Higher Learnin'

About a year ago I thought 'I hate what I'm doing'. I was working as a project manager for the family-owned drilling company, and while I realized that me taking over the business wasn't in the cards, I continued working there because the money was good. I've always enjoyed building things but I also really enjoy drafting and designing. Years ago I played around with taking architecture but was talked out of it. 'The oil industry is where the money is' I was told. Well, that's true, but it's a shitty soulless environment that in 12 years I've never learned to enjoy.

So here I am, three weeks into the 'Architecture Technology' program at the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology. I chose the two year diploma program over the six year professional Architect program because I've always felt that a professional program has a way to pigeon hole people when they graduate, and I know that I'm only ever happy when I'm allowed to do a variety of different things.

It's weird being back in school, but exciting to be doing something new. I'm by far the oldest person in the program and I find myself constantly shaking my head in disbelief at the mentality of the 17-22 yr olds I'm surrounded by. It's fun though, and projects like the model building exercise in the picture above make me look forward to getting to school every morning.

So anyways, I still have some unfinished business with my house that I'm going to keep picking away at, I actually just began building a large vacuum press to help with the construction of an entry door. I'll keep updating the blog as I pick away at wood-worky type things, but the posts may be spaced a long ways apart.

Pete's Page

Just a quick note. My friend Pete, who's shop in Brooklyn I posted pics of a few months back, finally has a website. His Wife Maura is actually doing it for him, and she says there's more editing to do, but the initial effort is looking great. Check it out:

www.heilmandesign.com

New Old Saw

A couple months back I was working in my garage building cabinets when my mom showed up with a friend of hers, Eileen. My mom gave Eileen a tour of my house renovation and afterwards they wandered over to the garage and the three of us chatted for a few minutes. Eileen looked around at my mess of tools & machines and said 'Bill (her husband) bought this old table saw years ago and he's never done anything with it, it just sits there. You should come get it". I didn't think much of it at the time because, A: I didn't think that Bill would share her enthusiasm at giving his tools away for free, and B: I just figured the table saw would be some old piece of shit. So last weekend my dad happened to be out at Bill and Eileen's place (they live a couple hours away) and he came home with the tablesaw in his trailer. I was delighted to see that it was a 12" Poitras with a sliding table! It is certainly suffering from years of neglect but it's definitely worth the time to rebuild.


I had to borrow my dad's skid steer to move the saw into a storage shed at my place.


Unfortunately the saw has sat out in the weather for a few years so the trunnion is seized up and the table is getting fairly pitted with rust. The sliding table still works well though. It slides smoothly and doesn't have any play in it. I don't think I'll keep the original fence though. I'm pretty sure it outweighs me.

The first order of business is to get the table off and the trunnion out. I'm going to get the motor tested, I'll soak the trunnion in diesel fuel overnight to free it up, and I'll take the table and cabinet to work one day and sand blast it all. I'll probably take the table to a guy I know in Edmonton who has a 48"x64" surface grinder. The table appears to be nice and flat, but sandblasting is fairly abrasive and won't leave a very smooth finish. The motor is 5hp, 3ph, and has a square housing. I hope it's in good enough condition to rebuild, because it appears to be an un-standard frame. Something I find interesting is that it's direct drive, no belt, I'm not sure how I feel about that. Direct drive is nice because there's no belts to slip, and tends to allow more torque, but it's more difficult to deal with runout or vibration. It's much simpler to true and balance an arbor than it is a motor armature. Again, I hope the motor is in decent shape, getting threads cut and a blade flange pressed on an armature will cost some dough!

Another thing I'm not crazy about is that it's right tilting. I've never actually used a right tilt tablesaw, and from what I can tell they're not very common anymore, but they seem wicked dangerous. I guess we'll see!

This is the extension table for the right side. At first I was a bit dissapointed to see it wasn't a solid table, and then I picked it up - and almost pooped my panties. It's plenty heavy and rigid - I'm sure it'll work fine.


It looks like it was purchased at some point from House of Tools, which is a big tool resaler here in Alberta that just recently went into receivership. I called Bill to ask where he bought the saw from and he said, and I quote, 'a retard shop. Y'know, like one of those shops where retard kids build... I dunno, birdhouses or something'. Old Bill, he's not the politically correct type.

Mo' Drawers

I finally got a coat of finish on my drawers yesterday and this morning I installed them. Here's the boring details.

These are the clips that hold the front of the undermount slides. Actually, the technical name for them is 'nipples' (teehee) - crazy europeans. At first glance they look pretty chintzy but they actually do their function very well.

The back of the slide has a little tab (that, incidentally, seems much more nipple-like) that needs a corresponding hole in the back of the drawer to engage. Originally I made a much fancier jig to locate and drill the hole accurately but it didn't work as well as this simpler version. Sometimes you just have to nail some scraps together.


