This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.
Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.
If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I don't know when I last said what I was doing, so to recap...
I built a boardgame table last year out of rustic walnut. I calculated it would cost me $300 in lumber, somehow I actually spent $450. Still beats the $2000+ asking price of most places selling them. I spent the summer working on it, burnt the fuck out, and took a break for the fall/winter. But the weather is getting nice again, so my un-climate controlled shop is getting nice again too. I sorted out all the off cuts from my table, and am going to make a set of 4 chairs to go with it. Because right now I have a motley collection of crappy folding chairs and desk chairs pulled from my computers.
I based my design off these plans. Except I made it a little smaller because when I compared it's dimensions to virtually every other chair in my entire house, they were comically huge. I'm also not using home depot lumber, because WTF? Nor am I using pocket screws, and am instead going with 100% mortise and tenon joinery.
I mean christ, I wouldn't trust a pine chair held together with pocket screws... would you?
But first I had to build a new chicken coop, because a fox killed 3/4 of our laying hens, and my wife thought that was a great excuse to buy 20 fucking chicks. Granted, she's apparently promised to give 10 of them away to friends when they mature, but still.
After that I got serious about the chairs again. I took all the random offcuts I had sorted out, and milled them to the proper size. I also had 2 spare planks of walnut I ended up not even needing for the table which became the seats, and a few more random parts. Next up was gluing up the seat panels. I may end up creating a template for these to give them a slightly more interesting flared shape, but we'll see. They may end up just square.
Next up I made the template for the back legs. This was a fairly straight forward process of putting a gentle curve on a blank with a flexible piece of scrap I had lying around. Then making the cuts with a jigsaw and lots of sanding.
I'm loaded for bear on this project because I decided to invite a buddy over this Saturday to work on it with me. Going to head to the lumber yard, pick up the 6/4 stock I need for the legs. I'm hoping 2 planks should do it, but we'll see how many knots I need to work around. Might get a 3rd just to be safe. Then hopefully get a few milled, cut, and maybe even get some chairs dry fit together. Which means I need as much done as possible. I still need to get the tenons cut on all the parts and my router dialed in to cut the mortises in the legs. I may even take a piece of 2x6 or whatever I have lying around and make some test legs just to make sure everything looks good. Then after the day is over, and I can take my sweet ass time sanding, shellacking and waxing all the parts.
It's remarkable how wood working is like, maybe 15% cutting and assembling. The rest is design, milling and finishing. I'm starting to understand how a lot of people just buy S4S boards, and then also have some other professional finish it to boot. If I ran a business and/or had the money I might do that too.
I'm currently making a foot stool and having my first go at cutting mortise and tenon joints. I don't have a router so I cut the first set of blind mortises with a multitool + chisel and now I'm doing through-mortises with a jigsaw. It's going much better than I expected, and it's a whole lot nicer to make something where I can pick up and rotate the entire piece with one hand than it was building full size built-in bookcases inside the same actively occupied space they were sized to fit. And yes, putting two coats of finish on 8 uprights and on both sides of 36 large shelves did indeed take forever.
Next step is deciding how I'll create the chamfer/roundover without owning a router or a plane. I've seen people do it with rasps but I don't want to tear and chip the soft pine, but I'd also like something faster and less dusty than sanding. I'll have to try out a few methods on the off cuts.
Honestly I'd say just nut up and get a router. But if that is ruled out for whatever reasons, like you are attached to hand tools, maybe a card scraper? I keep meaning to grab a few myself.
It's 100% on the list. In the meantime this is a small project and I kind of like the challenge/discipline of making do with what I have. Plus despite having added ~25m of shelf space most of that was instantly consumed and I'm still very limited on space and storage, so while a router is justifiable a lot of the larger and more practical tools are off the table. If anything the move right now would be to buy a block plane but again, I like the challenge of having to get creative.
Yeah, I hear that. I remember getting creative, and finding ways to use my tablesaw as a jointer, and putting rabbets on joints for drawers and boxes with it.
Then I discovered the raw joy of having the correct tool for the correct job. The jointer I got last year has been the best edition to my shop by a mile. No more planing sled or makeshift jointing on the tablesaw for me!
IMHO, a router table might be the second most important powertool behind a tablesaw. It can joint, template, profile, mortise, and probably more. If I had to do it all over again, I'd probably have skipped my miter saw and gotten a router table sooner.
Also my next project is ripping out a bunch of poorly optimized shelving that came with the place, and instead putting in a miter saw station, lots of drawers, and a wall rack for rough lumber. So that'll be fun.
I'll definitely make a small/portable router table once I have the router. As useful as it would be a table saw is out of the question though.
Americans are lucky that a lot of you seem to have large garages and basements to use, and YouTube being mostly American often gives the impression that table saws are the next step up from owning a power drill. I did eventually find the British corner of YouTube where people squeeze their hobby woodworking into our more typical potting sheds, but if I worked in my potting shed I'd then have nowhere for my gardening stuff.
Alongside the creativity aspect I just have an aesthetic dislike for solving problems by waving a credit card. On the other hand the last time I made a foot stool shaped object I did it using only a Swiss Army knife with a saw stroke of <2", and there was that time I cut a crude mortise for a door lock using little more than a screwdriver and a vegetable knife, so I won't deny there is a certain minimum threshold of viability.
I'm not sure what I'll make next. I've got a lot of projects I'd like to make, a lot of jigs I'll need to make, and a few more tools to buy. Quite keen to learn some sewing actually, was thinking last night that I could start off by making some sort of upholstery cushion for the top of this stool. Should be fairly straight forward, I don't think fitting gets much easier than a small flat rectangle.
Oh damn, not even a tablesaw huh? I really was completely in the wrong mindset for you. There I go being all American again.
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I'm seriously thinking about sticking some heating in my shop, maybe even a mini split. It's a lot easier to work on stuff (and bring yourself to work on stuff) when your hands aren't blue.
My wife keeps bringing that up, but my shop is too large and poorly insulated for that to be practical. There is actually an old wood stove out there I could get going if I ever spent an appreciable amount of time out there during the winter. But I think for my purposes something like this or this might be more useful. Something a bit more on demand and directional, so I'm not pissing the wind trying to heat up an enormous drafty space.
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