Sewing Box with 3 Dr

Dark Chocolate and Sponge Cake (12)

In the last post I was sorta getting my sea legs again in regards to this project, and had spent a fair amount of time going over the previously done drawings and making sure I was completely understanding where things were at and where they needed to go.

That drawing work continues in regards to sorting the details out on the skirt and feet which fit below the cabinet sill, but otherwise everything seems to be worked out satisfactorily, including the somewhat complicated connection between posts and the sill and skirt/feet assemblies.

In this round, a bit of attention was devoted to the top and bottom carcase panels, both of which are edge-to-edge glue-ups of mostly quartersawn wood. I gave it a once over with a finishing plane in preparation for some joinery work to come:

I tend to get these sort of fibrous shavings from mahogany:

Once the surfaces were cleaned up – andI will give the upper surfaces a final pass before  assembly at a later point – I cut the sliding dovetail trenches in the underside:

I use a Japanese dovetail bit with a somewhat steeper angle than most bits found over here:

The other panel, which fits to the sill frame, came out similarly to the top, and it should since they are the same size as one another:

There’s one more panel yet to be dealt with, one of 3/8″ (9.5mm) thickness which covers the middle shelf with incorporated drawer bank. I have yet to glue up the two boards for that step.

Next, I got to working on the frame corner joints for the sill assembly. These are the same joints as were employed on the upper frame corners and described in earlier posts. The cut out is the same as before and while it might be repetitive, I decided to post some pics anyway. Hopefully readers will bear with me.

Here I’ve just cleaned an abutment to the line marked using a down-shear bit – and if you look closely you’ll see a trace of the knife line at the top:

I knifed the lines on the first pair of sticks but later realized that the down-shear bit was giving clean arrises so didn’t bother to knife the joints on the long side frame rails.

Another view, another corner:

No knife lines on that one to worry about.

A few more cutting operations took place, not pictured, and got these sill corner joints to the point today where a first trial fit could be ventured:

A look at one of the corners:

A look at the inside of a (nearly) completed joint half:

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This Scrappy Saturda

This Scrappy Saturday project is sliding bookends for open shelving. These sliding bookends are a great addition to any room with open shelving. This is a fun and quick project to complete! #bookends #openshelving

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If art is power then

If art is power then this power-carved piece packs a WHOLE LOT of it.

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Dark Chocolate and Sponge Cake (11)

Amazingly, to me at least, the last post in this series occurred on March 29th of this year. Where did all the time go? Well, that’s easy enough to answer – most of it went into the project work at Colgate University, and then a few other things came up. I had thought I might be away from this piece for a 2~3 month stretch but somehow more water has passed under the bridge than that. That’s how it goes.

So glad to be back on this project, and ready to dig into some more of that delicious Cuban mahogany. The parts previously cut have been sitting in my shop, strewed around somewhat as I juggled other parts from various projects, and now that I dust these pieces off I am pleased to find that the mahogany, of both varieties (Cuban and Honduran) has remained perfectly stable. The joined frame joints remain tight and clean, and the panels free of warp, bow, cup, or twist. That’s a benefit of having the parts ‘season’ in the shop mid-construction. The Cuban mahogany has oxidized a degree back to a chocolate color, so I feel like there’s no need to worry about applying dye to freshly cut sections to blend parts together for color/tone -it will all look uniform after a few months so I’ll make the piece intending to celebrate the variegation, knowing it is but fleeting.

One of the lessons that has come to be clear to me in recent years, when faced with a situation where a project is interrupted for a lengthy period, is that it sure pays to be doubly cautious when re-entering the fray. One can’t always step back into full flow and take up as if there has been no interruption, for as much as there has been a time break there has also been a mental one. Caution is merited on account of the precious nature of the wood I am working with, the supply of which really does not allow for those sort of mistakes which would necessitate that a stick or panel be replaced. But the other caution flag which comes up for me now relates to that getting one’s head back into the project and not making assumptions about next steps until one is thoroughly back into the very head space which shaped where things had been taken to in the previous design and build phase.

On top of all this are the factors which come up when you look at something with fresh eyes again and may well choose to do some details differently than previously envisioned.

