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Pumped Up

Dark Chocolate and Sponge Cake (23)

Dark Chocolate and Sponge Cake (22)

Schopfer-Woodworking-cutting-board-macro

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Dark Chocolate and Sponge Cake (20)

Aufgearbeiteten Holz Verlobungsring-Kasten. Diese schlanke | Etsy

Aufgearbeiteten Holz Verlobungsring-Kasten. Diese schlanke | Etsy

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Wooden sewing box or jewellery box. Thread box. Sewing basket. Craft organizer. Cantilever sewing box. Accordion sewing box. Needles box. ¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨°º©©º°¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨°º©©º°¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨°º©©º°¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨ Beautiful hand decorated gift item - wooden sewin

leather and wood wooden case pencil etui glasses piórnik skóra skórzany drewniany cowhide grain leather and wood pen box holder office

Bathroom Towel Rack #Decoratingbathrooms

Tool Sale

I’m lightening my load a bit, and have some specialized woodworking equipment for sale. I’ll list it here for a week, and then will list it elsewhere if some items are not sold.

Makita 1805C 155mm portable planer with quick change knives and electronic motor:

In the original factory storage box. This machine runs on standard 115v, single phase.

A box of 10 packages of knives also included:

Planer is still on its original set of knives and the base is without any serious scarring:

Factory owners manual also included:

$500.00 buys it, shipping on top. Local pickup preferred.

Another factory storage box, with a grooving machine inside:

This model is the ‘finishing’ groover, and comes with both types of edge guides:

This machine runs on standard 115v, single phase.

Original throat inserts are unscarred:

One cutter in the machine, with these also included:

Will sell for $550.00, shipping on top, local pickup preferred.

Next, a Makita 380mm circular saw in a fitted baltic birch box I made:

This model is not available in N. America, and comes with the much nicer all cast baseplate:

A 100tooth blade comes on the saw. This machine runs on standard 115v, single phase.

Another view – the cord has been swapped for a UL-listed Makita one compliant with our receptacles:

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On the Eave of Construction (III)

I’ve been making good progress on the drawing, and have reached a point where I am satisfied with where things are at. That doesn’t mean the drawing is perfect, but I feel I’ve absorbed some good lessons and further work on the drawing is more along the lines of making every last piece of timber aligned and to correct length, perhaps fleshing in the joinery details, etc., none of which would be categorized under ‘new things to learn’ or ‘necessary to complete’, so I’m not feeling compelled to follow through with those aspects at this time.

A look up at the hip corner:

The minoko, which is a drooping verge between the main roof plane and the fascia assembly at the gable end, characteristic of Japanese traditional architecture, was a bit tricky to deal with but I like the shape at this point and the underlying geometry seems correct:

At this stage, there is no box ridge drawn, so the termination of the minoko at the top is not quite as it should be, but I am not feeling compelled to finish that off right now.

There’s more to explore with the minoko aspect for sure, and it’s one of those areas of layout which is very poorly covered in the extant texts, most of which I own, so I am left to devise solutions as best I can given my knowledge of the software at this point. In any case, the drooping verge was something there was really no chance to draw cleanly in Sketchup, so it was exciting for me to be at long last able to render the shape, which is a complex one, without too much fussing about.

Front elevation:

The rear elevation hints at the number of sticks involved – and not all are indicated in this view anyway:

This is a small building, all of 17′ (5.1m) or so between posts.

In recent days I have been exploring a class of tools using in rhino to panel surfaces, as this is an area with rich architectural and furniture design potentials. As part of that study, I thought it would be fun to draw the minoko in this project as composed of a network of flowing hexagonal rings:

Another view – remember, this is just something I did for fun and to test-apply a tool I had just started to use, nothing more:

Speaking of that paneling tool, here are a few other pieces I put together while playing around with it:

These shapes do not take very long to draw, despite their apparent complexity.

There’s so much more to learn yet, and I’m finding the process invigorating yet daunting.

I’ve also been looking at the plug-in which comes included with Rhino % for Mac, namely Grasshopper. This application allows for parametric modeling, which is a type of modeling where a part which has been created, and duplicated in various places in an assembly can be reconfigured, such that reconfiguring one item will cause all the rest to change identically at the same time. It’s a totally different type of application though, and looks a lot more like a flow chart with interchangeable directions and tools, so I kinda stare at it for the moment and go “oh my god, how the hell does that work?”.

I got some time in at the shop yesterday, so look for another post in the near future in the futon storage cabinet build entitled ‘Dark Chocolate and Sponge Cake’. Until then my friends, take care.

