Wood-fired!

Curly’s Sacred Heart

The Village Carpenter has a recent post describing a 19thC grease box. The object is a small carved box with a swivel lid. The inside is carved out to hold a supply of grease. This reminded me of a wonderful piece by Matthew Harding.

This is carved in the form of a human heart from a wood called purpleheart. It functions as a container for his mother’s heart pills. It also uses a swivel lid as shown below.

The piece was first exhibited in 1996 in a group exhibition called The box as container curated by George Ingham.

I created an online version of the exhibition way back then. It is a part of my old web site that I haven’t migrated but you can still view it here. Some of the external links may now be broken.

There are some very good pieces hidden in there. I will attempt to highlight a few in future posts. Three reviews of the exhibition are included. All are interesting but I highly recommend reading Michael Gill’s review. Woodworkers especially will find it entertaining.

6 comments February 1st, 2009

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

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

Spring workshop renovations

Well I started drafting this post in late Spring. It is mid-summer now. So much for spontaneity in posting! Still the cleanup was actually done in spring.

I need to revive my lathe. After an initial honeymoon with my wood lathe some 20 years ago it has sat neglected in the corner of my workshop. As I mostly make contemporary furniture, the lathe is only useful for creating cylindrical elements and for years I have been making these by hand-planing and sanding. Now I need some shaped cylindrical elements so the lathe must arise.

For the last 18 months the lathe has been used to support a stack of blackwood and figured eucalypt. In fact that whole corner of the workshop had become a bit of a dumping ground. Fortunately I didn’t photograph it before the cleanup!

The spring clean turned up a few interesting items.

This is the safety guard for my Wadkin saw. I don’t use it because I find it safer to have a clear view of the blade¹. What’s impressive to me is the size and solidity of the components of these old machines. This guard weighs almost 5kg even with some aluminium parts! I should have put a scale in the photo but the guard is about 150mm (6″) high. The arm that supports it is 1.5m long and so has to be pretty hefty itself - it’s a steel rod about 40mm in diameter and damned heavy. I don’t know if the guard has its the original paint job but anyone who loves old Wadkin machines will find the logo as ’stimulating’ as I do. The guard is sitting on the sliding table of the saw which itself weighs over 1000kg. You can see the dark but shiny patina that has developed on the milled steel surface over its 50+ years.


As an aside - this is the rip fence for the saw. As you can see, the fence slides longitudinally on a dovetail and tilts to 45°. The position mechanism is a delight to use. You slide the fence to roughly the right location and lock it using the cam lever at the back. Micro-adjustments can then be made by turning the knob at the extreme right. The final location is then locked with the cam lever at the front. The inset scale is highly accurate. You can confidently rely on it for at least .25mm accuracy - probably better.

This box has been sitting on a shelf behind the lathe for some time. It held a few parts for my trimmer router and some other tools. The box deserves, and is now getting, a little more respect. It represents my first serious attempt at dovetails.

Back in 1990 I was considering getting some formal training in woodwork. I was looking around the world for somewhere to study (including Krenov’s College of the Redwoods) and found that one of the best teachers in the world - George Ingham - was teaching right here in Canberra. I dipped my toe in the water by enrolling for a week-long summer school to make a dovetailed box. The course was run by George and his partner Pru Shaw. This is the box that I produced.

It’s quite a simple, even austere, box. The wood is plantation mahogany from Fiji. The top and bottom are MDF². Many of the other students were perturbed that we were using a man-made board for the main surface of a box that took so much effort and care to make. But the choice made perfect sense to George. Much of new furniture design especially in the 20^thC has been driven by the arrival of new materials or technologies - think about steam-bending technology, plywood, lamination, plastics. In his own work George strove to get people to consider MDF for its own merits rather than just as a stable substrate for flashy veneers. Nevertheless some students insisted on a traditional look and veneered the lid.

My eyes were opened to a whole new level of excellence during this workshop. In addition to acquiring some skills I got a glimpse of what one could strive for and an insight into the importance of systematic approaches to the processes of woodwork.

I now have this box close to my handwork bench and use it to store my more delicate components such as fine brass hardware and supplies of mother-of-pearl. It holds a place in my workshop more in keeping with its role in my development as a woodworker.

And now the result. Shelves were erected to store some of my more valuable sticks of wood. The lathe is usable again and I have some table space for saw accessories.

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