Fettling: Making the Shop More Functional

I think beginning woodworkers (and I still consider myself a beginning woodworker) are challenged by all the setup required for the shop to work well. Many tools are sold looking like they are functional, but with serious flaws. And even those that don't have serious flaws need fettling to perform at their potential. These tasks often seem endless.

The router table pictured above came from an estate, complete with router, for about $25. I knew I needed a router table, and I also knew it would be a while before I make the one I have planned. This seemed like a good solution (still does), but the the stock fence, which was designed to look like would allow straight guided cuts as well as small scale jointing, had challenges.

Ryobi is the manufacturer, and the table and fence are made from aluminum. They look like they were cast and machined to be flat, but the fence itself curves significantly. When I placed a straightedge against it, there was a visible deflection of up to 1/8" at the center. Whether I used it with the plastic guide surfaces or without, the fence caused anything that ran over it to stall when it hit the gap, and the act of correcting this problem would put a wrinkle in the line of the routed groove.

I had to fix the router fence before I could route the slots on the cold frame lights. And to do that I needed to finish setting up the jointer (finally). I spent a night last week setting up the jointer, and about an hour and a half this weekend flattening a fence and setting it up to receive the bolts. Two more fettling tasks done. And the router table performed to the tolerances I required (something it would not have done before adding the new face to the fence).

It turns out that the new surface is not actually flat, and some day I may sink the bolts further in and run it over the jointer while it is attached to the fence. Today is not that day.

Building the Jointmaker Pro (Part 1)

Christmas continued at my house this week with the assembly of the Jointmaker Pro. I received the unassembled version of the Jointmaker, which provided a great opportunity to understand exactly how the machine goes together.

Before starting, I cleared and vacuumed the benchtop. I only wish I had also vacuumed the floor: there are a lot of small parts (with no extras), and I managed to drop three of them. The game of hide and seek would have been easier on a carefully cleaned floor.

The tool parts arrived securely boxed. Inside they were packaged in protective plastic bags, carefully wrapped in paper, or nestled in perfectly-sized high impact Styrofoam compartments.

As I mentioned in my previous post, there are a lot of small parts and the assembly requires a lot of patience and care. If I had not had such short lengths of time to work in, and not taken so many pictures along the way, I think it would have taken about three hours to assemble. As it was, it took about 4.5 hours plus time to solve the two troubles I encountered (more on this later).

The hardware was divided into manageable groups of parts, and I kept them in their bags until I neared the end of the process. The logic of the sorting was not always obvious, but there was a logic: all of the same sized screws were in the same bag, and all of the orange aluminum parts were in the same bag, all of the square topped bolts, etc. When I looked for a part, it was usually in the bag I look in first.

In addition to the Allen wrenches Bridge City shipped with the kit, they mentioned the need for a #2 Philips head screw driver, a small hammer, a 9/16" open ended wrench (or adjustable wrench), and needle nosed pliers. I quickly found that a small, accurate square was also required for referencing some of the parts, and I wished many times for Allen wrenches that had screwdriver handles for the two largest sizes that Bridge City supplied.

The front and back panels were wrapped in individual heavy plastic bags to preserve the quality finish of the tool.

The stretchers each had a perfectly fitted seating on the back of the front and rear plates. These were then easily screwed into place.


Doesn't it look good already? But a tool looks good because it works well, so there wasn't too much time spent admiring it. I didn't get nuts with the pictures until later in the assembly process (I really did go nuts), but assembling the shafts to the keel was when the square became useful: it was the perfect tool for ensuring that bearing blocks are square and flush with the keel edges. There are pictures in the manual showing exactly how the gears should interlock. At first it seemed to me that I couldn't do this incorrectly, but the slots in the keel allowed some play in the positioning of the shaft. I found it easiest to check the correct placement by feel: the gears should interlock so that the teeth meet on exactly the same plane.

A blurry picture of the gears after both shafts are attached:

With the shafts assembled, the working part of the tool starts to take shape.

