Hey, Rake!

I left home yesterday for a two-week business trip, and I’m already missing my workshop. (Okay, so I’m missing my wife and kids, too!) Maybe this is a chance to update the blog with some recent work.

With a functional (if not yet painted) tool chest, it was time to pick back up on a neglected project: my hay rake table. I know, I started this project well over a year ago. Let’s just say the cobbler’s children may finally get new shoes this fall.

The hay rake stretchers came together relatively easily. I was pleased with the way the legs came together with the stretchers.

The base is now nearly complete. I need to complete the scroll detail at the ends of the top bars that support the tabletop, and join those to the legs.

I’m tempted to embellish these scrolls with more detailed spiral carvings, since they already suggest the volutes of an Ionic column. I’m really torn here: I’d been looking forward to adding carving to my work, and the minimal carving to define the scroll went very quickly. I worry a bit that an overtly Classical reference would seem a little out of place on an Arts and Crafts piece. It could work, especially in the context of the volutes on a Windsor chair.

What do you think? Stop with the scrolls as they are, or continue to carve a more intricate volute?

In the home stretch.

The stretchers assembled.

Dry-fitting the legs to the stretchers.

Dry-fitting each mortise and tenon joint.

A closer look at the hay rake stretchers.

Drawbored mortise and tenons may be my favorite joints to make.

These “top bars” need to be joined to the legs.

A sharp plane iron leaves a mirror-smooth surface.

Beginning to lay out the scrolls.

Ready to carve this turkey.

I like the logic of this design.

The red will be wasted away; the pencil will be carved.

I refined the scroll shape with a block plane and spokeshaves.

Another shot of the scroll.

I carved the concave space here with a 3/4″ No. 3 carving gouge.

Scroll carving up close.

Hay Rake Table: Some Mid-Project Reflection

It’s been nearly two weeks since the end of my sabbatical and my return to part-time woodworking. Even though my project isn’t complete, it seems like a good time to look back.

Over the past six weeks, I’ve learned some great things. I learned that I like the feel of old tee shirts, preferably at least ten years old. I learned that my daughter is old enough to mow the lawn, and she does a good job of it.

I also learned quite a bit about my woodworking practice, and what I can improve for the next project, and that’s what I want to focus on in this post.

I haven’t completed my hay rake table, but I’m pleased with my progress. The table top is glued up; the stretchers and legs are milled, mortised, and tenoned, but not yet assembled. Next up is to chamfer the legs and stretcher pieces. I also need to make the breadboard ends and inlay the splines, and of course apply the finish.

I gained a great appreciation for my local lumber dealers. Had I been working with store-bought lumber, I likely would have saved a considerable amount of time spent planing. I didn’t anticipate the amount of twist I would encounter in this wood, or the extra boards I would plane when I encountered defects in other boards.

On the other hand, I discovered some time-saving work methods as I went that will make the next project more efficient. For example, it finally hit home that by ripping a wider board close to final width, the twist in the board becomes easier to manage. (For the ripping operation, it worked well to follow a chalk line on my bandsaw, knowing that I would joint the edge by hand later.) It was helpful that I’d decided on a table top composed of four 10″-wide boards.

Given that decision, I suppose I could have taken my lumber to my dad’s shop and used his 12″ jointer, but I tend to make large, expensive wedges on powered jointers. I’m sure some coaching would sort out that tendency, and as coaches go, I’ve been fortunate to have my dad to learn from. However, the results I achieve by hand and the satisfaction I get from the process are what keep me at it.

Three weeks is the longest stretch in which I’d worked consecutive full time in the workshop. Working full time is much different from the evening and weekend work I was used to. For the three months prior to my sabbatical, I’d been woodworking in the mornings before work, which forced me to think in ninety minute increments.

The ninety minute mark is not an arbitrary measure for me. Ninety minutes turned out to be the amount of time required to accomplish a meaningful unit of work in the shop. Less time and I found that I didn’t have a chance to get into the flow of the work. More time, and I either wasn’t getting enough sleep or I was showing up late for work.

One of those ninety minute tasks I’m looking forward to is applying a coat of finish. For the finish, I’m leaning toward Tried and True Original Wood Finish. On my sample piece, it imparted a warm glow that should contribute nicely to the character of this project.

