Todays Project - What did you do today?

[f350ca]

Thanks Randy,
Now that you've mentioned it, I guess I've been unintentionally steering toward cleaner, simpler lines in the pieces I've been doing. It's practical in nature when I'm building kitchen cabinets. Spill something down the front of a cabinet and try to wipe it off a door with a fancy raised panel, bordered with a frame sporting a Roman Ogee edge.
I read through your post on Hobby Machinist. Your work is inspirational. A testament to the fact that wood and metal work can go hand in hand.
Ash seams to be the wood of choice at the moment, mainly because I quartersawed a couple thousand feet of it a few years back. By choice I prefer cherry, a lovely wood to work with and it seams to have such a depth to it when you get a finish on it. In a couple of years quarter sawn red oak will be in flavour. I got a load of fire wood logs a month ago. At least a quarter of the load are saw logs, would be a sin to cut and split them.
I was using a new 4 flute centre cutting end mill when I machined those slots for the table wings. My mill has a top speed of 4200 rpm, still low but probably not bad for HSS. On those parts the slot was 13 inches long. The harmonic it set up was deafening. Speed and feed rate made little difference. The first piece pulled into the cutter and ruined it. I had to support the end on a machinist jack and clamp it down. Despite all the noise the finish in the slot was incredible.
No need to apologize for the mirror, thats not dirty, its pantene. I know it too well, I also lost my wife to cancer, many years ago now.

As for Todays Project, it looks like we're off to salvage some big white pine logs that a wind storm made available. No need for pine lumber at the moment and worst, no where to store it but the hoarder in me won't let them go to the dump.

[randyc]

Hi Greg,
 
I’d never considered the clean-up advantages of non-routed cabinets, LOL, but you struck a nerve with that point !
 
Attempting to put a casserole dish of lasagna in the oven last night, it slipped out of my hands; the filling went EVERYWHERE: on me, on the oven, on the floor and on the routed edges of drawers and doors on the closest cabinet !  I was really unhappy, my dogs were really happy.  Cleanup was PITA !
 
When I started woodworking about forty years ago, my first power tools were a 3/8 drill, a saber saw and a router.  The first two were necessary but the router was definitely not.  The initial efforts were horrible combinations of crude carpentry plus some French Colonial fou-fou using every shape cutter that I could lay hands on.  There was no sense of style or continuity in any of the designs and the pieces would have looked much nicer if I’d thrown the router away !
 
Moving from the San Francisco area to my current location, I made a clean sweep of household goods and donated almost all of our (mismatched) furniture to Salvation Army.  We slept on the floor and ate, sitting on the floor, for a while until I gradually built some furniture.
 
I’d already decided to keep things simple and thought about the kind of furniture in our old farmhouse, growing up in Tennessee.  Apropos of that, during a visit to the local hardwood supplier, I found a fresh lot of Tennessee Cedar for something like $1.46/BF and the smell took me back to my childhood, ha-ha-ha.
 
The combination of wanting to simplify and finding the cedar suggested designs like these.  The small chest of drawers and the night stand are Tennessee Cedar and Cherry – and you’re sure right about working Cherry and the way it takes a finish.
 
   
   
 
BTW, I made the base of the lamp, too, edge-gluing cedar with oak.  Although the piece looks like it has been turned, it was actually made on a jointer - the glue joints, of course but also the rounded exterior shape.

These pieces were sprayed with water-base polyurethane, which I was experimenting with for the first time.  I liked it OK but I’ve since gone back to oil base over a shellac or boiled linseed oil sealer.
 
This hope chest is Tennessee Cedar and Red Oak veneer.  One of these days I’ll get rid of the hardware store latches and pulls and make some.
 
   
 
My California King bedstead is Tenneessee Cedar and brass tubing.  I re-sawed 1 x 4 cedar planks into 3/16 “veneers” and glued them over Douglas Fir 2 x 4s since it wasn't possible to obtain anything bigger than 1 x 6 in cedar.
 
