Wood-fired!

Making a tea caddy

An earlier post showed the tea caddies I made for Xmas presents. This post describes some of the techniques used.

The cross section shows the overall construction. The lid and base are made as floating panels to allow for movement of the wood. The main feature is the use of an insert to create the flange for holding the lid in place.

The project started when I tried to find a way to use some very highly rippled eucalypt. This is difficult to machine - or indeed to hand plane - and is so striking that it asks to be used as a highlight rather than the main timber. I decided to try harness the strong linear figure by quartering it and arranging the ripples in a square. The wood was thicknessed to about 2.5mm using a drum sander¹.

Four quarters of a square were cut on a bandsaw with the ripple running slightly off parallel to the outside edge (the hypotenuse). These were squared up on the shooting board, glued and held together with my favourite clamp - blue painter’s tape. The completed lid was then sanded to about 2mm. Because the lid was so thin it could be fitted directly into a 2mm slot in the walls of the box. No rebate was necessary.

The base was constructed in the same way but using 5mm padauk. The edges were rebated to fit the 2mm slot.

The box walls were made from 8mm padauk stock. The edges were mitred roughly on the table saw and then hand-planed using my mitring jig. The 2mm slots were routed at the top and bottom to accommodate the lid and base.

Glue-up starts by laying out the sides on the blue clamping tape. The top and base are inserted as the mitres are glued and the box sides effectively rolled up.
Additional tape is stretched around the box to pull the mitres tight.

Once the box is dry, the tape is removed and the four faces cleaned up with a plane. The box is then cut in two on the bandsaw. Notice the tape used internally to prevent the glue from marring the inside faces. Once this is removed the sawn edges are planed smooth and flat.

The pic at right shows the lid and base reconnected after the join is tidied up. With a tiny amount of pressure from the cute clamps, the join is effectively invisible. The black dot shows where the lid joins the base.

A 4×4mm deep rebate was cut into the outside edge of where the lid and base meet as shown in the cross-section. An 8×4mm (plus a little to allow for cleanup) piece of the same rippled eucalypt was cut to fill the rebate. The piece is oriented so that the grain and ripple direction match the lid as if they were continuous. This provides a side view of the ripple where you can see the waves of grain direction. (Check out the side view in the cross-section image at top and the finished box at the end.)

The inserts are mitred and glued into the rebate in the base of the tea caddy. Blue clamps are used again.

The lid is tuned so that it slides easily but firmly into the insert. The insert is then planed flush with the base and lid.

A 5mm mother-of-pearl dot was inlaid on the base and the lid to show the correct orientation of the lid. The boxes were finished on the outside only with nitrocellulose lacquer rubbed back to about 6000 grit.

1. This is a classic role for a drum sander. The ripple is caused by waves in the grain direction. This means that there is no direction in which you can plane with the grain. Even with a super sharp blade and a high blade angle, it is near impossible to plane without some tear-out [↩]

4 comments January 31st, 2009

Benny’s pencils

Our step-grandson Ben turned 21 today (Happy Australia Day everyone!). He’s about to start a uni course in graphic design so I made him a simple pencil box in Paduak that holds 14 sketching pencils of various grades.


This is a straight forward lidded box with inner fillets to retain the lid. I tried a little letter (or in this case numeral) carving using the techniques described by the Village Carpenter.

As a big fan of rhythm and repetition in design I couldn’t go past a few photos of these wonderful pencils!

5 comments January 26th, 2009

Stations of the Block

This blog is largely about my passions. One of the stations of my passion that I haven’t covered yet is wood-block printing (and linocut and wood-engraving). The print above is one of my favourite linocuts. It is one of the set of glorious Christmas Cards produced by Eric Thake between 1948 and 1977. This delightful visual pun was produced the year before the Sydney Opera House was opened.

The image at left is one of my meagre contributions to this fine genre. It is the bookplate we use at home (when we get around to it which isn’t that often). As you can see it was designed with my cookbook collection (120+) in mind.

I find it hard to explain (even to myself) why I am so enthralled by black and white prints - often made with relatively crude cuts into wood or lino. I don’t know whether it’s the sense of immediacy or honesty or low-tech accessibility or something more primal. But they never fail to thrill me.

I’ve had the above image on my computer for many years and no longer know where it came from. It exudes a confidence in life’s bounty that may now be misplaced - much like the provenance of this image.

This linocut was exhibited at the National Gallery of Australia in 1994. It shows a wonderful array of the textures that this medium allows. I love the organic rhythm in the background.

Not exactly a print but in the same style is this logo used as a giant protest banner and a bumper sticker. It was designed by my friends Michael and Christine during a successful campaign to prevent the establishment of a charcoal factory in the small town of Mogo on the south-east coast of Australia.

This is a gorgeous example of wood engraving by a favourite artist, Lionel Lindsay (brother of the more widely known Norman Lindsay).

4 comments January 14th, 2009

Wholesome chicken pie

No fancy food photography here! Just a recommendation for a tasty and satisfying pie.

This is a very old favourite from the days of struggling to put food on the table when my partner and I were both studying and the kids had big appetites. We’ve revisited this many, many times over the years and have recently rediscovered its wholesome silkiness.

