Of Mice & Men & Design Changes, Part 2

When last we met, I had finished making the handles for the pulpit that my pastor had been asking for. They are made from four pieces of red oak, with oval shaped cut outs in the middle. To remind you, here is a picture showing what we're shooting for when it's all done.

Once I had finished shaping the handles, I clamped one against one of the sloped sides and carefully traced it onto the plywood. I had all of the boxes bolted together, so I would make the cuts in the two sides simultaneously. After tracing the handle block, I carefully measured & cut a straight guide that the shoe of my jig saw could ride against while making the vertical cuts.

I then began to cut out the notch. The cuts I ended up with weren't as clean or straight as I would have gotten had I been able to make these cuts before the boxes were assembled, but they would have to do. I even had to cut some wedges to slip in between the notch & the block on one side. This was the first one I had cut; the second one came out much better.

Here's a picture of the better of the two cuts after it was cut & before the handles were glued in. As you can see in the picture, I did get some tear out. I own a cheap Skill jig saw, and my skill with it isn't terribly great. But that thing does jump around a lot & is hard to control.

After making the cut, I cleaned it up with my belt sander & a file. The sander wouldn't fit in the entire notch -- that is, it could only reach the forward most 3 inches of the bottom. This allowed me to get that area pretty flat, but I needed the file to work on the rear portion. With about 30 minutes or so of work, I was able to get the blocks in to the notches well enough that any final clean up could be done with a ROS or block plane.

Here's a picture of the finished notches with the corresponding handle blocks in place but not yet glued. As you can see in the photo, the notch was cut a little over size. Believe me, though, it was a lot better than the other side.

Because the fit of the blocks wasn't the greatest, I decided to use 5 minute epoxy to glue the handles in the notches. The epoxy would fill any voids & would even glue the end grain to the notches. The result would be a very strong bond that should hold up to even my weight pulling on it.

After gluing in the handle blocks, I proceeded to fill in the remaining spaces with stainable wood filler. I will probably have to give these areas some extra attention to get the color to match, depending on how everything looks after final staining. Here's a picture of the pulpit with both handles in place & wood filler applied.

While this completed all of the retro-fitting work that needed to be done, there is still work to do on these handles. The cap rails that go over these areas will have to be shaped to make the handles easier to grasp. But that will have to wait until after I make the rails some time in the next couple of weeks.

Next time: Mitering the Base Mouldings

Of Mice & Men & Design Changes

Back in October, I decided that the lectern was too plain as originally designed. The design for the improved lectern appeared in my head almost as a vision. I could see what I wanted to do. So I put together the change in Sketch-Up in a couple hours. The picture below shows the idea I had.

Essentially, the lectern will be shaped like a tomb stone with a 1/4" wide strip of maple inlaid 3/4" in from the edges. And there will be a purple heart cross inlaid in the center of the field created by the maple inlay. I'm going to need to purchase an inlay kit for my router to do the inlay. Luckily, these kits aren't too expensive. These will also be my first inlays. I intend to practice a little before doing it for real.

Through out the summer, my pastor kept asking me to add "handle bars" to the pulpit design. At first I thought she might be joking. But she often feels dizzy while preaching as the Holy Spirit works through her and felt she needed something to hold on to, in order to keep from falling over.

After determining that pastor wasn't kidding, and after making the obligatory jokes about putting chopper handlebars & a seat on the pulpit so she could take the pulpit for a spin, I began to wonder exactly how I was going to meet this request.

A number of ideas presented themselves to me & were discarded. One was to actually get a set of motorcycle or bicycle handle bars & add them. That got discarded quickly -- I just couldn't see how to make that work. And I don't think anyone would take seriously any pastor preaching from behind a pulpit so equipped.

Then I had the idea for what I call the "towel rack". This would be two triangular gussets made of maple a full 3/4" wide rabbeted into the corner posts of the center box. Between them would be a rod or dowel made from purple heart a full 1" to 1 1/2" in diameter. This would give pastor a place to hold on. But this still didn't work for me. All the pulpit would need at this point is a pair of wheels in the back & you could tilt it back & push it around.

Then, one night while driving to the Men's Ministry meeting at church, I had another vision of a change to the pulpit. As originally designed, the boxes had nothing but square corners. I saw the pulpit with the inside corners of the center box & the adjacent outer boxes cut off at an angle. And our Elder Jack then suggested cutting an oval hole through the partitions.

This idea appealed to me so much that I started working on modifying the drawing that night. After a few hours work, I came up with the design shown in the picture below.

Since the partitions are made of ply, I first cut the corner off of one of the outside boxes. I then transferred the line to other outside box so they would be cut identically. I then cut the corner off of that box. Next I transferred both lines to the center box & cut those corners off. These cuts were made with my circular saw & straight edge guide. Because my straight edge guide uses a carriage to hold the saw, I couldn't get the blade low enough to cut all the way through the corner posts, so I had to finish these off with my flush cutting saw.

