sewing caddy outer carcass

OK, few more tentative steps towards a sewing caddy to put forth. now that the interior carriage is sort of done, it's time to build the "husk" that will nest directly outside of it. This involved rescussitation of a few old doug fir/redwood siding boards harvested from the throes of my rotting garage's rafters from an earlier post, jointed forth.

The vertical sides will be 9" tall so had to glue up a panel, making sure to note grain direction in the boards



One old trick about jointing mating surfaces is to fold them over and plane them thus:



glue-up and wait. wish I had more large mouth clamps to apply the pressure:



Now the tricky blocking out of the panels to length. That strut of wood interior to the xacto knife and outer carcass piece will be glued to the inside of the carcass and form the opposing cleat surface for the wedge which holds this entire piece together. Need to take it's width into consideration when measuring out the pieces and almost forgot this morning:



Chopping the tails for the carcass joints. Using a J. Krenov influenced layout where the tails are narrower towards the edges:



A lot of cautious sawing, and a few hours later and every joint is chopped out and fitment is tested. Looking actually pretty okay for my level of accuracy. Next step is glue up

sewing caddy undercarriage

OK! spent some more time on the gutz of this assembly: the undercarriage for the sewing machine. This is just a simple frame of hard wood that the sewing machine will rest upon. I have no present intention to affix the frame to the sewing machine; its main purpose will be to be the interior support of a pair of lateral rods which hold the lower frame into the external "shell" cover. I'm sure this doesn't make any sense in words, but imagine a horizontal grove on the outside of the below frame, and an interior grove on the shell at the same place, and a long rod shoved down the middle to hold 'em together.

Anyway, the frame wood I saved from the happy destruction of an old lounge chair that Sarah had mercifully allowed me to architecturally reconfigure with my handy 10 pound hammer. we wanted it out of the house, and I wanted the material since it was made mostly of oak and maple. the maple seems okay, but punky in spots. The oak has a few worm holes but is harder than hell mostly. Had to rehone my POS 1/2" chisel a few times before I could punch it through these dovetail chops:



Testing fitment of the joints



How she rests right now

Ratka's Sewing Caddy Part 1

Here's the Sewing Machine, gorgeous old iron. Ratka wanted something to house it other than the janky veneered particle board desk that it was attached to:



I'm going to go for a sort of "lunch pail" assembly. I'll make an undercarriage which will support the sewing machine from the underside of it's perimeter frame. This carriage will then have a sort of cleat which will connect to the exterior "shell". I have not diagrammed this well below, but should be apparent in later posts!





Job starts with wood, and I'm using some old panels that were up in the rafters of the garage when we bought the place. Really beautiful wood. Tight, tight grain, probably fir, but it could be redwood, I don't know. The key is how fine the rings are, which to me says: "Old" and Old Wood Is Beautiful:



My "Table Saw" is kind of Barbaric, but get's me close, and I thank my mate Peter Sutherland for hooking me up with an extra circular saw for the job!



Typical of wood siding, it has a bit of a cup to it so you plane out the bowed side, before you flatten out the cup here:



The tight tight grain of this wood made planing a real joy. I'm used to old, salvaged wood being kind of temperamental, and prone to tear out, but this behaved really nicely. The 14" Jack Plane from Lee Valley helps