woodworking – Page 4 – Nothing In It

Keyboard Booster for Work

Posted on 2021.06.23 by Elliott Evans

I started a new job back in September, while the office was completely closed. I about reached the end of my work-from-home productivity rope this Spring, so I appealed to my boss to be allowed to start coming in to the office. It’s been a good move, productivity-wise, as I am able to focus on work much better when I am not in the same room with so much of my crafting equipment and materials.

One thing I was really missing about my home office though, was the ability to work while standing. At home, I had started putting the cedar stepstool up on the craftsman endtable, and using that assembly as a standing desk for my work laptop. In the office, I’m using a desktop computer with a full keyboard, and the stepstool is not wide enough to accommodate that and a mouse.

Luckily, I still had some finished pine shelves from the old house in the garage. I cut one of them up into pieces, joined the pieces with dowels and glue, reinforced the joins with some metal right-angle brackets, finished the cut ends of the pieces, and now I have a standing desk for work without having to appeal to the furniture gatekeepers for an expensive motorized desk.

If you are interested in my ginchy custom desktop backgrounds, see the “Liberty Exit” and “Tokyo Maple Shrine” images in my Desktops Gallery.

Completed Tachi Kake

Posted on 2021.04.28 by Elliott Evans

I built this Tachi Kake sword stand back in July, but I only got as far as putting a few coats of black finish on it before winter settled in. In early Spring of this year, I added embellishment to the Tachi Kake in the form of karakusa vinework in gold paint. I did all the painting by hand, because it is fun and I have started to get good at it. I then put several coats of clear shellac over the gold paint so that it will not rub off at the slightest touch.

I now have two pieces of furniture embellished with gold karakusa. There is this and the kyousoku armrest that I suppose I never formally posted about. One day I suppose I will have a full set of fancy gentleman’s accessories. Anyway, here is what the Tachi Kake looks like with my Tachi sword in it.

Kakejiku Storage Box

Posted on 2021.04.212021.04.19 by Elliott Evans

If I want to be able to take the Hitomaro Kakejiku with us when we go camping or whatnot, it is going to need a storage box to protect it in transit. Such things exist in the Japanese tradition, so I made one.

It’s made mostly of poplar. I had an abundance of quart-inch poplar in my stock of surplus wood, so this was an easy choice. The top of the lid is actually 3/4″ poplar, to give the whole thing a little heft. I rabbeted the top so that it would fit inside the walls of the lid, and not appear thicker from outside.The inside is unfinished.

There are small blocks of cedar at either end of the box that cradle the ends of the scroll rod and keep it centered in the box. You can see the rabbet for the lid top and the interior blocks in this process photo.

The outside is finished with several layers of garnet shellac with a black dye added. That’s what gives the final finish that deep mahogany color. I was hoping this mixture might be a good substitute for black lacquer. It is not, but as its own thing it is very nice.

Mahogany Solar Flicker Lantern

Posted on 2021.03.27 by Elliott Evans

I finished up the last of the six solar flicker lanterns today! The pieces for this one have been sitting on the workbench since before it got too cold to work out in the garage, so it’s a relief to be able to check this project off my list. Here it is hanging from the shourou:

This one is not just special because it’s the last one in the project, but because it is made from some mahogany that Sir Ogami Akira, the O-daimyo of Clan Yama Kaminari gave to me years ago from the surplus of his boat building supply. I’m pleased as punch to finally be able to do something with it, and to have that thing be for the Clan. I had just enough wood to make the lantern, though some of the sticks are a little thinner than specification. The construction is all mortise and tenon, with little 1/4″ tenons.

I also managed to get a picture of this one before the paper went on, to show you how the lighting unit just rests inside the rails on a couple of angled braces:

Here are links to the posts about the other five lanterns in this series: oak, maple, cherry, poplar, mulberry.

Shelf Table

Posted on 2020.11.182020.11.15 by Elliott Evans

Back at the old house, we had six shelves in the guest/sewing room. They were made from edge-glued pine panels, stained with a water-based “rosewood” stain, and finished with water-based polyurethane. Here at the new house, we only needed two of them, so the other four shelves were in storage waiting for a good project.