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On the Eave of Construction (II)

With weather remaining endlessly cold, my shop remains under that 40˚F threshold, a mark which I have decided is my cut off for working in there. I’ve been continuing on therefore, with my work at home to draw a certain type of Japanese residential roof, with an aim to cementing my knowledge of how to learn RhinoCad and work out some long-standing carpentry drawing issues which I couldn’t resolve with the previous drawing software.

I’ve put a lot of hours in, and things have been going well generally with the drawing work, at least as far as the CAD aspect is concerned. Essentially, I find that one has to flail away for a certain amount of time, have certain things not work out for some reason or another, and then try a ‘plan b’ and do it all again, and probably again, until eventually you can produce what you want. By one’s own mistakes in modeling, one learns better ways to model.

The reason for this is that with many given tasks in Rhino, there is more than one way to do it. Certain habit patterns in how I go about modeling parts I bring over from sketchup prove to not work so well sometimes in Rhino. In SketchUp you produce solids a lot of the time and then push, pull and intersect them to obtain the finished part you want. In Rhino, one can do all those same sort of techniques, but they may lead to a part which is a collection of faces that will not weld together to make a solid or some such outcome.

As an example to show the variety of potential approaches to a given objective there is the task of ‘creating a surface’, one of the most basic in modeling:

• One could opt to draw 4 lines to produce the outline of the surface, then join them together with a separate command, then patch that outline with a surface.
• Or, one could use the rectangle tool to produce the outline, then patch.
• Or, one could draw the rectangle with a ‘polyline’ tool and then patch.
• Or, one could use the ‘surface’ tool and in one move it’s done.
• One could alternatively have previously created a cube, from which one can extract the desired surface, or copy that surface, or explode the cube and subtract everything you don’t need to obtain the surface you want.
• One can take a set of lines comprising the surface one wants to model and then use a tool to loft a surface over that outline.
• One can take the lines comprising the surface and then use a tool called ‘curve network’ to create the surface.
• One could take a larger surface and then use a ‘wire cut’ tool to slice out the portion of surface in the shape desired.

I could go on as the above list is hardly exhaustive, but I’m sure the above list is enough. it’s the same for a lot of modeling tasks, with various ways to approach a thing presenting themselves. And when you are new at it there is a tendency to stick with a the one tool you got a mental grasp on, and use that exclusively, until you find one time it isn’t working for some reason. And thus you must learn other ways to do the task, and eventually one comes to understand why one chooses one tool over another to get a certain job done efficiently and well. It’s no different than woodworking really, save for the fact that the drawing work is virtual.

As a concrete example, here I’ll show a curved hip rafter. In cases like this one, where the curve is not of continuous radius, the ‘backed’ top of a curved hip has a shape which changes shape as it moves along. Thus the surfaces of the backed cut on each side are twisted planes:

This kind of twisted surface is a modeling task which was all but hopeless in SketchUp. In Rhino, there are several ways to do it. In the above I used a tool which produced quite a busy surface, but it was mathematically precise.

Later, working on a similar task on the ‘field’ hip rafter, I was able to obtain the same result with a much less busy surface, which is certainly easier to look at:

I’m very much at the early learning stage with some of these tools, so a lot of stumbles still lay ahead I’m sure.

The problem of learning which tool to use and why, is one aspect that has been another. A second point of struggle relates to the layout manuals which I use. My favorite ones are by Togashi, and they are certainly comprehensive. I thought they were essentially flawless, however I have recently discovered that he makes mistakes too.

All of my drawings for roofs and such are performed much as if I were doing the task in my shop- sketching first in 2D to produce the required shapes and then using those shapes as templates to make the parts. Here’s one of the developed views I sketched of this roof model:

Towards the bottom right is where one projects lines from the view of the eave timber build-up over to the hip rafter:

I followed Togashi’s methods, however because I am able to create the parts afterwards as 3D solids and then superimpose those solids back into the 2D drawing portion, I am able to check whether the 2D method is producing parts which are shaped and positioned correctly. And that’s where I found problems with Togashi’s book:

It’s a problem I actually discovered previously and had forgotten about. As you can see I do scribble notes in pencil on the textbook to keep track of things like this.

His mistake in this case is to project points over rom one view, which are of planes along the centerline of a part, then then reflect them in a secondary view but on the wrong line of reflection. If you look at the above sketch of drawing the ‘kera-kubi’ hip nose treatment, you can see that where he has marked point ‘e’ is where he reflects a line showing the front face miter from the eave’s kaya-oi timber – but the line he is reflecting the projection upon is the line for the face of the hip rafter, not its centerline.

