this happens, you need to be willing to go back and start over.
There are plenty of places you can make a mistake that ends up ruining a piece, but with a little care, stock selection and layout shouldn’t be one of them.
- Rory (rory@woodclips.com)
Arts and Crafts Tile Top Side Table - Stock Selection and Rough Dimensioning
Construction begins by selecting the stock and laying out the pieces for optimal effect.
Top-Down Table Design
Sometimes a piece just about designs itself. The focal point of the Arts and Crafts Tile Top Side Table is the ceramic tile that covers the top, so selecting the tile was a logical starting point. The table was built to sit next to the couch in our living room, so the wall color and trim in the room had a heavy influence in the tile selection (as did my wife’s aesthetic preferences).
With the tiles purchased, the next step was to arrange them in pleasing dimensions that both looked good and resulted in a table that fit the space. I wanted the top to be about as deep as the couch’s arm, and the height a little bit lower to make it easily accessible while sitting on the couch. The width of the border around the top was determined by mocking up a couple different sizes until I was pleased with the proportions.
The top dimensions and another table I was using for inspiration helped determine most of the other dimensions for the piece. The leg and rail widths were picked to look appropriate for a table of this size, and the slats were dimensioned to fill up the wide open space on the sides without looking crowded.
I originally was going to have an entirely different configuration for the sides and bottom rails, but my wife insisted on a shelf in the bottom, and the customer is always right. The only details I spent much time debating were the attachment method for the top and the support for the shelf (the latter being a somewhat difficult problem because the shelf needs to expand and contract, yet I’m relying on it to hold the two sides together on the bottom).
In the end, I was pleased with how all the details came together. I wish the details for every project fell into place this easily.
- Rory (rory@woodclips.com)
Arts and Crafts Tile Top Side Table - Design and Planning
Working out the details ahead of time makes for a smooth construction process and predictable results.
Inspiration in the Tile Aisle
Side tables (or end tables or lamp tables—I haven’t quite figured out the distinction between these different names) are relatively utilitarian pieces of furniture. They are meant to hold a lamp, a drink or some random stuff that you want to put on display next to a chair or sofa in your living room. They sometimes have a shelf for holding books or magazines, but otherwise they are simple pieces, consisting of a table top and four legs.
Building a side table, especially an Arts and Crafts side table with its straight lines and minimal adornment, posed a challenge for me: How could I make this utilitarian, straight-lined, non-adorned piece of furniture consisting of four legs and a top… interesting?
The answer to this challenge turned out to be ceramic tile. The tile aisle at my local Home Depot runs along one of the major arteries through the store, and I often found myself marveling at the selection as I passed by. I’ve seen tiles incorporated into dining room tables before, I used them successfully on top of a plant stand I built in the past, and they are featured prominently in a number of Arts and Crafts homes I’ve seen, so why not use them in the top of an end table?
This introductory episode kicks off the Arts and Crafts Tile Top Table series. The episodes in the series will span all the steps in the project, from the initial design and planning, through construction, and concluding with the finishing and tile work. The finished ceramic tile top ended up exceeding my expectations, and my wife has already insisted that I build another table with matching tiles, so I’m happy to report that the design was a success.
I hope you enjoy the project.
- Rory (rory@woodclips.com)
Arts and Crafts Tile Top Side Table
Ceramic tile adds something unique to this Arts and Crafts side table design.
First Things First: Table Saw Safety
I never intended the first WoodClips video to be about building a table saw accessory. Let’s be honest here: this isn’t the kind of woodworking project that you are going to show off to your non-woodworking friends or significant other, and I was hoping to start off with something a bit more impressive. However, when I accidentally snapped off my old splitter while using my table saw as an assembly table (note to self: remember to remove insert and cover with a sheet of plywood next time), I found that building a new insert and splitter had moved up to the top of my priority list before I could embark on my next project.
When I first bought my table saw, “splitter” wasn’t part of my woodworking vocabulary and “riving knives” wouldn’t become a standard safety feature on table saws in the United States (I believe the Europeans were way ahead of us in this regard) for years to come. At the time, I thought I was relatively well-versed in table saw operation and safety precautions, yet I naively used my table saw for several years without any sort splitter (as did everyone else I knew). Looking back at that period of time, I shake my head and breathe a sigh of relief that I never had an accident.
I eventually learned the importance of splitters while attending The Center for Furniture Craftsmanship in Rockport, Maine. The concept here isn’t difficult to understand when you think about the path that a single tooth takes during the rotation of the blade: when it first appears above the table at the back of the insert, it is traveling straight up, and then as the blade rotates, it travels back towards the operator before disappearing back below the table at the front of the insert. Now imagine what would happen if a piece of wood caught that tooth and traveled along with it for the entire trip: that’s right, it would first be lifted up, and then it would be shot back towards the operator. This phenomenon is known as “kickback”, and the flying projectiles and loss of control that comes with them (potentially sending your hand into the blade) are a major source of workshop injuries.
Luckily, there is something we can do to greatly reduce the chances of kickback, and this is where splitters come in. A splitter is a piece of wood, metal or plastic located directly behind the blade that keeps the workpiece from contacting the teeth at the back of the blade if it shifts away from the fence as it is pushed through, or if stresses released during the cut cause warping that causes the kerf to close up and pinch the back of the blade. Splitters are usually attached to the saw table and are designed to be removed for cuts where they will get in the way; riving knives take the concept a step further by attaching the splitter to the same mechanism as the blade so it is raised and lowered along with the blade and is always right behind it.
The concept of a splitter is pretty simple, but finding a way to implement it on your saw isn’t always so. New saws come with riving knives these days, which are undoubtedly a superior solution, but older saws didn’t come with any sort of splitter (I’m discounting the blade guards that came with older saws because they were usually pretty cumbersome) and aftermarket splitter options were limited and only available for certain models. This is where the idea of gluing a piece of wood into a kerf in the table saw insert comes in: it is a super simple way of mounting a splitter, and it doesn’t require any fancy materials or procedures to build.
I’ve been focusing on the safety benefits of this project, but having a zero-clearance insert is also a pretty nice upgrade from the factory insert: it reduces tearout, eliminates a big gaping hole for cutoffs to get stuck in and it should cut down on the amount of dust that gets kicked up by the blade. While this may not be the most glamorous project, I consider it important enough that I wouldn’t consider using my saw without it. This time I’ll make a couple though so if I break one in the future it won’t hold me up. If your table saw doesn’t already have a splitter or riving knife, I’d recommend that you give some serious thought to making a couple, too.
- Rory (rory@woodclips.com)
Table Saw Insert and Splitter
Upgrade your table saw with this zero-clearance insert and splitter.