HeathRobinson
Established Member
Boy am I glad to have found these forums. I’ve recently resigned in order to start my own business. This resulted in me finally having some time to myself, and looking around the house I’ve noticed just how little I’ve really done until now. Too much personal time wasted making bosses richer and the age of instant flat pack furniture have done much to damage the ingenuity I naturally possessed as a youngster not to mention the look of my home! I used to love working with my hands and Miss. Robinson and I have decided on a few projects that will let me do just that.
As our home is small and lacking in storage we are talking about shelving and boxes to start with. However, on the other end of the scale we have aspirations to make things like a custom sofa bed, some custom trellis work to pretty up the tiny garden and, my personal favorite, a display cabinet come side board come – are you sitting tightly? – woodworking bench. Yes that’s right, the only space I have to work in is the lounge so multi use design and hand tools are the way to go for me. Miss. Robinson is fine with a side board that is also used as a bench so long as it’s designed so that the crockery doesn’t get damaged. I love her very much! Hehehe
With all this in mind I took stock of the tools I had amassed over the 6 years that I have been living in my own home. They consisted of a claw hammer, junior hacksaw, two C-clamps, a portable work table, a hobby knife, some sand paper and wood glue. How sad is that? Especially when I own up and tell you I’ve recently worked out that the hacksaw blade is meant for cutting metal. Pathetic really but I still managed to trim the trunk of the Christmas tree every year with that tiny blunted hacksaw and judicious use of the claw hammer as a ‘trunk destroyer’.
This situation clearly needed to be rectified before commencing on the new projects. Accepting that it is wisest to buy new tools only as and when they are needed I produced a design for an introductory project based around a 9x70mm pine plank from Focus. It’s a tissue box. This is my draft for it.
I then mentally rehearsed the project and decided on the tools I would need. For marking out I knew I would at least need a try square. Almost all cuts appear to be across grain so a decent cross cut saw would be needed. The opening for the tissues might be decorative so perhaps a coping saw too. I would use one of Miss. Robinson’s old belts as a cramp for the box during glue up and a sanding block with various grades of sandpaper would be required to get a good finish.
I made the assumption that the plank would be planed all round and therefore wouldn’t require any planing to true it up. How wrong I was, but more on that in a minute. I went out and bought the plank of pine, an engineer’s try square conforming to BS 939, a beech wood mallet and a bottle of boiled linseed oil with the intention of soaking my mallet in it (something I read on the internet). The mallet isn’t necessary for this project but I figured I would get it anyway.
Having acquired the affliction known as “beautiful tool envy” by looking at some of the pretty but expensive saws available on the internet and being completely disgusted by B&Q’s offerings I ordered one of the cheaper Lynx brand gent’s saws from Flinn Garlick Saws. An alright deal for a new saw that I can resharpen I think. It doesn’t have the mirror finish of the more expensive offerings but I sorted that out with a bit of 1200 wet and dry, lots of elbow grease and brasso. The brass on my saw is now near enough mirror finish so I can admire myself in it while I cut wood in the future. Haha. Later I’ll probably upgrade the handle too as I am not satisfied with the factory finish. That is for another posting though…
Once I had all the tools and wood together I set about measuring and marking up. Straight away I noticed a rather extreme cupping in the plank of wood. The advice on the internet is to plane the board true and flat again but planes are expensive for a newbie so I decided to continue anyway and take what comes. I’m sure many will recognize that this was not a wise decision. I managed to cut all four sides and associated cuts for the joints quite accurately but the cupping came back to bite me when my joints wouldn’t fit properly. A bit of sanding in the joints roughly sorted that out and I cramped the whole lot up with Miss. Robinson’s old belt. The belt worked well and the next morning I ran downstairs to find a very nicely glued up framework.
It was time to turn my attention to the top of the box. The 70mm plank isn’t wide enough for the top of this design so I started researching how to join planks to form wider panels. Oh dear, those expensive planes were recommended again to sort out the cup in the wood and to true the edges before joining the planks. I was desperate to get on with the project and headed back out to Focus. £7.19 total for a smoothing and a block plane! This deal seemed so good it blinded me to common sense. I hurried the planes home and immediately the problems started. There was no way to fine tune the position of the blade other than by moving it with my hands. An hour or so later and plenty of butchered wood in my wake I had the planes working. By that I mean I could hack of a chunk just thin enough that it curled just like the shavings I’ve seen more experienced wood workers produce with their planes but was probably thousands of times thicker. To my surprise I managed to get the edges of two bits of pine straight enough to joint and glued them up to form the top. Looking around for things to do while I waited for the glue to set I decided to try and get the corners of my box razor sharp and then chamfered using the block plane. Well, I couldn’t push the plane across the face so I forced it and it dug in. My box sides now looked like I had used a cheese grater on them. Angry at myself I tried again with a bit more force and every joint on the box broke apart. I was so annoyed, I took those planes straight back to Focus the very next morning for a refund.
