The Wardrobe

Posted on July 5, 2025 by Steve S.

I am, among many things, an opportunist. Two of my daughters, who share a big bedroom with no closet, have been after me to build them a proper wardrobe. I had been putting the project off because it was going to require a lot of both time and material. But when the material suddenly appeared free for the taking, I decided it was time to build the wardrobe.

My university had announced late last year that they would be tearing down an old academic building and building a new one. So before demolition began, I asked permission to salvage some of the hardwood trim and a few other items that were going to come down with the building. I soon realized, however, that many of the old offices had built-in bookshelves, so what began as a quick salvage project became a multi-day effort to remove as many of the old pine shelving boards as I could before time ran out.

I recruited a couple friends and a few family members to help, and between us we were able to carry away about 100 pine boards that were 10″ wide and between 4′ and 5′ long, as well as numerous trim boards and a few whole shelving units. My 2-car garage had (temporarily) become a no-car garage.

Free, salvaged material always comes with interesting challenges. There are the usual the nail-pulling challenges, as well as the working-around-massive-flaws challenges. But I’m used to that. The added challenge here was building a 6-foot-tall structure using only boards that were 4′-5′ long. Now where is that mythical board-stretcher when you really need it?

In truth, woodworkers make long boards out of short boards pretty regularly. There are all manner of scarf joints and other techniques that allow us to do that. In my case, though, I opted to butt shorter boards together and use trim boards to join them together in a big panel while also hiding the butt-joint in the middle. These panels will become the two sides of the wardrobe.

These boards are also edge-joined with tongue-and-groove joints, which will allow for seasonal expansion and contraction in the panel. My Veritas plow plane (with the optional tongue-and-groove kit) got a lot of use in this project.

I also spent a lot of time composing each panel. All these shelving boards are knotty pine, so I sorted through many to find ones with straight-ish grain on the edges and the knots in the middle. It’s no fun trying to plane a tongue or a groove straight through a pine knot.

I had also salvaged several long trim boards, and those became the key to joining up the whole panel. After joining together all the panel boards with tongues and grooves, I clamped and temporarily screwed the trim boards to the face-side of the big panel. The beauty of working with salvaged wood is that it’s already pre-distressed, so a few extra holes will hardly be noticed. They can be filled with putty, or just left open as part of the overall distressed look.

While this project came together mostly via the rough work of driving nails and screws, it also involved some fairly precise work, like cutting material right to a knife line–while cutting around flaws and notches left from the boards’ first life as office shelving.

After all the trim boards were ready, I flipped the whole panel over. (It covered my entire workbench, and then some.) I screwed the panel boards to the trim boards from the back. With careful placement of screws, I think I should be able to force the expansion and contraction toward the tongue-and-groove joints on the inside edges of each board.

I was also able to attach the trim boards so as to create big rabbets on the top, bottom, and back of each panel. These rabbets will allow me to assemble the whole case with just nails, nailing through each rabbet at the four corners of the case. More on that later.

After taking the above picture, I re-thought the placement of a few of the screws and moved them closer to each other. Old pine should be fairly stable dimensionally, so putting in screws 3″-4″ apart shouldn’t cause too much trouble. Putting them farther apart is more risky, as the wood is liable to split when it shrinks in the winter.

Even the screws were salvaged. We must have backed out a couple hundred old drywall screws while removing this wood from the building. And while they’re not as nice as genuine wood screws, they were free! And most of them were perfectly serviceable.

While I built the panels for the case in my basement shop, I decided I did not want to haul the whole thing up two flights of stairs to the second floor. Instead, I brought up the main pieces and put everything together right there in the room. The top and bottom got nailed on just as planned. There’s also a shelf near the bottom that got nailed onto battens.

The back boards also got nailed on. To allow for expansion and contraction, they are just shiplapped, just for variety. I was kind of tired of tongues and grooves at this point. The back boards add a lot of rigidity to the case and also help keep it more or less square. Most modern pieces would have just used plywood for the back, but I had over 100 shelving boards to pick from!

You can see in the above picture how the case is assembled, with the trim boards creating the rabbets at the corners. The shelf is set on top of battens that will also serve as drawer runners, and there are more drawer runners nailed to the bottom of the case.

Normally I would not use pine for drawer runners, as they will tend to wear out after years of regular use. Hardwood lasts much longer. But these runners are extra-wide, so once they do wear down somewhat, they can be pulled out, flipped around, and reinstalled so the drawers run on full-thickness boards again. And if they wear out yet again, they can always be replaced or reinforced with hardwood runners–but that should be another lifetime from now.

As I was putting the case together, my wife suggested that I put the whole thing on swivel casters, so as to make it easier to move for cleaning behind. That sounded like a good idea to me. So I screwed some spacers to the bottom and installed the casters. I made sure the grain of the spacers was running the same direction as the boards they are screwed to. That way, they will expand and contract at roughly the same rate, and the screws will pose no problems.

But for the cross-grain battens, which I installed to help reinforce the skirt boards, I used nails. The nails will allow for a little more expansion and contraction than will screws.

The doors are very plainly constructed. Each one is made of two boards joined on edge with a tongue and groove joint and reinforced by battens screwed on from the back.

I put cabinet latches at the top and bottom of each door, and now each door will close securely–without the risk of locking anybody inside.

The drawers are very simply constructed. They are joined at the corners with nailed rabbets, and the drawer fronts are screwed on from the inside. While the result is a very thick drawer front, that extra thickness isn’t noticeable in a case of this size. Plus, the drawer front serves as a stop. And I was able to make the drawers just a little bit under-sized because the drawer front takes care of the reveal around each drawer.

Normally, the bottom of a drawer like this would be a piece of 1/4″ or 3/8″ plywood set into a groove. But again, I was using only the wood I had salvaged from the building, and that meant making the bottoms out of 3/4″-thick pine boards. I glued up two boards to make a wide enough panel, then beveled three of the edges to fit into grooves I had plowed in the drawer sides and front.

As it happened, I had some spare cabinet handles on hand, so I didn’t even have to purchase the pulls. The only parts of this wardrobe that I bought were

  • Nails
  • Hinges
  • Catches
  • Casters

Everything else was salvaged material I got for free. While this is one if the biggest pieces of furniture I’ve ever made, it is probably also one of the cheapest.

To finish everything off, I added some simple molding to the top of the case. The front of the whole case is very plain and minimalist. Had I had a little more time and been inclined to do more work, I might have set the doors into a proper frame instead of building them as flat panels with nothing around the edges. But they are rigid as constructed, and I felt that the material lent itself to this aesthetic. Plus, these boards all have finish on them which, while distressed in places, is still in fairly good shape. I wanted to leave the original finish on these boards intact, and doing more framing and/or trimming would have meant making a lot of cuts that would have revealed fresh wood, and I would then have had to then match or at least complement the original finish In some way. And I was not about to try to replicate an old, distressed finish on the front of the piece. Sometimes you just have to work within the constraints of your material.

The whole project took me about 4 or 5 full work-days, which were spread out over a couple weeks. I now have significantly fewer than 100 shelving boards in my garage. I can park one of our family vehicles in there again, and the girls finally have a place to hang their dresses. So that’s progress all around.

I did warn them that I was not going to build in a portal to another world in the back of this particular wardrobe. It hasn’t stopped them from checking, however.

That other famous wardrobe, you may remember, had been built from wood grown from an apple seed brought here from that other, magical world. That’s why it opened the way for the four children to enter Narnia.

