diy wood

The slate is blank no more! Progress has been slow, but things are shaping up. As every little piece falls into place, the shop takes one small step towards finally being functional again. Small steps, but noticeable. Yes.

Here's what I accomplished last weekend - Clamp-O-Rama!


For the first time ever, my clamps (of which you can never have too many) are actually making me happy. They used to be a jumbled mess that made me crazy if I even looked at them, but no more.

The clamps on the lower rack are clamped on firmly, while those on the upper rack hang loosely, trapped behind a raised lip on the shelf edge.

Louis enjoys his newly relocated shop nest.

Back in August, in my post about the New Wood Rack, I outlined my plan for the Total Shop Overhaul:

Phase 1: New Wood Rack
Phase 2: Remove Old Wood Rack to make room for the wall
Phase 3: Partition Wall w/ door
Phase 4: Window Installation
Phase 5: Rearrange Shop

I'm happy to report that Phases 1 - 3 are complete and I will be jumping to Phase 5 as soon as I can! Wahoo! The Phase 4 window installation is probably going to have to wait a bit, but I think I can live with that.

The main thing is that the partition wall is complete (okay, the door isn't in yet, but again, I can live with that). It's open at the top to allow heat into the shop, and open at the bottom because - well shoot, okay it's not totally done yet. Actually, it will have some sort of venting at the bottom to allow cold air return - otherwise I'd be working in a deep freeze all winter. I'm not sure what my plan is for the bottom venting yet, so I just left room.



You might notice that I used cheap, and not very smooth plywood. Hopefully, that won't be as noticeable once things are in place, otherwise I will regret saving the money...

So now it is on to the fun part - rearranging/reclaiming the shop! Options, options!

The next step is making about 30 feet of French Cleat...

Before I even get started on this post, I should point out that the majority of projects that leave my shop (and those that stay) are not painted. I really like the look of wood, either unfinished, or oiled/waxed. But sometimes paint is the finish of choice and here is a perfect example of why.

I finally finished dismantling the old wood rack. But what to do with the wood? I didn't want to store it and it didn't feel right just burning it in the wood stove - "Well, thanks for the years of yeoman's work old rack, now it's off to a fiery doom for you! Muwahahahaha!" And we did need some kind of firewood storage for on the front porch, so...

Enter the Frankenchest!


This was a down and dirty salvage build, so material wise nothing is particularly nice about this project. The 3/8" plywood is rough CDX salvaged from the old rack's shelves. The 2x4 internal frame also comes directly from the rack. The skirting is birch ply from the long gone CD shelves, and the 1x stock for the upper trim was pulled from the scrap pile. In short, the wood is a mismatched hodgepodge. However, the proportions are not bad - maybe even nice, which is why painting this monstrosity makes sense.

Paint unifies the design, hiding the wood's grain, texture (somewhat) and coloring, and thus allowing proportion to dominate the viewer's perception of the final product. This is, I believe, the reason Windsor chairs were traditionally painted. Of course, we're talking about a Frankenchest here, not some fine Windsor chair, so the results are not exactly the same, but I think you can see the difference:


Yeah, it would take more than paint to make this baby shine, but it does take it from rather hideous to "not too bad", which in my book definitely does "Give it more juice!" (NOT a woodworking related link, and jump to 8 minutes for the scene with the quote - spoiler alert if you haven't seen this movie yet...)

And yes, this is the second, huge, green chest I have built recently - I think I should be good for a couple of years at least. Although, a huge, blue chest might be nice...

Well, after a small prescribed burn, I have at least one corner of the shop decent enough for some pictures.

First is the new wood rack doing its job quite nicely:


I didn't realize how much 6' stock I had picked up. This was mostly because the old rack couldn't handle 8' stock in an easy manner. Now that I have a much better rack, I can go back to buying longer, and thus more versatile, stock.

As I mentioned in a comment on the previous wood rack post, I added plywood "decking" to the second and third shelf to both increase the racking resistance (earthquakes) and allow for easier storage of shorts. Also, I added sliding trays under the bottom platform to handle even more shorts.

And here is the GGTC - Gigantic Green Tool Chest:




The body of the chest is made of 3/4" birch plywood that I found buried at the bottom of the old wood rack. I don't use plywood very often anymore, but this was leftover from my table saw days and much too nice to send to the landfill.

This is going in to my school shop to safely keep unsupervised hands away from sharp tools.

Now it's back to the shop overhaul - next up, the new wall!

You know things are going crazy when a good day is one that you don't talk about burning down the shop.

I think there might have been one day last week that I didn't say it.

The shop is still a royal mess, but I guess progress is being made. I filled the new wood rack - it works great. I'll post on it when I can. I have partially disassembled the old rack, but I wasn't quick enough and it started to fill up again with random stuff looking for a horizontal surface to land on. Where does that stuff come from?

I also managed to finish two projects for the new school shop I am outfitting (I get to teach 6th grade AND hand tool woodworking - yes!). First, I made some adjustments to my sawbench design and completed one of the two we will need. Someday I will post about the Sawbench Mark II (mostly the same really, I just tweaked the dimensions a bit). Second, I just finished a gigantic tool chest to hold the school shop's tools (which still mostly need sharpening, fettling etc.). Next up is the small matter of building six workbenches, but the students are helping with these...

No pictures from either project were taken, as I have no intention of preserving the present state of the shop for posterity. It's just too painful. I want to forget it as soon as possible. I will however try to take some of the final products.

The tool chest should go into school this weekend, and with the room that frees up (did I mention it is gigantic?) I think I can start to make more progress on the shop itself.

Or I could burn it down.

Well, my shop is in a state of utter chaos. I'd post a picture, but it's too depressing.

I mentioned last month in the New Wood Rack post that I was overhauling the shop. Well, it has been creeping along, feeling like it will never be finished. I'm only on "Phase 2" and it looks like a tornado went right through the shop.

What I find most disturbing is how unusable the shop is in its current state. It's hard to even move out there. Every time I have a few minutes to work on it, the sheer enormity of the project just overwhelms me. I need to keep plugging away at it, but it's hard when I can't see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Alright, enough whining! Back to it!

Here's another old furniture repair post, and also a lesson on the importance of grain direction.

This old rocker had a broken runner:


A closer look revealed how the sawn runner split down the grain. If the runners had been bent, with continuous grain, this couldn't have happened.


I didn't need to disassemble the chair; it was easy enough to loosen the screws and rotate the broken parts to get at the surfaces needing glue. The brown fuzzy strip is adhesive backed felt to protect the bamboo floor.


Here's the clamp swarm holding things put after glueing:


The glue probably would have been enough, but just to be sure I removed some of the felt and drove two finish screws across the joint. To insure that the screws pulled everything tight, I bored two different size pilot holes. First I drilled a small pilot hole (the size of the screw's shank) the full depth of the screw, and then bored a larger hole (the size of the threads) just as deep as the break. This way, the clamping effect was between the threads of the lower part and the head of the screw.


To replace the felt, I squished the new felt with clamps until it was the same thickness as the older felt. Although I am confident this repair will hold, I didn't want to tempt fate by putting a lump right under it. Confident is confident, but safer is better.

Oh, and although I already pointed out that bent runners would not have failed this way, I also concede the point that these sawn runners lasted almost 100 years. So there you go...