Saturday, July 6, 2013

bench and cabinet in reclaimed fir

Part of the remodel of our bungalow, a built in cabinet and bench system leading out onto the south facing side of the house via French doors. Details:

  • 12'long, 36" high cabinet tops, 18" bench with angled back.
  • Finish is Watco Danish Oil.
  • Frame&Panel construction atop birch ply carcass.
  • laminated quartersawn pieces for the cabinet tops using breadboard ends, 7/8" thick
  • Seat back and sides milled from doug fir sent here from my dad up in the Seattle area. Tree came down in a bad wind storm some years ago and he had it milled on site. had a few nice planks for me to use.
  • Rest of the wood came from reclaimed doug fir that I scrounged around for. Urban Ore and Earthsource Lumber
  • I'd never done built in work so had no idea how much fun it was to match up the theoretical straight boards with the empirical geometry of a 1911 bungalow.
winging the miters for the base moulding with my ryoba was not much fun. perhaps a miter box would be a nice thing to have
Here's a foto roll of the work in progress Worked weekends from end of March through today

plywood substrate

I milled this fir from earthsource lumber in san leandro.
the ring density on this stick was too nice to pass up, although i had to chisel out each one of these inch spaced 16penny nails.

Some drawer pull ideas I had. Ended up using the ones integrated into the drawer front

The blum hinges work really well. Thanks Tim for lending my your 35mm forstner bit :-)

The angled frame/pannel sides were a bitch
I don't have a concave making plane so I did this using my plough plane to define the shoulders and then a block plane to round out the interior space.

Friday, February 8, 2013

south facing deck in redwood

we had a hard to enjoy aft section of the house, and after a few years living in it, decided to hire an architect to assist with the zoning and design, and carpenter to do the heavy lifting, and myself to do the delicate fussy stuff. Here's where she stands now.

My hired carpenter took care of all the hard stuff, excavation for footers, demolition and establishing the deck framing

half-bath addition:

Meanwhile, I took care of the fine work, using timber framing joinery for the trellis cantilevers. The corner one was exceptionally difficult to lay out:

45degree

I decided to hang the bench footings off the posts using A34's but the legs are mortised into the rails in the usual way

Installation of the trellis on the deck was an exciting day, as the carpenter and myself combined our respective work to establish the whole. Since the posts were part of the deck structure, everything had to line up perfectly, and for the most part it did.

Thursday, June 7, 2012

learning alder wood; a small favor box

So last year my da sent a several hundred pound shipment of wood milled from a windfall on the family farm some years previously. The mass was divided between some gorgeous VG Fir, and some alder:

I've never worked alder before, but my curious first swipes from a block plane revealed some pretty grain and color patterns despite my being colorblind

This weekend, I milled a small offcut plank of the alder for a simple gift box to my mom on her birthday. The wood proved "springy" in that i'd plane it flat and watch it cup and warp before me after inspection. Perhaps it was a flat sawn piece, but working this will be a challenge. All this is fine given the way the wood looks. I plagiarized a design from a recent blog posting by Mr. David Barron here. I have attempted wood hinge mechanisms before but his with the tapered thickness lid is quite elegant.

Here, I am fitting the lid using bamboo skewers from the supermarket as hinges.

And this is the finished assembly, with a couple coats of "citrus shield" paste wax. LxWxH 8,3/4x4,5/8x2,1/4.

Here we can see some of the grain reversal chipping out in the dovetails due to my hamfistedness. must be cautious while working this stuff. But otherwise, you see the grain patterns. the diagonal "shooting star" effects are part of the wood's grain itself. quite a thing to behold.