This wardrobe, however, has been built from wood that came from an even stranger world called Academia. So if on some rainy afternoon the children are playing hide-and-seek and stumble through their wardrobe into a world populated not by fauns and witches and lions but by undergraduates and adjuncts and post-docs, well… who knows what adventures they might have in such a strange land?

Posted in Build-Alongs, Furniture, Lumber, Wood and Woodwork | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

The Most Basic Woodworking of All: Cutting Firewood

Posted on December 2, 2024 by Steve S.

The holiday season is a wonderful time to catch up with friends and family, who inevitably ask me what kind of woodworking I’ve been doing lately. With some chagrin, I have to say that I’ve been so busy that I’ve barely touched my hand planes and hand saws since this summer. I haven’t been doing any woodworking at all.

But that’s not entirely true. In fact, this fall I’ve been working with a lot of wood. It’s just that the wood I’ve been working won’t become fine furniture or even wooden spoons. I’ve been cutting firewood.

Earlier this fall, there was a tree service doing some work next door, and as they were trimming limbs from a mature maple tree, my wife wandered over to ask them if we could take some of the larger limbs for firewood. They were all too happy to let us take them.

Happy with what few logs we could fit into the back of our minivan, we were not prepared for what came next. A few hours later, the foreman knocked at our door and asked if we wanted more. They had taken down couple old honey locust trees, and he had a small trailer full of logs in our driveway. My wife kindly showed him where to pile them up in the back yard. Over the course of the day, they brought over even more wood, until they couldn’t fit any more logs into that corner of the yard.

In the weeks following, I worked away at the pile a little at a time: cutting logs to length here and splitting and stacking them there.

Seen from a distance, cutting and splitting firewood probably looks mind-numbingly repetitious. What could be simpler than standing a section of a log on end and bringing the business-end of an axe down hard on it, over and over again? Well, I think that in practice splitting wood requires the same kind of attention and intelligence that other, finer forms of woodworking require. Much of what I already know about wood and woodworking applies to splitting firewood.

It is rough work, to be sure: the kind of work that exemplifies what David Pye calls the “workmanship of risk,” in which the tool is guided solely by hand and eye. The outcome of each stroke of the tool is not predetermined, nor does it need to be. Cutting firewood is perhaps the roughest kind of woodworking there is. But it is real woodworking, for all that.

For example, all woodworking projects require you to acquire the right kind of stock for the project. Different applications require different lengths and widths, and often different species. As a rule, the denser the wood, the hotter and longer it will burn, so this honey locust should make for some fine midwinter fires. Just like in other woodworking applications, it is easiest to work with stock that is straight and free of knots. Of course that’s not usually the kind of wood one uses for firewood, but it’s nice when you can get it.

Some woods split easier than others. Oaks split very nicely, especially when green. Elm won’t split at all. But whatever species you’re working with, you get to know its characteristics. This honey locust can be tough to split at first, especially if the log is big. You can hardly drive in a splitting wedge. But I’ve learned that once you get the split going, it comes apart pretty quickly and cleanly.

And as always, the best kind of wood to work is whatever you got for free!

As with milling wood for furniture, so with cutting firewood: cut around the big knots! I like to isolate the big knots and the big crooks in very short sections, which will split more easily but may also have to be left thicker or not split at all. Not every workpiece is worth the trouble of salvaging.

When looking over your stock, you have to figure out what lengths you can get out of each piece–what’s too long and what’s too short. Measurements for firewood are approximate, of course, but every fireplace has a maximum length it will accept, so it’s good to know about how long to cut each section. For my fireplace, the ideal length is the distance from my elbow to my fingertips.

Cutting to the maximum allowable length saves time and effort. If, for instance, you have a 3′ log, you could cut it into three 12″ sections, which will split just fine. Or you could cut it into two 18″ sections, which will also split just fine, but with 2/3 the number of strokes. When you’re working your stock by hand, it’s important to economize where you can.

Using well-maintained tools makes all the difference. A sharp chainsaw will sail through even very tough wood. A dull cutting tool is useless–and dangerous. But there are different standards of sharpness for different tools. A splitting maul needs a slightly blunt edge to split the wood well. A rust-free surface helps the head cleave the wood cleanly and makes it less likely to stick. A couple steel wedges and a sledgehammer help with the more recalcitrant logs. I like a smaller, narrow wedge for starting splits and a thicker, taller one for opening them up.

Speaking of wedges, be sure your tool handles are fully secure in the heads of your maul and sledge. Dry weather, such as we get in the Midwest during winter, can cause heads to loosen. If the head wiggles at all, get another steel wedge and drive it into the top. Use a couple if you have to.

And don’t forget the most fundamental tool of all: the work surface. For furniture making, the work surface is probably a workbench. For splitting wood, it’s a chopping block. Like a good workbench, the block needs to be solid and heavy enough to stay put during use. It also needs to sit level so the workpiece doesn’t rock on top of it. And it needs to be the right height. About 12″ is the perfect height for me.

For my chopping block, I decided to use one of those really knotty sections that would be nearly impossible to split anyway.

As with all woodworking, proper technique is always superior to brute force. If the axe or maul won’t split the wood easily, don’t try to force it through. Use a wedge or two. Whichever tool you’re using, employ a good stance, and use your whole body to bring the maul or the sledge up and over in a smooth arc. But don’t bring it down too hard. Let the weight of the tool do most of the work on the way down.

Here’s one helpful tip: as you finish your swing, bend your knees a little. Dropping your whole body as the maul comes down adds just a little more force to the blow with minimal effort.

The best technique is also the safest technique. Do your splitting in an open space where you won’t catch your tools on things like branches, fences, or clothes lines. Keep both hands on the handle so you don’t mash your fingers. Don’t swing toward your shin or foot. It’s a good idea to wear leather gloves, as long as they give you a good grip on the tool handle. Eye protection isn’t a bad idea either. Expect bits of the wood to fly around as you strike it. Keep bystanders out of the line of your swing. And remember that a rolling log can hurt you just as seriously as any woodworking tool can.

Above all, be willing to take the time to do it right. Whether you’re applying finish to a Chippendale highboy or splitting up sections of oak branches for firewood, the project always repays patience and punishes haste.

For firewood, the most time-consuming part of the whole project isn’t cutting, splitting, or stacking. It’s waiting for it to season. Burning wet wood produces too much smoke that can be choking indoors, even with a good flue. It will take a year or more for this wood to be ready to burn, so I’m splitting up firewood for next year and probably the year to come. As with any woodworking project, it pays to think ahead.

Posted in Wood and Woodwork | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Building Bookcases for My Home Library. Or, 82 Dado Joints by Hand. With a Rolling Library Ladder!

Posted on July 1, 2024 by Steve S.

Every few years, I remember that the whole reason I started woodworking was that I needed to build bookshelves for my family. Some things don’t change.

When we moved into this house a year ago, we had big plans to turn our front room into a proper home library, complete with a whole wall of built-in bookcases. But as of last month, most of our books were still in boxes.

I spent much of the month of June turning this room into a real library, complete with something our whole family has always wanted: a rolling library ladder.

The house has 10-foot ceilings on the first floor, and this wall is over 12 feet long–a perfect place for a big bank of built-in bookcases. I just had to build them.

The Bookcases

My wife and I went over to the local hardwood dealer with a shopping list and a budget. My initial plan was to build it all out of poplar and add maple face frames to match the original maple trim in the room. But as we were browsing, we found a whole pallet of these:

They were drawer-side shorts and rejects–maple boards glued up with a groove near one edge, all between 3′ and 4′ long and 7″ to 9″ wide. At 5/8″ thick, they seemed good enough for the shelves. We bought as many of these maple shorts as we could, plus several 1″ thick poplar boards for the uprights.