The consequence of the above mistake would be to cut the angled receiving notch on the end of the hip rafter, right at the point of the miter, too far uphill. The kaya-oi would bind in that location, as the error in line position is about 4.5mm. It’s not as if he would be wanting to make that sort of mistake, would he? Not generally an objective in Japanese pursuits, as far as I have noticed.

I’m not expecting readers here to grok exactly what I am talking about – just to state that there is a problem in the text that I was initially in some disbelief about and had to overcome. And it is not just that page, as he repeats the same problem on other drawings, and I have discovered other minor mistakes besides.

And I’m not trying to run the guy down either – I esteem his work greatly and I’m a little shocked to find any mistakes in it as it is that good otherwise. I think my main point  is that having the ability to construct parts in 3D solids off of 2D, and back-check them is a truly wonderful thing. I think that if you are only drawing in 2D all the time, with the myriad of lines to stare at it is only a matter of time before even the most experienced folks get a little mix up here and there.

Anyway, I have made some modest progress after a bunch more struggle. Here’s a view of the eave from underneath with the eave build up complete and rafters in place:

A view from the top side shows the curved field rafters getting put in, and gives a look of the field hip rafter:

The fact that the field rafters are curved down, or sagged (called ‘tarumi’), means there are some complications in the production of the field hip upper lines, as one must account for both the cure in the field common rafter, and the fact that the rafters travel along an eave edge which also curves up at the end.

I had made the field hip rafter deeper in section in the lower portion so it could sister against the decorative hip rafter below. However, after I had the parts together and could take a look, I could see room for improvement.

So, I started those parts again, and this was the result:

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Dark Chocolate and Sponge Cake (19)

Chipping away at the chipping away. The sill is getting close to completion. It employs sliding dovetails, which I might more usually avoid in favor of other connections, as the assembly sequence for the piece is driving a lot of the joint design decisions. I did thoroughly consider a couple of other options, but this one made the most sense given the conditions.

Here you can see one of the sill corners with the nosepiece partly slid into place:

There’s a floating tenon fitted to each of the corners to check that the sill assembly fits well onto the lower frame assembly.

Here’s a view of the sill sitting atop the lower frame as I complete a trial assembly:

Using my Knipex plier wrench with a couple of end grain clamping cauls lets me do a bit of grain compression of the dovetail males to achieve what I feel to be a good fit:

The nose lengths are meant to be asymmetrical, in case you were wondering. It’s a solution to connecting the sill parts together and also giving room for the post tenon to connect and be pegged in a demountable fashion.

The sill assembly is then flipped over and placed so that the floating tenons begin to engage in their corresponding mortises in the lower frame:

It seems to go together without issue:

Another view – at this stage the lower frame has not received any profiling yet, so this is not the intended final appearance by any stretch:

The nose treatments are yet to be chamfered too. Still mulling that over.

Another view, an overview of the lowest framing elements assembled together:

Next step was to process the sliding dovetail mortises for the three battens which engage with both the lower frame and the associated floor panel:

And here are those battens, waiting for their chance to be fitted up:

Three of the mortises are cleaned out, while the opposing three have been dovetailed but not yet cleaned out:

Another couple of days should see these through. A cold snap however will keep me out of the shop for the next couple of days, so I guess i will be working on drawing study on the computer.

All for now- thanks for visiting the Carpentry Way.

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On the Eave of Construction

A Sketchy Situation

Draw first, then build – seems simple enough in theory. Drawing is best informed, I would suggest, by how the item is to be made, and this is where a person who makes as well as builds has a inherent advantage over those who only design. That said, one caveat is that sometimes new and original designs come about from those who do not labor under preconceptions and strictures imposed by best practices in a given field’s fabrication practices. It is all too easy though to design things which are impractical or even impossible to build, and these sorts of designs generally emanate from those who do not get their hands busy with actually making.

Division of labor of course has it’s benefits, but it is not without drawbacks.

The means by which one draws is itself a controlling factor in regards to design. I thought it might be relevant to some readers if I recapped my own approach to drawing over the years, providing some explanation for how/why the process has evolved in the direction in which it has, and why I have made some recent changes.

A long time ago I drew on sheets of paper or door skin, either to a scale or 1:1, using the conventional tools of ruler, compass, pencil, etc.. Those methods remain valuable to this day, as sometimes the most straightforward approach, especially in regards to larger architectural items, is to produce full-size templates on door skin and use those to transfer lines directly to the wood.