I found the hardest (most nerve wracking) part of the assembly to be inserting the spring pin that attaches the front height shaft to the spine. Needle nose pliers truly were necessary for this, and though the instructions recommend using a small hammer they don't make clear how hard that hammer has to strike to drive the pin home. Too lite and the pin just waggled around. It took a solid blow to get it started enough to abandon the pliers and pound directly.

With the pin fully seated, this is what the connection looks like.

Next, the front and rear height shafts are screwed into the keel. This is where the work of raising and lowering the blade takes place. The instructions have specific lengths mentioned that should protrude from the gear bushings. This was another place that I found the sliding combination square handy: I set the rule to the required height and used it as a depth gauge.

After this step, the keel was held upright in the bench vise, as recommended in step 7. The pitch adjuster screw was inserted and the rear spine guide attached (again with the combination square to seat it properly square and flush to the keel). The next part involved tightening down a screw that threads into the rear pitch adjuster until it is tight, then backing it off slightly. This captures the spine between two washers and allows free movement of the screw while the spine pitch is adjusted. A simple and elegant solution.

Notice the Allen wrench in the top of the spine. There is a very small hole there for inserting this into the trap screw, and the instructions have two names for this screw. I note that one writer on the Bridge City forums had quite a time finding this, and if I hadn't done this in the same sesiion that I threaded the pitch adjuster and trapped the spine, I might also have had troubles.

That ends the first part of the assembly. I'll post the other half of the pictures soon.

Before and After: Loading the Wood Rack

Last night I loaded the wood rack. Above, you can see how it looked at the beginning of the night. Below is what it looked like when I was done.

I didn't realize just how much wood I had stacked around the basement, and now I'm worried that the pile of ash that's sitting up at my friend Sean's house will not fit anywhere on the rack. The good news is, right now no wood remains piled in other sections of the basement. Here's a look at a few more before and after shots:

The walk way into the shop, lined with sheet goods, spalted maple, and freijo.

The same space with only unassembled metal shelves and insulating panel remaining.

The wall next to my bench and radial arm saw, lined with scraps and two large planks: one of cherry, the other of an unknown hardwood (maple?).

The same space ready to be vacuumed and painted.

And finally, the main section of the basement, piled with lumber: pine, poplar, ash (on the left under the boxes), and oak boards. At the bottom of this pile, a bunch of rough cut pine waits to be used for making (among other things) cold frames.

The same space, ready for reorganization and (my wife tells me) a pallet of wood bricks—fuel for the wood stove.

Journal Entry #5: Jointer Assembly Complete

On Sunday I finished assembling the new jointer. I still need to adjust this for use, but I'm within an hour or so of having it fully functional.

Journal Entry #5: Key and Sword

Tonight the key arrived for the jointer. So more progress was made on assembly: I put the drive pulley on the motor, put on the belt, and adjusted the tension. That was all I had time for tonight because I have a sword to make.

If you are not familiar with the Society for Creative Anachronism, you probably don't realize that making swords in my world is a woodworking project. I've been making swords for 15 years now, and I'm just starting to get good at it. They are made of ratan, which is technically a grass, but enough like wood to qualify.

Tonight I removed the old sword from the basket hilt, cut a new length of ratan to the same length as the old one using the nifty "new" miter box that my friend Glenn passed on to me—a big improvement over cutting freehand with a crosscut panel saw—determined the "direction" of the blade, and thinned the full length to 1.25" using a draw knife.

Tomorrow I'll shape and size the handle, aiming to have it pressure fit into the basket hilt tightly enough that it would stay seated without tape. Then I'll mount and tape the sword using a combination of strapping tape, nylon webbing (to add weight and durability), duct tape, and electrical tape.

Every sword is a bit of a crapshoot, but careful and consistent work tends to produce a superior blade. It is easy to get carried away with the draw knife, so even though I'm working to a deadline I'll need to be slow and deliberate with the handle.

I'm taking pictures of all this, so I hope to post a "how to" entry with roughly step by step pictures of how I do this—maybe on Sunday.