It took some experimentation to get the shelves spaced out in the best way. I needed some space for tall books, and I also wanted all the books to have proper head-room while still having as many shelves as reasonably possible. I ultimately decided that the bottom two shelves would have 15″ of clearance for tall books. The rest of the shelves are about 13″ apart, which is enough for just about any standard size book. The very top has 12″ of clearance below the ceiling.

When doing any kind of big built-in, it’s best to build the whole thing in several modules, which you then assemble on site. You build them small enough to fit in easily and add trim to fill the space.

I built four separate shelving units that were 3 feet wide and 9 feet tall. Each unit had 8 shelves, seven of which were housed in dadoes and the last of which was merely rabbeted into the top and secured with both glue and nails. All the joints are covered by trim.

If you do an operation enough, you get a process down and it goes very quickly. I have cut many dado joints before, so the joinery went fast. I saw out the sides of the groove with my stair saw, which is set to stop at a particular depth (in this case 5/16″). You just keep sawing until it stops cutting and then go on to the next cut.

I use a chisel to knock out most of the waste, and a router plane levels out the bottom. If you have marked out the joint accurately enough, the shelf fits snugly into place. By the time this whole project was done, I had cut a total of 82 of these joints by hand, plus 20 rabbet joints.

I built the units one at a time so that I could clamp one up and let the glue dry while I worked on the next one. (Pro tip: always check each unit for square before the glue sets!) One by one, my wife and I carried the units up out of the basement workshop and set them in place.

No old house has even floors, so it took quite a lot of shimming to get everything straight and level. (My 13-year-old included for scale.) I screwed each side to the adjacent one and also used L-brackets on the very top to screw the cases to the wall studs.

I covered the gaps with maple trim, all cut from the same pile of maple shorts that gave me all the shelf pieces. I just cut apart the few panels that were already de-laminating or that had serious flaws and used the good parts for the trim. A coat of Danish oil finished everything off.

It was about this time that I realized I should have already ordered the hardware for the rolling ladder earlier. There were quite a few options online, but I ended up using the Rockler kit, which worked out fine. It was the least expensive option from online retailers that I was inclined to trust. But as any builder will tell you, the really expensive part of any cabinetry project is still the hardware. I spent about as much on the ladder hardware alone as I did on all the wood for the whole project.

Interlude: A Smaller Bookcase

While I waited for the ladder hardware to be delivered, I started to look around at another space in the room that seemed ideal for a bookcase. I counted up the maple boards I had left over and found I had enough for one more unit–if I was willing to build it in three pieces instead of just one.

This is the result. (And yes, that is a sprinkler head up near the ceiling. This house was a commercial property for a couple decades and still has a lot of features like exit signs and a fire suppression system.)

As I planned out this unit, I recalled a bookcase that Chris Schwarz had built years ago. He called it a set of Monticello Bookcases, which are essentially a bunch of long, stackable crates he made look really, really nice because they’re made from hardwood, dovetailed together, and set on a decorative base. While the construction method requires more wood than an ordinary bookcase (because each shelf is doubled up), it can be build from relatively short boards if necessary. It was a perfect solution for my own situation–I had a bunch of short boards on hand but no long ones.

Each unit was about 3 feet square. The bottom one is deeper than the top two. Construction was very simple–the middle two shelves are set in dadoes while the top and bottom shelves are nailed and glued into rabbets. A rabbet in the back of each one lets in a plywood back.

The rabbet in the back was the easiest part. Remember that my stock is all drawer side rejects? Each one has a groove near one edge. So I just ripped off the part past the groove and–voila! There’s a 1/4″ rabbet left on the back edge, perfect for housing a sheet of 1/4″ thick ply.

I set the bottom unit on a plinth in order to raise it up a few inches off the floor. I wiped on a couple coats of Danish oil finish, and once everything was dry, I stacked the three units in place and screwed them together. It was a very straightforward way to build a bookcase, and should I need to build a similar unit again, I will probably build it along the same lines.

Once the finish was dry, we very quickly filled it up with books.

The Library Ladder

Meanwhile, the hardware for the library ladder arrived. It comes with detailed plans for making a ladder out of wood you supply yourself. While the plans are good enough, I have something of an allergy to building anything from somebody else’s plans. (I have a similar aversion to teaching from somebody else’s lesson plans. I just can’t do it.) So I made some modifications to the plans, and I’m happy with the result.

The plans called for all 3/4″ thick stock, which looks a bit thin to my eye. I wanted a ladder that looked more robust. Also, the stability of the ladder in the plans depends entirely on the hardware, including rods and screws underneath every step. But I don’t like the look of a ladder side bristling with bolt heads. Plus, I know how to build a ladder that will stay together without a lot of extra hardware. I sketched out a modified plan and got to work.

I chose to use yellow pine, which is quite strong and very cheap. I cut out of some wide 2X stock I bought at the local home center.

You can almost always find a couple wide pine boards that have knots in the middle but have clear and straight sections near the edges. That makes for good uprights for the ladder. I cut around knots and defects in second board to yield the stock for the steps. I dimensioned everything down to about 1″ thick, taking care to remove approximately the same amount of material from each face.

The hardware is made to attach to thinner stock than I am using. (If you’re using the Rockler kit, do check the dimensions of each piece of hardware. The instructions will say everything is made for 3/4″ thickness, but it’s not perfectly consistent. You should always measure hardware yourself and dimension your wood accordingly.) So I shaped the ends of the uprights to accept the hardware designed for thinner stock.

That way, I still get the benefit of thicker uprights where it matters–where the steps dado into the uprights–while still being able to use this hardware designed to mount on thinner material.

In order to keep the ladder together, the bottom and middle steps, as well as the top rail, attach with a through-mortise and tenon joint.

This prevents the uprights from pulling apart and keeps the rest of the steps set securely in their dado joints.

Once the glue was dry and everything was trimmed, I gave the ladder a couple coats of the same Danish oil finish that I used for everything else, and then I attached the hardware. (One more note if you’re using the kit but modifying the plans: you might need to source longer bolts or otherwise plan to recess the supplied hardware should you opt to use thicker stock.)

Set in place, the ladder is strong and stable, and it rolls well even on our fairly thick carpet.

We have had to warn the kids, however, that this is a piece of furniture and NOT a Disney ride–whatever they may have seen Belle doing during a certain musical number in the animated film Beauty and the Beast.

The room has quickly gone from being a cluttered spare room to being one of the most comfortable, inviting rooms in the whole house.

Posted in Books, Build-Alongs, Wood and Woodwork | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

A New Workbench, Part 4: Additions and Accessories

Posted on June 14, 2024 by Steve S.

You never really know what you need in a workbench until you build one and work at it for a while. For that reason, it’s always advantageous to make your initial design as simple as possible. That way, when (not if) you find you need to modify it, the process is as simple as possible.

As soon as I finished my new workbench, I started building bookshelves. (Story of my life.) In the process, I found that I really liked my new workbench. But there were one or two things I found could improve.

First, I needed some holdfast holes. On my first bench, I bored my original dog holes in a pattern, spaced evenly. But I found that some of those dog holes got used all the time, while others hardly ever got used. On this bench, I have decided to just bore holes as I need them. Thus far I’ve bored three, spaced so I can use my holdfasts to hold down long boards as I cut dadoes into them. I’m sure I’ll eventually bore a few more as necessary.

Second, because this new bench is a lot narrower than my old one, I found that my tools were piling up around my workpieces, and I needed a way to keep track of some of my smaller tools (like chisels and squares) without interrupting the work surface.

