Rough Wood

18 mortises, 24 rabbets, 16 grooves for paneling, 4 tongue-and-grooves, a lot of sawing, and we have ourselves a giant planter. Done by hand, it was a lot more work than it looks. It was good practice though, and a great workout for my bench. I mentioned this project a few months ago.

It turned out almost as I had planned, with a few minor modifications along the way. The joinery was a bit more complicated than expected.

At the junctures of all of the rails, there are stopped grooves that open to mortises from 2 directions. Since the legs are relatively thin, the tenons are trimmed at an angle to allow them to mate with the tenons sharing most of the mortise. Lots of geometry in these corners, and in something like chunky and irregular redwood there’s a major risk of blowing structure out. On more than one occasion I found myself right on the edge of peeling entire layers of this wood apart like an onion. I had to glue a chunk of one of my tenons back together when half of it peeled right off. Be careful with this stuff.

There are a few things I would do differently. First off, I’m glad that I went all-in with the hand-cutting of all of that joinery. It was good practice. I was in a weird headspace the whole time though. I chose fencing materials since I could get stock in sizes that were close to what I need. This material is cut to size, but warps and bows quite a bit. So while intending to do this precise joinery, that little voice kept saying: “It’s just fencing, and it’s just a planter, so I won’t bother planing this…” In the end my joinery was a bit less precise than I had wanted, partially because redwood compresses so much that even with a good fit, it won’t be a good fit for long if you’re not very careful.

My angles were slightly off due to slight warping in various pieces, but with slightly rounded edges on the fence stock, I couldn’t plane down much. I used the softness of the wood to my advantage and coaxed things into place when necessary. It all came together though, at about 4mm off square.

One thing that I was particularly cautious about was guarding against water pooling and wicking. For the tongue and groove joints I angled the shoulders of the tongues down slightly to encourage water to run out. I sealed the ends of the tenon shoulders with glue so they wouldn’t absorb so much water. Those shoulders are partially exposed to the elements due to rounding of the stock. I also applied some thinned glue as a sizing to the bottom of the feet, then a coat of full-strength glue over that while it was still wet. The intention here is to get some glue soaked into the fibers where the feet will be in constant contact with the ground.

This project also served as a testbed for some theories about building outdoor furniture. I’ll revisit this in a few years and see what’s still intact. I think having done it all with waterproof glue, mortise and tenons, floating panels, and liberal amounts of sealing should mean that this thing will be around longer than me.

Once the glue dries I’ll put mountains of soil into it and start planting things in my new mini herb farm. It’s Dogfish Head time.

Also, major carnage…

Ah, spring! With winter behind us again, all those months of Vitamin D deficiency are but a lingering memory. It’s time for actual sunlight, refreshing breezes, being buzzed by daredevil hummingbirds and getting the grill ready for some serious outside time.

It’s also time for me to take care of that pile of *stuff* that had to be put on hold while I hibernated. I saw the light last weekend, and started attacking a planter project that has been at the bottom of that pile. It’s a 3′ x 3′ (roughly) planter box with a bottom, in which we will grow a range of herbs in our tiny back yard. This one has to be finished in time for early spring planting, so it’s chop-chop time for me.

After some shopping around, I found that buying chunks of fencing at the widths that I needed would do the trick for less than buying and breaking down lumber from a hardwood source. With my now-indispensible keychain tape measure in hand, I headed off to Home Depot for some fencing. I grabbed 6′ lengths of 5.5″ x 3/4″ FSC-certified redwood (not surfaced) for $1.87 a piece. Yes, please.

I also grabbed some 8′ lengths of semi-decorative strips at 1.5″ x 1.5″, something that would have been less expensive to rip down from a board bought at a hardwood dealer. I don’t have a table saw, and ripping long strips with a hand saw isn’t my idea of a good time these days, so prefab wins this round.

On one particularly nice day, my saw bench, my ryoba and I planted ourselves on the patio and started breaking this stuff down. The interesting bit is that I reworked my original plan for the planter based on the stock that I bought, and accurately built the joinery (mostly grooves) into the SketchUp model. After spending a bit of time confirming the accuracy of the model, I then used it as reference for each initial cut. I did some rework on the sizing of the grooves as I went.

This thing isn’t really complicated, but it was the first time I’ve left the numbers up to SketchUp after building the joinery to specs.

