[Apothecary Chest] Mitred Dovetails

Mitred dovetails are also known as full blind, and they are tricky. The actual dovetail joint is not the hard part, once layout is really understood. I had to do about six of them before I could intuitively mark and cut the layout without confusion or uncertainty, and even then I still cut on the wrong side of the line (despite it being labelled). So why go through the trouble? Well, it is fun. If you are into that sort of thing.

Here is a sample joint showing what I am after: a frame-and-panel unit with mitred edges, pillowed corners, and no fasteners. Tails are oriented so this unit has strength when lifted, as it is meant to be portable, like a suitcase.

The method I have been using for marking involves creating a template which is used for both the pins and tails. It takes a great deal of care to mark properly, aware of orientation and which face is the reference. The actual cutting of the joinery is not so different than a half blind dovetail, I use a scraper with teeth cut into it to he define the rear corners. Skewed chisels are useful, too, but since the joinery is not visible, it can actually be a little ugly and narrow waists  on the tails are to be avoided so that larger chisels can easily fit.

For me the real difficulty is simply is sculpting the perfect mitres! It should be as simple as marking the 45 degree angle line, and working to it while checking for lumps with a bevel gauge. In practice, it is a finicky process and I have yet to feel that I really command it. Each one is improving, and that is the point.

My inspiration for this work is the apothecary chest on the cover of this book:

Unable to source (or to afford) vintage medicine bottles, I have secured some modern bottles suitable for herbs, teas, and the like and will be using those as my design module. My chest will only have one drawer in the center for simplicity, and this will itself be built with half-blind dovetails, which will feel like a breezy vacation after this. 

Here is the start of the rough draft. My over abundant and redundant labeling may appear like too much noise, but I have been needing all the help I can get when rooting through a pile of boards in a crowded, noisy shop full of distractions and tight on personal space. The location of the tape, cabinetmaker's pyramids, and english labels like "UP" all conspire to help keep me on track. I only mess up sometimes now, instead of often.

Soon the panels for front and back will be created and set into grooves, and then shelves will be inserted. This will start to look like something. I hope.

Note also the miniature anarchist's tool chest in the background. Not mine, but it has been a pleasure to consult and watch it go together.

Side Table

School has kept me very busy!  This is a good thing. For patient readers, updates are forthcoming, but in the meantime, I made a side table:

It is made largely of cherry, with a maple drawer front which came from a tree in my yard in Oregon. The drawer sides are poplar. I added complexity by including a lower shelf, which doubled the number of tenons involved. The lumber was milled using a power planer, but was finished with hand planes and all the joinery was done with hand tools. Finish is 3 coats of tung oil. This project was great fun and I look forward to building a second. This table was designed using the human form as a module, and proportional design throughout. At no point did I measure in terms of inches or meters, this is just "hip high" with whole number ratios driving the rest of the concerns. The chunky style is based on deconstructing a dresser we have, and imposing harmonious rations upon it. Smoothing the curly maple drawer face was an adventure, but I have learned a lot about sharpening and it was well worth it!

I am now in the midst of my final project, and I will have more to say about that soon.

[School] Midway

Time flies.

Each day I get up early, make breakfast, and head out the door. Depending on what the tot's needs were (and if she were awake yet) I get a half hour to an hour of quiet time at the school to prepare my materials for the day, sharpen my tools, and organize my workbench. These moments pay big dividends throughout the day, and I am feeling that organization and sharpening are not only fundamental, but are absolutely critical for my own success as a woodworker.

The day then flies by in a blur of instruction and practice. At the end of the day, cleaning happens again. In addition to general sweeping and cleaning of the shop, we each have a designated chore each week. This week I have been especially enjoying being assigned to the machine room. Since we are not using it all that much yet, I've been able to make visible headway each day, cleaning the machines themselves as well as long-forgotten corners and areas under the machines. My theory is that if I do the entire room three times (this only takes about 20 minutes) each day, by Friday it should look pretty good! We'll see.

After the cleaning, I endure the commute home, about 2 miles by bicycle through forested neighborhoods. Traffic includes deer and occasional cars. Sometimes there is a pedestrian or other bicycle. Dinner, dishes, play and read stories to the kid, and I am about ready for bed. Hence, not much time for blogging or even reading.

That said, we have been productive and I have been learning a great deal. Highlights have been becoming much more proficient with freehand sharpening, learning to (finally) sharpen my saws, and radically improving my chisel technique, particularly with rounded or sculpted forms. We've built layout squares and tool totes. The students skills are beautiful to see unfold, everyone has now a decent command of dovetail joints as well as basic rabbets and dadoes, meaning they can build a huge variety of constructions now. We've also learned the fundamentals of shellac and other non-toxic finishes. We have touched on design; the tool tote is made entirely from ratios based on a module (our hand span) with pieces all sized to each other or to ratios, no rulers or tape measures needed. So far, they all fit just fine. This week we will begin learning more design techniques and loft plans for a side table.

Here are some images:

[School] Week Two

With two weeks almost over, it is hard to believe how fast time is flying. We are busy from the first moments each day until the last. We start with warmup exercises or continuing to work on projects, then have a brief lecture, and then continue with projects and exercises for the remainder of the day.

In week one, we continued with green woodworking by making rustic stools.