Tool Rack in the Back

I needed to add a tool rack. I dug out a perfectly clear yellow pine 2X4, cut it the length of my bench, and planed it down. I then cut spacers and planed them down to 3/8″ thick. I found that, after measuring the thickness of the tools I wanted to fit into the rack, 3/8″ was the ideal width of the slot.

I glued the spacers in place, and then once that glue was set I glued on the 2X4, leaving it just a little proud of the benchtop so I could plane it down level. I could have just screwed or nailed the pieces in place, but I am trying to avoid all unnecessary metal in the benchtop. Should I ever have to drill into the top or modify it in some way, I want to be free to do so without having to check for nail or screw heads. So I took the time to glue it in place.

The spacers are about 6″ long, and there are four of them spaced more or less evenly across the back of the 8′ top.

I was very happy that my squares and chisels fit perfectly, along with some other tools. But after a little experimentation, I found that some of my smaller chisels (1/2″ and thinner) tended to rock back and forth in the slots because the handles are a bit heavier than the blades. So I glued in a few more spacers to make 1″-wide slots for my narrower tools.

For the spacers, I cut some pieces just a little over-thickness and planed them down until they could be tapped in with a hammer. A spot of glue keeps each spacer in place. Problem solved.

Should I need more narrow slots, I can always add more spacers.

The slots will also hold handsaws, which is especially helpful because a handsaw laid on the benchtop takes up a lot of space. Now many of my essential tools will always be at hand, and I can easily clear them all away any time I need the full depth of the bench. I just need to be mindful of sharp edges protruding below the back of the benchtop.

I also bored a couple 1/2″ holes so I could mount my architect’s lamp. It’s very handy to have adjustable lighting at the bench.

Bench Hooks

I have known for a while that I desperately needed to replace the old pine bench hooks that I’ve been using for years.

I picked up some cheap maple shorts at a local hardwood dealer. After gluing them together and planing them down to 3/4″ thick, I had enough stock for three new bench hooks.

Here are my original pine bench hooks set on top of the stock for the new ones:

The exact dimensions of a bench hook aren’t crucial. They just need to be straight, square, and consistent in thickness. It helps to have them in a standard thickness (like 3/4″) so you can use any random dimensioned bit of scrap for additional support underneath a long or oddly shaped workpiece. I’m making my new bench hooks a little deeper than the originals–approximately 9″.

I like having three sizes available: long, medium, and short. The longest one is probably 14″. The shortest one will be about 4″. The medium one is whatever I had left after cutting out the other two.

Anyhow, I glued on the cleats and sawed the three apart.

Having them in different sizes allows me to work on different lengths of stock.

Little workpieces can be sawed on the large or medium hooks. Longer workpieces can span two or all three. That’s the advantage of having them all precisely the same depth.

And while you’d be tempted to make them out of whatever scrap you might have on hand, it’s worth the effort to select straight, knot-free, stable stock. If your bench hooks warp, they will soon be useless.

There. That should do it. Now my workbench is officially done.

For now.

In the meantime, I’m going to finish building those bookshelves for my new library.

Posted in Build-Alongs, Wood and Woodwork | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

A New Workbench, Part 3: The Vise and Planing Stop

Posted on June 7, 2024 by Steve S.

In my last post, I showed how I constructed the legs and stretchers of my new workbench. In this post, I’ll show how I built in two of the main work-holding features of the bench: the face vise and the planing stop.

The Vise

As I glued up the top, I planned the final stage around the vise I had. If you’re building your own workbench, you really want the hardware on hand as you build. Modifying an existing bench for new hardware is possible but never easy.

For my vise, I used a Groz quick-release vise that had served as the end-vise on my old workbench for many years. Eventually I found I didn’t really use an end-vise nearly as much as I thought I would, and while it was always handy to have a second vise on the bench, I felt this vise could be much better used in the face-vise position on my new workbench.

So before laminating the final layer onto the front of the new bench top, I laid out the vise placement.

The vise needed to be let into the top, both on the edge and on the underside. I marked out big notches on what will be the bottom (so the vise sits closer to the top of the workbench) and the front (so the metal jaw sits behind the front edge of the top). I marked out the depth and sawed some kerfs. It was actually helpful that the front 6″ or so of my bench top is thicker than the rest. It was easy to just cut what amounts to a giant through-dado.

I knocked out the waste with a wide chisel and proceeded to the second stage.

The second part of the operation required boring out most of the waste with an augur bit before splitting away the rest with a chisel.

I got the surfaces as level as I reasonably could with the chisel–which wasn’t very level. But there’s no need for a precisely flat surface here. As long as the metal vise sits flat on it, it’s good enough.

I also got to experiment with different methods of leveling things out–broad chisel, shoulder plane, etc.

The shoulder plane was a Christmas present, and I was really glad to have it here. It cleaned out the corners effectively.

Now the vise sits steady in its notches.

I glued the cherry face onto the front edge of the benchtop, creating a mortise for the rear jaw of the vise.

You can’t see the mortise here (it’s on the other side), but now the vise’s rear jaw will be flush with the entire front edge of the benchtop.

Once the top was mounted on the legs–but before I flipped the bench right-side up–I attached the vise with some lag screws.

If you are building your own bench, I highly recommend constructing it upside-down. Attach the base and any heavy hardware (like a metal vise) first, and then find some people to help you turn it over. You don’t want to have to flip over a bench like this any more often than you absolutely have to!

I added a hardwood jaw liner, which I think might be a little thin. But I’ll go ahead and use it for a while, and if it gives me problems, I’ll reinforce or replace it.

I also lined the jaws with leather in order to give it a better grip. I glued the leather on with Shoe Goo, which is used for shoe repair jobs but works well for adhering leather to wood, too.

The Planing Stop

One of my favorite features of the old workbench was the adjustable planing stop. I don’t remember where I first saw this design, but it’s not my own invention. It works very well.

It’s just a hardwood board of sufficient width and thickness–this one is about 1 1/4″ thick and about 6″ wide, and long enough to span the entire end of my workbench. I used cherry wood because I happen to have a lot of it on hand.

The construction is very simple: the stop itself is just a board with slots. It attaches to the bench via threaded rods epoxied into the bench. I use wingnuts (with washers) to secure it at any height up to about 2″ above the benchtop.

Here’s how I built it:

I bored holes a couple inches deep into the end of the bench, about 1 1/2″ below the benchtop–far enough down that the wingnuts will be placed well below the top. I measured and cut the threaded rod to the right length. You have to leave enough rod sticking out that you can loosen the wingnuts without them spinning right off the rod. (Before you saw the rod to length, make sure you thread a nut onto the rod. That way, any roughness left on the end of the rod will be smoothed out when you back the nut off the freshly cut end.) When in doubt, leave it a little bit longer than you think you might need. You can always trim it back with a hacksaw later.

I used original JB-Weld epoxy to secure the rods in the holes. Dip the end of each rod into the epoxy and then tap them into the holes. Keep the nuts on the very ends so you can tap on the nuts instead of mangling the threads on the end of each rod with your hammer. This epoxy has yet to fail on my original stop, although I’ve been through two or three of the wooden stops, so I’m confident it will hold up here.

While the epoxy cured, I made the wooden stop. After cutting the board to length, I cut the slotted holes. The simplest way is to drill overlapping holes the a little wider than the threaded rod and then square up the slot with a chisel. It needn’t be very neat work–as long as the rod slides freely through the whole slot, it’s good enough. I planed down the very top of the stop so it doesn’t sit proud of the benchtop.

Here’s how to use the stop:

It can be set low for face planing. However wide the board you’re planing, you just butt it up against the stop and plane away.