Tab A into hole B.

One of the nice things about under-mount slides is their adjustability. This little blue wheel moves that wedge-thingy in and out, which moves the drawer up and down on the slide. So if the drawer front is a bit out of alignment you have about 1/16" of up & down adjustment on each side - allowing some fine tuning of the final fit.


...And it snaps in. Easy-peazy.


It's kinda nice to not have to see the slides.

Dust

I really have to get my dust collector set up. Unfortunately I don't have any room for it yet, so until I do I have to put up with crap like this:

This is the carnage left on my table saw after milling up a bunch of window sill material for my house.

I milled the wood for my cabinet doors last weekend. I had already bought some wide planks of birch and was hoping that I could resaw them to get rift to quarter sawn material. Turns out though that I couldn't get what I wanted out of it so I spent a great deal of time hunting around for some 12/4 birch. I'm not sure why, but 12/4 birch or quarter-rift sawn birch is really hard to find. I ended up finding what I was looking for in Sherwood Park, a 'suburb' of Edmonton. There's a guy there who builds baseball bats and all his material is 3x3 blanks of air dried ash, maple, and birch. I was a bit dissappointed to find out that it was milled green, and with drying had shrunk almost a quarter inch. Fortunately though, being air-dried, it didn't move a hair when I resawed it all into rail & stile stock. I squeezed three strips out of each blank, and they ended up at a skinny 7/8" thick. I'm really hoping I can get 3/4" out of them. The nice thing about building all your own doors though is that if I have to make them 11/16" it isn't a big deal.



I knew that cabinets would take me a long time to build, but I didn't realize it would go into the 6 month mark! I've had a pile of other things going on with my house renovation that diverted my attention, but the trim carpenter starts this week and the last few things I have to do should get ticked off this weekend. All there's left on my list before I move in is cabinet doors and countertops, and I'm getting help with the concrete countertops. So anyways, it's getting close! Housewarming invitations are in the mail!

NY Chairs

I forgot I had taken these pictures.

While I was in NY I snapped a few shots of some chairs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Brooklyn Museum. There was tons of furniture there but most was crazy ornately carved/upholstered/gilded european stuff. There was a few interesting plywood chairs though.


The plaque on this chair just said 'Ray Komai. Side Chair 1949' but I looked it up on the museum's website:

www.brooklynmuseum.org/research/luce/object.php?id=155417

At the MET there was a display that shows how their artifacts are stored and cataloged, and in that display there were a bunch of interesting chairs with no details whatsoever. Unfortunately the chairs I was trying to take pictures of were up on the top shelf, so I had to hold the camera up over my head, and flash photography is strictly prohibited. Anyway, here's the couple of pictures that sort of turned out... sort of.

Drawer Making

I started working on drawers a few weeks back and have been picking away at them since. I keep getting side-tracked by other things but I'm pretty much done now - I just have to put a quick coat of finish on them.

I don't like lower cabinets, because I hate bending over or getting on my knees trying to rescue something from the depths of the cabinet. Instead I built lower drawers, 24 of them, including a large drawer that a trash can will fit inside. I used baltic birch plywood for all the drawers, 1/2" for the smaller drawers and 5/8" for the larger ones, although I think now that 5/8" was a bit of overkill. I built the drawers in three batches. The first was the upper drawers, then the larger second and third row, and finally the remaining 5 in the island. The picture above is the last batch, all cut to size and ready for joinery.

I looked around for quick & strong drawer joinery and finally settled on a 'groove & rabbett' joint because it was simple, quick, and if oriented properly and tightly fit I'm sure it'll be very strong. Especially with a high-quality material like baltic birch ply. I don't think it would be very strong with solid wood because of the short grain the joint would cause. Also, I'm not sure it would work great with domestic plywood because the plys are so thick. The bit of holding wood left after the groove is cut might want to tear off if the joint is too tight.


First I cut the groove. On the first run of drawers I used my router table but I had inconsistent results with each test joint I cut (for some reason) so I switched to the dado blade. It worked more consistently but I had to scribe each cut to prevent tear out.


For Euro-style bottom mount slides the drawer bottom must be captured which adds another step into the drawer construction. I made sure to reference the fence to the top side of the drawer so that the top was all flush during glue-up. It means that I had to re-setup for every different drawer height but it made for less clean up after glue up.

I cut the rabbett last, using a sacrifical fence.

The final joint, ready for glue-up. When I had the joints together and the drawer box square I shot 3 or 4 crown molding staples through the joint for some added security. Like I said, I'm just a CNC router and a drinking porblem away from being a production cabinetmaker!