"Dad, I want to build a box."

"And I want to use dovetails." Brings a tear to my eye! What more proud moment for a father?

My daughter Shelby, a senior in high school, wanted to build a box to collect submissions for the school literary magazine. She had wanted to build the school box from The Joiner and Cabinetmaker over a year ago, but I kept putting her off, busy with other projects. In this way our children's lives flash by under our noses. Cue the Harry Chapin.

At least last year I was able to help out with her boat-building project at school. My son, in contrast, after finishing his Boy Scout Eagle project building picnic tables for the town park, swore he would never pick up a tool again. I think having to supervise a half-dozen other teenaged Scouts put him over the edge.

This time I was determined to get it done. In the workshop, I pulled out some pine 1x8 and we discussed how to cut around the knots and defects. She picked one bit of interesting knotty grain that she said looked like a galaxy for the front.

The design is a cross between the school box and a mailbox, the grain running across to dovetailed sides, with a sloped top. We needed to glue up wider panels to be tall enough to hold 8 1/2x11 paper dropped in through a slot in the top.

This was the first time Shelby had really used any of these tools, so for each operation I showed her how and then let her do it. Some of the handles were a little big for her hand, but she did very well handling them.


Crosscutting the pieces from the board.


Cleaning up the edge with a Lie-Nielsen #4. That's easier to handle than a full-size jointer.


Glue-up to make wider panels.

We watched TV for a couple hours while the glue dried (our favorite father-daughter shows are Criminal Minds, The Walking Dead, and Justified, good wholesome bloody fare; she says Timothy Oliphant is hot). Then she scraped the glue lines and dimensioned the panels.


Shooting the front panel end grain with a Lie-Nielsen #7.


Planing the end grain of the two side pieces ganged together with a Veritas small bevel-up smoother.


Cutting the sloping top of the side after knifing a line and chiseling a trough to guide the saw.


Ripping the front panel to match the height of the side.


Jointing the ripped edge with a Stanley #6.

Next I had Shelby do some dovetailing practice. First is sawing practice on a piece of scrap. She's never handled a joinery saw before, so this teaches her how to control it.

I'll be showing her Paul Sellers' method for dovetailing. But first I took some of his advice and modified my dovetail saw, filing the first inch of teeth back to remove the rake, turning them into little equilateral triangles. This means they form a trailing edge to the end grain, so the cut starts much more easily.


Making a set of repeated cuts to develop the required control.

Then I started a pair of tails in some narrow scrap for her to complete and transfer to the pin board. I didn't bother measuring anything, I just wanted her to see the different steps involved.


Sawing out the waste between the tails.


Chopping down to the baseline...


...and chiseling out the final bit of waste.

She made the pin board and we put the joint together, examining how it fit. Now it was time for the real thing. I showed her how to lay them out, keeping it down to three tails to keep the number of mating surfaces down, since each one is a place where things can go wrong.

Like anyone doing their first dovetail joint on a real piece, she worked slowly and carefully. This takes an enormous amount of concentration. The guys you see online banging these out in a couple minutes? They've done a few before to get to that point.


The pressure's on! Sawing the tails.


Sawing out the waste.


Chopping down...


...and chiseling out. She did this from both sides, meeting in the middle.


After chiseling troughs all around, making a Robert Wearing/Chris Schwarz first-class cut to remove the end pin waste.


Final paring using Phil Lowe's chisel corner method to clean out the end pin space with fine precision and control.


The resulting tail board, which will be the front of the box.

I told Shelby she had some nice looking tails there. She said that was inappropriate.

Next, we'll finish off the tails on the other side of the front, then do the pins on the sides. This is quality time beyond compare.

Building A Queen Anne Foot Stool

This past Spring, I joined SAPFM, The Society Of American Period Furniture Makers. In March, 2012, the Connecticut Historical Society (CHS) in Hartford, CT, will be hosting a 6-month juried exhibition of SAPFM member work. The deadline for submitting pieces is this coming October 31.

CHS even offered to allow members controlled access to their collection to allow them to survey items to reproduce for the exhibition. I contacted Mickey Callahan, the SAPFM Exhbition Coordinator, to inquire about participating and visiting the museum. As a novice, I knew there wasn't enough time for me to tackle a complex piece, and of course as a hobbyist with limited time, scheduling a visit is difficult.