Assumptions can be a real drag sometimes if they do not prove to be correct. Every woodworker knows this, and I would venture to say that making erroneous assumptions is one of the most common sources of error in projects, along with plain old inattention and/or obliviousness.

When I start in on a drawing for a project, I tend to work first in big (digital) brush strokes, coming up with appropriate massing and configuration for the piece to suit the intended purpose. Once I have shared these initial ideas with a client, the direction forward hopefully becomes more established, and eventually I am rendering the piece in fairly close detail.

I say ‘fairly close’ detail rather than ‘exact’ detail because, with more complex pieces especially, certain areas of a drawing such as joinery details (if they are not a visual feature), or uncertainties about the final form of a molding profile, or any spacing/number errors which may crop up in SketchUp drawing that indicate there is a problem somewhere (a problem however which would require significant backtracking and analysis to parse out), tend to be left for later. In such cases I tend to continue forward with the sketching of the piece, the goal being to produce a drawing which conveys all of the visual detail the client needs in order to make the decision to proceed.

Others might only take their drawings as far as the concept sketch phase in their interactions with their clients, but I find that with joinery-based solid wood pieces a lot of the constructional detailing is going to be apparent in the final product, so it makes sense to define it fairly thoroughly so that the rendered drawing is very close to what will be made. The look of the piece comes partially from how it is made, not from what is applied to something otherwise to make it look like something it really isn’t.

Once I have reached the ‘go-ahead’ phase with the client, wood and other materials are sourced and I go about producing any necessary templates I might need. Once the wood is in hand and ready to be worked, I start breaking down the material as per a cut list, prioritizing the critical pieces first. When it comes time to cut joinery, I go back to my drawing and go over the component in question with a fine-toothed comb looking to correct errors, flesh out details, make minor changes as required.

So, at this phase, I grab rendered components in my drawing and duplicate them, and then in the same sketch make the duplicate white in color so that I know it is a revised and ‘final’ part.

After a while the overall sketch becomes cluttered with various components which have been dragged out, made white and revised to a detailed level. My main drawing looks like this right now, for example:

Sometimes I put things on different layers, toggling layers on and off, but I don’t always bother with that for single pieces of furniture.

I also start new sub-drawings dedicated to particular aspects like doors, back panel framing, drawers, etc., copying parts over and then going through them in detail, again rendering to white. Once the part is finalized in the drawing I print take-offs of various parts and their details, with dimensions, which I then take with me to the shop. It’s like a road map. Until recently we have not had a family laptop, so taking the drawings to the shop has become what I am used to, as opposed to keeping a computer at the shop. My shop lacks an office or dust-free space, so I tend to be averse to bringing a laptop into that – and my wife certainly is not keen on that either.

And, where I last left off in the build I had just started the fabrication process with this futon storage cabinet, having prepped most of the stock, and having constructed the frame for the top and the 4 sets of latticework which comprise the sides of the cabinet:

I could have re-started pretty much anywhere, but I chose to continue on with the fabrication of the top frame and panel. So far I have prepped the stock, cut the corner joints, cut the interior edge dado for the panel, and molded the outside. See post 6, post 7 and post 8 if your memory needs refreshing. I know mine did!

The frame of the top has the thickest section height of any stick in the cabinet, and I was only able to squeeze out the four frame members I have from the 8/4 stock I obtained. There were only two boards out of the pile which yielded material of the required thickness, so if something goes south with joinery cut out on the frame, which is a bit on the complicated side so it is rife with opportunity for errors, then I have nothing with which to replace it. It’s not like I can go and get some more Cuban mahogany at the hardwood lumber outlet. So, I’m super careful. Well, a bit paranoid too! It seems that you can’t so freely use the term ‘it’s only wood’ when what you have to work is in actuality virtually irreplaceable.

One of the tricky areas with frame and panel work is that of joining the frame outer corners together with their supporting post. The three way connection in other words. There are various solutions of course, and I’ve wrote about them extensively in the past, and I have written two joinery Monographs which deal with this topic exclusively. Yet, with a new project comes new particulars, and I sometimes need to come up with new configurations of three-way connections to satisfy the requirements. I find this a lot of fun actually and relish the challenge.

