Rough Wood

At a local hardwood dealer, on a mission for some 8/4 White Ash, I found sapele. Since I was gearing up for a few projects, and shopping for some thick stock for vise materials, I decided to get this one giant board. The plan was to take a relatively small piece of it for my vise chop and build the thick bits for a few furniture projects from the same board.

The salesperson suggested it as a nice solid material that could serve both purposes. This assessment was absolutely correct, if a bit extravagant in the vise context. It is often used as a substitute for mahogany. It is beautiful, dark, and very much like mahogany in appearance, with the exception of its figure, which is generally very ribbony. It is slightly harder than hard maple, works well with hand tools and machinery, and is incredibly inexpensive for such a wonderful material. It glimmers like rain sheeting down a window. It even smells nice.

No one mentioned that it is considered a “vulnerable” species in certain areas of its range. Sapele is found mostly in Africa, in an area including Sierra Leone, Uganda and the Congo. It is a rainforest tree. As it turns out, some populations are exhausted.

Old growth materials are scarce because we’ve overdone it. Highly prized exotics are expensive because we’re using them up. You may not be one to observe or be concerned about the environmental impact of this, but surely you can agree that, for example, Honduran Mahogany supplies are dwindling for a reason: our demand outweighs the trees’ ability to grow, and then they are gone. I’m all for the gorgeous exotic woods if I, personally, have some indication that the species isn’t threatened, that the flora and fauna of their habitats aren’t being squeezed out of existence, and that any indigenous populations are not being backed into a corner because I like nice table legs.

So I’m staring at 12′ of gorgeous 8/4 sapele, considering that I intended to use it to make legs and structural elements for a few projects that I was very excited about, and that I’d need to go back to buy several 4/4 boards for the tops of a desk and a tool cabinet that I intended to build with it. What to do? Support this by buying more, or find a plan B and stick to more locally available hardwoods?

This has been a wakeup call for me. I am going to cut my vise face from this board, because I need it now and it would be wasteful (to any species) to buy a whole new board for such a small piece. This board was cut roughly in half at the dealer for transport, so I’m stuck with it. I’m not going to buy more unless I can verify my dealer’s source (there are a few “protected” sources of sapele in various places, including Australia). I will keep this board, and dole out small amounts of it for very special and specific projects, but I will take the financial hit and go back to the dealer for something else (probably cherry) for the current furniture projects—again, unless I can confirm the source of it.

It is up to us as individuals to be aware of our impact. I am not going to preach about what is right and what is wrong for any single person, but I will suggest this: Know what you are buying, and by proxy, know what activities you are supporting. In my case, my other projects can be just as beautiful (in different ways) in walnut, cherry, or a number of other “exotics” that are not quite as fragile, and I will not buy without being more aware of the impact of my decisions.

In the meantime, I’m going to have a damn fine vise chop.

I started building the knock-down workbench about a week ago. I’ve been trying to write a post about it since I started, but various things have conspired against me. So this one is a doozy.

After further consideration for the directions of the forces involved, I’ve made some design changes. Many thanks to readers Dean and Dyami for other suggestions.

I’ve placed the stretchers along the long axis, as this will be the direction of the most forceful planing. Most forces along the short axis (in the vise), like jointing, will require more precision than sweat. I’ve also redesigned the leg bracing. The legs are now entirely enclosed, so they  fit into very tight mounting braces made of various pieces of 2×4 material squeezed tightly together.

I have the hardware for using 3/8″ carriage bolts (with knobs) to anchor the legs in, but they are quite sturdy. I got a real workout trying to get them out the first time, after having clamped the bracing tightly together to screw everything in. Yay for thoroughness!

An interesting side note: I waxed the ends of the legs so they will slide into the mounts more easily. This fit is not based on friction, so it doesn’t have to be grabby. There’s 3.5″ of vertical support in the braces, so they aren’t going anywhere. I also waxed the shoulders of the lap joints. Since glue would be pointless here, I wanted to reduce the tendency for the bench to creak under pressure. It is, thankfully, not a noisemaker like the old one.