You can also set it higher for edge planing. The stop will go up about 3″ above the benchtop, which is as high as it will ever need to go.

It can also be skewed for working stock of varying thicknesses. This is where cutting the slots fairly loose is an advantage. It allows for just a bit of skew.

The number of rods you use to secure it is flexible. My original stop used only two. This one uses three. I wouldn’t bother with any more than that.

It’s a simple modification that could be added to nearly any workbench.

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A New Workbench, Part 2: The Legs

Posted on May 31, 2024 by Steve S.

In my last post, I showed how I built the top of my workbench with yellow pine boards that I brought from Alabama when I moved to Ohio last year. In this post, I’ll show you how I built the base from pecan wood that I have been saving for several years now.

I don’t know how long ago it was–certainly more than 5 years ago–a friend in Alabama gave me a pecan wood log that was about 6′ long. It’s shape was peculiar, and I wish I had pictures of it intact. While most logs are somewhat round, this one had a distinctly square shape, especially near the base. At about 7″ in diameter, it looked like it would be easy to quarter and shape into 3″ square beams, and if I cut it just right, each of those beams would have a natural “corner.” I cut up the log as planned and laid the beams aside to dry.

I began working on the legs in December, 2023, as I was waiting for the many glue-ups of the top to dry.

Unfortunately, my wood stash in Alabama was attacked by termites (a continual hazard in that part of the country) and I lost some good material.

A couple of these pecan beams sustained localized damage, and I was forced to work around it for this project. As a result, I had to make the tenons in the front legs just a little shorter than I would have ordinarily liked–just shy of 2″ long, rather than the 3″ tenons I had originally planned.

As I mentioned in my previous post, the front edge of my new benchtop is an inch thicker than the back edge, so the front legs won’t be as long as the back ones. Had I not left the top thicker, I wouldn’t have had enough length in these legs for the tenons at all. It wasn’t planned on my part, but I sure am glad it worked out!

Each leg and stretcher needed to have two flat, straight faces at 90 degrees to each other, and that required cutting some of the faces down to size. The quickest way to reduce the thickness of a beam like this is with a hewing hatchet.

On each beam, I wanted to keep as much thickness as possible, both for strength and to save work. After the hatchet work, I used a drawknife on a few spots just to level the surface a bit more.

Cutting 3″ wide pecan wood isn’t easy with a drawknife, so I didn’t do much work this way. (Note the glued-up top in clamps in the background!)

With a jack plane I leveled the surfaces out even more.

Pecan is very hard, but it does plane reasonably well with a sharp blade. Yet I didn’t need the whole surface straight and level, just enough to serve as a reference when laying out the joints. I left quite a bit of roughness on these faces, but I used a square to ensure that the planed surfaces were indeed square to each other. No need to do more work on a very hard wood than absolutely necessary.

I was pleased to find some spalting and mineral staining here and there. It hadn’t weakened the wood, so far as I can tell. But spalted pecan has been something of a theme in my workshop for years, so I’m glad to have it integrated into my workbench.

I oriented the legs to each other and marked them out, roughly indicating the direction each tenon will run. If you look closely at the photo above, you’ll see what I meant by this log having “corners” rather than being round.

The base of the workbench has a total of 12 mortise-and-tenon joints: 2 in each leg for the stretchers and one where each leg is mortised into the top. The legs are a minimum of 3″ thick, so I opted for tenons 7/8″ wide, just under a third of the total thickness of each leg, and plenty thick enough to be strong.

It was April, 2024, by the time I started mortising and tenoning in earnest. Cutting the tenons was pretty straightforward, though they were so big that I used a full-size ripsaw to cut the cheeks. It took me a long time to bore out the mortises, however. Because the legs weren’t all squared up, I would have had trouble boring out the mortises on my drill press. The stock would have wobbled on the table. Plus, I have a fairly sedentary job, so I needed a workout.

My auger bits are made for drilling in softwood, not hardwood. It helps to drill a 1/8″ pilot hole for the lead screw first. That also helps the auger bit run true. It still took a lot of torque to bore 3″ through-mortises in the legs.

As it happened, I did not have quite enough of the pecan beams for all eight pieces of the base (4 legs, 2 long stretchers, and 2 short stretchers). So I dug around in my wood stash and came up with a cherry beam of about the right size–see the foreground of the picture above. It’s also Alabama wood, and I have LOTS of it.

After boring out most of the waste from the mortises, I squared them up with chisels. As it turns out, squaring up mortises in pecan can be hard on tools.

A casualty! My 7/8″ Whitherby bench chisel broke its tip right off as I was levering waste out of a mortise.

Well, these things happen. I ground a new edge, honed it, and kept working–albeit a little more carefully this time.

I used my 3/8″ mortise chisel a lot. When working on shorter pieces, I prefer putting them in the vise. But for long pieces, straddling the work is just as good, especially if I use a clamp to help keep it still.

It took a long time, but by May, 2024, all the mortises and tenons fit together.

Finally, I bored all the offset holes for the drawbore pegs, which are 5/16″ oak. The pegs are the only stock in this bench that I didn’t bring from Alabama. When we moved into this house in Ohio, I found an old side of a church pew up in the attic.

I have no idea where it came from, but, it’s laminated from 3/4″ stock, which is very straight and bone-dry. That’s everything you want in drawbore pegs. I cut some lengths off and split them down for the pegs.

When assembling a structure with drawbored mortise and tenon joints, there is no real hurry with assembly. You take your time because the joints need no glue. They are mechanically locked together.

However, those shorter tenons on the front legs had me worried a bit, since those are the joints that will be the most stressed as I work at the bench in the years to come. So I decided it wouldn’t hurt to put some glue in just those mortises, though they are drawbored as well. None of the other joints required glue.

Everything is assembled now. The base is as rigid as can be.

I like the look of the rough surfaces in contrast to the straight, level surfaces. It lends the structure an element of what David Pye would call diversity in texture.

Now that I have trimmed back the excess length of each drawbore peg, everything is nice and neat.

I will admit that I had to wrestle the structure here and there to get everything to fit. There’s a bit of twist here and there in a couple of the beams, which meant I had to persuade some joints into place. That’s how it goes when timber framing, I suppose. But everything came together just how I planned, and the workbench stands upright!

In my next post, I will show how I finished up this workbench by installing the vise and the planing stop, as well as a shelf underneath.

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A New Workbench, Part 1: The Top

Posted on May 24, 2024 by Steve S.

Since I moved from South Alabama to Ohio last summer, I have had precious little time for woodworking. But now that the school year has ended and my schedule is more flexible, I can finally start some of the big projects I’ve been planning all year. First job: a new workbench!

I have been planning to replace my old workbench since 2020, when I started picking up wide yellow pine boards at the home centers one or two at a time and storing them away. By 2023, I had collected enough wood to build the whole bench that I had envisioned, which would improve significantly on the bench I built back in 2008 or 2009. But instead of building the new bench, I changed jobs and moved a few hundred miles away. I considered giving away the yellow pine boards I had collected and just re-buying them in Ohio, but I wasn’t sure I would be able to find good yellow pine locally–the construction wood of choice in the Midwest is fir or spruce, which is quite a bit softer than the yellow pine I have been used to working with in Alabama. Besides, I thought it would be a nice tribute to my years in the South if my first major project in Ohio used only (or mainly) woods that I had acquired in Alabama.

A workbench is a simple thing, really. It’s just a thick tabletop on sturdy legs. You could describe the construction process in a paragraph. But because I want to go into more detail on different elements of the build, I am dividing the blogging process into three separate posts: The Top, The Legs, and the Vise and Planing Stop.

