Descending Ashtray

Last weekend Sarah and I joined friends Thom and Amanda on a tour of Portland’s modern homes. In the home I was most enamored of, I spotted this interesting coffee table. How do you think it’s held together? I didn’t feel it was appropriate to try pulling pieces off, but I did lift it with Thom’s help, and it seemed to be hollow.

This is a site specific table that I am making for our neighbor, hence the unusual shape. The spindle legs are perhaps a little more traditional of a style then what I would normally make but it was a fun project to work on and figure out. The spindles themselves are not square stock at the top and bottom. They are more of an arrowhead like diamond shape which made it tricky finding the center point for turning them. I also learned early on not to use a wide gouge on the transition between the square and the round part of the spindle. The first attempt splintered out really bad and made it unusable. The second attempt went much smoother. I wrapped masking tape around the part I wanted to stay square and used my narrowest scraper to cut into the spindle at angle that moved the knife away from the grain instead of into it. Anyway the rest of the legs turned out pretty good. Then I Kreg jigged everything together from the bottom.

I probably should have taken more pictures to illustrate the process, oh well, maybe next time.

(I realized after posting the picture that it is kind of hard to see that the top is a trapezoid shape. In the picture it looks like a long table that is foreshortened. It is kind of an optical illusion.)

End-grain cutting boards are a step up from the simpler long-grain versions, because the end grain provides a milder cutting surface for the knife. They are also a bit more work to make, but not too hard, as you can see from the photos below.

I keep a special pile of scrap that’s about the right size for cutting boards, and selected some mystery wood, fir, birch, walnut, cherry and bubinga for this piece. Bubinga isn’t something I normally have around, but since this cutting board is a wedding present, I bought some at Woodcrafters to give the board some added color. Here are all the cutting board pieces laid out for gluing. They are all of different thicknesses, but I will glue them up and then plane them down to uniform thickness later.

You can really never have too many clamps!

Once the glue had cured overnight, I de-clamped the cutting board and ran it through the planer until the board was perfectly flat on both sides. It looks pretty good at this point (in fact, Sarah wanted me to stop here), but I wasn’t done yet. I set up the table saw with a stop block to crosscut the board into pieces of equal width. This width is the basic thickness of the finished cutting board, as we’ll be rotating the pieces 90 degrees in the next step.

Once the board was diced up, it was time for re-assembly. The first step was to flip the pieces the long way (the north-south axis) to alternate the grain patterns of the pieces, creating a sort of checkerboard effect in the finished piece.

Next was the second and final glue up, making sure that I rotated the pieces 90 degrees along their east-west axis to have the end grain face-up. Glue went on the long grain side of the wood.

Once the second glue up was complete, again waiting overnight, I prepared for a long winter’s sanding. I used a belt sander for about an hour to level both sides of the board, cleaning up glue squeeze-out and the inevitable irregularities caused in gluing up a project like this. A planer won’t work on end grain (it will beat the knives to kingdom come and tear out big chunks around the edges), although a hand plane might have done the trick had I thought of it. Once the board was level, a little bit of food-safe oil really brought out the deep color of the woods. It’s a pretty substantial board that I’m sure will last a long time.

I also want to go on record as having completed this wedding present before the wedding, which is a first for me!

I have been working on this flat file for a while now and it feels good to have it done. The drawers are 35″ x 44″, a fairly good size for plenty of paper and matte board storage. The most challenging thing was getting the drawer slides to work. I built the cabinet first before attaching the top, and had trouble with it staying square. But once the top was screwed on, the slides and the drawes lined up perfectly. I ended up using 16 steel balls for each slide. More balls gives it more support when opening and closing the drawers.

A close up of the homemade slides on the inside of the drawer.

I’m not so good at reading German, but this sculpture by Yvonne Fehling and Jennie Peiz is pretty amazing.

It sometimes feels like my shop is nothing but a collection of tools and unfinished projects - I tend to get very excited about starting things, and not so much about finishing them. But today, I completed a sculpture I started over a year ago, my Totem Study, shown here in front of a wedding chest I made for my sister. I just put a coat of oil on both of them, which is why they look a little wet; they are.

I also started work today on another carving, which I’ll post tomorrow. I made very good progress, but I want to do a few more things on it tomorrow before showing it in progress.