The frame is joined with pocket screws and large timber screws, because, really, why go through the trouble of doing mortise and tenon joinery in squishy 2×4? I will very happily move on to a more substantial bench whenever I have the space, but I didn’t need to spend weeks on this one.

The top is 3/4″ poplar (actual 3/4). I found 11.25″ boards, jointed them with my fantastic new Veritas jointer fence and did a glue-up that worked rather well. After a small amount of planing, it’s incredibly flat, in spite of my not having had anything flat to make it on. There was a little wind in the frame, but I planed it out, and everything on that front is nice and stable. Notice the lip on one side. I’ve designed this overhang due to my abundance of clamps that have a 3-4″ clamping range. The primary series of dog holes will be along the opposite long edge.

A threading kit arrived yesterday, so I’ll get started on the vise soon!

This thing is really coming together. What amazes me is that in the course of working on this I’ve seen exactly how not-flat my Workmate surfaces are… I don’t know if it was this warped when I first bought it. It flexes quite a bit with heavy planing and has probably bent over time.

I have experienced a few very surreal moments during this process. The first was when I faced the task of planing the top, connected to the frame—because it’s thin enough to flex without the support. The only waist-height surface at my disposal was my old/current bench. This bench surface is about 4x larger than the Workmate, so I had to work out a way to support this relatively massive structure on the Workmate. The solution was to attach a pipe clamp under the new bench surface, which was hooked onto the old surface as if the new surface were a gigantic bench hook. Remarkably, it worked with some clamp support on the far end to keep it from tipping. This photo might explain better.

A bench bench hook?

Another really weird moment came when I started to trim the mating surfaces of the laps with my (also new!) router plane. The new bench was assembled for some measurements. Since I was working on the stretchers, the bench was just standing there taunting me. So I clamped a stretcher on it and started doing some trimming. It was so automatic and comfortable, as opposed to the old bench—which would always take some crazy contraption to hold things down—that I actually got some work done. I didn’t have to think about it. That is, until it started sliding across the floor because it wasn’t fully assembled. I didn’t want to go very far with it, but I couldn’t help myself.

The glue on the stretchers is dry, and it is rock solid in the long direction. It is flat and stable. A bit of additional weight from the vise gear should help to keep it from tipping at the end. I can’t wait to be able to use this thing.

Also, carnage shot:

[update] Please see the latest on the completed workbench, which went through some redesign.

First things first.

Before I tackle my tool cabinet project, I need a workbench upgrade. I’m definitely on a plateau in regards to my collapsible bench. As my upper body strength has developed I’ve been flexing the Workmate more, and my patience has worn thin. It’s an interesting observation—I had read that one can’t do proper planing on anything but a nice solid workbench, but I did for almost a year. That worked because I was not physically capable of hogging as much wood as I could have, and as my ability to cut deeper and deeper has increased, so has the amount of force that I can exert.

That, or my bench is flimsy and is finally giving out. I prefer to think the former.

So I’ve taken some cues from my knock-down saw bench project and have been working on a knock-down workbench. I am still working out some details, like how exactly to make the temp/knock-down joints for the legs the most stable, with the least fuss. Here’s where I am so far. It looks simple from the top:

It looks a bit like a”real” bench, except it’s 36″ long and 24″ wide. There’s an apron, but the top panel is on top of the apron rather than being inset in rabbets like many workbench designs. This is purely due to portability and wanting to keep as much of the thickness as possible in the structure. I’d also like to be able to swap the top out once it wears. Tan geometry is 2×4, darker stuff is hardwood.

By design, it fits under my bed when disassembled. Yes.

I researched vises and am leaning towards making my own with a thick, solid piece of wood that is guided by thick hardwood dowels, with a mechanism based on wooden screws. The metal flavors are heavy and unwieldy for something that needs to be portable, not to mention the damage that they could do to my floors…

I’m sure this all sounds flaky and bizarre to those of you who have the space for a solid bench, but when compared to what I have now, it will be like winning a low-grade lottery. Some day I’ll have my hands on the big bucks.