But first, here is the finished product:

I designed this workbench along the lines described in Chris Schwarz’s book The Anarchist’s Workbench, which you can get here in hard copy or as a free download. The finished dimensions are 8′ long, 24″ wide, and 34″ high. The right side overhang is 26″ and the left side overhang is 16″.

I made a slab top laminated from 2X construction timbers, with legs and stretchers connected with mortises and tenons. It’s a very simple design–sturdy and very heavy–but it can also take a long time to build. Most of the time is spent gluing up the top, which needs to be done in many stages. Fortunately, it can also be done one evening at a time, spread out over weeks or months if necessary.

I began the project in December, 2023. First I ripped the boards in half on my bandsaw, leaving me with a bunch of boards 1 1/2″ thick and between 4″ and 5″ wide. I decided to keep the extra width and make the front edge of the bench extra thick, instead of cutting everything down to the same width. It complicated the layout of the legs a little bit, but it turned out to be a good thing that I made that front edge extra thick.

The process of making the top is pretty boring. You plane a couple boards as smooth as you reasonably can.

Then you face-glue them together and clamp them up as well as you can.

This process uses a lot of glue. I bought a gallon and used a lot of it.

Normally you want to use boards all the same length. But when I pulled out all the boards I had set aside for the top, I realized that two of them were about 6″ too short. I have no idea how that happened. But I certainly wasn’t going to cut the whole length of the bench down just because of that. Nor did I want to just buy more boards and risk combining newer, wetter wood with my older, seasoned stock. Instead, I made up the length difference with scraps butted to the ends of the short boards and sandwiched between full-length boards. It doesn’t look great, but it’s not a structural problem.

Anyhow, I kept planing down boards and gluing them to the outside of my ever-widening benchtop.

It helps to get the clearest, straightest boards you can. I kept the boards with the tightest grain for what would become the front edge of the top. In yellow pine, the tighter the growth rings, the more wear-resistant the wood will be.

Every couple weeks, I would go down to the basement and plane down a couple more boards and add them to the lamination. And as it happened, having these scraps protruding from each end was a real help every time I needed to roll the whole thing over or stand it up on its side to apply glue. If you build a bench this way, consider using an extra-long board in the middle and leaving the extra length on each end to serve as handles. You can saw them off flush when you’re done.

Anyhow, I think pine is a great wood for making a workbench top. It’s cheap, easy to work, and wears pretty well in the long run. But yellow pine has a drawback that I learned from my old bench. The wood tends to splinter pretty badly under certain stresses, and after a number of years the front edge of my old SYP bench was starting to catch on my clothes. I ended up having to round over the front edge quite a bit, which made it hard to work on small workpieces set right up close to the front edge.

So on this new bench, I am lining the front edge with a less splintery hardwood, and I have set aside a special board for the purpose.

Among the boards I brought from Alabama is the last quarter-sawn cherry board from the lot I used to build my bed, my nightstands, and my dining room table years ago. I had been looking for a fitting “special project” to use it on, and this is it.

I am jumping ahead in the build process now. Before I laminated this final cherry board to the slab top, I mortised out the spot for the quick-release vise. (I strongly recommend building your workbench with the hardware both in mind and on hand.) The rear jaw of my metal vise will be let in behind the board on the front edge so that the entire bench front will be in the same plane–rather than having the vise stand out proud of the front, or having to chop a deep cavity into the front to let in the vise and a separate jaw. (More on the vise in a future post.)

Once the top was all glued up, it sat upside down on sawhorses for months while I worked on the legs. I started on the legs. (Again, more on that in a future post.) One night there was a tornado warning, and the whole family spent an hour in the basement in the middle of the night.

The workbench top made a pretty good makeshift bed for two of the girls while we waited out the storm. There was no damage in our neighborhood, fortunately.

I had started in December, and in May I finally finished the legs and set to work leveling the top with a jack plane. I found that my glue-ups could have been a little better aligned, and it took me an hour or so to level it all down to the lowest spots.

I periodically used a straightedge to help me find the high spots so I could work more efficiently. The top doesn’t need to be dead-flat, but there should be no big hills or valleys. I want workpieces to lay flat on the benchtop without rocking or bowing.

I asked one of my kids to take a video of the planing work:

It takes a while.

By the end, the floor was covered with shavings–as it should be.

85% of the planing is done across the grain with the jack plane, using as deep a cut as you can manage. Once it’s pretty much leveled, you plane diagonally to the grain with a longer plane set for a somewhat finer cut. Finally, you use a smooth plane going directly with the grain using a fairly fine cut. On nice furniture, you would follow with a card scraper or sandpaper to remove the last of the plane tracks, but a workbench top does not need that level of attention. When the smooth plane can take a full-width shaving on every cut, the top is smooth and level enough.

I finished the benchtop with a bit of Danish oil. On my first bench, I never used a finish at all, and it was fine. But that old benchtop did absorb anything that got spilled on it–glue, stain, paint, coffee, etc. I didn’t like the way it looked after a few years. So on this benchtop, I decided that a little oil would make it easier to clean and prevent drops of glue from sticking. Plus, it looks really nice.

In my next post, I will show how I built the legs and stretchers from wood that I sawed out of a log and dried myself.

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How to Mill Your Own Lumber on a Bandsaw

Posted on January 12, 2024 by Steve S.

So you’ve got a log. Maybe its a tree that came down nearby, or maybe somebody heard you’re a woodworker and offered you a log. And you have a bandsaw. You start wondering if you can mill this log into boards yourself. Sure, you could invest in an Alaskan chainsaw mill, or you could try to find someone nearby who runs a hobby sawmill to cut it up for you. But you would love to be able to say you made something from wood that you milled yourself.

It’s a question that gets asked a lot. And not many people have answers that aren’t hypothetical because not many woodworkers do it. There are reasons for that (keep reading!), but it’s something I’ve done quite a lot. And it is a LOT of work. But it can be done. Here’s how I do it.

To begin with, don’t try to saw up a whole log on your bandsaw. Unless the log is quite small and very straight, you will struggle to make a straight cut, and the log will want to rotate on you. Besides, a log small enough to send straight through the bandsaw is going to be too small to yield much usable wood anyway. You want a log big enough that it will actually yield usable boards, which means you have to do a lot of processing before you even get to the bandsaw.

Here is how I do it:

1. Be picky about your stock.

Just because you have a log doesn’t mean you’re going to get nice lumber out of it. There are many, many logs that are good only for firewood. So first consider whether sawing this particular log into boards is really going to be worth the trouble. Take a good, hard look at it. If it’s twisted or knotty, or if it has rotten spots, it’s not worth messing with. And don’t bother with wood species that you can easily get commercially, either. You are looking for a log that is straight, clear, and sound all the way through.

If you get to choose your logs, then you’ll find that some woods are a lot easier to do this with than others. For your first time especially, try to find a wood that will split fairly straight–like walnut, hickory, or one of the oaks. Some fruit woods, like cherry, can also work. Other woods, like elm, will be a lot more difficult. But this is a great method for getting lumber out of species that aren’t available commercially, or logs from trees that have sentimental value. You may also be able to get good lumber out of tree species that that are too small to sawn commercially.

2. Crosscut the log to length.

Cut the log not much longer than your bandsaw’s outfeed table. (Do you have outfeed support for your bandsaw? Because if you don’t, this is going to be really difficult. I strongly recommend rigging up some kind of outfeed table for your bandsaw.) There’s a limit, though, to how short or long is practical. Too short (under 2 feet) and it will be too short to use. Too long (over 4 feet) and you’ll have a really hard time handling it on the bandsaw. After doing this a couple times, you’ll get a feel for how long a log you are able to handle.