Just in case it might not be clear, here’s the connection I am using in this cabinet to join the top’s corners and posts together:

It’s a form of half lap, but one which needs to incorporate the size and position of the post tenon amid the lap’s dual locking pin mechanism, shachi-sen, plus accommodate the molded front profile, and the interior dado for the panel. Pushing the design configuration is the intended assembly sequence involving the latticed side frames and bottom frame. Also pushing on the design is the fact that the post tenon’s visual exposure means that the position of the rear post tenons need to be the same if at all possible to the front tenons, and yet the form of post used at each location is different. The rear posts accommodate the clip-in back panel assembly, while the front posts are shaped to partner with the door stiles in such a way so as to allow the doors to swing 180˚ open. Finally, there was the design decision to use a joint which showed a bit of it’s mechanism, instead, say, of a joint with a fully mitered appearance. This decision was made in light of the piece overall and wanting to walk that fine line between showcasing the material and showing the virtues of joined work too. The corner joint with shachi sen is becoming a frequent feature of my work, part of the design language.

So, there’s a lot going on in a tight space and a lot to consider. Of course I fully recognize that I do bring this on myself though the desire I have to build, insofar as possible/reasonable, without any recourse to glue or metal fasteners and using joinery which is, to whatever extent it seems sensible to push it, demountable. It would all be vastly simpler and quicker, to be sure, to join everything together with glued butt joint and miter joint connections with dowels, biscuits, dominoes, etc., and maybe even tack on a little joinery simulacra. I’ve seen in some pieces of furniture the look of through tenons simulated by simply burning rectangles on the surface for instance. How these pieces are not outright laughed at and withdrawn from consideration for sale at the furniture outlet is beyond me, but of course there are price points to consider. Anyway, I’m not tempted by those easier routes though it certainly offers what it from many sides a more pragmatic way to proceed, that is, from a manufacturing and profit/loss perspective.

Anyway, back to the top frame detailing. The relative simplicity of the core of the joint, that of half-lap pierced by single tenon, appealed to me, but wringing out the details took a while. I think that’s one of the key things to realizing a design successfully: sitting with the design until it is truly done to the last detail and not giving into the strong temptation to just get on with the cuttin’. Sometimes those little tiny details that seemed better to gloss over, the ones your choose to mentally abbreviate, can come back to bite you – this certainly has happened to me enough times.

When I got my head back into the drawing after the long break, I discovered that I had left off working on the drawing in the middle of finalizing certain details. Some things were not pencilled in fully, and some parts were annoyingly off their marks for reasons which were unclear. About three days were absorbed in straightening everything out and getting to a point of being ready to fabricate.

Back then to the cutting, I decided to mortise the lap joints for the tenons, and thought it made good sense to mill these mortises with the joints tightened and in an aligned position. In the past I have tackled such joints with chisel alone, by hollow chisel mortiser, and by router with edge guide. Now my weapon of choice, more often than not, is the Zimmermann pattern mill. I’ve gravitated, therefore, to the tool that tends to produce the most precise results, with the safest way to produce the cuts, with the cut area clearly exposed to view, the cleanest way to produce the cuts, and with the most reliable fixturing. That, in a nutshell, is the pattern mill.

I used a pair of Bessey clamps to dial each corner joint in tight and dead square, before clamping the assembly down onto the work table of the mill:

The mortises had been marked out months ago, but a last double check revealed one of the mortises was in the wrong position (!), so I’m super glad I took the time to re-check that and make the correction.

The mortise is roughed out initially with a under-size cutter and the location of the mortise defined by that cut’s position checked with a caliper in situ:

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man I just really wa

man I just really want a yarn bowl

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A Minor Project

I’m finally completed some work that was under a N.D. Agreement, so I can return to regular programming, blog-wise. Look for another post in the Dark Chocolate and Sponge Cake series soon!

Meanwhile, I can talk about a small project I tackled over the last couple of afternoons in my frozen cold shop: a wooden serving tray. Maybe it is hardly worth writing about, given that it took less than 6 hours to put together, but it did allow me to explore some fun joinery that came as a result of considering various options for connecting some sort of feet to the tray top.

