Since I returned from the Marc Adam’s School, life has not offered much opportunity for me to get into the shop. Rest assured that I will soon be doing some work to complete the Huntboard project and then I will be back onto the Sculpted Rocking Chair…nothing like having too many irons in the fire, huh? Well summer is traditioonally my slowest woodworking time so, at least I’m consistent!
What I have been doing when I get a little time in the shop is more turning on the lathe. As I have mentioned in the past, I’m a member of the Rochester Woodworkers Society. I’m also a member of the Turning special interest group of the club. This is a segment of RWS that is associated with the American Association of Woodturners. For a couple of months now I have been working with a mentor from the Turning SIG in his shop. My mentor Ralph has been turning for something like 30 years and teaching woodturning for a good portion of that time.
I started the mentoring relationship because I wanted to learn more about turning hollow-forms. However before we got started we thought it might be a good idea to work through some basic bowls in order to check and refine technique. The thinking was that we could progress from an open bowl to a semi-closed form then to a hollow-form. At this point we are working on a semi-closed form and I can definitely tell you that starting with the basics was the right way to go. I have learned as much about sanding as I have about refinements in tool technique! Additionally, the process has taught me a lot about looking for the right form in a piece and the subtleties of why some forms look better than others.
I have said in the past that certain techniques seem to be well-suited to subtle hands-on illustration and correction. Hand tool operations are one, and I think that woodturning is another. There are certain things that are difficult to learn from a book or even videos. However, when a mentor reaches over and slightly adjusts the angle of your gouge as you turn a bowl, the message becomes clear very quickly!
In the pictures you can see a Chinese Elm semi-closed form that we are working on in Ralph’s shop (a couple of the pictures are of the bowl on my lathe as I complete the sanding sequence). Also, you can see a Walnut bowl that I did in my shop after some mentoring by Ralph. For the Walnut bowl I followed the sanding and finishing sequence that Ralph teaches to achieve a nearly flawless glossy finish.
If you don’t belong to a woodworking club, I’d urge you to join one – the commeraderie alone is a great benefit. If you turn wood, finding a mentor is also a definite plus to help you progress at a much faster pace than you would if otherwise on your own.
Tags: American Association of Woodturners, mentor, Rochester Woodworkers Society
Well I knew it had to come to an end some time. Friday was the final day of the Hut Board Class at the Marc Adams School of Woodworking and to boot it was a shortened day due to shop clean-up and packing at the end of the day.
The morning was filled with some lectures and demonstrations on dovetails and drawer making. One of the assistants demonstrated the Rob Cosman method of laying out evenly spaced dovetails using a set of dividers. Then, Jeff Headley showed how he and Steve cut dovetails for drawers. Interestingly they gang the two side boards together back to back with a couple of brads. Then they plow a groove on each side for the drawer bottom and lay out their dovetails on each end. No special methods for layout here – just done by eye and using a shop made brass layout marker for the slope of the tails ( approximately a 1:5 angle). They also scribe a baseline for the tails first.
Next, it was on to the band saw to cut out the tails. Jeff demonstrated this by cutting to the line and nibbling out the waste in between tails leaving very little paring to be done afterward. The remainder of the joint was done in the traditional way. They did use a 1/4″ block set into the drawer bottom grooves in the front and side pieces when marking the pins. This was done with the front board in the vise and the side board laying across it and on top of a plane laying on the bench. The 1/4″ block kept things locked together while marking out the pins. These are half-blind dovetails and the marking gage was set slightly wider than the side thickness when marking the baseline for the pins. This causes the pins to be slightly proud after the joint is assembled – they can then be planed flush. Also, when cutting the pins they make no issues of cutting well below the baseline in order to get as far into the pin as possible – this was very commonly done on period furniture.
We also discussed the fine-line inlay, cock-beading and escutcheon for the drawers. The escutcheon for the Hunt Board is the same as done in the embellishments class that I discussed in an earlier post – it’s put in after the fine-line is completed. They do the fine line with a shop-made scraping tool after the dovetails are cut, but before the drawer is assembled. In this case the fine-line is only about 1/16″ wide. An important thing here is that the fine line must be allowed to dry completely after gluing before scraping it flush otherwise, it may shrink below the surface when dry due to swelling while wet with glue. In this piece there will also be some fine-line installed in the top. The cock-beading is installed after the drawer is assembled. The top and bottom pieces are installed to the full depth of the drawer front. The side pieces are mitered to the top and bottom but are not as deep so that the dovetails on the sides of the drawers are not covered.
