Good vs. The Best

 I have been saving for a bandsaw and dust collection.  As a hand tool woodworker (just my personal preference as I really want to work with my hands), it's the one tool that I think will be really helpful.  It is a huge pain to reduce stock thicknesses by hand.  To the point, where I have made things more thick that I would like.

I have find myself falling into a trap I first encountered 15 years ago in another hobby upgrading equipment.  What is the best?  Though a natural question to ask, it is one the leads to much frustration as so I was discovering then and am experiencing now.  I suddenly remembered reading a book called Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz that discusses this in detail.

By searching hard for "the best" we are setting ourselves up for feeling unhappy with whatever we choose.  The better question is "what is a good choice?"  In doing so, we relieve ourselves of the mental burden reading all that has been written and reviewed.  It's relatively easy to find good choices; hard to find the best.

Rediscovering this has helped greatly.  As such, I've been more quickly able to narrow what bandsaw I will likely get as well as which dust collector.  All I need to do is now find a good band saw and good dust collection; not the best of each.  If you haven't read the book, it's well worth getting and can probably be found used.  It will likely save you lots of agony over woodworking equipment as well as other things in life.

Bread Box Part 3 - Front & Back Panels and Finish

 With the carcass now together, it was time to make the front and back panels.  I decided to start with the rear panel so that I could get some practice/warm up before making the more visible front panel.  I had just enough scrap thin cherry to glue up for the rear panel.  

As for the mortises, I had an unfun experience making them for my tool chest.  As such, I opted to use a mortise machine that I had recently purchased.  Part of me feels like a failure and as if I am giving up going this route.  What I simply need to do is practice making some mortises by hand.  If I can dovetail by hand, then I should be able to mortise by hand.  Making tenons by hand I find easy.  What I think will help me is to make and use a simple alignment jig that Paul Sellers discusses when cutting the mortise.  Again, one or two weekends of practice and I am sure I will feel confident.  Till then, I will use the mortiser.

For the back, I decided to try a stop groove that holds the panel by using the mortise machine. It was actually annoying and time consuming to do it this way.  The front will use a through groove and a haunched tenon.  I'm not upset. I just need to try different ways to see what does and doesn't work.  The tenons were cut by hand and refined to fit with a hand router plane.  I learned this from Paul Sellers and it works very well to get the final fit.  Glue up went well.

For the front, basically the same process in that I used the mortiser.  Then, I used the plough plane to run the groove.  It was much faster plus I like to do it this way.  I was very happy with how well the groove came out.  There was a bit of a learning curve to using the plough plane but I think I have it now sorted out.  As for the panel itself, it was thicker than then 1/4 groove it would go into.  The simple option would have been to put a bevel to make it fit.  That would have been fine; however, that's not what I wanted.  I felt that panel would be too thick.  Since how I make something is important to me, I did it the way I wanted to do it.  I used hand planes and took the maple panel down to 1/4" thickness.   Forever more, when I look at the bread box, there will be a little internal smile knowing I made it the way I wanted to make it.  Glue up went very well and the joints were tight on the rails and stiles.  Starting to feel confident on making frame and panels.

Hardware install was straight forward using hand tools.  A recessed magnet holds the door shut.  As for the finish, I went with my favorite go to.  I used shellac.  Garnett shellac for the cherry and blond shellac for the maple.  Parts of the finishing were done before the carcass was assembled and blue tape on the parts that were going to be glued.  Partway through I denibbed.  After letting the shellac "harden" for about 5 days to a week, I then used OOOO steel wool and wax.  The piece came out nice and the wife is happy.  I'm happy because it was my second piece I designed and it looks like the design I made.  It is big but the specs for what it was to hold dictated that.

Bread Box Part 2 - Under-bevel on top and making the legs

 With the main carcass construction complete, it's time to move onto the legs.  Before I can size the legs, I need to put the bevel.  For this, I just used my hand planes.  I started with the cross grain bevel and then moved onto with the grain.  Doing crossed gain first allows a chance to fix any tear out when working with the grain.  It went quickly with now issues to report.