A great deal of attention has been paid to basic structure, knocked-down size, clearance for the vise (whatever it ends up being) and accessibility. I actually had a design that folded nicely, and used keys to lock the legs in place, but didn’t like not using the longest axis of the bench for the vise. I have also struggled with having enough clearance for dog holes near the edge, so I can put a planing stop on the end and do face planing of longer boards. In this design they are as close as 1.5″ to the edge.

In this most recent design, there are various parts which help to provide a solid base into which the legs fit. It would be supported on all sides by wood, except for the attachment face (the outside). The legs themselves have cross members which help to keep them from rotating in the joint. The last element to work out will be the mechanism for cinching the legs to the main body, and at this point I’m considering tightening knobs like the saw bench. The leg stretchers also provide a spot to rest a foot, for keeping the bench in place when things get hot and heavy.

Determination is my friend, friends. At least I now have a saw bench for the cuts.

I am a bit romantic about this hand tool thing, but I am not driven by dogma. That’s a highbrow way of saying that I use a cordless drill. For now.

While I use mostly hand tools, I admit that my current situation is not entirely of my own doing. If I had been a garage owner when my woodworking roots started taking hold, I probably would have jumped into the same pool that the average hobbyist woodworker swims in—using power tools, with hand tools for touch-ups and the occasional organic work. I’m mostly glad things turned out this way. Mostly.

The up side to this is that I have spent my time working on discipline, on getting my hands functioning more precisely on command, and on getting my head around the way wood works. People refer to it as being “Zen” a lot, but for me it’s more like hand/eye yoga for now. I am not a production woodworker, so I have little reason to complete a table over a weekend, other than wanting to just get it done. What would I do then, make more shop furniture? I will probably make 2 tables for myself in my lifetime, so I’m in no hurry to fill up my house with efficiently-created experiments.

This opposition causes a few problems for me. While I have projects that I need to complete, I have a lot to learn and would like to try and enjoy the process. Along comes the tool cabinet…

I’ve begun designing a standing tool cabinet, to replace an old chest that is literally stuffed with woodworking shrapnel—and tools that deserve a much better home. Above you can see the rough current design, which requires 2 drawers and a central shelf on the left, and clear vertical space on the right (with a bottom shelf eventually). In order to be able to build it with hand tools, I’ve worked on a traditional frame and panel design. As it has congealed, it has become clear that there would be 28 mortises cut by hand, just for the legs. If I were more experienced at this, and had any shop space to stretch my legs in, that number wouldn’t sound so weird.

On the flip side, if I were to build the same cabinet using newer materials and techniques (all dados, grooves and rabbets), it would be a bit more like this:

Note that the drawers would likely use drawer hardware, rather than the traditional kicker/runner/glide structure, hence the empty hole in the drawer area.

So you may wonder: why not do it the easy way and go have a beer? I contend that it’s not always the easier way. Referring again to my shoplessness, in my situation I’d have to buy a circular saw—to ensure straight cuts, as cleaning up a 3′ long hand saw cut in plywood would be miserable. I could try the jigsaw with a clamping guide, but there are always tear-out and wandering concerns there. Those cuts would be edged with edge banding, so they’d have to be perfect. Then comes the groove/dado routing. This doesn’t sound like much fun, outside in the yard, annoying the neighbors and suited up for the apocalypse.

Here we cross a familiar threshold—buying tools for specific projects, and considering what your current tools were actually designed to do. Since I am just as new to circular saws and cutting rabbets in plywood, why not take the more deliberate route and do it by hand, without the added expense and inherent danger?

I also have a lot of residual cheaply manufactured plywood-and-MDF furniture in my house, and am trying to slowly replace it with stuff that doesn’t rack, stink, peel or eventually fall apart when the screws strip out…

This project will dominate my woodworking (and probably my blog) for a while. It’s a good testbed for developing my SketchUp skills, my traditional and modern design skills, and my patience. At this stage I’m leaning heavily towards the traditional approach, but with plywood panels throughout. I could hand-cut the panels with a ryoba since the edges don’t need to be made perfect due to their being in a groove. It’s either that, or make 7 or 8 glued-up panels and go to town with the plow plane and router plane.

That’s the best, and worst, of both worlds.