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Woodwright's Shop—28th Season

Creating A Cove

The original sawbuck table (pictured at right) has a raised panel on the drawer front, comprised of sloped edges that rise up to a decoratively-shaped field where the date and drawer pull are found.

All of the raised panels I've ever made have had flat slopes, but the sawbuck's are concave (cove profile).

If you don't have a moulding plane that matches the cove's shape (raising hand) and believe it's too dangerous a task to be performed on a table saw (raising both hands), then you need to get resourceful.

It's all about stock removal. How you achieve it depends on the tools you have and your personal preference.

The top edge of the slopes sits a bit lower than the decorative field, so I reached for a tool I'd never used before, a Record 043, to define the depth of the recess and the width of the slopes.

Even though I spent time sharpening the Record's blade and flattening the fence and depth stop, it worked very poorly—tearing up the wood like kids unwrapping Christmas gifts. It was difficult to keep the fence tight against the edge, due I think to the type of wood—curly cherry.

So I employed my Sargent combination plane, which worked superbly.

From there, a block plane, moulding plane, rasp, scraper, and sanding block finished the profile. Some of these steps could have been skipped, but I was figuring this out as I went along.

I'm sure there are a number of other ways to create a cove so feel free to share your own creative methods.

Caution: Woodworking Links Ahead

I recently came across a woodworking site where the owner, Jim Boyett, has compiled a heaping helping of links to sites about hand tools.

Careful, though. I recommend only visiting the site when you have lots of free time at your disposal.

Jim's Hand-Tool Woodworking Links

Half Blind Dovetails

I believe the two most important skills in handcutting dovetails are careful layout and the ability to saw a straight line.

Regarding the feather-ruffling question: Pins or Tails?

My answer is: Yes.

For a box or drawer that will have fat pins, I cut tails first. Cutting the tails first allows you to saw the two tail boards at one time. Plus, transferring layout lines from tails to pins is easier than vice versa.

For a delicate project with skinny, English-style dovetails, I cut pins first. With thin pins, it's very difficult (and in some cases, impossible) to transfer layout lines from tails to pins, so cutting pins first makes sense.

That being said, I'm cutting tails first for the drawer on the sawbuck table, with through dovetails at the back and half blind at the front.

The drawer will have angled sides, so the width at the top is 15" and the width at the bottom is 13". I believe I've mentioned my geometry-challenged brain before.*

My tool arsenal includes: dovetail saw, jeweler's saw, various chisels, guide block, plane blade, pencil, ruler, dovetail marker, clamps, marking gauge, mallet, and tiny square.

I call the technique: Dovetails with Training Wheels.

The training wheels are in the form of a guide block that's used to keep the chisel perpendicular to the workpiece. This ensures that the area that's removed between tails & pins will be flat. Some people like to undercut this area so pins and tails seat exactly to the guide lines, but a guide block removes this potential problem.

Once I've cut the tails, I use a bevel-edged pencil to transfer the outlines to the adjoining board, but you can also use a marking knife. Take care to make precise marks when you transfer these lines. When you saw the waste, cut right to the line (the line will just barely be sawn away when you've finished cutting). The more accurate the layout and cut, the less paring (if any) you'll have to do to fit the boards together.

*A friend accused me of never posting anything that I've screwed up. So here it is. Because I'm missing a math gene, my boards are not aligned along the top and bottom edges.

To transfer the tails' outlines to the front board, I aligned the top and bottom edges as I would with a square project. But bevelled sides require that the boards be offset when you transfer your marks.

I still don't know the equation to figure out the measurement for the offset, but fortunately the depth doesn't matter in this project, so I can plane the top and bottom edges to match.

There's also a gap in the top pin. But it's nothing that a little well-crammed wax can't fix once the project is finished.

Small Wood Mallet

I plead ignorance.

When a friend watched me set both the iron and the wedge on one of my handmade planes with a metal mallet, he said "You're supposed to use a wood mallet to tap the wedge and plane body."

"Yeah. Well, I sort of like the tool marks on the backs of my planes," I insisted.

He gave me a look that said he knew I was bluffing; that I really had no idea you should switch mallets mid-adjustment.

I've been abusing my planes this way for years and they have the half moon marks to prove it. I've even all but obliterated my name on one of them.

Little wood mallets come in handy for more than just plane adjustments. They're also helpful with driving in & removing the wedges from tusk tenons, and joining dovetails & finger joints. And it was high time I made one.

The element that's lost in small wood mallets, though, is weight on the hammer end. So I chose to make the handle from cherry and the hammer head from rosewood. Rosewood is heavy and dense, which can damage a project in use, so I decided to buffer the blow with cherry pads glued to each end.

I referred to a tack hammer's handle as a template, rough cut the blank on the bandsaw, and finalized the shape with a sanding drum chucked into my drill press.

A wedged through-tenon is an effective way to secure the hammer head to the handle. First, drill a hole at the lower end of the tenon so it won't split when you drive the wedge in. Then saw a kerf down the middle of the tenon.

The 6th photo shows the [slightly] loose-fit tenon that provides wiggle room for the wedge. Cut the wedge with your tool of choice; I used a Japanese dozuki. Add glue to the tenon, mortise, and wedge, and then hammer the wedge home.

Two cherry pads and three coats of Watco Wipe On Poly later, and my wood mallet and handplanes are playing nicely together.

