MVFlaim Furnituremaker

So the final days of building the Shaker tables are here. After building the legs and mortising the sides, I focused my attention to the tops. Made from Curly Cherry the tops will be the focal point of the tables. I glued the tops up to 16" wide x 18" long and smoothed them with a smoothing plane. I used story stick to gauge my progress to make sure the tops were perfectly flat.

Story sticks are nothing more than two pieces of wood with contrasting wood on top. You sight down the piece you're planing to see if the two stick are nonparallel. If they are parallel then you know your piece is flat. It's a trick that woodworkers have been using for centuries. I wanted to plane the tops instead of using sandpaper so that when you rub your hand over top of it, you can feel the slight variations that the plane blade has made letting you know that the tables were hand made. It's the little details like this that sets my furniture apart from big furniture manufacturers.

When I finished planing the tops, I flipped them over and routed a 45 degree chamfer to the underside. This will give the table a lighter look.

After the tables were built, I started to mill out the lumber for the drawers. I used 1/2" thick soft maple for the sides and routed a 1/4" groove a 1/2" up from the bottom on all of the pieces. Then I laid out half blind dovetails and hand cut them with a dovetail saw and a set of chisels. Hand cut dovetails don't look as perfect as ones that are cut with router and dovetail jig but that's the point. I want the drawers to look like were down by hand and the slightest imperfections in size will catch the human eye.

Once the joinery was cut on all four drawers I dry fit them to make sure they are square. It's a lot easier to spend time now making drawers square than to try to custom fit a rhombus shaped drawer into a square drawer opening.

The final process in building the tables were to install drawer runners and cleats to hold down the top. Now it's off to the finishing room where I applied five coats of an oil - polyurethane and finalized the top with paraffin oil and 600 grit sandpaper. The inside of the drawers were coated with two coats of shellac so that the drawer won't have an odor when you open it.

Four completed shaker tables. The hand cut dovetails and the branding of my logo on the side adds a touch of class.

Posted by mvflaim at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

After I got all my parts milled out I needed to cut the tapers on the legs. I whipped up a tapering jig from a scrap piece of plywood. Making the jig was a cinch. All I had to do is figure out where I wanted the taper to start on the leg (6" from the top) and where it would end (3/4" thick foot). Then I nailed strips of thin plywood around the leg to hold it in place.

I slid the jig over on the table saw so that the blade barely touches the pencil line to start the cut. Then I ripped the piece off and flipped the leg 90 degrees to taper the other side. Once all the legs were tapered, I gathered them all up in sets of fours and taped them together. That way  I wouldn't be confused which direction they go.

After I got down with the tapering, I planed them smooth and beaded the straight edge on each leg with my Stanley No 66 beading plane. The bead also helped me identified which side of the leg gets the mortise. It got really confusing sometimes but once I marked the proper location of each leg it became a lot simpler.

I used loose mortise and tenon joinery and cut my mortises with a Beadlock joinery jig. I'm not going to waste your time about how I actually cut the mortises because I found the jig to be a piece of shit. It was difficult to align the mortises with each other and I was constantly fiddling around with the jig to make the joint work. Next time I make these tables I'll find another way to make the mortise and tenons.

Once all the joints were cut, I dry fitted the three sides together and laid out where the top and bottom front rails would go for the drawer.

The top of the front rail is cut with a simple dovetail joint while the bottom is a small mortise and tenon. Both were cut using hand tools and they are very simple joints to make. I drilled out the pin part of the dovetail and the mortise using a 5/8" Forster bit. each joint took about five minutes to complete.

After everything was dry fitted, I glued and clamped each table together. I let them sit in clamps over night to make sure the glue sets. I'll work on the tops next.

Posted by mvflaim at 05:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Today I went down to Paxton Lumber to pick up some cherry to make a few end tables. I plan on selling these tables as pairs on Etsy in the coming weeks to see if I can drum up some extra sales. I bought 10 bt ft of 1 3/4" thick cherry to mill out the legs, 10 bd ft of curly cherry to use as the tops, 15 bt ft of regular cherry to mill out the sides and 8 bd ft of 1/2" soft maple to use for the drawers.

I started out milling the legs by ripping the 1 3/4" stock down to 1 1/2" square on the table saw. Then I finalized the cut with my Stanley No 8 jointer plane to achieve a smooth surface. Tomorrow I make a tapering jig so that I can taper two sides of each leg.

I took care to select the best grain for the top and front of the drawers. I want both to have striking grain to enhance the character of each table so I opted for curly cherry. I will apply four coats of a ploy tung oil finish that will pop out the grain when finished.

Cherry often has lighter colored sap wood on the sides of the board. I examined all the boards and cut off any sap wood and replaced it by gluing in heart wood in it's place. I spent about four hours milling up the wood for four tables and had a huge pile of wood shavings when I was down.

Tomorrow I'll taper the legs, plane the tops flat and start mortising the sides and legs for mortise and tenon joinery.

Posted by mvflaim at 06:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I always liked the idea of having a shaving horse. A few years back I built a set of windsor dining chairs and shaved the spindles with my draw knife and spokeshaves. Back then I didn't have a shaving horse so I ended up using my woodworking vise to get the job done. While the vise worked, I knew that using a shaving horse would be a lot more comfortable and a lot more fun. I've seen shaving horses for sale on different websites but the problem was that they were over $500 a piece. I knew that wasn't going to fly so I had to make my own.

Then one day I ran across an article Brian Boggs did for Fine Woodworking. The shaving horse he made was simple and straight forward to make. Right then I knew I had my plans. The one problem that I saw was that he used 2" thick material to make his. I wasn't about to splurge big money on 2" thick ash or maple so I decided to make mine out of good ole southern yellow pine.

I went to Lowes and picked out two pieces of 2x10x8's that were as clean as possible without any knots. Total cost was $14.73. While Fine Woodworking showed "plans" for the horse, they weren't exactly what one would call plans. They didn't go into great detail about how to actually build the horse and a lot of detailed measurements weren't even given. So I just eyeballed where I thought edges should be and built the horse as close as possible to Brian's. 

Building the horse wasn't complicated at all and it only took me a weekend to make. I milled the body out, shaped the back legs and made an extra long front leg. The nice thing about using a 2x10 is that you can cut both back legs out of one piece that's 21"long. Once the back legs were installed, I leveled them with a compass and shaped the feet so they would sit flat on the floor. Then I took the front leg and leveled the horse, marked where the top of the leg ends and trimmed it flushed.

The only caveat of using 1 1/2" stock as opposed to full 2" stock is that the head becomes narrower. Brian's bench head is 5 1/2" wide due to the fact that he had three 2" wide boards glued together. My bench head could only be 4 1/4" wide due to three 1 1/2" pieces glued together. Fortunately I don't think that's a big concern due to the fact that mostly what I'll be shaving are spindles.

The one thing I did differently from the plan was that Brian used a bicycle tire tube to act as a spring for the key. I didn't have an old tube lying around and didn't feel like buying a new one so I ended up using a big fat rubber band instead. While it works, I'm sure the tire tube would work much better since it would have more spring to it.

I also just shaped the seat using a chair shave and spoke shave then sanded it smooth with a random orbital sander. Brian wrapped his with leather which gives his horse a real nice look. I did however glue a piece of leather onto one side of the hold down bar so that the horse would grip the stock better.

All in all I''m very happy the way the horse turned out and I can even take it apart for storage or to travel with. Now I just need to find me some fresh cut logs to make a chair.

Posted by mvflaim at 01:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (42) | TrackBacks (0)