A few months ago, the Sweetie asked if I could make a bedside table for the guest room here at the new house. The only real requirements were that it matched the room furniture, and had enough space underneath to fit this hamper that also lives in the room.

I took three of the surplus shelves, cut them to length, joined them with dowels, and glued them together. Of course, that was pretty-rickety. so I added some diagonal braces that I cut from one of the offcut pieces of shelf.

Underside of Shelf Table, showing bracing

Not very fancy, but it saved us a trip to the furniture box, and we know it matches the shelves!

Cherry Solar Flicker Lantern

Posted on 2020.09.07 by Elliott Evans

This is the third lantern in a series of at least six. This simple Japanese frame lantern is made from some Western Pennsylvania cherry lumber that I bought a bunch of years ago and am still working scraps out of. It follows the same design as the Oak Solar Flicker Lantern and Maple Solar Flicker Lantern before it.

I have a new method for applying the paper that I think yields a much tighter and smoother result. I’m using Warlon Taf-Top shoji paper, so I can’t just dampen the paper to shrink it. Unless the lantern is perfectly square, wrapping a correctly-sized strip of paper around it leaves wrinkles or bulges. Instead, I cut the paper oversized, apply it to the lantern, then trim the paper down so that it is perfectly straight and flat. It watses a bit more paper, but I think it is more attractive.

The shoji in the background were made about a decade ago, and are made from cedar. I bought the bunny painting from an antique store.

Measure and Mark

Posted on 2020.07.172020.07.17 by Elliott Evans

I’ve been working on a new large carpentry project, and it involves a bunch of joinery that for some reason I have decided to cut by hand. Everything needs to be measured out and marked, regardless of hand or machine cut, since I almost never trust jigs or templates for this kind of thing. Here’s the kit of measuring and marking tools I have assembled for this particular project.

So yes, there are three adjustable squares here, so that I don’t have to keep setting and re-setting them for the different lengths I need. The tool right in the middle is called a wheel gauge. You set the length you want, run the large brass bit against the edge of the board, and the little metal wheel at the end cuts a groove in the wood. I do have a Japanese kebiki gauge, but I have a difficult time getting accurate distances with it. The larger aluminum tool next to the wheel gauge is a modern Japanese marking square that is awesome because the large sides let you mark around the corners of lumber, so it’s easier to get straight cuts on 2x4s and other similar pieces. The small metal ruler is very useful for drawing lines between marks, and inserting into small holes as a depth gauge. I mostly mark things out in pencil using the blue 2mm drafting lead holder. but the pocket knife in the upper left is helpful for cutting a groove to start saw cuts, particularly on rip cuts.

Mid-Height Japanese Sawhorses

Posted on 2020.07.132020.10.15 by Elliott Evans

Some years ago, I made a pair of low Japanese sawhorses for my workshop. They’ve been great, and very useful (mostly for keeping lumber off the floor in the garage), but it was time to take the next step up. My rickety western sawhorses spend most of their time sitting outside in the rain and snow, so they are not in very good shape. A set of mid-height Japanese sawhorses would be nice to have, because they are designed to break down into pieces for transport and storage.

These sawhorses are about 24 inches tall, 24 inches long, and 22 inches wide at the feet. This height is just short enough that I can put my knee on a board to hold it while sawing, but tall enough that I don’t need to worry about scraping my saw along the ground. All the joinery is mortise and tenon, and there is no metal hardware in anything.

They are made almost entirely from pine. Given their modest stature, I could cut all four horses from three 4×4’s, two 2×6’s, and one 2×4. This means that there is only about forty dollars of material in the whole set. The pegs that secure the feet to the legs and the wedges that secure the legs to the stretchers are made from some surplus walnut I had in the shop. It’s always best to make the fasteners from wood that’s harder than the wood it is securing, but maybe walnut was an extravagant choice.

I wanted to make these from cedar instead of pine, but it turns out that these days cedar is five times as expensive as pine. It used to be only twice as expensive as pine. My next big woodworking project is going to cost me $500 instead of $100 for the lumber alone. Gasp.