I’ve made many sushi geta previously, which are simple wooden tops with transverse battens, held in to the top with full length sliding dovetails, and serving as feet. If you google the term you’ll see what I’m talking about.

The issue with that sort of construction, even with a top as narrow as 6″ (155mm) across, is that seasonal movement in the top across its width will leave the end of the dovetailed battens either protruding or slightly recessed at different times of the year. It’s no big deal, considering what they are used for, but it is nonetheless a drawback to that form of connection. The exposed dovetail joint is also a decorative feature on the geta, a sort of message most people will get, if that’s going to be part of it, design-wise. If you’re not interested in such messages, then it’s a drawback to have the joint exposed.

Also, while a flat-bottomed batten is a relatively simple thing to produce, in order to have a piece that will be less prone to rocking from bottom surfaces that are not co-planar, or are bowed slightly by movement of the top, one might resort to hollowing out a mid-portion of the batten undersurfaces to produce, in effect, a pair of ‘feet’ at either end. This is what I’ve been doing anyhow, and on recent pieces I’ve taken to more deeply machining out a hollow in the bottom surface which leaves much more pronounced 2-footed look.

With a wider top board, even if one were to employ quartersawn material, the dimensional difference between the width of the top (which shrinks and swells) and the length of the battens (which hardly change length at all) would be evident at both the driest and the wettest time of year, so it is an even less ideal solution when you get into wider tops.

And if you’re going to shape a batten’s undersurface to produce 2 contact points widely apart, then you’re well on your way to another form of feet for the tray altogether, one consisting of 4 separate feet instead of 2 battens. That way the feet can float back and forth with the movement of the top board. The batten doesn’t serve much purpose besides that of a foot in a sushi-geta, so though simple, I thought more about having 4 independent feet on the tray.

Along those lines, I considered different ways one could connect those feet to the top. There are plenty of options, and in thinking about placing feet so that they meet the perimeter of the top in some locations, one consideration that came to mind was thinking ahead as far as the chamfering is concerned. It’s an issue with the regular exposed end of the sliding dovetail batten form of construction – it is a joint interface which doesn’t lend itself well to chamfering unless you also partially house the batten sidewalls into the surface.

So, with those considerations in mind, this is the solution I decided to explore, by all means not the only one, but one which I think may have a certain usefulness.

I’m lucky to have an off-cut chunk of quartersawn Honduran mahogany, and that seemed like a good piece with which to make a large serving tray. In preparation for the layout and joinery, I leveled the bottom surface:

Despite a clean appearance, the board had a 3″ (76mm) long slightly scalloped band in the surface, which you can faintly see in the above photo after the first round of passes, and there was no point taking many shavings to get rid of that dip when just 3~4 heavier passes, one of which you see above, did the job. Obtaining a clean, tool mark-free surface is the goal regardless of how many passes one takes, and that was managed somehow.

Then, entirely on the mill, using a sequence of cutters and operations, I produced some double-dovetailed sliding trenches at four points:

A closer look reveals the double dovetail trench:

Then some chisel work followed to clean up the interior abutment:

A small block of tight-grained cocobolo, 4″ (105mm) square and 1.25″ (30mm) thick provided enough for the four feet:

As the run of the grain is aligned between the top and the sliding dovetailed feet, I could have glued without the usual concern for seasonal movement working over time against the connection. But instead I decided to do the connections dry, using just the friction of fit between the parts, and trust that to hold up over time:

This piece will be in use in our home, so I can observe how this dry fit joinery approach plays out over the years. I’m not much concerned though, as I’ve plenty of other pieces with dry-fitted joinery in my living room and they’re doing fine.

Besides, cocobolo, being an oily wood, it tough to glue and my strong preference in that case would be a special epoxy that I have for oily woods. While mixing a bit of glue is no big deal, after a brief mulling over I concluded ‘some other time perhaps’ for that way of doing things. Let’s try something else this time.

The foot starts its journey, a hand press-in to start:

Then a mallet does the persuasion:

I know there should be final ‘all the way in’ pic inserted here, but I forgot about taking a picture, so…

…and there we have it, four feet fitted:

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Storage Screwed; Trouble in DC (this just sucks!)