As an alternative, Mickey asked me if I knew how to make a cabriole leg, and suggested building a Queen Anne foot stool for which he had plans. That seemed like a good stepping stone project. I even have a nice stock of walnut that would be suitable, after Patrick Leach sent me an email last year about a fellow in New Hampshire who was clearing out his basement shop in preparation for selling his house; he'd had the wood for 30 years, intending to build a table. I was flattered that Patrick thought of me! He, of course, was buying up the tools.

SAPFM has recently added downloadable plans to the member section of its website, and Mickey's foot stool, his own design based on decades of experience with period furniture, is included. Last week I downloaded it and started to work. Completing it in time for the deadline will be a challenge.

In addition to the woodwork, it has an upholstered slip seat. As my reference, I'm using Don Taylor's 1989 Fine Woodworking article "Upholstering a Slip Seat" (in fact, this finally convinced me to sign up for paid FWW online access, since it's only $14.95 a year for subscribers). Mickey told me he gets his supplies from DIY Upholstery Supply, so today I ordered supplies and a set of basic upholstering tools from them. Instead of horse hair, I'm using rubberized horse hair, which Mickey uses in his slip seat upholstering class at Connecticut Valley School of Woodworking, but otherwise I'm following Taylor's instructions exactly.

I have several references for cabriole legs, all by Phil Lowe (I really like his instruction): his 1983 FWW article "Cabriole Legs", and two DVD's, Carve a Ball and Claw Foot [VHS] and Measuring Furniture for Reproduction: with Phil Lowe. The videos cover a lot more material than their titles suggest. His recent FWW article "4 Chisel Tricks" is also a good reference for both the leg shaping and the joinery work.

The first steps, as always, are stock preparation. The rail pieces were easy, but the leg pieces were some work.


Mickey's plans printed out, and the walnut stock, 4/4 for rails in front, 12/4 for legs in back.


Crosscutting the 4/4 stock to rough length.


Ripping to rough width.


Cross cutting the 12/4 stock for legs. It's not quite wide enough to rip each length into two leg blanks.


Ripping down to rough width. This is a pretty hefty rip.


The rough-cut rails and legs.

Once the pieces were rough size, the next step was to four-square them all to exact finished dimensions with the FEWTEL sequence: Face, Edge, Width, Thickness, End, Length.


Jointing the face of a rail.


Jointing the first edge.


Marking for width, referencing the fence against the jointed edge.


Taking heavy shavings to reduce the width quickly with a heavily cambered jack plane. I followed this with the jointer.


Marking all around the edges and ends for thickness.


Again, using the jack for reducing thickness quickly, followed by the jointer. This wood worked very easily along the grain even for the heaviest cut; I didn't have to plane diagonally or straight across the grain.


Periodically sighting across winding sticks to check for twist.


After using a smoother, the dressed faces and edges. This shows the planes I used, and the shavings they produced. Measured with a dial caliper, the heavy shavings from the jack are about  22 thousands of an inch for fast stock removal, the shavings from the jointer are about 5 thousandths, and the shavings from the smoother are about 2 thousandths. What's that brown line in front of the piece? That's the whisker of wood off the edge from the marking gauge; when the plane reaches the gauged line and removes the whisker, you're done.


Shooting the first end. The shooting board leaves a precisely squared end, the plane taking wispy end-grain shavings.


Cutting the other end to length. I actually cut it just a hair long, then shot that end on the shooting board as well. In addition to precise squaring, this allows you to get down to precise length, a thousandth at a time.


Reducing the width of a wider piece by ripping. This is a useful alternative when it would be too much to plane off, or the scrap is too large to waste.


Two leg blanks squared up after roughing down with scrub plane and metal and wooden jack planes. These planes all have different width irons, cambered to different radii. Each face of the wood responded a little differently, so I used whichever plane did the fastest job of stock removal. There's a lot of meat to remove here, so this is a bit of work. This thicker stock also didn't plane as easily as the thinner stuff, particular on the faces tangential to the growth rings.


Ripping off a nice thickness that would have been a lot of work to plane down.


The pieces squared up to finished dimensions.

This completes the rough work. Next will be shaping the legs and doing the joinery; that's where this project really gets interesting. Note that because of the cabriole shape, only a small portion of the leg blanks actually needs to be square and flat. That will be more apparent once they're sawn out.

(Continue to part 2)

Workshop Reorganization

Whew! After 7 weeks unemployed and storm after storm leaving me exhausted clearing snow from driveways and roofs, I was getting desperate for shop time.

