Carl Stammerjohn Furnituremaker
Custom furniture handcrafted in Southern California
You are currently browsing the monthly archive for May 2009.
I have received some questions from my students regarding how my top attachment system works. I know my description in the previous post was a little hard to understand, so I made a cut-away mockup of the setup.
This photo should clarify any issues. Please comment if you have other questions.
Tags: top attach
There are lots of ways to attach a table top: cleats, buttons, figure-eights, pocket screws, Z-clips. All work with varying degrees of elegance and effectiveness. But none of them will work for my hall table; with the exception of the pocket screws, they all incorporate parts that would interfere with the drawer or would be visible from the exterior of the table. I suppose some version of pocket screws would work, but that just occurred to me right now as I’m writing this…
I mentioned previously that one option would be to use a method similar to the frog attachment on a Stanley Bedrock plane (or Lie-Nielsen). After lots of thought, I decided to go this route. It appealed to my engineer brain; it was functional, elegant, and challenging.
The pins are 3/4″ brass, turned on my Jet mini-lathe. The brass mills surprisingly easily with standard turning tools. I located and drilled 7/8″ holes in the base, then made a locating pin using dowel stock and a dowel center. The table top was already located via two 1/4″ dowels, so I installed the locating-pin/dowel-center in one of the 7/8″ holes, mounted the top on the 1/4″ dowels, pressed down so the dowel center did its thing, then repeated three more times with the locating pin in each hole.
I then mounted the brass pins using #10 screws, installed the top, and marked the pins with the locking screws (#8 x 2″ Spax screws) to get the correct height of the groove in the brass pins. The pins were put back in the lathe and a groove was turned with my parting tool. Each groove was located slightly off center from its locking screw in order to provide some hold-down force.
I hope that all makes sense…
Some photos:
The bottom photo show the little jig I made to drill the lock screw holes. It worked great; all the grooves into which the lock screws protruded were at almost identical heights.
When I put the whole thing together, it works great. The top feels very solid and is right where I want it. I emphasize “right where I want it” because the other option I looked at was using keyhole hangers. They would have worked, but I was concerned about the lack of a fixed location and getting them all equally tight.
Despite the extra work, I’m very happy with how it came out.
Tags: top attach
Just a quick post to say that my hall table has been accepted into the Design in Wood exhibition at the San Diego County Fair.
If you’re anywhere near San Diego between June 12 and July 5, you shouldn’t miss this show. To quote from their site: ”Described as ‘the biggest and best woodworking exhibition in the country’ by the editor of Fine Woodworking magazine, the international Design in Wood Exhibition now averages over 300 entries.”
Highly recommended!
Handles have alwasy been a challenge to me. The problem is, I can’t just go out and find some nice handles at Lee Valley Hardware or Whitechapel Ltd. I have to make them, and it’s never easy finding the right shape to complement the piece.
My mockup, because it was made of nondescript MDF and baltic birch, had no grain. That’s typical of how you make a mockup; you don’t want the grain to take away or distract from the form. But once the table came together, the grain on the doors changed things significantly. I suspected early on that my round handles weren’t going to work. But I forged ahead.
They were made by turning them on a lathe, veneering (iron-on technique, as described by Mike Burton), then cutting them in half. I used a Japanese saw to cut them, minimizing the kerf. I then trued up the cut edge on my disc sander.
I don’t have a photo of them installed, but trust me when I say they look like someone played “Pin the pig-nose on the hall table.” The beautiful grain on the doors was broken up by the shape of the handles. When I showed them to my wife, she was speechless for about ten seconds. That pause is always a sure sign that something is amiss.
I considered my options. Perhaps, I wouldn’t even use handles; because of the door design, the doors could be opened by pushing on their outer edges. Workable, but I didn’t like it.
After some trial and error, I came up with handles that were about at unobtrusive as I could imagine, but still functional.
They are slightly undercut on their outer edges, just enough to open the doors. Tenons, 3/16″ thick, are used to mount them. I would have mounted them higher, but the grain on the doors has a slight hourglass shape just above where the handles are mounted. Mounting the handles in the middle of the hourglass looked incongruous, and moving them above the shape placed them too high.
When the photo was taken, the table wasn’t quite complete. I had to get a picture, though, in order to enter the Design in Wood competition. I’ll take some better pics when the finish is fully applied.
Tags: handles
I have a pretty good handle on finishing, at least as far as hand-rubbed finishes go. I even received an award for the finishing on a piece in 2002. The finish was shellac and wax, which on a hard wood like shedua is really beautiful.
But we all make mistakes, especially when we get in a hurry. In my haste to get the hall table completed in time to make the Design in Wood entry deadline of May 1, I goofed. The doors, which are MDF panels with applied sawn veneers, had been sanded on a wide-belt sander to get rid of some minor tearout. They were dead flat, but had relatively large sanding scratches in them.
I carefully sanded them, using a random orbital sander, starting with 120 grit and working up to 320. I then applied a coat of oil/varnish blend (one part tung oil, one part polyurethane, one part mineral spirits). The next morning, I took a look at them and noticed an area, about 2″ in diameter, that was a little darker than the surrounding area. (Insert a few choice words here). Big scratches…
That was last Saturday. I knew I had to resand. A little voice in the back of my head said, “You should resand both doors – they may not look the same after re-sanding only one.” But I ignored that little voice, and I paid the price.
It went something like this: resand one door, reapply OV blend (looked really bad); resand both doors, reapply OV blend (didn’t look like the rest of the project); resand both doors to remove all finish and get back down to raw wood, reapply OV blend (finally got it). I’m leaving out all the painful details: removing as much of the finish as possible prior to sanding with mineral spirits, uncured oil clogging numerous sanding discs, hours of time and energy which could have been spent on making handles (more on that later).
I knew better. I would have told a student the correct thing to do in the same situation. I was in a hurry and thought I might get away with it.
Lesson 1: Slow down.
Lesson 2: Listen to that little voice.
Tags: sanding