There are so many lessons here. You get what you pay for. The right tool for the job. Always true up your wood before working with it. Patience is a virtue and gluing end grain to anything does not a strong joint make! I am sure the more experienced here could point out many more.
To try and salvage at least some of a bad situation I decided to try a different approach and created a rough miter cutting jig out of scrap. Then I cut miters into the now separated sides and joined them up that way. It turned out really rough to say the least. Not exactly the invisible miter joints that I had hoped for but I am sure you can see this in the picture.
I looked up the proper way to do miters and it seems I should use a plane along with a shooting board to make them really accurate. The planes again! They are starting to haunt my dreams. Unfortunately because I’ve changed the type of joint and in so doing had to saw off the old joints the internal dimensions of the box are no longer suitable for holding tissues and the cheese grated wood is horribly disfigured. So now I have a badly constructed frame of a cheese grated box with nothing to show for it but experience
So then. Here I am, asking to borrow some of your hard earned experience. I want to attempt this project again and Miss. Robinson has OK’d a mild spend on a plane or two perhaps from Ray Iles’ Old Tool Store as their soles are reground flat. I’ve said that I would attempt to build my own planes from wood in future but needed these planes in the very least before I could even do that. Luckily the recursive nature of this problem was not lost on her. I would be interested to know what planes are the correct types to use to get rid of cupping and for truing up wood as well as for joining edges to form wider boards. On the subject of shooting boards does anyone know of plans or even pictures on the internet of shooting boards that will help me make better miter joints? Miter joints sound easier to me than dovetails or the sort of box joints I originally tried. Am I correct in thinking miters are alright as a beginner joint for the corners of a small box? Perhaps I am wrong in thinking a box at all is a newbie project. Is there any sense in a newbie attempting to make his own wooden planes?
My humblest apologies for the extremely wordy post but I thought more context and a bit of story might make what must be a very common request for advice a bit more interesting. Perhaps other newbies will see a bit of themselves in this story too.
All the best,
HeathRobinson
PS. Is it because I am a new user that my pictures won't show?
As our home is small and lacking in storage we are talking about shelving and boxes to start with. However, on the other end of the scale we have aspirations to make things like a custom sofa bed, some custom trellis work to pretty up the tiny garden and, my personal favorite, a display cabinet come side board come – are you sitting tightly? – woodworking bench. Yes that’s right, the only space I have to work in is the lounge so multi use design and hand tools are the way to go for me. Miss. Robinson is fine with a side board that is also used as a bench so long as it’s designed so that the crockery doesn’t get damaged. I love her very much! Hehehe
With all this in mind I took stock of the tools I had amassed over the 6 years that I have been living in my own home. They consisted of a claw hammer, junior hacksaw, two C-clamps, a portable work table, a hobby knife, some sand paper and wood glue. How sad is that? Especially when I own up and tell you I’ve recently worked out that the hacksaw blade is meant for cutting metal. Pathetic really but I still managed to trim the trunk of the Christmas tree every year with that tiny blunted hacksaw and judicious use of the claw hammer as a ‘trunk destroyer’.
This situation clearly needed to be rectified before commencing on the new projects. Accepting that it is wisest to buy new tools only as and when they are needed I produced a design for an introductory project based around a 9x70mm pine plank from Focus. It’s a tissue box. This is my draft for it.
I then mentally rehearsed the project and decided on the tools I would need. For marking out I knew I would at least need a try square. Almost all cuts appear to be across grain so a decent cross cut saw would be needed. The opening for the tissues might be decorative so perhaps a coping saw too. I would use one of Miss. Robinson’s old belts as a cramp for the box during glue up and a sanding block with various grades of sandpaper would be required to get a good finish.
I made the assumption that the plank would be planed all round and therefore wouldn’t require any planing to true it up. How wrong I was, but more on that in a minute. I went out and bought the plank of pine, an engineer’s try square conforming to BS 939, a beech wood mallet and a bottle of boiled linseed oil with the intention of soaking my mallet in it (something I read on the internet). The mallet isn’t necessary for this project but I figured I would get it anyway.