The boxes were then bolted back together & everything sanded with my belt sander. The photo below shows everything after all of these steps were completed.

The next step was to make the handles. I didn't just want to cut oval holes in the ply, as that would make the plies visible. Plus, I wanted to round over the edges of the hole to make the handle more comfortable to hold, and there just wasn't enough room to get a full size 2 1/4 HP router base in there at this point.

So I decided to make the handles out of solid red oak, cut notches to accept the handles in the ply, and glue the handles in. The next step, therefore, was to actually make the handles. Since the boxes come apart, I would have to split each handle in half & glue each in to a different ply partition after the notches were cut.

As you can see from the Sketch-Up image above, these pieces are parallelograms. I drew the shape on one of the ply partitions & set my bevel square to the angle. I then used the bevel square to set my miter gauge. It turns out that the correct miter gauge setting to cut the shape in the drawing is about 25°, give or take a few tenths of a degree.

So I took the two failed bottom rails for the center box & ripped them to 2 1/2" wide. I then cut them into blocks for the handles. After cutting 5 blanks from the two rails, I layed out the oval holes.

Originally, I planned to make the holes by drilling 3/4" holes at the ends with a Forstner bit, then clearing out most of the waste with the same bit. Then I'd clean everything up with my chisels. I also figured I'd use one as a pattern & use a flush trim or pattern bit to get all 4 holes identical. It's important that someone holding the handles doesn't feel any uncomfortable edges because of inconsistencies in the shapes when the boxes are bolted together.

Well, the first attempt didn't come out very well shaped. And the holes were a bit tight on my hands. And when I tried to pattern rout one of the other handles, I inadvertently made a climb cut & the handle split in half. Luckily, I was able to glue that blank back together & you can't tell where the split happened without looking at the end grain.

I decided the best way to recover was to increase the hole diameter to 1 1/8". This was the minimum size I needed to remove all traces of damage to the grain within the hand hole. This time, I did a better job of cleaning everything up & the handle came out much better, as you can see in the next photo below.

Next, I ripped the four blanks to the thickness of the ply and rounded over the hole edges using a 3/8" round over bit in my router table. The photo below shows the handle after rounding it over & sanding everything smooth.

That's enough for now. More on installing the handles next time.

A Momentous Week

This is going to be very short. I'll write something in the next few days about the pulpit.

This has been a very momentous week for the nation, and it turns out, for me, too. On Tuesday, we elected Barack Obama for president. A man who has no track record in a leadership position. I guess we'll see if we were right or not in time.

On Wednesday, I got laid off. Another victim of the faltering economy & globalization. This is the second time I've been laid off in my career. It's not as hard this time around, though I am going to miss all of the fine people I used to work with. I'm also going to miss the regular paychecks.

As of now, my woodworking future just got a lot murkier. I'm going to finish the pulpit, since I have just about everything I need for it. But I'm not sure what I'm going to be doing in the coming weeks after that. I do know I'll be looking for a full time job.

I just want everyone to know that since I've come to know the Lord, I know that He will take care of us & everything will work out even better than it was before. Of that, I have no doubt. It's just a matter of getting through to the other side.

At any rate, it's time for me to get into the shop & make some progress on the pulpit. Later, dudes.

Some Assembly Is Required, Part 2

I had started writing part 1 of this 2 part report a few weeks ago. And then October got busy with things besides the pulpit. We had a revivalist, Dr. Gabriel Heymans and his wife Anita, visit our church. They ended up staying for two weeks, and I spent almost every night at church. I spent every night of the next week working on the center box, trying to make ground on it. I finally got a chance to finish part 1 over the weekend, and now I'm bringing it up to date.

In part 1, I recounted putting the two side boxes together and the issues I found with mis-cut panels for the center box. Now it's time to address the issue.

As I said in part 1, I decided to remake the rails for the center box in order to recover from my mistake. But first, I had to cut off the bottom rail I had glued into one side.

I didn't want to risk damaging the post, so I pulled out my Shark flush cut saw (the only hand saw that I have that I really trust myself with for this kind of work) and cut the rail off about 1/8" - 1/4" from the post. Next, I used a chisel to pop off the shoulders of the tenon that were left on the post. Since the joint there is end grain to long grain, they popped right off.

I set up my plunge router with the same 3/8" straight bit I used to cut the groove & mortise. I set it up for a maximum plunge of 1/2", as I did when I first cut the grooves. Next, I attached my edge guide & set it close to where I needed it. To fine tune the position, I placed the router in position & turned on the router. I lowered the bit down so it just kissed the surface. I then carefully adjusted the edge guide so the bit was cutting the wood I needed to remove and only that wood.

When I was satisfied, I made the two passes, the first at 1/4" and the second at 1/2", to re-establish the full length of the groove. This went perfectly well.