Shop Vignettes

I enjoy looking at shop spaces and projects. Here are a few recent photos from my shop:

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The back side of my old Delta drill press has become an impromptu shrine to the kids: An origami whatsit from my eldest, and a note from the youngest. If you can't quite read the note, it says:

"Dear Daddy, I really love you and I really want to say I love you as much as Echo, because I love Echo a lot. To Daddy, from Marian"

Echo is the cat.

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Above is a planing stop I built with nothing but saw dust. Oh, and glue and wire brads. Yes, the scrap MDF from the radial saw top and testing boards (I must post about this sometime soon—I have the pictures) has come in useful. This stop allows me to set the board unclamped on the bench and quickly plane both sides. It lets me plane down to 1/4" in width.

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SWMBO recently started upgrading the kitchen. This involved some screw-together furniture, and a wish for one more shelf. The clear pine was almost too good for the project, but it was the perfect width with only one glue joint.


I don't know why the notches on the underside were so satisfying to make, but they were. These notches seat themselves on pegs, two of which I manufactured from the shanks of two wood screws (there were only two extra with the kit, and I just could not see paying Lee Valley $11 to ship me 50 more).

While making the shelf pegs I discovered that I no longer had a hacksaw (though I did have a hacksaw blade). Have you ever tried hacksawing by holding a loose blade in your hand? It makes the hand cramp up, so after a while I got smart and clamped it in a machinist's clamp. That was slightly better, but you can bet I bought a hacksaw frame when I went to the hardware store earlier this week.

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This 12" wide, 10' long cherry board cries out to be used for something good, preferably before Christmas. Wish me luck with fitting this project in with everything else.

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Two new additions to the shop, courtesy of Patrick Leach. I've wished for a grooving plane on many occasions, and now I have one. Will I ever do more axe hewing? I hope so. I just have to tighten the handle up in its socket and I'm all set.

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I started the storm window stock preparation. Above was a rough rip and chop.

Then the pieces were jointed and planed to width at a friend's shop. I'm letting it aclimatize to the shop while I figure out when I'll have time to work further on it (maybe tomorrow after helping my brother-in-law lay subflooring in his new "man cave".

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The pictures above almost speak for themselves. I cut a hole in the wall of the basement stairwell. Someday soon the plumbers will come and fix our plumbing, and I'm ready for them. For this project I pulled out the keyhole saw that had languished since I impulse purchased it from my friend Trevor.

Nothing beats the satisfaction of having the tool you need on hand, especially when you've never needed it for all the years you've had it.

Featherboards for Ripping Window Stock

The Radial Arm Saw (RAS) adjustments are completed—I expect to write about that soon—and it is almost time to start building the storm window to replace the old rotted one I willfully destroyed. This is a project on which I will definitely use machinery, and the RAS will play a key roll.

Research revealed that my prior belief that poplar would be better than pine for outdoor applications was wrong. In fact, consensus amongst online woodworkers and the Wood Handbook from the U.S. Forest Service agreed that pine was usually better, but not by much. So ignore my earlier intimation in the Replacing a Rotting Stair Riser post that poplar is any good for rot resistance: it isn't.

Among the contenders for stable outdoor woods: cherry, walnut, cedar, white oak, and mahogany. What a bummer: the beautiful woods are apparently also the ones to use in painted applications outdoors. There is a small silver lining in this: about two years ago I said "yes" when a friend offered me part of a bargain pile of mahogany offcuts, all 4/4 in random widths and 5 foot lengths. This stock is perfect for building the storm, and I selected window stock from this pile:
The thinnest piece will become a simple triangular molding designed to stop water from flowing easily into the window joints. I plan to post the storm window plans in a future entry. Especially because the molding stock was so thin, I wanted to have it seated firmly against the fence of the RAS (yes, I am going to rip stock on a Radial Arm Saw; and no, I am not any more afraid of this than I would be with a table saw). I wanted feather boards.

