Spring will come
in the meantime: reviving some neglected projects
I keep telling myself that spring will come, the birds will sing, oak will still split and sharp tools still slice. Those mantras are my way of coping with the state of things lately. In the shop, I’ve begun a sort of spring cleaning - trying to finish up things that have been hanging around. I have a box that I did my demos on during the recent class - so I finished assembling it.
The next step is the lid. I glued up two perfect oak boards - this one will get a carved lid. Then paint in the background - it’s been a long time since I painted one.
There’s a large table that’s been in limbo for a year.
I pegged the ends together the other day - like an oversized joined stool. It’s drawbored mortise & tenons - below, if you look real close, you can see the scribed circle where the hole would be if it lined up perfectly. Then I moved my piercer bit toward the tenon shoulder to create the intentional offset for the tapered pins to pull the joint together.
I shave the pins with a chisel, making them maybe 5”-6” long in this case, going through a 3” thick stile.
I always think of Jennie Alexander when I do this work, she introduced me to these concepts. But over time, my methods and hers diverged. Only in the details, not in the concept. She shaved pins extra-extra long - with a drawknife - and drove all the pins together. I assemble sections, then knock them together. Especially in this table, which will end up being 3’ x 6’ - I’ll do the final assembly in its destination.
Long after our book on making a joint stool, I found slides of JA doing just that. Too late for the joint stool book, some of these will now make it into my Craft Genealogy book.
Once those ends were pinned and the long rails test-fitted - I turned my attention to the top. I have two absolutely perfect pieces of white pine (thanks, Ted) and ripped the sapwood off one edge.
One board’s about 20” wide, the other around 15” - I started jointing the edges to glue them together. I only got this work started - it was late in the day and the shop’s a bit cluttered. Time to back up, clean up and make room for this work. Jointing and planing wide long stuff requires all the space I can muster in this shop. So this falls under the phrase “Backing up for a head-start…” - another mantra.
The joint stool book is here https://lostartpress.com/collections/green-woodworking/products/make-a-joint-stool-from-a-tree
The box at the top of the post won’t be done for a while, but there is still a box like it for sale -
two boxes for sale
Two boxes for sale in today’s post. One brand-new, the other a used box, about 10 years old. I’ll talk about the new one first -
I think I learned my lesson about batching stuff. I made a desk for one kid from 2x4 but was playing with draw boring. 32 pins. Made to stand without pins, I drilled the mortices, assembled it up, squared it, marked them all and took a picture. The next day I took it apart and bored all the tenons. 31 of them bored on the wrong side of the line. Went and bought a new bottle of glue.
Lovely work as always, Peter, and that pine truly is perfect!