Riverbend Journal

When I started out woodworking, like most people, I bought a lot of cheap tools that have since been replaced. A lot of it was because I simply couldn't afford better tools and often I learned by using the tools, what I liked and what I didn't like about them. The one exception is my planer (seen above) which I bought twelve or so years ago and have been tremendously happy with it ever since. It is probably no coincidence that you can find one of these in perhaps any long time woodworking hobbyist's woodshop. I know more people with one of these than I do those that have other makes and models.  I won't bore you with details but a planer has spinning knives in it that make rough boards smooth and the surface flat and parallel to the opposite side. It is an essential piece of equipment if you ever make something from rough sawn lumber which I do quite a bit since it is considerably cheaper to buy. The three large knives spin very fast and essentially scrape the wood smoo...

  Not long ago, I attempted to make some chaos coasters out of scrap wood and while cutting the 10th coaster, my bandsaw blade caught the wood and epoxy plug and threw it clear across the garage, damaging the blade irreparably in the process. At the time I decided I didn't need a 10th coaster when I had nine others but I never through away the plug. As the weeks went by, I decided that I could do better and perhaps get one more coaster out of the plug after cutting off the broken end if I made a jig to do the holding which can be much tighter than my own grip strength. So with a scrap piece of plywood and some scrap 2 x 4 material, I made the jig above. The block with the V-groove in it on the right is permanently glued to the scrap piece of plywood. There other block with the V-groove on the left isn't attached at all and the short square block above acts as a spacer. Unseen beneath the plywood is a scrap of wood that slides in the miter slot of the bandsaw allowing me to fee...

After getting all the drawer pulls and drawer faces sanded and finished, it was time to attach them to the drawer boxes. To do that, I used a trick to allow you to space everything all nice and neat. Starting at the bottom and using shims that I cut from scraps, I set the bottom row of faces in place. Prior to that, I had drilled holes in them that match the holes also drilled into the back of the drawer pulls. So with the drawer faces in place, I sent some screws through them into the drawer body using those predrilled holes for the drawer pulls. This holds the drawer face firmly in place until I can pull out the drawer and fasten the drawer face to the drawer from the inside of every drawer. I can then repeat this process for each row working my way up to the top of the dresser making sure to use the shims so the spacing looking nice. One detail you may or may not have noticed is that the drawers are grain matched from side to side. I used a single board for each row and kept the pie...

I'm not good at repetition which is why I always decline when someone sees something I have made and tells me I should make more to sell. The only time I have listened was when I built a second batch of inbox drawers for desks but I needed one anyway for personal use and I thought, why not build a couple more while I'm at it. I don't mind the work of cutting and assembling but when it comes to sanding, I always regret my decision. So when it came down to making the drawer front for my 12 drawer dresser, I wasn't terrible thrilled because I knew it would be a lot of repetition. Above is the beginning of the drawer fronts. Since they are just going to be plain flat oak without adornment, they shouldn't be too bad. It is fairly easy to sand flat things fairly quickly. The only real concession I made was that I kept things ordered so I can grain match the drawer fronts. Essentially every row of drawer is cut from the same board and in order so when assembled, the grain ...

  I subscribe to a couple dozen woodworking YouTube channels mainly to get inspiration for projects that I would like to build. But one particular channel The Family Woodworker , I subscribe for a slightly different reason. The channel owner is a very artistic woodworker and has lots of projects simply creating art out of wood which is something I have always struggled how to do. I can design and build a 12=drawer dresser from looking at pictures and knowing how to build furniture but I struggle when it comes to making things that are just artistically beautiful. The Family Woodworker has inspired me over the years with his artistic skills and when this project came up recently, I knew I just had to do it. As a woodworker, I generate a fair amount of scrap. I generally save the bigger pieces on racks and in piles to use elsewhere, many times as jigs to help me do various wood working tasks or sometimes as smaller projects. But I still end up with a lot of small scraps of beautiful ...

  After catching up on the garden and a mountain of paperwork that it takes to run the life of a family and someone who volunteers perhaps more often than he should, I set my sights back on the dresser project. For the last month and some change, it has been residing in our front hallway. I put it there so that it could live in a temperature and humidity controlled environment while I was away, especially after all the effort I put into flattening the dresser slab top. With the flattening done, the hard work was done but the time consuming part began, repairing all the defects and sanding. Repairing the defects is relatively straight forward. I used picks and such to remove dirt, debris and bark from the internal cracks at areas where limbs had been at some point in the walnut tree's life. Once they were cleaned out, I applied tape to one side of the board and then after flipping, poured black epoxy into the defects on the other side of the board. The tapes purpose is to prevent th...

  Before I left on vacation, I hinted at doing something different for the dresser top than I usually would do. I knew I wanted to make the top out of walnut for the color contrast and just the sheer beauty of the wood. However, working out of my garage that I use at night to park too vehicles leads to some restrictions on what I can have for equipment. Normally, I would buy walnut boards that I would run through my table saw to clean up the edges enough that I can glue them together to form a surface big enough for what I want. This however, usually results in a slight wavy surface that isn't perfectly flat because said boards have slight twists in them. Also, because I have no place to purchase lumber where I can select the perfect boards, I end up with a surface where I can see the edges of every board used. This time however, after pricing out mail ordering the required walnut boards and ending up with a surface not quite flat and seeing the outline of each board, I went a diff...

