Back trouble

I know what you're thinking…(and it's not ''did he fire six shots or only five?")  Neither is it a slipped disc, crushed vertebrae or the indefinite need to use a walking stick.

It's the back panel on the latest Alan Peters cabinet, a simple enough affair of two panels, three stiles and a couple of rails, something I've done many times before, but has it gone together without a hitch?

Has it buggery!

I've had to remake the whole bloody thing at least twice, including both panels and all the frames as the cock-ups have been too numerous to catalogue.  My only excuse is that with the Christmas excitement about to dawn, I haven't been 'in the zone'…

 Yeah right..some who read these tales of woe will no doubt nod their heads,  quietly smirk to themselves and whisper that '' the silly sod rarely is''…

However, we progress and the latest version is currently being glued.  Not the final gluing I hasten to add, but the current cock-up as a false 5mm  Domino has been glued in place because I failed miserably to check that the machine was set correctly, so the resultant slot was 2mm too low.  It'll just be flushed off when the glue has set and then re-cut.

With a little luck and a following wind, it ought to go together by the end of the day.

Don't hold your breath though….

Arise Sir Tribe

Open almost any woodworking mag these days and you'll be inundated with useful 'tips', most of which will set you back an arm and leg and many of which are as much use as a chocolate bloody teapot!

The best one I've seen is definitely worthy of a swift mention here and can be wholly attributed to my friend Chris Tribe.

It concerns cramps and cramp heads.   For years, I've used bits of 6mm plywood with a slot cut out...

















…so that they hook over the bar.  Works quite well, but does have the slight problem of...

…cramp inversion.  Turn it upside down and they fall off, so either you need to fix them to the job (with masking tape) or fix them to the cramp heads (with yet more masking tape), both of which are a veritable pain in the backside.  In addition the cramp itself is prone to fall over, which is intensely bloody annoying so instead of paying a king's ransom to some nefarious tool company for supports, simply make...  

…your own.  Blocks of scrap wood with a slot milled down the middle.  How simple is that?…and you've still got some 'folding' left to spend down the pub in the evening.

To return to the cramp heads, here's the solution.  The 'fork' has now been cut off and some offcuts of nice thick leather glued to the face, but here's the cunning bit.  The reverse….

….side now sports an 8mm rare earth magnet, set in flush with the surface.

This means that your cramp heads stay in position...

…no matter which way the cramp is orientated.  Clever n'est pas?

 See Chris's full Utoob clip for more enlightenment.

Slotted...

A couple of posts ago, I mentioned that the verticals on the latest cabinet were veneered ply, shown above, but the horizontals were solid, presenting a distinct jointing problem…one will move and the other won't.  My solution is to have some unhappy, cross dowels in the vertical bits into which would eventually go some rather large screws.  To accommodate the movement of the elm, the pan-head screws will...

…be free to move in large slots.  The big bit shown above the slot will eventually be filled with Indian Ebony, which may or may not be glued in, as I'm just trying to get a couple of brain cells in line (or not as the case may be) to work out how to make them removable in case the screws will ever need a 'tweak'.

Tricky…deviousness required.

The Coolness...

Some time ago, Popular Woodworking in the USA ran a competition so I decided to enter my little Robert Inghamish box that I made a few years ago.  I didn't expect to win anything, but surprisingly, my friends in distant climes quite liked it, so it came first in one of the competition categories.

There were quite a few good books to choose from on their website…however the ones I wanted I'd already bought years ago, so when I was re-directed to the Lost Art Press there were a few there that:

…I thought were well worth dipping into.  As many know, I do like parcels and this morning the nice FedEX man wrapped on the door with a package all the way from the USofA.  Inside were my three books and even better, the Schwarz...

…had autographed one.

 How cool is that?

Jointing Juxtaposition…troisième

A very kind reader of this nonsense, who's obviously got far too much time on his hands, pointed me last week towards this web site where there was a much more sophisticated version of my rather crude doweled joint…the tiny pic has been lifted from that site.

I thought I'd have a go and you can see that I've used elm this time and all the dimensions, including the 'round over' are about right…even the horizontal section is an off-cut from the actual job.

It looks identical to the previous attempt:

…but when it's pulled apart you can see that the shelf locates into a double housing that wraps around the leg.  All told, a much better (and possibly stronger) solution.

Jointing Juxtaposition…le deux.

When you don't have a scoobies what you're doing, which like me, is most of the time, it's a pretty sound idea to tread cautiously as it's quite plausible to end up at the far end of the creek, submerged in the 'sticky stuff' up to one's hat band without the proverbial means of propulsion to extricate oneself.

In the Queen's English…you're in the crap!

…and if you dip into this drivel fairly frequently, you'll have realised that it's a place which is not unfamiliar.

In this particular instance, I didn't have a clue how to make the joint between the legs (the upright bit, 50x26mm) and the horizontal bit, bearing in mind that there will be sixteen of these things to do (eight each side).

Having a delvation into the scrap box, I happened upon a bit of oak (from the Bow Fronted Cabinet) and an oddment of brown ash.  What you see in the pic above is a sort of a bastardised halving joint ...

…which works quite well, but the cunning part is that there's an 8mm dowel inserted down the centre which makes the whole thing quite rigid.  I've used a 6mm roundover bit in the router, but the actual legs will have a slightly greater one, perhaps 9 or possibly 12 mm.

The trifling little difficulty, as both parts are 'bare faced' is that the joints will need to be made really tight, then planed, sanded and finished prior to gluing.

That's a long way off though…plenty more 'sticky stuff' to fall into in the meantime.

Joining Juxtaposition

The next big project is under way…a large, free standing cabinet with eight legs, in the style of the late, great Alan Peters, with a distinct element of Gordon Russell and a nod to JK.

The horizontal elements will be in solid elm, with the vertical sections being veneered and lipped ply.

The question that was causing me a bit of botheration was…

…how to join the two?

As any numpty will tell you, joining solid to man-made is fraught with difficulty, simply because the fore mentioned will move and the after mentioned won't, so somehow we have to allow for the movement.

So here's how I've done it.  Plan A, which should work.  Note the 'should'…..

Shown in the pic are the two vertical sections with three 22 mm holes at each end, each of which contains a chunky bit of sapele to act as a cross-dowel (it's actually quite happy to be there, but you'll no doubt appreciate the gag)

Across the top of the solid horizontals will be an elongated slot, to correspond with the positions of each dowel into which a large panhead screw will fit and engage with the dowel.  Between each dowel there'll be a 5mm Domino to act as a reference and it'll be glued into one half so that the other will be free to slide about in an elongated slot.

To cover up the slots above the panhead screws, there'll be  sections of Indian Ebony which will be raised and rounded…sort of a 'Green and Greene' type of effect.  Peters was known to have said that a potential problem could be turned into an interesting feature.

…which is exactly what I'm trying to do here.

Confused at the back?…stay tuned for yet more confuzzlement (and the inevitable cock-ups) as this one continues.