Most of the remaining time for me on Friday was spent fitting the drawer fronts very closely to their openings. This took a bit of time, but I have them now fit precisely. After the dovetailing and fine-line is installed I will plane them down to leave a very small reveal around the drawer. Unfortunately this work will be done at home in my shop because the class had to come to an end.
After cleaning up the shop and packing my piece for the long ride home, I bid farewell to the school, the assistants and Jeff and Steve. This was a great experience and I will definitely do it again. There were no great revelations learned, but rather many, many little refinements in technique and process plus, the comeraderie was great. I’m already searching for my next class! I’ll leave you with a couple of pictures of the piece with the drawer fronts fitted before I packed it for the trip home.
Tags: cock beading, dovetails, drawer making, fine-line inlay, hunt board, Jeff Headley, Marc Adams School
Well I am still at work here in Franklin, Indiana at the Marc Adams School of Woodworking. The Hunt Board class has certainly been a marathon of woodworking…sometimes bordering on speed-woodworking.
I did not update you with a post yesterday because I was attending the traditional school dinner that is put on during each week long class. at the school. After the dinner students are treated to a slide show and/or demonstration by each of the visiting instructors for that week. This was a great event not only because of the camaraderie that it fosters between the students but also because it provides additional inspiration to the students by exposing them to other aspects of woodworking that they may not have considered. Certainly it’s a great marketing tool for Marc Adams to promote the school.
Yesterday was spent fitting tenons on the case. Lot’s of mortises and tenons…did I mention how many mortises and tenons are in this thing? In fact as of the close of the day yesterday, I was uncertain if we would even near completion. We also chopped out the mortises on the back of the case and created the tenons on the back of the interior partitions. Lots of chopping, planing, chiseling, paring and fitting later it was finally time to dry fit the entire case and move on the glue up.
The glue-up was a several step process. We started with the center of the front of the case including the bridle-jointed top rail. Steve Hamilton, Jeff Headley’s partner in business and the second instructor in the class demoed the process for this glue up. In the pictures you can see that two cauls from the center scroll were saved in order to assist in the glue-up and to avoid over-stressing the scroll and possibly cracking it.
Next , the remainder of the front of the case was glued up. We were very careful to not apply too much pressure with the clamp across the top because it could easily bow the assebmly. I did not get a picture, but at the same time, the back and back legs were also glued up. This was a fairly straight-forward glue up because the back is a solid 3/4″ thick and the tenons had been pre-fit. If things were not so hectic I would have snapped a picture of the completed case glue-up. However, this process was very complex and complicated…so much that for every one of these anyone who was available in the shop stopped and came to help gluing the process. That process involved lot’s of glue, mortises and tenons, and was finished by driving wedged into the through tenons from the interior partitions into the case back! Oh, and by the way…now I know why Jeff and Steve use Elmer’s White glue for everything. It dries clear and it have a longer open time for complicated gluing tasks like this one. The last thing that I glued up was the hunt board top – this was a glue-up with two pieces taken from the same board for a good color match.
While the case was drying I started on the drawer bearers. These are glued to the case sides and interior partitions and keep the drawers from skewing and tipping out as they are inserted and extended. I also started sizing the drawer fronts. These are initially sized for the exact size of the openings and will then be mildly embellished and will also have cock beading applied. I’m hopeful that we will get at least one drawer completed on Friday. In the picture you can see the result of the last two days work on my bench at the school.
The last two pictures show one of walls with little plaques of every woodworking Master’s recipient from the school. These are awarded to each student who completes a curiculim of certain class requirements. From there students can go on to a fellowship with an extended stay at the school and working with a specific instructor. The last shot is another view of the machine room after the days work had been completed.
Tags: hunt board, Jeff Headley, Marc Adams School
Day 2 of the Hunt Board class was fairly productive. This will be a fairly short post because I still have some sharpening to do to prepare for tomorrow and I am dead tired!
In the pictures you can see the notes on the blackboard with yesterdays mortising assignment. Notice the that Einstein’s Theory was part of the assignment! The second shot is a partial view of the machine room that we are using – Marc Adams School has a bunch of SawStop table saws. So, my experience with and impression of them is very positive.