I could have glued up cedar planks to make up 2 x 4s but I had just about exhausted the supply of cedar by this time (there are a few other pieces of furniture that I didn’t photograph) so the option of gluing up cedar boards wasn’t available.
 
I didn’t use aged fir so there is some shrinkage at the end of the bed and every morning when I make the bed, I remind myself to plane the cedar high edges down.  Hasn't happened yet.
 
   

(Incidentally, since Tennessee Cedar is VERY knotty, I warmed up some clear epoxy until it was very thin and then "painted" it into the knots to stabilize them.  I waited a full week before beginning to saw the cedar.)

The only routing on any of these pieces, BTW, was some internal slotting for drawers and some slight corner-rounding and chamfering on external edges.  Oh yeah, the wooden drawer pulls are almost entirely shaped on a large table router.
 
You mentioned using a 4-flute cutter and obviously it worked just fine but I would have thought a two-flute might clear chips better.  Did you experience any burning ?
 
The top speed on my mill is even lower than yours, only3100 RPM.  It works fine for molding cutters, dados and the like and I do use it for routing but for small cutters it just doesn’t work.  The feed has to be so slow that burning is all but guaranteed.
 
One day I got tired of that and threw this together in a couple of hours:
 
   
 
It clamps to the quill of the vertical mill and holds a $20 Harbor Freight trim router.  All functions of the mill are preserved, X, Y, Z and quill downfeed.  My problems with small router cutters were solved.  The original intention was to check feasibility and then make a permanent metal holder.  But, since it DOES work, motivation has been low.  Maybe I'll paint it someday, LOL.
 
   
 
I was doing some work on a friend’s bathrooms, adding small custom molding around mirrors and tiles.  He had a table saw and a drill and that was the extent of his woodworking tools.
 
I made this little portable rig to accommodate another cheap trim router so that I could make the molding on site.  It clamps to any convenient flat surface.  (A fence is easily fashioned by clamping a straight piece of stock to the table.)
 
   
   
 
I hope that this long post doesn’t violate any forum policy.  This is partly a response to fc350a it also illustrates a few projects although they weren’t recent ones.
 
Cheers,
randyc

P.S.  As of this date, I have NINE routers - I just hate to change cutters so there is a different one in each - but most are never used.  My father-in-law, 93 years old and going strong, who is also a woodworker, hangs out at garage sales and picks up a router every time he sees one.  Between the two of us, we must have twenty of them.  But ninety percent of the time the ones that I use these days is a 3.5 horsepower Milwaukee on a table and the two little trim routers, ha-ha-ha.  Seems like I've almost come full circle -

[f350ca]

I started woodworking about 40 years ago too. We were married in school and flat broke so I used some of my uncles tools to make us some furniture. Some of it hung around for decades.
Some beautiful heirloom pieces you've created Randy. 
You've got me trumped on the routers, I only have 6 but I'll up you a shaper. I use it a lot making window sash for glass doored cabinets. With the right cutters I can fit the ends of the rails and stiles to the molding shape.
I was a little surprised, that 4 flute cutter (though it was screaming) made a beautiful smooth burn free cut.

Got the panels glued up for the wings on the table this aft.



My dumb phone camera doesn't do the grain justice.

This is how I started the day. Four wagon loads of white pine. The pile is getting daunting.



I wouldn't worry about the long post Randy. Don't think there are too many policies to break here.

[Jim1611]

I made a plate to clamp in my Kurt vise for holding things that won't fit in the vise or need to be clamped down. I used it the other day to cut some blind dadoes in some cabinet sides. It's 3/4" thick 6061 that was left over from some fixture I no longer use. Measures 12"x17.5". I machined a groove in the bottom for some 5/8" CRS and bolted them together with 3/8-16 flatheads. I also drilled and tapped some 1/4-20 holes in the back for attaching side plates. I will likely drill and tap some holes in it to allow the use of toe clamps.