Now that I'm settling into a new job, I decided to tackle something that's been nagging me for a while, a popular topic on many blogs: shop reorganization. I wanted to put away the unused power tool accessories and make my hand tools more accessible. However, I also wanted to keep it simple and not turn it into a major home-improvement project.

My current tool storage consists of pegboards on the wall, a hodge-podge of small cabinets and plastic drawers spread around the shop, and a shop-built rolling cart. My biggest complaint, as always, is lack of space and accessibility. I have to move all around the shop, open things up, and hunt around for tools. That inevitably leads to me leaving things out and piled up, which just makes finding them again harder.

After taking note of various hand tool setups I've seen in photos for the past year, I picked a couple ideas I liked. I hate the look of pegboards, plus the hooks are always falling out, so replacing them was a high priority.

I much prefer the look of wooden-walled shops, but lining entire walls with pine boards gets expensive. In the book Great Workshops from Fine Woodworking, Carl Swensson has a brief article on making modular wooden panels that can be hung from a cleat, so that offers the attractiveness of natural wood at modest cost, with a lot of flexibility. Various simple holders can be nailed to the panel and reconfigured easily.

I also wanted to make my planes easy to grab, so I'm building an angled plane till similar to the one Christian Becksvoort featured in a recent tool cabinet. Derek Cohen and Kari Hultman also have similar tills.

My guiding design principles are pretty simple: have everything out where I can see it, and place tools at roughly arm height just a couple steps to the side of my bench. And no horizontal surfaces where I might be tempted to pile things up!

That way I can put my hand out and grab something quickly, and just as easily put it back in its proper place. The angled plane till will hold the planes in approximately the proper orientation for use, so I don't have to pull them out at some awkward angle and twist my wrist around. Just grab and go.

Laying out the plane till first on a quarter sheet of plywood. Allowing for 1/2" dividers and an extra margin a little over 1/4" per plane, this comes out to 24" wide by 24" tall. Now I know how much space it'll take up.

Swensson's panels require anchoring cleats securely to the wall. However, my basement shop has solid concrete walls and floor, so attaching anything to them is difficult. The simple solution I used for my original pegboards was to hang half-length 2x3 studs from the exposed floor joists overhead with screws, and secure the pegboards to those.

For these panels, which I expect to hold more weight, I used full-length studs, wedged at the floor for rigidity. A fancier option would be to build a proper stud frame with top and bottom plate and secure it to the bottom of the joists as a curtain wall.


The studs in place against the concrete wall, with a 1x2 cleat mounted level across them.


Detail showing the sophisticated method for screwing the stud tops to the floor joists.


Detail showing the even more sophisticated method for wedging the stud bottoms against the floor. The wedges are ripped from the end of a stud scrap.

Swensson's panels are glued up to 24" widths, with a French cleat across the top edge. In order to be able to screw mine directly to the studs, I made them about 32" wide, with 1x3 cleats across the middle like fence sections. With studs on 16" centers, each panel spans two of them.


One panel built up, made from cheap home-center 1x8 pine, complete with authentic twist, warp, and cup. The boards are edge-glued, with cleats securely screwed across the back. Other than jointing the edges for a secure bond, I left them as is, no attempt to clean them up; I like the rustic look. You may prefer a more finished appearance.

The panel top cleat hangs on the stud cleat. This is more for ease of mounting single-handed than for permanent support, like hanging cabinets. One side or the other can be shimmed to get a close fit between panels before putting in four heavy screws through panel front, back cleat, and stud.


Squaring up a panel to fit against its neighbor.

Three panels hung on the studs. This gives me plenty of room for hanging tools, and there's room to add another on the right.

It took me three tries to decide on the mounting height, experimenting with one panel. I started flush with the top of the wall, but that looked too high. Then I tried down a foot, and that looked too low. This ended up looking just right, with my eye line 18" down the 48"-high panels. In addition to being pleasing to the eye, that puts everything within easy reach without having to stretch or stoop.


The assembed rack for the plane till, 1/2"x3/4" borders and dividers screwed to a 1/2" plywood base. The borders are also glued, but the dividers just have two screws to allow easy rearrangement.

The rack of the plane till will sit at an angle in a simple shelf unit. The unit will have upper and lower shelves for wooden molding planes, and will be mounted on the second wall panel. At that position, it will be directly to my right as I work. Two steps to the right, grab a plane, two steps to the left back to the bench.