And I can finally remit my H.A.A. (Handplane Abusers Anonymous) member card.

Canine Christmas Carol

Bark! The herald angels sing.
Mommies put us in these things.
Christmas comes and Christmas goes,
and still we’re tortured with these clothes.

Woe to us, we feel so blue.
Hats like this, they stick like glue.
We can’t wait for it to end.
Our misery we do portend.

Bark! The herald angels sing.
Our nerves are hanging by a string.

If you’re not familiar with this Christmas Carol, you can listen to the melody here.
(They have the lyrics all wrong, though. *wink*)

A Home for my Gnomon

There's no such thing as making a simple box if you're a woodworker.

I wanted to build a container for my reference ruler, or gnomon according to Stephen Shepherd, and had every intention of making a utilitarian one.

But while making the grooves to hold the lid and bottom, the scratch stock tore out some of the curly cherry (something I swore that scratch stock would never do!)

No problem. I'll fix it with my Lie-Nielsen side rabbet planes. This is a gravy tool—unnecessary, but really nice when you need it.

Smoothing the tearout of course made the top edge too narrow, which would leave a gap when the lid was glued in place.

No problem. I'll just add some string inlay to fill the gap. While I'm at it, might as well add string inlay to the bottom of the box.

Mitered corners was the joinery of choice for the box, but how do you cut miters on such tiny pieces? It's not very safe with power tools, in my opinion.

No problem. I'll just build a miter box and handsaw them.

Cutting a perfect guide line for a miter box proved to be more difficult than I thought. Even a slight miscut results in poorly fitting miters.

No problem. I'll build a simple miter block (also called miter jack) to trim the miters square.

Miter blocks are cool jigs that go for hefty prices at antique auctions and I had planned to build a beefy one with threaded rod someday, not really knowing if they worked well or not.

I was shocked at how perfectly this simple jig squared up the miters...and a beefy, threaded rod miter block just moved up the ranks on my to-build list.

To plane the inlay strips to thickness, I used an invention by Steve Latta that we students made in one of his classes. (Lie-Nielsen now carries this tool.) Basically, it's a piece of steel with a bevel and a burr (like the blade on a scraper plane), that's attached to a block of wood. By dragging the inlay through the gap between the burr and the "wall" of wood, the inlay piece is made thinner.

After the box was glued up, I cut the lid off at the bandsaw, which resulted in rough surfaces along the cut. Flattening these rough edges is easily achieved by laying a sheet of sandpaper on a flat surface, like your table saw, and "scrubbing" the workpiece until it's dead flat.

In order to keep the lid secured, I had to add some insert pieces. But rather than leave the top edges flat, I decided to embellish them with a bead. For this, I used a bead profile in my scratch stock.

The miters were cut with the box and block as before. Using a miter block enables you to take very thin shavings so you can sneak up on the final fit.

I prefinished the inside with shellac before glue up and had planned to shellac the outside, but the contrast between the unfinished and finished cherry is attractive, so I might just put a couple coats of wax on it instead.

What started out as a utiliatrian box project turned into something a little more complicated.

But why settle for a shed when you can build a little cottage for your gnomon?

Lee's Medicine Cabinet

I am absolutely inundated/swamped/buried/up to my eyeballs with tight-deadlined projects at work...and what better time to take a day off to visit Gettysburg?

The Museum Specialist at the Gettysburg National Military Park granted me hours of time to photograph and measure the General Robert E. Lee Medicine Cabinet.

He explained that the cabinet is thought to have belonged to one of Lee's personal physicians, possibly Lafayette Guild, but that a letter which supports this claim and perhaps more details about the cabinet, was lost with the most recent owner, a physician who specialized in tropical deseases, whose widow donated the cabinet to the museum upon his death.

Close inspection of the cabinet revealed not just its stunning good looks, but (what I consider to be) its complex and unusual construction. The cubbies in the top section (under the lid) are of two depths— 2 1/8" & 6 5/16"—including a skinny, secret compartment within the shallow front well which drops down an additional 4 3/16", thereby matching the depth of the 6 5/16" compartments.

What I find most interesting is the fact that, if the two doors on the front & back and the side panels are removed, the box is seemingly held together with 4 stiles and only one rail across the back (where the lid hinges are installed).

This isn't like any box construction I've ever seen. Little pins along the bottom edge of the 4 stiles indicate that they are dovetailed into the base. This holds the box together at the bottom, but what's keeping the top together? I believe that the long, lidded compartments in the top section are somehow attached (maybe just glued) to the stiles and effectively act as rails.

The back walls of the vertical cubbies (on the sides of the cabinet) are probably dadoed into the stiles. This would help keep the cabinet rigid and provide another glue opportunity.

Other details include v-grooves between the dividers in the upper compartments (beneath the lid), 5 dovetailed drawers (the largest one is removable from both sides of the cabinet), and two splined side panels that slide into grooves along the edge of the stiles. The wood is mahogany, the finish is unkown, and the pulls for three compartment lids look like pieces of shoe lace.

All the hardware is brass. I checked Londonderry Brass, but did not find an exact match. The pulls on the Londonderry Brass website are all fancier than the hardware on Lee's medicine cabinet.

The contents are as interesting as the cabinet itself with some of the original elements inside the glass bottles and other containers still intact.

My favorite label was "testimonial wine", which must have been a popular remedy as that particular bottle was empty.

*Photos are made possible through the permission of the Gettysburg National Military Park.