3. Split the log, at least in half.  

I often use my chainsaw to saw a shallow kerf where I want the log to split. Then I drive in steel wedges to split it. If all goes well, the split side will be nearly flat enough to lay on the bandsaw table so I can saw up the log. With a bigger log, I’ll split it into quarters or even eighths. The more you can do with wedges and a sledge hammer, the better. 

4. Remove the bark and pith, and (depending on the species) maybe the sapwood.

A froe, hewing hatchet, or drawknife is handy here. If you’re cutting oak, you’ll want to cut away the sapwood. The more work you do with your coarse tools, the less work you’ll have to do on the bandsaw. Be sure to cut/split the workpieces down enough that they will actually fit through your bandsaw. If you have 6″ of cutting depth on your bandsaw, then that’s as wide as your workpiece can be. There’s nothing quite like getting to the end of a cut only to find out that the very end of your workpiece is 1/8″ too high to fit through the bandsaw. Use a drawknife or hatchet to take off any high spots. I have found it best to plan for at least 1″ of clearance under the top guide of the saw’s bade.

You will also want to cull your stock at this point. Splitting the log will reveal defects like large knots that won’t be worth the effort to cut through. Be willing to discard some (or even all!) of a log that ends up having too many defects. The logs in the pic above were all cut fairly short because I just needed to make wooden spoons out of them. 30″ was plenty long enough for that purpose.

5. Get the bandsaw ready.

Make sure you cut with the coarsest, widest blade you can put on the saw. I use a hook-tooth, 3 PPI blade. And make sure it is SHARP. A dull blade will make this much, much harder than it already is. And (in case you missed the point the first time) you really do need some kind of outfeed support–even if it’s just a partner who will help you on the other side of the table. A solid outfeed table of some kind is even better. Also make sure your bandsaw won’t move when you bump it. If you’re feeding a 40 lb. chunk of wood through it, you don’t want it rolling around on you, or tipping over!

6. Mark your cuts with a square and a chalkline.

Examine each section of the log carefully to see which is the flattest side, and how you can cut it for the best results. Because you’ve split the log, this method strongly lends itself to quarter-sawing. You will probably need to do a little work with a hewing hatched or drawknife to make the reference face flat enough. It needn’t be perfectly flat, but it shouldn’t rock on the table.

Use a square and a pencil to mark out your first cut on each end of the workpiece. It is best to saw your log section into pieces about the thickness that you expect to use–allowing a little extra thickness for shrinkage and planing, of course. I’m sawing the log section above to 1 1/4″ in the hopes of having a board I can finish to 1″ thick after it dries.

Connect your thickness marks on each end with a chalkline. The chalkline is invaluable here! It gives you a clear reference to follow as you saw.

7. Now saw the wood!

As you push the wood through the cut, follow the line carefully, and keep the feed slow and steady. After a few inches, the blade may start to bind. Have some small, wooden wedges ready to drive into the kerf to keep it open. You do NOT want to pinch the blade in the middle of a big, wet, heavy workpiece that you are struggling to balance on the bandsaw’s table. (Trust me on this one….)

If all goes well, you will open up a nice, sawn surface!

Once you’ve made your first cut, you have a few options. You can keep the workpiece in the same orientation, or you can rotate it 90 degrees, using the freshly-sawn face as the new reference face. You can also flip it end-to-end. I plan out one cut at a time, depending on the grain pattern I reveal with each cut.

8. Set a fence.

After the initial cut, a single-point fence will help cut to a consistent thickness. If you have several log sections to cut up all at once, it’s best to make an initial cut on several pieces, set the fence once, and run all the workpieces through on the single setting. This is heavy-duty production work, so you will want to economize on time and effort wherever you can! But the result should be fairly consistent thickness from board to board.

Through all the sweat, make sure you take the time to appreciate the beauty of the wood grain that you reveal. Every cut yields a new discovery!

9. Stack your lumber properly so it can dry.  

There are standard practices for stacking freshly-sawn wood so it can air-dry. Logs are full of water–even if they’ve been sitting for years! You will want to make sure it is properly stacked with stickers in a sheltered place that allows for some air movement on all sides of the pile. It also helps to weigh down the stack with something heavy. You can find lots of good online guides for air-drying lumber–no need for me to repeat them here.

Since you’re working with fairly short pieces, I do recommend that you seal the ends of your new boards with wax so as to minimize checking. You want as little waste on each end as possible.

It is an extra step, but if your boards came out extra-nice (as with this spalted pecan wood) then it’s probably worth the effort.

10. Wait for the wood to dry.

Milling up your own wood is a lot of work, but what will really try your patience is waiting for the wood to get dry enough to use! There are some applications, like spoon carving, that are best done with freshly cut wood. But the vast majority of furniture work demands stock that is at least adequately dried, and often very thoroughly dried.

How long should you wait for it to dry? It depends. Under ideal drying conditions (boards cut fairly thin, properly stacked, with low humidity and good airflow through the pile all the time) then you might be able to start using it in 6-9 months. But since drying conditions are almost never ideal, you should plan to wait a year or two before you start cutting into it.

Also keep in mind that thick boards will air-dry MUCH slower than thinner ones will. You may have heard a rule of thumb like “One year per inch of thickness, plus a year”? Yeah, it’s not true. 12-18 months for 1″ thick stock is usually sufficient. But 2″ stock will still be wet inside after 3 years. Thicker boards can take exponentially longer to dry than thinner ones. So if you’re thinking of of saving effort by cutting your boards to 2″ or 3″ thick and telling yourself, “I can just resaw them into thinner boards later!” don’t listen to yourself. When you do resaw them, you’ll end up with boards of uneven moisture–bone-dry on one side and quite damp on the other side–and the board is very likely to warp. No, you are always better off sawing your boards to the thinnest practical thickness. You’ll get much better results in the long run.

So with the right tools, a little hard work, and a lot of patience, you can mill some of your own stock from logs you have on hand.

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Panel Saw Restoration

Posted on December 20, 2023 by Steve S.

One of the perks of moving to the Midwest is that old tools are still relatively easy to find–if you know where to look. When I lived in Alabama, it was really difficult to find old tools in local antique shops, but Ohio is awash in antiques of all kinds–especially furniture. And if you’re looking for vintage hand tools at bargain prices, antique malls in Ohio are usually worth a look.

Take, for example, these saws I picked up recently at a local antique mall. I don’t recall what I paid for them–under $10 apiece, certainly.

The saw on the bottom has been resharpened so many times that the blade is about gone. I’ll take it apart and repurpose the nuts and probably the handle. I’ll eventually cut up the blade for card scrapers. That will be another story, though.

The smaller saw on the top, however, is getting restored. Underneath the dirt and rust is a usable tool with lots of life left in it.

I first removed saw nuts and the handle from this little saw. It was pretty easy to clean the rust off the blade. I just scraped the rust off with a razor blade, using a bit of WD40 as a lubricant. I finished up with a little bit of fine steel wool and wiped everything clean. (Do this over cardboard or something. It’s messy.) I scrubbed the handle with a green scrubby pad and some Murphy’s Oil Soap. Then once it was dry I applied a coat of Danish oil. Once the oil had cured, I put everything back together.

Now that the grime is gone, let’s take a closer look at this panel saw.

I can just make out the remnants of the etch, which is the Disston company’s keystone logo. There is a “00” in the center–whatever that means. The Disston company identified different model saws by number–No. 7, No. 8, etc., and on some saws the model number appears in the middle of the keystone. I’ve never seen a reference to a model “00,” though.