I then reset the maximum plunge of the router to 1 1/16". Everything else was left unchanged. I then remove the tenon material left in the mortise. This went well too. In fact, I found some stretchy glue residue left over in the mortise that I was able to remove with a chisel. I just had a little clean up to do with a 3/8" chisel & I was done.

I went out to Condon's & picked up a board that I intended to use to remake the rails. I wanted to get a 5/4 D2S board, but some how I miss measured at the yard & got a 13/16" D2S board instead. I did have some boards left from the original order that I was going to use to make the lectern, but I decided I could use them for the rails instead & use the D2S board for the lectern.

Incidentally, everything described from here on happened in the evenings after work the week of October 18.

So I milled those boards. Somehow, my Wixey digital planer height read out got about 1/16" off. And, of course, it was reading 1/16" higher than it really was. So the boards I milled ended up being 13/16" thick instead of 7/8". The trouble is starting already! I decided to mill the 3/8" groove off center & keep the narrow part on the inside.

I ripped the parts to width & cut them to length. I milled the groove by mounting my 3/8" straight cutter in my table mounted router & setting up the fence & some feather boards. This went OK and the grooves were done. Then I carefully cut the tenons. And I did the first dry fit -- a real dry fit. I didn't glue anything together before the dry fit.

The middle rails were fine, but the top & bottom rails were still too short! I forgot to account for the extra 1" of tenon on these parts when I calculated how long to cut the parts. Doh!! At that point, I knocked off for that day.

I went back to Condon's, and this time, I got a 10' long board that was a true 5/4 thick and about 4" wide. Actually, it's width tapered from about 3 1/2" or so to about 4 1/2". I had them cut it in half so I could get it in my Accord to take home. If I didn't screw up anything more, I would be able to get all the wood I needed from half the board, so this was to my advantage, anyway.

I cut the new board into pieces of rough length. I face & edge jointed, then watched the thickness carefully in between passes. I used one of the original rails to gauge the thickness as I milled & I stopped when they were about the same. I used my fingers to make that determination, not a ruler. The new parts are as close to being the same thickness as I can feel.

When I was happy, I ripped everything to the proper widths, but I still didn't cross cut anything. Next, I set up my aux fence on the table saw & mounted my dado set, at 3/8", to the saw. I set the fence 1/4" from the blade & mounted a feather board on the fence to push the stock down to the table. And I ran the parts. They came out great.

Next, I cut the parts to length. I took the length of the original top rail & added 1 1/4" to it. That's the length I cut the top & bottom rail stock to. Then I made the tenons on the end. They came out well, too.

Dry fit time. This time, everything came out the right length! Big sigh of relief!

Next, I made new front stretcher / shelf supports from ply. I ironed on some edge banding to hide the ply edge grain on the inside. And it's time to make new shelves. I cut the 4' x 4' half sheet of ply I had left over from remaking the other shelves into four blanks. No problems here.

I used some left over pieces from the failed second set of rails to make the edging for the new shelves. I planed them down to 3/4" thick and then ripped them to the right widths & cross cut them long. The space between the posts would be 20 1/4", so I needed them to be at least 21" long, if not 22".

I glued the edging on. I left them in the living room over night to dry on Friday night. It's gotten cold here in Westchester, and I don't think I can leave stuff in the unheated garage to dry and get a good bond. I've had enough go wrong so far that I don't need the edging to fall off if someone leans on a shelf.

On Saturday, I cut the notches in the new shelves. This time, I made a few changes to my technique. First, I put my stock fence with the tall aux fence still attached to it & put it in the right miter slot & made a pass. This established a width for ripping that piece of ply so I wouldn't have to remove the fence from the miter slot if I needed to swap miter slots. I then ripped the fence to that width & put it back on the miter gauge.

Second, instead of nibbling away the material, I set the blade height for one side and made one pass to establish one shoulder at that particular blade height for every cut that required it. Then I set the blade height for another side & made all of those cuts. I repeated this until I had all of the notches made. This time, they went a lot faster & came out real nice.

I finished up drilling the pocket holes I needed to attach the top rails to the boxes later. I had to drill these before assembling the box because I wouldn't be able to fit the drill & bit inside after assembly -- the top shelf isn't deep enough for the bit & drill to fit. Holes were drilled on the inside of the front rail, along the outside of the ply partitions where they will touch and will never be seen when the three boxes are assembled to each other.

Time for one more dry fit. Everything looked good. And I glued it up. And I finally got all three boxes assembled!

Here's a picture of the center box with the clamps still attached after I glued it up.

And here's the top shelf. The wood is still wet in the corners where I wiped off some glue squeeze out with a wet rag.

And finally, here are the three boxes, bolted to each other for the first time after the glue dried.

We're just about up to date. I did a little bit of work this week after work, but I'll leave that for next time.