The post title is a tad dramatic perhaps, but accurate.

In recent weeks I have been working on organizing and cleaning my shop. One area that has long vexed me is how to store commonly used fasteners in such a way I can easily access them and assess stock, without the storage comprising open compartments that fill with wood dust over time.

I’ve tried a variety of approaches to storing screws, rivets, nails, etc., the most recent being a wall-mounted plastic bin with clear plastic trays that you pull out to get at various fasteners. It worked okay, at best, but squinting through the end of a little plastic tray turns out to be not the most clear method for knowing where a given fastener might be located, and how many you might have.

I’ve taken in recent years to moving away from the ‘tools on display’ mode of handing stuff on the wall, to storing tools in rolling cabinets. A cabinet drawer can be lined with material to keep corrosion at bay, and the tools in a cabinet are much better protected than otherwise, and contents don’t get caked with dust. Contents can easily be secured with a turn of a key. I still have hammers and saws hung on the wall, but eventually they will both be going into some form of cabinet storage.

As for cabinets, new ones that are decent are pricey, so I buy them used, partly as I try to avoid offshore (i.e., made in China) products by and large. I’ve found Kennedy tool cabinets to be a good choice so far, as a used Kennedy roller cabinet can generally be found in the $200~300 price zone. So far over the past 3 years or so I have acquired three roller cabinets, 2 of which are 29″ models, and 1 of which is a 34″ model.

Looking in Kennedy’s online tool catalog the other day I noticed a couple of things. One is that they have decreased their range of products somewhat. I guess the company was bought out in the past year or two by Cornwell Quality Tools Company, and as that company owns other brands with certain product overlaps to Kennedy, they have ‘rationalized’ Kennedy’s product line somewhat, reducing the scope of offerings. Hopefully these aren’t the first steps in rationalizing the company out of existence, as has happened elsewhere.

I also noticed while perusing their website that Kennedy makes a series of drop-in tray liners for their cabinets. I thought I’d obtain a couple and see how they work, in the hope of getting some semblance of control over fastener storage.

I chose a couple of trays for one of the 29″ cabs, this one residing at the infeed end of the jointer:

I ordered the trays directly from Kennedy’s online store and they came a week or so later. I was impressed with the trays out of the box as they were considerably stouter than I had imagined they might be. They were both a perfect fit inside the cabinet.

The lower drawer has the liner with the deeper 4″ compartments and thereby stores larger fasteners:

And the upper drawer has the smaller fasteners in shallow 2″ trays:

I think this storage solution works very well for me, and I’d recommend the solution to anybody. The drawers keep the dust out, and simply pulling the drawer open makes everything perfectly accessible and it is obvious what you have and don’t have.

I plan to get a couple more of these insert trays in the near future so that I can similarly store my overflowing collection of larger fasteners, including bolts, washers. lag screws, cap screws, etc.. I think it will only be a matter of time before that 29″ Kennedy box is entirely devoted to fastener storage. Another used Kennedy box looks to be in my future as well, so I’m keeping my eye on Craigslist and other places.

Now, onto the problems I’m having with DC. By ‘DC’, I refer to my dust collection system. Not to say that the other, more well-known DC doesn’t have an extensive list of defects to address….

Dust collection is one of those things that is absolutely essential to a shop yet is entirely unglamorous if not generally forgotten about. Many shops, I dare say, entirely underwhelm in their choice of (marginal) dust collection equipment, and I’m even aware of some folks somehow trying to run modern machinery without dust collection.

There are certain kinds of machines, particularly of the old ‘arn variety, where you might be able to forgo a dust collector, and indeed many older machines have poor provisions for collecting dust anyhow. I’m thinking of classic machines here like jointers, where chips can fall out the bottom, or shapers even, where chips can just spray everywhere if that works for you.

Even planers can be run without collection, however anyone who runs a planer like that will attest to the startling volume of mess very quickly produced, so, unless your style is to take all your day’s shop footsteps in 6″ of chips, or spend half your day sweeping up, then dust collection is mandatory. And if wood dust is a health concern, then a focus on good dust collection is absolutely essential if you want to have powered stationary machines.

