Arts & Crafts Entry Bench & Mirror Project (Complete!)

Finally!

After 1 month of planning and 9 months of construction (with 3 months of interruptions), here are the results.  This project involved several firsts for me, so here's the rap sheet.

• First grain selection & planning from the beginning
• First resawing and experience with case hardening problems
• First bookmatched panels
• First handcut inlays
• First quadrilinear legs
• First corbels
• First handcut tongue & groove joints
• First handcut bevels
• First clocked screwheads
• Best handcut dovetails so far
• Flattest handplaned panel so far
• First DIY Scratch Beader
• First scratch beads
• First removal of breadboard ends
• First mistake with lid supports
• First screw hole repairs
• First use of aniline dye finishing approach

As it has required so much planning, effort, thought, and problem-solving to pull these two objects from my mind and force them into reality, I consider this to be my finest work to date.  Here are the long-awaited pictures of the finishes pieces.

I'm going to take a good rest before starting my next project. This one took a lot out of me, but I'm very happy with the end result.  Thanks for following along.  :-)

Arts & Crafts Entry Bench Update

I mentioned earlier that I screwed up resawing the wood for the lid and had to order more lumber.  While waiting for the new wood to arrive I got started on the floor boards using my new scratch beader and then shiplapped them.  Scratch beading works way better on hardwood than softwood.  You really need a delicate hand with softwoods so that you don't dive into the board.

Scratch Beader at work on the floor boards.

Rabbeting for shiplaps.

So here's one of a dozen or so dry-fits.   

You might be wondering why the front/center panel is missing.

Because I'm the biggest idiot in the world.  That was a very bad day.  I wasn't paying attention and was so focused on making progress that I didn't realize I was cutting the rabbet on the wrong side of the panel.  Every panel is supposed to be flat in the front and rabbeted in the back.  I can't simply flip the board over, because the other side is a non-bookmatched substrate with an off-centered seam.

I had put so much time and attention into choosing those panels.  They all came from the same board to ensure grain and color match, the grain patterns are the craziest I'll likely ever see, and the board is simply irreplaceable.  The cry of anguish when I realized what I had done still echoes in my house.

I attempted to glue pieces of wood back on, but eventually gave up.

I found another board with decent grain and built a replacement.  At least if it doesn't match it will be in the center on not to the side.  I'm hoping that the aniline dye will make everything look like it belongs together and cover up my mistake.

Dry-fit #13,342

The front-center panel is a little thinner than the others.  I had trouble resawing again (of course).  You can only tell from the inside, so who cares?

Boden says it'll be okay.  Moving on...

The Death March Begins

I've charted out every step I need to take to complete this project.  I took 3 days off of work last week and worked on it for at least 8 hours each day and I've still got about 3 weeks to go.  Sigh.

I spent some time getting the tongues to fit into the corresponding grooves.

I resawed, reflattened, and glued up the bookmatched panels.

I made my first quadrilinear legs :-)

In hindsight I should have used oak for the core.  Looks neat though.

Finished up the leg joinery (mortises, through-mortises, stop-grooves)

Make sure you know which leg faces which way. 

See the triangle inside the square.

[No photo]

I made all of the tenons on the table saw with a dado stack and fine tuned them by hand.

The first dry fit!

Arcing the Skirt Rails

And then I completely screwed up the lid.

I resawed an 8.5" wide piece of 4/4 oak, but forgot to edge joint it first.  The boards cupped immediately and were a pain to joint in unison afterward.  The substrate - also 3/8" thick and cupping - wasn't cooperating either and the entire glue-up, using every clamp I own and the heaviest and flattest objects I could find, still wasn't enough to create a flat lid.

Stepping back to clear my head, my brother Nathan helped me figure out where I went wrong.  Why the hell am I glueing four 3/8" planks together at the same time?  A cupping 3/8" thick board can't easily be glued into a panel by itself, and this is just the first part of the problem.  I don't have a stable, flat substrate to press my veneer onto.

And speaking of veneer, I don't need to have a 3/8" thick veneer.  A thinner 1/8" sheet might actually be easier to handle and press down.

So I'm ordering more wood so I can attempt to do a better job of this.  I'm going to glue together a solid 3/4" thick panel and square it up to be the final size of the bench lid.  When this is dry and flat and stable I'm going to edge joint and resaw another 8.5" piece of oak into a much thinner sheet and press this veneer down onto the 3/4" substrate.  Once that is dry I'll trim off the edges and we should be good to go.

It wouldn't be any fun if I didn't make a few mistakes and learn something along the way.

Back to work

This project was delayed for a couple of months.  My older brother, Matt, asked for my help at New Year's in making a spice rack and mirror for his wife's birthday at the end of February.  I asked him if he wanted the end result or the experience of making it, because one takes longer.  He chose the experience.  If he picked the end result we would have gone to Nathan's power tool shop and gotten them done in a single weekend.  He said he wanted to learn about making things with hand tools and agreed to bring one growler per week from the Craft Beer Exchange, so.