  Because I intend for this dresser to be more than just an average one, it sort of forced my hand in the drawer construction. I just had to do dovetailed drawers and you can see all the pieces in the picture above. Fortunately I have a dovetail jig that works with my router and because I've used it before it was already set up and fined tuned so I cranked out all the pieces in short order. Above you can see how the dovetails fit together and why the contrast is sort of beautiful and an indicator of craftmanship. I'm not saying that I'm a good craftsman but that most people who build drawers using dovetails likely are. Once the pieces were done, it took me the better part of two days to glue them up because I only had enough clamps to do one at a time. I could have probably stretched it to two at a time using other bigger clamps but I find when I'm racing the clock (glue starts setting in a little over five minutes) and using heavy clamps that are hard to get in the rig...

  With all the joinery done, it didn't take long for me to build the frames for which the drawer sliding hardware will attach. I made them out of poplar which is a nice wood to work with, is readily available and is much cheaper than oak and walnut. Only one edge of the frame will be seen when a drawer is pulled out and I have a solution for that. I took some scrap walnut that is too thin to really do much with and adhere them to the front edge of the frames that might be visible when you pull the drawer out. A simple step and pretties things up a bit. Once that was done, I drilled a few holes for screws to mount them into the overall carcass assembly and also holes for me to attach the drawer slides at some point in the future. Above you can see them mounted in the dresser carcass assembly. I need to apply a coat of oil to the front visible edge. There will be four drawers in each section and with three sections, that should add up to 12 drawers which is what the wife requested....

  With the main frame of the dresser assembled, I did some touch up sanding and applied a coat of oil all over the exposed wood. Since this project will take some time to complete and summer humidity will be arriving soon, I wanted to seal up the wood to prevent it from absorbing some of that moisture and expanding in ways I don't want it. Here is a close up of one of the end panel with showing some of the walnut grain and the finish it will have. I applied a second coat of hard wax oil to the front and sides that will be visible but not the back or inside. Likely I will add another coat or two to the visible parts at some point but that can wait for now. Above are the components of the next pieces I am going to build. The drawers have slides that allow them to glide in and out of the dresser when you pull on the handle. The slides are what connect the drawers to the rest of the dresser that doesn't move and my slides need some wood structure to fasten too. Above are the pieces...

  Due to possible wood expansion due to changes in humidity and temperatures, I applied a coat of oil on the floating panels before assembly. This allows things to change and you won't see any unpainted parts of the side panel. With that done, I was able to glue up both end assemblies and let the cure. Despite having tons of clamps, I didn't have any clamps long enough for the next step. But not too long ago, while watching a YouTube video about something, I saw someone just put a coupling between two of their pipe clamps to turn it into a much longer pipe clamp. Realizing that I had plenty of pipe clamps that I rarely use because they are heavy to wield without damaging a project being clamped and can easily exert enough pressure to damage whatever is being clamped, I decided that perhaps with some care, I could just repurpose them as long clamps. So I purchased some couplers for ninety-nine cents each, much cheaper than a clamp that was long enough for this project by a good ...

While going about spring doing spring things, I have also managed to squeeze in some shop time. Because I don't have a great source of walnut, I had to order mine online and because that means I can't choose my boards, I generally have to order some extra too. It certainly isn't efficient and I wish I had a better source but for now it will do. It also doesn't hurt to have some extra lying around for a small project or accent on a larger project. Above is most of the walnut pieces for the 12-drawer dresser project with the joinery already completed. I still need to order walnut for the top but that can be further down the road. This project is more old school because I'm using traditional mortise and tenon joinery. You can see some both in the above photo. Because wood varies to some degree, I always cut things so the joint is a bit too tight and then fine tune each joint individually using chisels to get the proper fit. Once that has been achieved, I label the join...

With my mistake fixed, I proceeded to do a lot of sanding and then was able to glue the shelves in place. Because I am working with real solid wood, which tends to shrink and expand with changes of temperature and humidity, I couldn't fully attach them along the width of each shelf. Instead they are essentially doweled only in the center of each shelf on each side to the side panel and the edges of both shelves just float in the air for now. Since it is a book-shelf, meaning heavy objects might be placed upon it at some point, I will need to add further support. I had flirted with the thought of some sort of floating mortise and tenon joint similar to a "bread board" table to accomplish the same thing but at the end of the day, I just purchased some small brass brackets which I will pin the underside of the fronts and backs of each shelf to the sides. This will allow them movement for seasonal changes and support for heavy objects. While that was drying, I got to work on ...

  Back before we left for Colorado, the weather was just getting nice to where I could work in the garage whenever I had time and there were even a couple days where it got warm enough to glue which required a full 8 hours or so of above 50 F degree weather. So I got to cracking on the bookcase project by cutting out the various parts, all of which you can see on my workbench above. You can even see some of the beginnings of the joinery work started with the slots cut into the boards on the left.  There are different levels of woodworking like most hobbies I suppose. One can use joinery techniques that will definitely get the job done but may not hold up for hundreds of years or one can go all out and build something that might last hundreds of years but at the expense of more time. I chose the first route on this project with my choice of mostly using dominos to join things together.  By using dominos, which are wooden domino shaped pieces of wood, inserted into the slot...

  Along with the other projects I have been working on, I have been slowly designing new bedroom furniture to replace those we still have that I bought decades ago as a young single man with not much money. They have held up well despite being cheaply made and will likely still be of service to one of our children until they start obtaining those sorts of things. Although you can't really see the joinery, it is all there, the tenons, the dadoes, the figuring out how I am going to build it.  When I was a working engineer with access to expensive software, this job was a bit easier but after retiring and losing access to said software, I spent about a decade mostly sketching things on paper in a notebook, making lots of notes and then still spending lots of head scratching while I was mid-build trying to figure things out. The end goal was usually accomplished but it wasn't a terribly efficient way to progress and mistakes inevitably get made along a way.  "The difference b...