I cut all the pieces to length by hand, but I used the mortising machine to cut nearly all of the mortises, and the band saw to cut nearly all of the tenons. I smoothed the walnut fasteners with a hand plane, though. After completing all of the shaping and joining, it took me about three hours with the orbital sander to clean everything up and remove most of the saw marks.

When taken apart, I can fit all the pieces for three horses into a single large (27 gallon) storage tote. This means that in the winter I can put the horses away in the garden shed instead of having them sit outside like the old ones.

Tachi Kake

Posted on 2020.07.082020.07.07 by Elliott Evans

The tachi is a type of Japanese sword that is similar to a katana, but it is worn differently, has different fittings, and is usually used as a more of a formal/ceremonial sword compared to a warrior’s katana. I bought a small tachi as part of my mission to recreate a full bunkan sokutai.

When not in being worn or in storage, the tachi would have been displayed nearby the bearer in a vertical stand called a tachi kake. These are readily available to buy, both as new items and antiques, but of course I wanted to make one myself. I was able to settle on a design, and I still have an excess of surplus wood in the garage.

Here’s what it looks like after cutting and shaping, but before finishing. It’s a little easier to see the shapes of the pieces. This is all pine lumber. The upright and the bracket at the top are just 3/4″ thick cut from 1by. The brace at the bottom of the upright is 1/2″ thick pine I had around; most of the examples I see online are only 1/4″ thick. The base is cut from some surplus 2by, to keep it bottom-heavy when unoccupied. The brace is fitted in a slot that I cut all the way through the upright. Tenons at either end of the upright fit into through-mortises for ease of assembly and disassembly.

All told, this item is about 26 inches tall when fully assembled. The tapering curve on the upright piece is one of my favorite shapes ever. I did almost all of the cutting on the band saw, though, because it made things like this curve so much faster to make. I also used a router to bevel and round over all the edges on all the pieces to give it a softer look.

Here it is after about a half-dozen coats of black-tinted polyurethane. This stuff makes a good affordable lacquer substitute, and it dries in hours instead of weeks. I sanded the finish between every couple coats, but it still needs some final polishing. I also want to add some embellishment like I did for the kyousoku arm rest, but that might not happen until autumn.

For a better sense of scale, here’s another picture of the tachi kake before finishing, with my ko-tachi in the stand like it is supposed to be:

Unfinished Tachi Kake with sheathed Tachi

Prototype Scribal Box

Posted on 2020.07.06 by Elliott Evans

When I was getting the Debatable Lands Woodworking Guild started, I polled the people who were attending planning meetings to see what projects we could work on as a group to produce things for the Barony. One of the ideas was to produce “portable desk” type scribal boxes that the Baron and Baroness could gift to scribes. It’s taken me some time to get around to it, but I was finally able to plan out what such a thing might look like, and use up some surplus wood from the garage to make a prototype.

This simple, hinged-lid box is made entirely from pine, and finished with amber shellac. The walls of the box are half-inch thick, and the larger surfaces are 3/8″ thick. both thicknesses are the result of planing down some 3/4″ lumber to remove severe cupping warpage. The top and bottom were made from some 1×12 shelving, so I was able to make the full width of the box from a single piece without resorting to plywood.

The work surface is 11 inches wide and about 12.75″ tall, a fine size to accommodate 8.5″x11″ or 9″x12″ paper with some room to spare. A slight slope should make work a little easier on the wrists.

I have no historical examples for this kind of box, I am merely imitating other scribal boxes I have seen in use around the SCA.

The interior of the box is about 10 inches by 14 inches, able to hold supplies slightly larger than average to a depth of about 1 inch at the front and 3 inches at the back. It’s slightly less than that because I decided to add the two battens underneath the lid to support the thin wood during use and keep it from warping.

The box is assembled using modern wood glue and wire nails, and finished with three coats of amber shellac. I’m not sure why my shellac came out so streaky this time. It could be that the shellac needs more alcohol in the mix, or that it was very hot in the shop yesterday causing the finish to dry more quickly than it could even out.

Because I had suitable material on hand, shaping and assembly of the box took less than a day. I did some hand sawing, but a lot of the sawing was done on the band saw. Assembly was entirely by hand, even to the level of hammering in the nails by hand to avoid blowing out the thin wood sides with the nail gun.