For this project I’m going full-bore. For absolutely no reason other than practice, I’m cutting mortise & tenon joinery for the frame and grooving the panels in. I think practice is a good reason, as the next project is the tool cabinet. At the very least, it will be the most over-engineered  flower pot in the history of civilization.

Rain or shine, if you will.

On a tangent, I cleaned up my cuts and did some surfacing on the components with the new workbench and it went very smoothly. I can’t describe how much less fatiguing it is to do face planing on a bench that you don’t have to simultaneously hold down with a foot…

Please note that there is an earlier post with more details about construction, which can be found here. Thanks!

It’s finished. Last night I put the final touches on the workbench. After a few coats of finish on the vise it was ready to assemble and put to work. I immediately made some bench dogs. It was a true revelation to have a real vise and a relatively stable surface. It’s not a massive, stationary bench, but it’s so much more than I had. It was made with hand tools, with the exception of the use of a drill for the many, many holes.

Here it is with the vise handle removed and ready to break down. The gray discs on top are what I call “bench slippers.” They are short bench dogs with nylon furniture glides attached. When the legs are removed, and the surface is flipped over, the slippers are inserted and the bench can be slid around on wood floors without damaging them. More on that later.

My design is literally full of holes. I made a large array of dog holes in the surface. It may seem like overkill, but I expect to use random things like the Veritas “surface vise,” as well as using dogs to box in various rectangles on the surface. With only 1 vice to handle all tasks, flexibility is key.

The vise works quite well. It feels very stable and predictable. My only complaint is that it screeches a bit, even after extensive waxing. Without a drill press, the angles on the screw and the 2 guide rods are not perfect, so there are various slightly opposing forces involved. It works great though, being both smooth and steady. The external garter works like a charm. The sapele face/chop is working great and looks amazing. There are more details on its construction here and here.

If I did not have soft wood floors (bamboo) I would have bought a metal vise and been done with it. Sometimes things work out for the better, because I really like this vise (so far). If you have the means to make the bench but not the vise, buying a metal one is definitely an option. The vise is by far the most complicated part of this project.

Once broken down, which involves removing the two leg assemblies, the main surface sits flat at about 5″ tall. With the 2 leg assemblies, it breaks down to a stack about 8″ high (+ the glides).

In the end, I had purchased about $40 worth of wood for the bench itself ($30 for the poplar top, $10 for the 2x). The vise is scrap, other than the face. If you have scrap around you could use that and make adjustments to the design. I bought knobs and long carriage bolts for temporarily joining the leg assemblies to the top, but don’t think I’ll need them. I used about $4 worth of the huge sapele board that I bought for this and other projects. Add $20 for the hickory dowel and we come in at around $64 for materials.

Here’s a link to a SketchUp file of the final build. There is no joinery in the Sketchup. Dog holes are represented by black cylinders so they can be rearranged. Please keep in mind that I am left-handed. If you are not, you might want to consider the orientation of the vise.  If you build it, please let me know, as I’d love to see it out in the wild. Please note that it does flex in the short direction due to the lack of stretchers there. I may add some supports that can be temporarily bolted in, but I want to use it a bit first. It’s quite solid in the long direction due to the existing stretchers.

Now I can actually build some stuff… Next comes the tool cabinet!

It’s so close.

My design for this vise involves one giant chunk of scrap cherry which serves as both the nut (the block containing the female threads) and support for 2 huge alignment rods using the same 1-1/4″ hickory that makes up the screw. Meet me over in Part 1 for specifics on the creation of the screw itself.

The process of tapping the nut involves drilling a hole that is slightly smaller than the original dowel (according to the recommendations of the manufacturer), then using the tapping device. I again used camellia to make the threads less prone to chewiness. Note the try square used for reference, as it was used at every step. This will be significant later.

The tapping went swimmingly. Clean, quick, effortless. Something must be wrong. Next slide.

Once the nut was tapped, I reluctantly drilled a hole through the apron of the bench and temporarily attached the chop/face using the screw. This acted as a guide for drilling the alignment rods through all 3 layers (chop, apron, nut). It was much easier to do this from the outside. It’s not as pretty, but we have ways…

After more wrangling with the slightly out-of-round hickory dowel, I had 2 alignment rods passing through all 3 layers. It was starting to feel like a vise. Time for some glue.

While waiting for the rod-chop glue assembly to dry, I made the garter. Since I drilled the holes for the rods from the outside I wanted to cover up the ends of the hickory, so the garter looks more like a plate, and covers about 1/4 of the chop.

This has been, by far, the easiest part of this project.