With several of the larger machines I have – jointer, planer, and shaper in particular -they won’t operate properly without a dust collection system drawing a certain CFM rate – the shavings will just jam up inside the works.

When I got my shop running – and I continue to use that term loosely – my first piece of bigger equipment was a 16″ Oliver jointer. I was able to run it without dust collection, however when I could at last obtain a planer, I knew I was also getting myself into dust collection as part of the bargain. I wrote a post nearly 10 years back about the system I obtained from a High School in the midwest, entitled Shop Vac Review. A later follow-up post detailed the relocation of the system to a corner of my space and some of the preliminaries in getting the parts together.

Later developments ensued with the system as I gradually configured the system for the shop, adding new parts as new machines came on the scene. This resulted in a post series entitled, far more appropriately than I realized at the time, “This Just Sucks“.

That turned into a 3-part series spanning a few years.

The most recent changes to that system formed a post from 2014 entitled Down a Dusty Road,  where I detailed upgrading from the bag house which came with the system from the high School, to a Oneida set up with dual 55 gallon collector drums, dual paper filters with removable catch bucket system. That filter set up set me back $1500.00, and the mods to the cyclone and cost of support stand were close to $1000. If you manage to wade through those posts in those three series you’ll be more or less up to date on the dust collection in my shop, save for extensions and additions I have made over the years as equipment has been added. Every time a new machine comes in, what comes along with it are several hundred in electrical components (conduit, boxes, receptacles, plugs, wire), and usually a bit more, $500~750, in additional dust collection components.

The new Hofmann long hole boring machine is a case in point. I’ve already done the electrical work and have it hooked up, but it has three chip collection ports requiring several meters of 120mm flex hose. Also needed are a couple of custom duct work pieces. It only takes a few bits and pieces and I’m soon staring at a $700 bill. You might call the electrical and DC parts the hidden cost of machinery.

I’ve made therefore a not inconsiderate investment in my dust collection system to date. Probably there is as much money in the dust collection components as there is in my SCM 24″ planer, or there is in the Hofmann mortiser.

I’d now I’d like to offer some new observations having lived with the system for a few more years now. Is is a dream set up? Am I completely satisfied or does it fall short in some areas?

Here’s a pic of the collection end of the set up, taken yesterday , with cyclone on stand over the two chip collection barrels, and the venting side with dual paper pleated filters:

A closer look at the filter set up:

You might observe in the above photo that on the side of the filter mounting bracket there is a gauge, which tells at a glance – if you bother to glance at it (ahem!) – whether the filters are allowing good air flow or are operating at less than optimal levels, that is, filter efficiency. The gauge is a $114 option from Oneida. I’ll get back to that gauge in a moment, but first let me describe how things go sometimes with the set up I have put into my shop.

I had an episode with the original bag house (the one that came with the cyclone) where the concealed collector bin filled up with chips while planing some stock, and the fill up continued right up the cyclone, and the rest of the chips went into the bag house before I noticed a problem. The clean up from that took many hours and was an unpleasant exercise to say the least. I felt afterwards that by upgrading the system to one having greater chip collecting capacity via a pair of 55-gallon drums, along with clear flex hose connecting the chip collection barrels to the cyclone base which would allow me, theoretically,  to spot chip overflow, would go a long way to reducing the odds of a similar over flow incident. The pair of filters replaced a 6′ x3′ pice of floor space, so it gave me a little more floor space, and the promise of improved air flow. Well, the set up I have hasn’t quite met that promise at all times, unfortunately.

Over time the clear flex hose sections above the two chip collection barrels have become permanently darkened, likely some combination of sunlight and loads of wear from the chips, and I can no longer simply tell at a glance whether the bins are getting full or not. I have to unclamp the lid from each barrel and inspect. It’s not a great inconvenience, but nevertheless is sometimes overlooked and I have made some lucky late catches – and sometimes I have been too late.

One might think it is a simple matter of replacing the flex hose however the stuff is not cheap and the shortest length I would be looking at – and having to store for years afterwards, is a 12.5′ length. And around $300. So, I’ve procrastinated on that. It’s doesn’t take much to become mentally preoccupied with a stack of wood to plane – for it is the planer which contributes the greatest pile of chips by far – and to thereby take one’s eye off of the situation – or underestimate – in regards to the immediate fullness of the chip barrels. And all it takes is to push one wide piece of softwood through taking a heavy pass and suddenly you got lots of chips.