To start, I ripped a scrap of pine into thinner sections to make two feather boards:

Then I turned the arm to 45 degrees and cut a fresh kerf in the fence:

Using the newly cut kerf, I could line up precisely with the marked 45 degree cut and know that the cut would be exactly on the line. This kind of precision isn't necessary for the feather boards, but it was good practice for when it would be:

With the angles cut onto the board, I turned the saw back to the rip position and started cutting fingers on the board. I ripped to the marked line, turned off the saw between cuts, and repositioned the rip. Unlike a table saw, where the blade is stationary and the fence moves, on the radial arm saw the fence is stationary and the blade and motor are repositioned:

Many people have cautioned me about the dangers of ripping on a Radial Arm Saw (including my father and a friend who attended the North Bennet Street school), and while I agree that any exposed blade rotating at high speed can be a danger, in practice I believe a well adjusted Radial is as safe or safer for ripping than most table saw settups. Take a look at this:

Notice that the body of the motor blocks access to the side of the blade, and the blade guard, once properly positioned, sits directly between the feeding hand and the blade. Through all of this ripping, I felt perfectly comfortable with the safety precautions on the saw. And because I had adjusted the heal/toe position properly, there was no tendancy to kick. The process went quickly and when I tested the newly cut feather board it worked perfectly:

The only thing I didn't like about the feather board was the long point just waiting to catch me in the hip. So I cut the other side to a 45 degree and rounded the tip before starting in on another. At the end of the night I had two feather boards completed:

With that done, I'll soon be ripping window stock.

One Reason to Hate MDF

Medium Density Fiberboard (MDF) isn't just for counters and insta-furniture any more. I've seen it used as a veneer base and structural component by woodworkers doing stunning work, and there are many things to recommend it, like stability, consistency, and affordability.

But I just can't like MDF, and after using it for reference boards to test and adjust my Radial Arm Saw (RAS), I can't say that I like it any more than I did. I will continue to use this product for sacrifice tables on the RAS, for reference boards used to test its accuracy, and for some jigs, but I aim to avoid using it as much as possible. Here's why:

If you don't know what you're looking at, it's dust. Not regular saw dust, but the finest powder I can imagine that still looks like it might be a wood product. I sometimes forget a dust mask when working with real wood, but never with MDF. After one cut, I'm ready to put the ventilator over my face—even on the hottest most humid day.

Two new rules developed this week while I was adjusting the RAS. These are good rules for any power sawing, but essential when working with MDF:

1. Clear surfaces of all but the tools required for the current job. This makes it easy to vacuum up afterward, and prevents the dust getting in the working parts of your tools.
2. If it can be closed, close all tool storage completely (Even if it is nowhere near the saw). Again: an ounce of prevention will keep most of this dust out of your tools.
   

One final sad fact about MDF: while you can plane it (and to make the reference boards I found it necessary) you cannot make shavings. Even with a sharp blade, MDF will only produce dust. Blade dulling, throat choking (the plane's, not mine), dust.

More Radial Arm Saw Adjustments

It has been years since the radial arm saw came into my shop, and I have not used it at all because it was not set up accurately. I've been working on fixing this over the last two weeks, and I'm getting quite familiar with the settings.

The thing that took me longest, was getting the table to be nearly perfect in its alignment with the saw arm. I had spend hours trying to get this right, and I was getting nowhere until I learned the trick from a book called Fine Tuning Your Radial Arm Saw, by Jon Eakes. The secret was to adjust four reference points on the table and use a crescent wrench as a lever for fine positioning. This simple trick was a huge revelation, and once I learned it, adjusting the table was done in under an hour. I'm sure I could do it in under 30 minutes now if I needed to do it again.


I'm now most of the way through testing and adjusting the saw. I hope to finish tomorrow and start ripping stock for the storm windows I need to build. I guess I just needed a big project (ripping and chopping the stock for 5 storms) with a deadline (winter) to motivate me to get this machine working. There was no way I was going to rip all that stock by hand.

No More Kerosene Tank; More Shop Space

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. So here's two thousand words about what happened at my shop today:



Perhaps I will build a lumber rack here and free up a bunch of floor and wall space currently housing lumber.