We spent today preparing our sides, backs and front rails. This included tenoning the rails and the sides on the table saw. The tenons were cut with a shop made jig that straddled the fence. Pieces were clamped to the jig and run through the blade. There were two stops clamped to the fence raik so that both cheeks of the tenons could be cut by sliding the fence from one stop to the other. This worked reasonable well however, with a fair amount of people using the same setup, there is a possibility for things to move out of adjustment. This happened and a few of the early tenons that were cut ended up being a bit over-sized. So, those had to be re-cut. I guess it was a good thing to be off using the 12″ jointer to prepare the two boards for the top of my hunt board! I thought I was in great shape being able to use the fresh new setup. However, in the fray of redoing tenons, someone before me did not lock the fence down and my first tenon was cut too narrow! We corrected the set up an the rest of my tenons were fine. As a result of this I had the extra step to glue on a shim to my tenons on one end of one case side…I’ll re-cut that last tenon tomorrow.
With the tenons cut it was time to start fitting pieces on the front so that the top rail measurement could be determined. This was necessary because of the potential accumulated error across the three scrolled font rails. This involved fitting all of the tenons across the front and dry assembling the pieces. Speaking of scrolling, we also traced scrolls on the three front rails and cut them at the band saw. Tomorrow there will be a bit of clean-up on those as well. In addition, today did a bit of work on the back and interior partitions. Tomorrow, those will be taken down to final dimension. In the second picture you can see some of the results of today’s activities as well as the state of disarray on my bench.
Tomorrow will be another busy day. With any luck we will be at the point of dry assembling the entire case. Stop by for an update!
Tags: hunt board, Jeff Headley, Marc Adams School
The first day of the Hunt Board class at the Marc Adams School of Woodworking with Jeff Headley and Steve Hamilton was a busy one.
The day started with a welcome talk from Marc Adams. Marc spoke about all of the programs going on this week and introduced his support staff. Following this talk we sat down to some discussion from Jeff and Steve regarding what we were going to attempt to accomplish on the Hunt Board project today. Today was about sizing, tapering and mortising the six legs on the piece as well as preparing the sides and rails for tenons tomorrow.
Before any work was done in the shop, we received a talk about safety on each of the machines in the shop by one of Marc’s senior assistants. Safety is taken very seriously at the school and the talk was very well done concerning safe operation of all of the shop equipment, jigs and accessories. Even though a lot of what was discussed was review for most, I definitely picked up several things regarding technique that I can employ to stay even safer in the shop. Marc’s assistants are all very knowledgeable and will always point out helpful suggestions one tool use in order to give you better and safer results.
One thing I had wondered about in coming to a class like this was how things would be managed to keep everyone on pace and with somewhat predictable results. The answer is that things were batched and several like machines were set up by Jeff ans Steve to do certain operations. Then, groups of students would migrate through the each setup to complete the operations. Of course we were also able to do other things in the shop but by batching things like this and assuring that pieces were machined usin common setups, a lot of the variability is minimized.
So, today I started with a pile of stock that I pre-milled at home (I also did some glue-ups as necessary at home). The focus for today was tapering the six legs. Most of these cuts were done on the table saw with a slde that clamped the leg via toggle-clamps at an angle as it was fed through the saw. However, the two center legs required tapers on three sides. So, two of the three tapers for those were done on the band saw. All of the tapered faces were cleaned up with a smoothing plane.
Next up were the mortises – and let me tell you, that there were a lot of them to cut! After some careful note taking and time laying out the joints on adjacent faces of the legs we moved to the mortisers. I don’t own a mortiser so, I typically cut my mortises with a router. The mortisers at the worked well but they do leave a bit of a rough surface that required a little paring with a sharp chisel.
We also spent some time cutting our sides and front rails to size to be ready for creating tenons tomorrow. I have some nice curly Cherry stock for the drawer fronts and front rails so, I also took some extra time to orient these pieces for the best composition – painting with the grain if you will. Hopefully, the extra time that I spent here will pay off in the finished piece.
In the picture you can see the sign posted over one of the doorways from the machine room going into our bench room. The second shot is the laser engrave plaque that each student gets when the take a week long class at the school. These are displayed on the front of your bench while at the class and are a nice memento of the week to bring home.
More to come tomorrow. While I have a lot to do to build the piece, I’ll do my best to get some more detailed pictures of things as I go.
Tags: hunt board, Jeff Headley, Marc Adams School