With furniture-scale pieces though, I’ve found in recent years that I save a chunk of time by having relevant portions of my CAD work exported to a large plotter which makes full size paper templates, which are then cut out, applied to door skin or thicker substrates, and used for layout or as a cutting template.

And my switch to using the computer to draw was prompted by a study I did a long while back in how to manually draw an item in perspective, using station points, and so forth. I found that the sheer number of traces required was leading to problems on the paper with lines which were really close together and thus in pencil or pen resulting in a big fat mess by the time one was halfway along.

These problems have been solved in the past by folks of course, yet one cannot deny the astounding amount of time it takes to prepare complete perspective views, especially of more complex objects. It’s time measured in hours and even days.

Drawing in perspective though is more or less essential when it comes to communicating with clients about what you propose to make for them. I’ve had experiences where I have presented the usual plan and elevation drawings to a client and had them nod and look like they were comprehending what they were seeing, but later found, through client comments when the work was well along, “oh, now I see what you had shown in the drawing”. A lot of people, it turns out, do not relate especially well to standard plan and elevation drawings, let alone more involved stuff.

And even from the point of view of being the designer, the standard views connote a limited amount of information. It’s hard to really get a sense of what the piece will look like when you are standing there next to it, or looking at it from across the room, say, without some sort of perspective rendering.

Also, drawing on paper or other physical surfaces tends to engender a ‘one-shot’ approach, especially for those sketches which take a while to complete. While lines can be erased and redrawn, if one has to do too much of this then things get messy. The more invested one gets into a sketch on paper, the more one tends to cling to progress realized and to loathe making significant changes. And of course this severely limits exploration on the design front.

Funny enough, a similar kind of thing happens with drawing software too, as hours spent invested in learning one type tend to disincline one from starting the process over with another software.

After encountering problems with drawing in perspective on paper, I decided to give Computer Aided Drawing (CAD) a try. The first one I opted for was called MacDraft by Microspot, a 2D drafting program. It is still on the market in fact. One of the first things I tackled was to employ the traditional means of station points to produce a perspective view of a heptagonal splayed stool. Here’s the finished product, with all the drawing traces removed from the view:

I don’t think I could have accurately drawn that piece like that were it not for the formal method, and CAD in 2D made it happen for me. It was immediately apparent that 2D CAD helped me do things that were difficult to realize with pencil and paper. It’s easy to modify digital drawings in most cases, Still, it took a long time to put all of the traces in there so as to be able to produce a perspective sketch.

A few years later after taking an introductory class in French Carpentry drawing from Boris Noel, I was engaged in a detailed study-draw-build for the 19th century Mazerolle treteau. That piece was rather complex, and my study was hampered by having neither a teacher nor a physical example of the completed piece which I could examine and learn from, and oh yeah, no fluency in 19th century French. Most of the traces required to draw all the parts are absent from the sketch, by necessity, in the Mazerolle book Traité Théorique Et Pratique De Charpente. The backside of the drawing of the piece in perspective was not visible, so I was left unsure of how the connections between parts looked when brought together on that side. I went as far as I could go in 2D before the doubts and uncertainties about what I was drawing, in other words how well I was understanding the method and whether it would actually produce the required parts correctly. It seemed like folly to try and construct the piece until I was sure that I had a handle on whether  things were working out correctly in the drawing.

This is about as far as I got with 2D in MacDraft:

This drawing work took place around 2008. The nagging questions about whether the drawing method in the book which I was trying to emulate was producing the right parts or not led me to my first 3D drawing program, SketchUp (by Google). The program was free, and users could submit their drawn models to a warehouse where others could make us of the files. Things in the warehouse like appliances, fasteners, etc, which otherwise would soak up crazy amounts of drawing time, were most valuable to me at times.

SketchUp was fairly intuitive to learn, pushing and pulling shapes around for the most part. I’d looked at a few other programs, including Autocad Lite, but as far as dipping my toes into the pool, Sketchup was easy to go with, and free does help make the move risk-free.

And the program allowed me to construct the traditional sort of 2D sketch on the virtual floor, and then erect the parts directly above, using plumb lines off of the developed views – hopefully this sketch gives the idea:

I remember a rush of excitement the first time I drew in the scissor braces in 3D and found that the 2D geometry was producing the correct parts so that I knew I was on the right path. Later I was able to identify more than a dozen errors of various sorts in the original illustration, and I’m not sure I would have caught those otherwise. The shift to 3D allowed me to leverage uncertain 2D developed drawing work into something that I was sure worked, and this lead later to actually constructing the piece.