The medallion is just the Warranted Superior eagle, not the more desirable Disston-branded medallion. The Disston company sold its best saws under its own brand name, whereas secondary-quality saws were sold with the generic “Warranted Superior” branding, though there are often enough distinctive features to tell that the saw was made by the Disston company. This saw was probably sold under one hardware store brand or another, which explains the odd model number. It would be hard to date the saw precisely, but the saw’s features resemble saws made by the Disston company in the 1920s.

You can also see a little number 11 stamped just above the teeth below the handle. That indicates the number of tooth points per inch. The higher the number, the smaller the teeth and the finer and slower the cut. The lower the number, the faster and coarser the cut. 11 is definitely on the fine side, which means it will be good for making relatively fine cuts.

This saw is shorter than the average handsaw you find in the wild, although a 20″-long blade isn’t exactly rare. Disston made many of its most popular saws in lengths ranging from 16″ to 28″, with some models being offered with a blade as long as 36″! The average antique handsaw has a blade that’s about 26″ long. It seems like most people who were buying handsaws a century ago preferred longer ones to shorter ones. A long saw has the obvious advantage of being able to make a cut in a thicker piece of wood. Plus, you can cut a thin piece of wood with a long saw, but it’s harder to cut a really thick piece of wood with a shorter saw. But a short saw also has advantages. It can work more easily in tight spaces, and it will fit easily into a tool box.

This saw has certainly lain dormant for a while. There is some pitting on the blade, but fortunately none of it is down near the teeth, so the pitting is really just a cosmetic issue. The decorative nib near the toe of the blade has long been broken off or removed. The saw hasn’t been resharpened very often; there is still plenty of blade left.

But whoever sharpened it last did not do a very good job. The teeth were uneven in height, so it took me a while to re-file them back to an even height. But once I did, the saw cut really well. I am already enjoying having a smaller handsaw like this available for making fine cuts in small workpieces. This may well become one of my favorite saws in my growing arsenal.

Merry Christmas to me!

Posted in Tool Repair | Tagged , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

New Home, New Workshop, Same Woodworking

Posted on November 27, 2023 by Steve S.

To make a very long story very short, this summer my family and I moved from southern Alabama to southeastern Ohio, where I have started a new job. We had lived in the same house in Alabama for 15 years, where I had found many ways to do my woodworking in a pretty small space. Over the years I had acquired many tools and a whole lot of wood, much of which I had cut and sawn myself. Then, in the space of a few months, I had to sort through it all and pack up everything I wanted to take with me. It was a lot of work, and I learned some important lessons along the way.

Let me tell the story through pictures.

First, the new house:

The new house is big and old and lovely. Like all old homes, it needs some work, but for its age it is in very good shape.

Our old Alabama house was about 1400 square feet and was built in about 1918. Our new Ohio house was built in the 1880s and is about 2900 square feet–not counting the huge attic and the basement. And it has a garage. So there’s plenty of space for all my woodworking tools–and then some!

The main problem, though, was getting it all there.

This was my main workspace in Alabama–one end of our large dining room. It took some time to clear off the old workbench and box up everything I had stored on, in, and around it. I had considered leaving my old bench and just building a new one when I got to Ohio, but I figured I would need a workbench immediately upon moving in. There are always little repair jobs that need attention, and it would be easier to do them with a full workbench available.

I had been hanging on to a lot of junk–bits and pieces of wood, wooden spoons that had cracked, prototypes I no longer needed, and templates I had long since replaced. I also had accumulated quite a lot of scrap for firewood. Some of it would have been worth keeping, had I remained in this house. But it was definitely not worth moving across the country. I burned some of it. I gave bits of usable wood away. And I ended up discarding a whole lot of scrap.

One thing I learned is that moving can be very expensive. Moving companies charge mainly by weight, and wood and tools are heavy. One of my relatives took pity on me and lent me a small box trailer with which to move my power tools, my workbench, and whatever lumber I decided needed to come. We ended up packing the trailer to the ceiling.

Once we got the trailer unloaded, the first order of business was to get the workbench put back together and get out my essential tools. Everything else could be brought out and set up a little at a time. I decided that the basement was the right place for my main workspace. The biggest room in the basement is about 12′ wide and runs the whole length of the house, which is plenty of space for a workbench, tool storage, and a sharpening station, as well as some lumber storage and the kids’ Lego collection.

The second thing I learned was that you should move all your tools yourself. The movers we hired were really good at their job, on the whole. But I made the mistake of letting them move my tool chest, which they up-ended at one point. I should have warned them not to do that.

I had had my chest packed pretty tightly, but not tightly enough. When I opened it, I found everything jumbled like this. My stomach sank as I gingerly picked up each tool and turned it over, looking for damage. Miraculously, the only damage I found was a little chip out of one chisel handle–nothing that couldn’t have happened during a routine day at the bench. I was so relieved!

As soon as we moved into our Ohio house, the utilitarian woodworking projects started. None of them were very exciting, but they all required a basic tool kit and a bit of skill. The first was new enclosures for my daughter’s pet box turtles, which will live outside during the warmer months. It was so nice to have a big, wide driveway to work in. It was also nice to be able to work in the July sun and not be soaked with sweat inside of five minutes.

Anyhow, we call these enclosures “turtleariums,” a word that I am pretty sure was made up by the 20th-century writer of children’s novels, Elizabeth Enright, who happens to be a favorite of my kids. The top of each turtlearium is hinged and can be opened to feed and care for the turtles. The slats are buried a little way under the soil to prevent the turtles from burrowing out, but they allow for plenty of air movement and a bit of extra sunlight, which the turtles love.

Another little job was to convert an unused doorway into a kitchen pantry. This is only the beginning of the many shelving units I have planned for this house. We own a lot of books, and we left quite a few built-in bookshelves in our Alabama house. So it looks like I will be building a big bank of bookcases to house our ever-growing library, probably this coming summer.

Now it has been a few months since we moved in, and I have finally gotten most of my tools unpacked and set up where I want them.

The old workbench is now at the center of a big workspace that includes a little sharpening station and my drill press, as well as several old cabinets that hold hardware and other supplies. (The Legos are now at the far end of the room.) I still need to build in some racks to hold lumber, and there are several other things to put into place yet.

But I am really enjoying having a lot of space to work with.

I have repurposed my small market table as a dedicated sawing station, and my new and bigger saw till fits right above it in this niche in the basement wall. (The floor does get pretty damp during the rainy seasons, so everything along the wall needs to be kept up on blocks.) The chopping block will eventually move elsewhere–not exactly sure where yet. And I will eventually hang a few more tools up on this board.

Did I mention that there is not only space for a workbench, but for two workbenches? Over the last three or four years, I have been laying up select pieces of wood in the hopes of building a new workbench. The old one is still serviceable, but I built it back when I didn’t know as much about woodworking–or about the kind of work I would be doing at it–as I do now. So, much of the lumber I brought with me from Alabama was the wood I had set aside for the new workbench. And because I have a lot more lumber to store and not a lot of shelving on which to store it, it seemed like the right time to start on the new bench. I am gluing the top up out of 4″ wide yellow pine boards. It’s going to be massive. The old bench will become more of an all-purpose utility/assembly bench, while the new one will be reserved for joinery.

A lot of things have changed now that we have moved to a new house in a different state. But some things are still the same.

I need a batch of small Christmas presents, and I brought a whole lot of spoon blanks with me, so I’ve been making spoons this week. They’re the first ones I’ve made in about six months.

It feels good to be back at it.

Posted in Home Improvement, House and Home | Tagged , , , , | 3 Comments