Having acquired the affliction known as “beautiful tool envy” by looking at some of the pretty but expensive saws available on the internet and being completely disgusted by B&Q’s offerings I ordered one of the cheaper Lynx brand gent’s saws from Flinn Garlick Saws. An alright deal for a new saw that I can resharpen I think. It doesn’t have the mirror finish of the more expensive offerings but I sorted that out with a bit of 1200 wet and dry, lots of elbow grease and brasso. The brass on my saw is now near enough mirror finish so I can admire myself in it while I cut wood in the future. Haha. Later I’ll probably upgrade the handle too as I am not satisfied with the factory finish. That is for another posting though…
Once I had all the tools and wood together I set about measuring and marking up. Straight away I noticed a rather extreme cupping in the plank of wood. The advice on the internet is to plane the board true and flat again but planes are expensive for a newbie so I decided to continue anyway and take what comes. I’m sure many will recognize that this was not a wise decision. I managed to cut all four sides and associated cuts for the joints quite accurately but the cupping came back to bite me when my joints wouldn’t fit properly. A bit of sanding in the joints roughly sorted that out and I cramped the whole lot up with Miss. Robinson’s old belt. The belt worked well and the next morning I ran downstairs to find a very nicely glued up framework.
It was time to turn my attention to the top of the box. The 70mm plank isn’t wide enough for the top of this design so I started researching how to join planks to form wider panels. Oh dear, those expensive planes were recommended again to sort out the cup in the wood and to true the edges before joining the planks. I was desperate to get on with the project and headed back out to Focus. £7.19 total for a smoothing and a block plane! This deal seemed so good it blinded me to common sense. I hurried the planes home and immediately the problems started. There was no way to fine tune the position of the blade other than by moving it with my hands. An hour or so later and plenty of butchered wood in my wake I had the planes working. By that I mean I could hack of a chunk just thin enough that it curled just like the shavings I’ve seen more experienced wood workers produce with their planes but was probably thousands of times thicker. To my surprise I managed to get the edges of two bits of pine straight enough to joint and glued them up to form the top. Looking around for things to do while I waited for the glue to set I decided to try and get the corners of my box razor sharp and then chamfered using the block plane. Well, I couldn’t push the plane across the face so I forced it and it dug in. My box sides now looked like I had used a cheese grater on them. Angry at myself I tried again with a bit more force and every joint on the box broke apart. I was so annoyed, I took those planes straight back to Focus the very next morning for a refund.
There are so many lessons here. You get what you pay for. The right tool for the job. Always true up your wood before working with it. Patience is a virtue and gluing end grain to anything does not a strong joint make! I am sure the more experienced here could point out many more.
To try and salvage at least some of a bad situation I decided to try a different approach and created a rough miter cutting jig out of scrap. Then I cut miters into the now separated sides and joined them up that way. It turned out really rough to say the least. Not exactly the invisible miter joints that I had hoped for but I am sure you can see this in the picture.
I looked up the proper way to do miters and it seems I should use a plane along with a shooting board to make them really accurate. The planes again! They are starting to haunt my dreams. Unfortunately because I’ve changed the type of joint and in so doing had to saw off the old joints the internal dimensions of the box are no longer suitable for holding tissues and the cheese grated wood is horribly disfigured. So now I have a badly constructed frame of a cheese grated box with nothing to show for it but experience
So then. Here I am, asking to borrow some of your hard earned experience. I want to attempt this project again and Miss. Robinson has OK’d a mild spend on a plane or two perhaps from Ray Iles’ Old Tool Store as their soles are reground flat. I’ve said that I would attempt to build my own planes from wood in future but needed these planes in the very least before I could even do that. Luckily the recursive nature of this problem was not lost on her. I would be interested to know what planes are the correct types to use to get rid of cupping and for truing up wood as well as for joining edges to form wider boards. On the subject of shooting boards does anyone know of plans or even pictures on the internet of shooting boards that will help me make better miter joints? Miter joints sound easier to me than dovetails or the sort of box joints I originally tried. Am I correct in thinking miters are alright as a beginner joint for the corners of a small box? Perhaps I am wrong in thinking a box at all is a newbie project. Is there any sense in a newbie attempting to make his own wooden planes?
My humblest apologies for the extremely wordy post but I thought more context and a bit of story might make what must be a very common request for advice a bit more interesting. Perhaps other newbies will see a bit of themselves in this story too.
All the best,
HeathRobinson
PS. Is it because I am a new user that my pictures won't show?