Two adverse things have happened, more than once now, under the sudden heavy load of thick curled chips from milling a wide piece of softwood. Neither of these things are a good time for me.

The first is that the heavy load of chips can foul the impeller on the bottom of the motor, which in turn lays atop the cyclone some 13′ in the air.

The second is that the second barrel can fill up and an additional blink of an eye seems to be all it takes before the cyclone is full. The excess proceeds into the filters. Those are intended for fine dust, something I don’t produce much of. I’m a chip man it seems.

When the impeller is fouled there is a bad noise from way on up there telling you that all is not well with that end of the cyclone. Then I have to drag out a ladder, go up and down on that ladder several times and remove a bunch of the p

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Wadkin Resurrection: Back Miter Fence (II)

For Part I of this Wadkin saw revamp sub-project, click here.

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When working on an irregular object, like this rough back miter fence casting, I would like to think that I could find an initial fixturing position and then generate perfect surfaces, one after another, from that starting point. That hasn’t worked so far quite like I might have hoped. Instead what I find is that I get better results by fixing an initial position as best I can, taking light skims off of a face and then an adjacent face, and this in turn allows the piece to better register to the initial face and base of the vise, and eventually subsequent passes on those surfaces, once I circle back around to them, gradually draws the part into a good geometric form with adjacent faces being 90˚ to one another. The key point being, I suppose, don’t bite off more than you can chew and proceed with a certain degree of caution and an abundance of observation. No different than joinery work really.

Here I’m taking a skim off of the inner edge of the base of the casting:

I’ve changed cutters after a reader comment in a previous post mentioning a fly cutter. While I don’t have a dedicated fly cutter, I do have a Mesa Tool accessory boring bar with coated insert for my Criterion Boring head which works superbly as a fly cutter:

I dare say that cutter gives exceptionally clean results, much better than the previously-used router bit(s). The boring head normally is a tool used for precisely fly-cutting the perimeter of a hole – i.e., the cut is in a sideways direction proceeding downwards. In machining work, it is not considered accurate to simply drill a hole if precision is desired, rather, one drills a hole undersized, then uses a boring bar to skim it to the desired dimension. The Criterion boring head is one of the standard in the field, though by no means not the only quality boring head made. Mine is the medium-sized one, and is adjustable on a 0.001″ (diameter) basis. In using it as a fly cutter though, there is no need to adjust anything but the depth of cut.

Here I’m decking the underside of the pivot boss portion of the casting to a preliminary depth relative to the base plane of the casting:

A couple of recent improvements to my mill I might mention in passing. One is a mounted proper machine lamp:

You can see in behind it the original wire for the lamp which would have come with the machine from the factory, now long-gone. Fortunately, the spacing pattern on the lamp mounting was very close to the original lamp mounting holes, so I was able to simply bolt it on without any messing around.

The other improvement is a cast aluminum Newall DRO mounting arm I found on Ebay for cheap ($45):

Previously the DRO was clamped to a plywood frame on the machine table, and was in the way half the time. I was able to mount the swing arm to the machine column using a lifting hook hole so no hole drilling was required.

After working my way around the back miter fence casting, I am on to final clean-up on the base:

One more light skim got a clean surface there. Then it was on to decking the underside of the sweep arm portion, taking it to the target height dimension relative to the base:

In the interim I also took a very light skim off of the front miter casting to make sure the mounting bolt boss on that casting was clean and flat, and also cleaned up the upper surface of the sweep arm portion. You’ll see the cleaned surfaces in a picture further down this page.

Now decking the pivot boss to final height:

Critical surfaces now nearly done, given the clamped position for the part I could take the opportunity to work on tidying up the casting otherwise. I put a 0.75″ (19mm) 4-flute spiral end mill in the collet holder, turned the rotary table 17.5˚, and started in on machining the angled side face of the casting:

Done, about 12 passes later, with a pass or three now afterward to clean off the end of the casting:

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