As for the legs, I had some pieces of figured maple that were the perfect size.  I picked out the parts with the best figure and cut to over length.  The one thing I'm not certain of is how high I want the legs to keep the bottom of the box off the surface.  After some mock ups and my wife's input (that happy wife happy life thing), we settled on either 1" or 3/4" (can't recall).  With the decided then it was a matter of cutting the legs to width.  I did a dry assembly and then measured how much flat spot I had underneath the bevel.  I had a target number in mind on width when I designed it; it is always good to double check to make sure something isn't way off after assembly.  Then I cut the legs to width.

As for the curve on the legs, I spent a fair bit of time looking at the legs I had made on the nightstand.  Different size so I need to account for scale down on the breadbox.  One of the carryover of being a bench chemist for a large part of my life is a lab notebook.  I am used to write detailed notes when I made things in the lab so I or others could duplicate the results.  Keeping a good lab notebook is a well ingrained habit and it carries over to woodworking.  For making the legs, I looked up how I did the layout for the nightstand. What I did there was measured midpoint and end point of where I wanted the curve and used something flexible.  As such, I figured out what I wanted my midpoint and endpoint to be on the legs then used a mixture of freehand and French curve to get the flow I wanted.  After the first leg is done, it then serves as a template for the other three.  Depending on the leg, I used either a coping saw or stop cuts and a chisel to remove the bulk of the wood.  Then spoke shave, card scarper and sand paper to finish.  They came out good.

Glue up was next and pretty straight forward.  Carcass first then the legs.  For the legs, I wanted to center the legs over dovetails (part of the design).  I think I went very slightly off center to cover up a hole in one side of the cherry.  To help keep the legs in place when drying I used some blind pin nails.

From here, it was time to make the panels and install them and finish the project.  That will be for the next blog post.

Bread Box Post 1 - Design Considerations and Making the Carcass

 My wife has wanted a bread box for quite some time.  It has finally came to the top of the list.  Her criteria was that it needed to hold both baguettes and loaf bread.  Beyond that, she was extremely flexible.  We decided that it should be able to hold two loafs of normal size bread and two 2-packs of baguettes from Costco (our frequent source of them).  

As for the measurements, it was quite simple, I measured the real world product dimensions and added an inch or two in each direction so I didn't need to cram the bread in there.  As for the design, I did a quick google image search and didn't really see anything I liked so I knew I would be designing my own but would be heavily influenced by things I've made and things I've seen and liked.  After the sketch, I waited a few weeks to mull it over.  The final design is show afterwards.  Essentially, very similar to the sketch but I put the floating panel on the front (and back) and used solid sides.  The wife approved of the design.  The only difference was the hardware, I wanted more of a Mackintosh dangling pull on the front.  My wife preferred a knob.  Not the end of the world so a knob it was.  Happy wife, happy life.

The inspiration came from a variety of sources.  For the frame and panel, beveled top, and curved legs, I took the design cues from a craftsman/mission style nightstand I had built for my daughter off of a set of plans I purchased from Wood Magazine (Issue 159 from Nov 2014).  For the legs lifting the carcass off the carton, I saw a while ago a small box from a website (don't recall whom).  I liked it and thought it would look good here.  The actual curve itself came off of the aforementioned nightstand, just scaled down.

In terms of wood, I wanted to use up what I had.  I had enough cherry and maple laying about.  My biggest regret is the maple front.  The cherry and maple compliment each other and will only look better over time.  What I regret is that maple I had for the front was kind of blah (I did the best glue up config with what I had).  I really should have either bought a new piece such as tiger or Birdseye or veneered birdseye or tiger maple on the front.  Given the time and energy I spent on this, the cost for that extra bit of wood is really irrelevant.  It's a learning lesson that I will take to heart.  If that this maple had been a non-show face it would have been fine.  For show faces, I will keep in mind that at times, it might be better to just spend a bit more if my budget does allow it.  In this case, I got sucked into the allure of making it from spare "free" wood I had laying about.  For the legs, I had enough figured maple to make them.  Of course, I used my favorite holdfast to break down the rough stock.

The underside of the top used housing dados to hold down the top.  The bottom is attached to the sides via dovetails.  The joinery itself was straightforward to do and came out decent.  No perfect but good enough.  On the back will be a frame in panel so  I made the housing dados with a mixture of chisels and router plane.  To hold the middle shelf (needed to separate loaves from baguettes), I went with housing dados.  I gotta thank Paul Sellers for his online training.  Everything I needed to do to make this, I learned from him. The post is getting long so we will stop here.