SketchUp came out later with a paid version called Sketchup Pro. While I continued on with the free version for several years, I eventually opted to obtain SketchUp Pro, for $500, for a job in which construction blueprints were required. SketchUp Pro includes ‘Layout’ which enables the production of various size formal construction documents, like this page out of a blueprint set I produced for another contractor for some standard kitchen cabinetry.

In order to communicate with the architects upon whose drawing the above work is based, I had to get SketchUp Pro. Since then I have barely used Layout, and for most users I would not have recommended they pay for the Pro version since you really don’t get much more than Layout for your money.

I found that even with my new paid-for SketchUp Pro, all was not ideal. For one thing, it is supposed to provide the ability to both upload and export drawing files in AutoCad format, the standard by which most other programs on the market are measured. File formats that autoCad works with are .dwg and .dxf.

I found that if I import an item into SketchUp which is in an AutoCad format, it will import and look fine, except it will often not be defined into different planes and discrete parts. What I mean is, if you click on the drawing, click the containing box open, and the ‘select all’, the entire part is highlighted:

This means that, unlike separate parts in the real world, like the fixing bolt and handle casting in the above sketch, are not separate but form a continuous surface with each other. It’s not exactly easy or quick to extract out the parts from one another in the drawing either. So if you have to modify one of these type of sketches in SketchUp, well, you learn it is best to avoid such tasks if at all possible.

That’s an issue with importing in SketchUp from AutoCad files. I’ve also had to export .dwg and/or .dxf files from SketchUp to a cnc fabrication place in the past, and they found that while the files I sent out of Sketchup (in the .dwg/.dxf file formats) could be uploaded, they also required hours of work to make usable for their machines.

It seems to me that SketchUp’s capabilities in terms of handling AutoCad format material is at best imperfect.

SketchUp’s less than scintillating performance continued with how it deals with files that grow in size to the point where there is a high count of polygons. I’ve encountered this a few times with different drawings. When a given sketch gets to a certain level of complexity, then SketchUp gets sluggish and even crashes. Crashes where I need to restart my computer. Later they introduced ‘Bugsplat Report’ to deal with sending info about the crash to the company – SketchUp now acquired by Trimble. It seems the company anticipates that program crashes are going to be sufficiently frequent to merit a special reporting application.

Trimble initially continued with the set up of there being a free version of SketchUp and a Pro One. However, when new versions were released, they charged for the update. Then they came up with the wondrous ‘Maintenance and Support Subscription’, and every year there would now be an annual fee to keep current. If your account was current, then you were eligible to receive any new versions of the software. if you let things lapse for a few years and then found yourself needing the current version, you would have to pay for all the updates that had occurred in the interim, if I am not mistaken.

If you didn’t keep up with the new versions, saving your cash – and why would you since the upgrades between versions,

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Dark Chocolate and Sponge Cake (18)

A little bit of trial fitting still needed on the drawer bank framing, as I had to mark out the locations for the peg mortises on the tenons of connecting parts. Here’s the connection between rear strut, rear upper rail, and the middle panel supporting batten:

On top of the same connection the through tenons are clearer to see:

Another view:

Then there was the connection between front strut, front upper rail, and the middle panel batten to assemble:

This spearpoint connection seemed decent enough upon initial fit:

Another view of the same connection, this time from the other side:

Now onto the next task on the list, which is processing the 4 drawer bank rails for their end joinery. This work was complicated slightly by differences in the posts, front and rear, to which they connect. This left the joinery looking much the same, but with 1/16″ (1.6mm) differences in lengths here and there:

The protruding tenons you can see at the bottom will be formed into dovetail males soon enough, and those are also sized differently for front and rear rail sets.

Then I got busy on a component which associates to the drawer framing, a stiffener rail which is fitted below the drawer bank’s front lower rail. A portion of this piece has a mitered return all of 1/16″ thick. I obtained a metalworking 45˚ dovetail bit for trimming the mitered portion, and it worked most excellently at 3600rpm:

After the trim is completed, I am left with a little chisel work to do on the abutment afterwards with my skinniest 1mm wide chisel.

The clamped-on backing piece prevents spelching as the cutter exits:

The next task was to remove portions of the stick’s sides, front and back, as this stick has the x-section form of the lower half of an I-beam. After the material was removed, I tackled the clean up with a shoulder plane:

One has to be careful in using a plane like that with a cutter going all the way to the side of the plane body (a little bit beyond that, actually), as it would be easy to gouge the 45˚ portion of the profile with the plane. Managed to get through without mishap.

The completed stick, shown here at one end so you can see the section:

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