We then continued to slightly more delicate work, making plates and platters for the school's kitchen:

A great sense of acocmplishment surrounded the completion of the stools:

In week two, we started to learn the techniques required for benchwork and joinery. We built straight edges, such as these:

With the ability to detect straight lines, we were able to then construct winding sticks. Most of the students completed those today. They required jointing of edges, gluing up laminations, creating parallel edges, precision cuts, creating bevels with planes, and trimming end grain. In short, many lessons were contained within these deceptively simple tools. As sawing and planing skills progress, we will soon be working on building try squares. It is quite a feeling to use a layout tool, accurate to a thousandth of an inch, which was created by hand!

I am too busy to take many photos, these are also courtesy of Tim Lawson. As we delve deeper into the types of benchwork I am familiar with, I may have more commentary on the topics and the concepts. For now, I can only restate that this is a blast, and I really wish I would have done it long ago. It is incredibly inspiring and rewarding to be among such passionate staff and students.

[School] Some quick pics

Class continues apace as we learn more about the nature and structure of wood, how to use chairmaking tools (such as travishers, spokeshaves, and drawknives), while continuing to learn about the students and instructors. Today was fast-paced and much was accomplished. Everyone's stool legs are fitted into the stool seats, and holes for the stretchers marked and drilled. Soon we will fit the stretchers, trim them all up, and the world will have 9 more stools than it did previously. Here is hoping that the moving box containing my camera is revealed soon! In the meantime, these are some photos taken by Tim Lawson. I should also point out that I learned today that there is still space left in Peter Follansbee's upcoming course, Make a Joint Stool From a Tree. This would be a killer opportunity to take a course in the beautiful Pacific Northwest with one of New England's most interesting traditional woodworkers.

[School] And So it Begins

Day one of the Foundation Course at the Port Townsend School of Woodworking. I'm tired. It was great. Here is a little more detail:

When I last posted, I was wondering about moving my tool chest. It all went well. I did get a little paranoid and stuffed some shop rags into the tills, and nailed them into place. It seems to have worked. My shop is now unloaded, but not unboxed. It will be some time until I have the new one up and running (the space needs some electrical work among other things), but that is no problem since I have access to the school's shop and frankly will have almost no time for anything at home for the duration of the course.

image courtesy of hyperkitten.com

Sadly I do not have a camera unpacked yet, but I hope to remedy that soon. So for this one you will have to use your imagination.

When we arrived at the school, a 30" diameter Douglas fir log was waiting for us in the yard. We rolled it around using peavies (long spikes with hinged jaws at the end), used a 2-man (or woman) saw to remove a sizable chunk of it which we then turned on end, and took turns driving wedges into it with sledges. This created some large "pizza slices" as they were called. We then used froes and mallets to divide these slices into smaller bits, almost but not really rectangular. The goal was to make legs and stretchers for stools.

We did have introductions and orientations first. It seems to be a great crew, diverse in ages and skill level. As Woodworking in America seemed almost exclusively attended by 55+ white males, it is refreshing to have a handful of women and rather young participants overall in this course. One of them is a bit famous (far outside of the woodworking world), but I will leave that a mystery for now.

Teamwork was instantly important as we swung heavy sledgehammers and mallets near each others heads and hands, and very important with the 2-person sawing operations. We then had some time to work with drawknives and spokeshaves at our benches, which also took some co-operation as the long legs reached out of our own personal workspaces and into the territory of those behind us.

We also did a bit od crosscutting of fir planks to create boards to make the stool seats from, and some nifty geometry via dividers to create the layout lines for the leg tenons and then used an enormous auger to drill the holes. This was a 2-person job since a crufe gauge was needed to drill at an angle to accommodate the splayed legs.

I am a bit surprised at how physically taxing it all was. I've been packing, loading, unloading, and unpacking for what seems like weeks now; carrying heavy furniture, loading all my tools into various containers, driving without rest, all while managing a small menagerie of animals and a little kid. I've felt so physically tired that I thought I was "in shape" but the class today was demanding! I cannot say the same of the bike commute. Although it has steep hills, it is nothing compared to the rides into town I was used to. I believe my jaunt this morning took about 7 minutes, the leisurely ride home perhaps twice that. At any rate, I will try to update regularly here with reports from the frontlines of the program, along with juicy photos of enthusiastic fledgeling woodworkers doing their thing in a paradisical setting, but for now I need to focus on a glass of wine courtesy of the supportive wife and try to get that kid into bed for some well-needed rest for all of us. More soon, and I daresay it will get good.

Moving a Tool Chest?

Soon, my entire collection of traditional woodworking tools will be moving about 380 miles north.

This is part of what tool chests were originally intended for; to protect tools during transit. However, I have been told by a trusted toolmonger to make sure I protect everything with plenty of bubblewrap and other padding. I certainly don't like the idea of edge tools rubbing around, but at the same time most of them are held in place pretty well by the design of the chest. I feel that wrapping the most fragile items, adding some filler to the tills, and then bracing the tills in place should be enough. I don't want to overdo it, nor do I want to ruin a bunch of valuable tools. Christopher Schwarz claims it is just fine for steel to rub on steel and doesn't worry. I worry.

If you've moved tools in a chest, I would love to hear your approach and your experiences.

I'm still trying to decide which of my lumber is worth moving. Too bad I do not have more local readers who would be interested in such stuff.

In other news, one of my patch designs has turned into the latest Lost Art Press tshirt. The whole thing is pretty silly (and intentionally so) but I am glad to be part of this esoteric world in some tiny way.

More soon as the new shop comes together and my classes begin!