Planing is Everything

“Plans are nothing. Planning is everything.” -Dwight Eisenhower

After a week of volunteering, I jumped headlong into my sabbatical project, a dining room table inspired by Sidney Barnsley’s hay rake table. So far, it’s felt like planing is everything.

One of my goals for this project was to use the swamp white oak lumber I harvested in 2008. Many of those boards were wide planks, 12″ and wider, with a few that were 17″ wide and over 8′ long. At 2″ thick, these widest boards weighed in at 90 lbs each, so this first week has been mostly about wrestling big planks, jointing them flat and planing them to a uniform thickness.

Had I gone to the lumber yard and purchased the lumber, I could have picked boards with less twist or fewer defects, but I wouldn’t have had the same connection to the wood – wood I’ve taken from tree trunk to planks, and now to table.

What’s emerging from the bushels of shavings are four boards, each with a gentle arc to the grain that will come together to suggest an ellipse in the rectangular tabletop and provide an interesting counterpoint to the series of butterfly splines I’ll inlay down the center of the table.

I’ll edge joint and rip each to 10″ wide before the glue-up. Given the amount of twist I had to contend with, it wasn’t practical to insist on using the full width of those 17″ boards. It turned out to be a good decision, granting me much more flexibility and permission.

My initial plan was to do the project in the remaining three weeks I’d have after my week of service, allowing about a week for the top, a week for the base, and a week for the finish. This plan gave me plenty of flexibility: if I need to, I can apply the finish once I return to work. I also left my weekends free in this plan, so if it’s close, I can work through my two remaining weekends.

While I underestimated the work It would take to joint the tabletop pieces, I learned a lot for the next project, and I’m grateful for the flexibility I left in my plan at the start.

Thirty Days

I’m one weekend in to a month-long sabbatical, and catching up on my blog is one of a few goals I have for my time. Over the course of the month, I’ll spend a week with my local Habitat for Humanity, followed by three weeks of woodworking.

The main project I’ll focus on is a dining room table. I fell in love with Sidney Barnsley’s Hay Rake table. I love the honesty of the construction and materials. There is no pretension in the design, no game being played; just an homage to honest work and work’s reward. It seemed the perfect use for the swamp white oak I harvested in the summer of 2008.

In the interest of time, I’ll be taking cues from Don Weber’s rendition, published in the February 2009 issue of Popular Woodworking. The design is available on the magazine’s website.

I’ll deviate somewhat from the plan by making the table about 20″ longer than the one Weber built. The extra length will make optimal use of the space in our dining room without overwhelming it. And that is the beauty of a custom-made piece. You get a piece that will last a lifetime without wearing out its welcome.

To get to this point, I’ve been busily finishing up old projects, tidying up and rearranging to find a better flow. My back saws are tuned up, my workbench is finally complete, and I’m no longer tripping over redundant tools. I’ll take some time this week to make some final preparations, and then we’re off to the races.

Taking Up the Challenge

Earlier I posed the question “what would I need to do–what skills would I need to develop–to allow me to get rid of my radial arm saw?”  This beast of a machine serves one purpose in my shop: it makes a nice, clean crosscut.  When making furniture, that’s an important result to aim for, but artisans have been making clean and accurate crosscuts for centuries, and with much simpler tooling that didn’t take up as much space as a horse. 

So here’s what I came up with.  Over the next six months, I’m resolving to crosscut exclusively by hand.  I own a few crosscut hand saws, and I know how to sharpen them. Along the way, I’ll build a pair of saw benches to get the work down to the right height, and I’ll build a better saw vise to speed up sharpening.  I’ll experiment with more saws: coarser teeth to go faster, finer teeth to get closer to a final finish with less planing of end grain.  With six months of focused, intentional practice, I should get pretty good at it.

I’ll start here by recording a baseline of my skills. 

Here I’m about 60% through a crosscut in a hard maple board. I’ve come close to sawing to the line, but there’s definitely room to grow.

I'm a couple of degrees away from my line by the end of the cut, and I was a couple of degrees off from plumb. Those inaccuracies left me with some planing to do to get a nice finished surface.

Since this will be the tail board for blind dovetails, I didn't need the edge grain to be perfect, so there are a few marks from the saw remaining.

I suspect the saw benches will make a significant difference.  I’ll get to those once I clear out a backlog of other projects.