Back to the screw, I had to work out a way to cut a garter groove into the dowel. My solution was a sort of makeshift lathe. I drilled a 1-1/4″ hole into a stop block and used the hole in the screw hub as another support. This left me with a free-spinning dowel between 2 blocks that I could clamp to the (old) workbench. After some chisel work, which was handled a bit like proper mortising, except… weird, I had a very rustic garter. It wasn’t as clean as I had wanted, but it was a reasonable way to get the job done.

There was however an unreasonable amount of adjustment involved in the fitting. Without a drill press, it’s quite difficult to get squared holes, especially at the scale that we’re talking about. A hole drilled slightly out of square will have a far greater impact when the total distance bored is 5″. When you factor in 3 rods in a tight space—all of which should move in unison—bad, scary things happen. I was able to adjust the projections a bit with some trial and error (and a rasp), but a drill press would have alleviated this. Time to get a brace and do some practicing. Workbench first, tool cabinet second, bit brace third.

I am closing with a photo of the vise as it stands (no pun intended), from below. It is rough and loosely assembled, waiting for glue to dry before proper shaping and refinement. From this angle you can see many things not complete: the hub needs shaping, the handle needs caps, the chop needs a good shape, the nut/support block needs to be cut down to final size.

Once the glue dries I’ll be back in awesome fun-time zone. This part was very technical, which is not awesome fun-time zone. I can’t wait to have a real bench, and a real vise. The first responsibility of the new bench will be to help me make accessories for itself—which really feels like a goal accomplished.

As part of the knock-down workbench project, I’ve been scheming an all-wood vise. Considering that this bench needs to fit under my bed, and will regularly come into contact with our bamboo floors, I don’t consider a metal vise to be a viable option.

So I bought a manual threading kit and some 1-1/4″ hickory dowel, which was the only 1-1/4″ that I could find locally that wasn’t avocado, and called in the attack.

The threading kit that I bought from Highland Woodworking worked reasonably well right out of the box. I expected to have to sharpen the cutter at least, but it really did a number on the hickory. The directions indicate that a soak in tung oil (or something similar) is often needed to soften and lubricate the fibers. I chose to use camellia, as I have an abundance of it . The other options are much more of a mess, and need to be neutralized or cleaned off after the soak. Too mucky. A light slather of oil and the threads magically appeared from the backside of the threader…

In reality, that’s not how it went at all. As it turns out, the dowel was slightly oval, by a mere .002″ or so. In a softer wood, you might be able to cram it through anyway. In hickory, not so much. Hickory is about 30% harder than maple, for the record. So I attacked again, this time with sandpaper. After a lot of sanding and precise measuring (man that stuff is tough) I had the seemingly minor oval tamed, and started with the threads.

They are not perfect. They are a bit chewy in areas where the layers of earlywood and latewood are thin and close to the surface. This may be where some oil soaking would help. These patches of compromised thread are generally linear, jumping through multiple turns of thread. They are only about 2 degrees of a full turn around the screw, so they shouldn’t affect the holding strength at all. I’m totally fabricating the number, but imagine two continuous feet of tongue-and-groove (on a smaller scale) with about 1/4″ missing. Now imagine trying to pull the boards apart along the faces. They would not go anywhere.

I’m thinking that the side of this bench will fail long before this vise, and I may have it for many years to come, long after retiring the new bench. In a little cartoon in my head, I tighten the vise so much that the apron for the bench just pops off and the bench falls limply to the ground with a workpiece still sitting on top. Cue a little puff of smoke.

I don’t have a decent vise, in which to hold the threading contraption or the tough 18″ of dowel. At times it felt like I was making a circuit in a gym—to the floor, using the shoes for grip, to the old bench using the weird thin surface-type vise, back to the floor. Eventually, as I approached 14″ of completed thread, the threader stopped cold. I hadn’t perfectly rounded a very tiny section of the dowel. After losing some of the callouses that I’ve worked so hard on lately, I backed it out and sanded a bit, then finished.

In the end, I had a stick with threads on it, and a workout.

Once that was resolved, I bought some wood for the chop (or face) and moved to actual planning. I’m going to do an external garter, and I am now devising a way to cut the garter groove around the screw without a lathe. Next up is drilling the holes for the screw, the guide rods for the chop, and the seating of the screw into the hub. If I’m more than a degree or two off, my vise will tend to bow my workpieces. Here’s where a drill press would enter the picture, if I had one…

To be continued!