The chicken and veggies are in a velvety velouté sauce. Something magic happens between the flavours of the chook, the sauce and the veggies - especially the carrot and mushrooms.

You can vary the veggies a bit - I have used parsnip and other root veggies. It is essential though to have the beans, carrots and mushrooms.

Homestead Chicken Pie

Serves 6.

250 g (1 quantity) rough puff or shortcrust pastry

Filling:
1/2 cup diced carrot
1/2 cup diced potato
1/2 cup diced turnip
1/2 cup chopped green beans
125 g (4 oz) mushrooms, sliced
60 g (2 tablespoons) butter
3 cups cooked chicken cut into bite-sized pieces
1/2 teaspoon thyme
salt
freshly ground black pepper

Velouté sauce:
1 tablespoon finely chopped onion
90 g (3 tablespoons) butter
3 tablespoons plain flour
750 ml (3 cups) chicken stock
1/4 teaspoon salt
white pepper

beaten egg for glazing

Make pastry according to recipe and chill well.

Filling: In a small pan of boiling, salted water, boil carrot, potato, turnip and green beans for 5-10 minutes, or until just tender. Drain in a colander and refresh them under running cold water. In a heavy-based frying pan, gently fry mushrooms in butter over a medium heat for 5 minutes. Place chicken in a mixing bowl and add all prepared vegetables.

Velouté sauce: Gently fry onion in the butter in a saucepan until soft but not brown. Stir in flour and cook roux over a low heat, stirring continuously, for 3 minutes. Remove saucepan from heat and pour in chicken stock. Return to heat and bring to the boil, stirring continuously. Increase heat to medium and simmer for 15 minutes. Stir in salt and pepper to taste. Pour sauce over chicken and vegetables and mix gently.

To finish pie: Place filling in a 1 litre (4 cup) oval pie dish or casserole and leave to cool. Roll pastry out on a lightly floured board to an oval shape and cover pie. Brush pastry (not flaked edges) with beaten egg. Place pie on a baking tray and bake towards the top of a hot oven at 220°C (425°F) for 20-30 minutes or until pastry is golden. Serve hot.

I’ve used a variety of pastry tops. My favourite is shortcrust but I’ve used a commercial puff pastry when feeling lazy. These pics show individual pies but I usually make one large one.

The original recipe is from a 1979 paperback called The Perfect Piebook by Anne Marshall. One of the many pie books in my library.

2 comments January 12th, 2009

A jig for a jig for a jig

My woodworking colleagues will be familiar with this scenario. You need to build a jig for a particular job. But in order to make the jig you need another jig that you haven’t built yet. In this case I had to make a third jig (albeit a trivial one) so that I could make the second jig so that I could make the jig that I needed for my job.

The job seems simple enough. I need to plane a 45° bevel along the long side of a thin board. Four such elements will make the sides of a long thin box.

Normally in box making the grain runs around the box so that the mitred edges are end-grain. So most jigs such as the one shown here are setup to plane end-grain - usually on the shorter side of the piece.

For several reasons it is difficult to mitre the long side of a board using this jig especially if the board is narrow. Two of my boards are only 25mm wide and around 200mm long.
It is difficult to register the board correctly because the end that must sit against the square fence is so short. And though it seems trivial, the effort to steady and run the plane on this jig detracts from the effort needed to manually hold the board in the correct position.

So I decided to build another add-on to my shooting board. The standard shooting board as used by most woodworkers allows the plane to run on its side on the bench. This works well as long as the side of the plane is roughly square to the sole¹.

The add-on jig will allow me to hold the board to be beveled at 45deg to the bench and run my plane on the bench with all my attention focused on holding the board in the correct orientation.

To make this add-on I needed some thick lumps of MDF cut to precise 45° angles to support the reference surface for the board to be planed. The 32mm MDF stock I found was quite small so cuttting it on my dimension saw was not going to give an accurate result. So I decided to cut it on my large bandsaw.

This is an old bandsaw with great power and accuracy but limited reference fences. I had added a good ripping fence but have no reliable arrangement for crosscutting or indeed cutting at 45°. So I needed a simple jig that I could run against the ripping fence that would hold my small piece of MDF at 45° to the blade.

This jig is also quite small and slightly tricky to cut accurately on the saw so I constructed this trivial jig to do the job safely and well. It’s pushing the definition of a jig because it’s really just a crosscut fence and a trusty magnetic clamp acting as a stop.

So I cut the jig on the table-saw. This allowed me to easily cut the wide blocks at an accurate 45°. I was then able to construct the add-on jig for my shooting board.

The shooting board jig worked quite well. I was able to accurately bevel the long edges of my boards and proceed with the project. Using the jig still requires some concentration and effort. It is not as easy as simple squaring on a shooting board but it is quite managable.

As always as soon as you have a jig you find other uses for it and wonder how you did without it. I find it very handy for putting small bevels (2 strokes of a plane) on the edges of small elements. I would normally do this with a block plane holding the piece in my vise or my hand. The jig gives a more consistent and even bevel.

1. this setup actually allows quite a deal of latitude provided the user is aware of what’s happening and makes minor manual adjustment [↩]

4 comments January 9th, 2009