I experimented with the loaded rack at different angles to see how shallow I could make it. At a comfortable 60 degrees, it extends out 12". At higher angles, the larger shoulder plane starts looking a little unstable. I've seen setups with planes mounted vertically, but they always require additional cleats or latches to hold the planes in place, which is something that slows down access, violating my design principle.

(Continue to part 2)

Making A Cutting Gauge

The finished gauge. I should probably chamfer the ends of the arm a bit.

Bob Rozaieski recently did a very nice video blog post on making Dean Jansa's marking gauge from the December, 2006 issue of Popular Woodworking. I remembered wanting to build that gauge then; this finally gave me the kick to do it, so I dug out my old copy.

However, I ended up making one change. The original was a pin marking gauge based on one in the Seaton chest, but I turned it into a cutting gauge instead, for several reasons.

The first was watching Steve Brown of the North Bennet Street School on an epsiode of Rough Cut, where he and Tommy Mac built a "Shaker-inspired night stand." Steve marked out the leg mortises with a cutting gauge, and it was beautiful to see how smoothly the gauge flowed along the wood as he pulled it. He also had a particular way of holding it that I'll come back to.

Second, in Ian Kirby's The Complete Dovetail, he strongly recommends a cutting gauge rather than a pin gauge, due to the clean cut line. He pushes it, using an overhand grip.

Finally, I met Matt Kenney, Fine Woodworking associate editor, at the Lie-Nielsen hand tool event at Phil Lowe's Furniture Institute of Massachusetts last Friday, after I had already started making my gauge. He had a bench setup with grooving planes, gauges, and bench appliances, all of which he had made. His gauges were cutting style, and he said he made the cutters from sabre saw blades with the teeth ground off. As I was admiring them, I decided to adapt the one I had in progress to a cutter.

So yes, it took inspiration from five people to get me to make this gauge.

This is a good project for using up scraps. I had a few small scraps of mahogany, so used those. Mahogany probably isn't the greatest wood for a gauge due its relative softness, but as I started working it I was reminded once again what a fabulous material it is. It works like butter.


Ripping the piece for the head.


Final smoothing to width with a #4.


Resawing to thickness. The waste will provide the wedge stock.


Chopping out the tapered wedge mortise.


Final cleanup of the mortise with a plane float (which is meant for a different kind of wedge mortise, but it's the same operation).


Chopping the arm mortise. I didn't have a 5/8" chisel, so I did it with a 3/8".


Ripping out the arm piece.


Final very careful smoothing of the arm. I still managed to get it a little too thin, so there's gappage in the mortise, but the wedge locks it tight.


Grinding the teeth off a sabre saw blade. I sanded the paint off the sides, put a round profile on the end per Kirby's recommendation, and sharpened it up on oilstones.


Mortising the arm for the cutter and wedge. This is getting pretty delicate, so the machinist's parallel clamp prevents splitting.


After hogging off most of the waste with a chisel, tapering the wedge by running it over the bottom of the #4. Just watch those fingertips!


Final delicate paring on the bench hook to shape the wedge with a little finial at the end.


Roughing out the curve on the head with a chisel.


Final shaping with a cheap four-in-hand rasp. The file card on the bench is necessary to clean out the dust in the rasp's teeth periodically.


Last step before wedging it up is to pare down the bevel on the bottom edge of the head.

I may have to remake the arm wedge. I ended up paring it down a little too much, so when I push it in to lock the arm, the wedge goes almost all the way into the head. When I loosen it, the finial is too small to keep the wedge in the head; it can fall out if I'm not careful.

Now, back to the way Steve Brown used the gauge. He held it in an underhand grip, thumb on top, the arm between first and second fingers. The fingers curl around the bottom bevel.


Marking out on some scrap for practice. Smooth!

This is very comfortable, but more importantly, as you draw it back along the wood, your fingertips press the bottom bevel against the side face of the work, while your thumb presses the gauge down on the top face. This gives very smooth control, even if the grain tries to carry the gauge off course. With a sharp cutter, the result is a crisp clean line. Very subtle, but very effective.

I tried it with the bevel on the cutter oriented both ways, toward the head and away. It works best with the bevel facing the head, due to the wedging action of the bevel drawing the head against the work. That's good for rabbets, fillisters, dovetail baselines, and tenon shoulders. However, for mortise outlines, bevel away from the head is better. Depending on the operation, put it on the waste side of the line, leaving a flat cut on the good side.

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