[randyc]

Jim, next time that you use that plate, I'd love to see some photos. That is a cool idea, I never thought of anything like that to extend the work surface for routing on a mill. I always <dumbo> removed the vise when I needed more space, and jury rigging clamping devices. Your idea could save so much time and could be modified for so many different uses ! Thanks for sharing -

[randyc]

Holy cow, Greg, where do you get thousands of feet of that nice wood (especially the ash although I like pine too - long leaf especially of course) ?

Are you operating your own mill ?  If so, photos would be neat.  There are a lot of one-man, two-man mills around here as well as four or five big ones (like Pacific Lumber).  Timber is our biggest industry followed by fishing and dairy products.

I bought a cheap 14 inch Harbor Freight bandsaw when I first moved here.  I made a 6 inch riser block, ordered 12 inch longer 4 TPI blades and made an extended table with a cast iron angle plate as a fence, all for re-sawing.  The idea, of course, was to harvest from National Forest deadfalls, drops from local mills and so forth.

It's rarely been used since I don't often come across treasures like yours.  It's easy to find fir and the like, not so easy to find hardwood of any respectable length, ha-ha-ha.

Your table is going to be really nice.  I like this forum a lot - I'm seeing many cool projects and good ideas !

[f350ca]

Guess it was 5 years ago I built the mill Randy. Must have been about the time I joined the forum, it was pretty much built when I started this thread.
http://www.metalworkingfun.com/showthread.php?tid=248
This is milling one of the logs the table is being built from.

[randyc]

Dunno know what to say except "remarkable" !

My father-in-law was a millwright, he worked in the timber industry all of his life and had two or three friends that ran one-man mills.  He helped them out for busy-work after he retired and he brought large planer blades over here every once in a while for sharpening.  (I worked out a weird way of sharpening using some funny fixturing on a radial arm saw with an abrasive wheel and quite a bit of subsequent hand work, ha-ha-ha.)

I visited Dad's buddys' mills - they were commercially made I believe.  Yours is a beauty and thank you for sharing, this is a great forum !

[Roadracer_Al]

Speaking of routers & shapers - does anyone on the forum make their own cutters? I've had a go at a couple tool steel cutters, but haven't been too impressed with the results.

[Pete O]

I was attempting to square a fairly large chunk of stock on the shaper yesterday and having a frustrating time as the inside of the vice was not parallel to the ram stroke; I put a 6" parallel across the vice jaws and ran an indicator across it and found about .055" of fall. This afternoon I decided to find out where the error was and make it good.
Started off by swinging the vice 180 degrees on it's swivel base, got exactly the same amount of error in the same direction. Good news, the old shaper vice was well made.
I removed the vice and laid the parallel directly on the table, got .055" in 6" with the outer end of the table sagging, no big surprise.
I removed, cleaned and adjusted the square gib on the cross slide, reduced the sag to .010" over the 6" parallel, much better but still not going to get anything square. So, flushed with my recent success in dressing the mag chuck on my surface grinder, I decided it was time to dress the shaper table.
   
I set the crossfeed to maximum and took a pass that cut about .005" off the highest section, just to get my bearings. Another pass at .010" d.o.c. looked like it was getting close, so I decreased the feed rate to one pawl per pass, i.e. the finest feed, and took a cut at .005", unfortunately it didn't quite get to the end of the table on the left-front corner so I sped up the cross feed to finish that pass.
   
Decreased the crossfeed rate again and took another pass at .005", this time it cut over the entire surface.
   
I cranked it manually across the T-slots to save some time, counted the strokes on the second section of the surface, 195 strokes at 18 strokes a minute, 5 sections to the surface, somewhere around 1,000 strokes per fine pass. Glad it's a machine that you can sit and watch and not have to do this by hand like the surface grinder.
Nice to get all the ugly dings out of the table as well as trueing it up, this old photo shows a bit of how ugly the table had got.
   
Won't know for sure just how successful this was until I remount the vice and get back to that block, can't see why it shouldn't be good though.