The mirror was a duplicate of the one I just made (which I still haven't applied a finish to), except without the shelf.  The spice rack was made out of maple with housed dadoes and wedged through-tenons.  I'll write a post on those projects later.  Lumber was purchased from Dunham Hardwoods and I am still satisfied with the quality and care Zach puts into every order, no matter how small.

Back to the task at hand.

With the mirror construction complete, it's time to get started building the bench.  Here's a reminder of what that's going to look like:

I decided to start with the frame assemblies that surround the panels.  

First up, get groovy.

Really groovy.

Next: Tongue Depressing

Awhile back I purchased the Wide Blade Conversion Kit add-on for the Veritas Small Plow Plane that converts it into a tongue cutting plane.  I only bought the 1/4" tongue cutter because I usually only work in 3/4" stock.  The 1/4" tongues that it creates are supposed to fit perfectly in to the 1/4" grooves I just finished making a ton of, and they even have a video showing just how easy it is.

Problem #1

Veritas provides you with something called a "shaving deflector" that is supposed to divert the shavings as they come off the blade and guide them up through the middle and out of the plane.  Perhaps this works with wider tongue cutters, but not with the 1/4" tongue cutter.  The shavings just jam between the deflector, blade and skate.  This happens regardless of how light of a cut I take, or how long my board is, and it happens after only a few passes.

My finger is too big to reach in and dig the shavings out, and they jam up in there so tightly that I have to jam the point of a pencil into the packed shavings to clear them out.  The frequency at which I have to stop what I'm doing to clear shavings out of the plane in this way is really annoying to the point that I consider it a design flaw.

I've tried not using the shaving deflector, but the result is the same.  Searches on the interwebs for people with similar problems got me nowhere.  I now understand what Christopher Schwarz is talking about when he says he prefers when the escapements on moving fillister planes eject shavings onto the bench, not into your hand.  I vote for a redesign.  I'm going to ask Lee Valley if I'm doing something wrong, which is entirely possible as this is the first time I've used this tongue cutting blade.

 

Problem #2

I cut all of the tongues only to find out that none of the tongues will fit into any of the grooves.  The tongues are too wide and/or the grooves are too narrow.  

Not like the video at all.

So I decided to use the new fractional dial caliper I just bought from Lee Valley (accurate to 1/100th of an inch) to make sure all of the groove blades and the tongue cutter are the correct dimensions.  Turns out, they're not.

5 groove blades and 1 tongue cutter. Caliper set precisely on 0" when closed completely.

The 3/8" Groove Blade is .005" wider than 3/8"  This isn't really a problem because I'd rather have a wider groove than a groove that isn't wide enough.

 

The 5/16" Groove Blade is .005" narrower than 5/16" (Problem)

The 1/4" Groove Blade (which I just used to cut all of those grooves) is .005" narrower than 1/4" (Problem) 

The 3/16" Groove Blade is exactly 3/16" (awesome)

The 1/8" Groove Blade is .01" wider than 1/8" (not really a problem)

The 1/4" Tongue Cutting Blade is .003" narrower than 1/4" (Problem)

Here you can see the end result width of the narrower-than-1/4" groove 

And the end result width of the wider-than-1/4" tongue

Overall differences from the advertised dimensions

I'm going to be contacting Lee Valley to ask them to replace the groove cutters.  The whole point in buying the Wide Blade Conversion Kit was to save myself some time.  I don't anticipate there being a problem.  They have a long history of excellent customer service.

Solution (for now)

I took my Large Shoulder Plane and trimmed all of the tongues and made them narrow enough to fit into the grooves.   Here's the progress shot so far:

30 Grooves, 16 Tongues (trimmed), and 4 Rabbets

Entryway Bench & Mirror Project (Begins)

The next project on the list is a Stickley-inspired storage bench with accompanying Stickley-inspired mirror for the entry to our home.  Currently we have a piece of junk, pre-made, dowel-assembled shelf unit painted with some sort of leather-effect spray paint my wife found and thought might be a good idea.  We hate it, but it's where the mail goes, and until we have an alternate solution in place, it will remain in place.

Gathering the Puzzle Pieces

The beginning of every project starts with identifying the problems we're trying to solve.  In this case, there are certain functions we want our entryway bench and mirror to satisfy.

• A place to hang our car keys
• A place for guests to sit to take off their shoes
• A place where we can temporarily place the newly received mail
• A place to check yourself in the mirror before going out on that hot date (riiiight)
• The mirror should be low enough that my 5'2" wife can see herself in the mirror, but also tall enough that average height individuals can do the same without having to duck. 
• A place for guests to hang their purses
• A place for guests to hang their jackets for short visits
• for longer visits we'll just hang stuff in the coat closet
• A place to store dog leashes, collars, treats, and poop bags
• A place to store winter hats, gloves, scarves, mittens
• It should match the other Arts & Crafts style furniture in the room
• We tend to prefer a little Harvey Ellis influence in our Arts & Crafts, though less pronounced on the curves.
• Built with solid enough construction that it will last 100 years

Finding Inspiration: The Bench

The next step is where my wife and I do a few web searches and critique different styles of benches.  We even visited the Stickley showroom and saw a few in person to get a sense of scale and construction technique.  This process resulted in the following images.

(source: Stickley Mission Collection)

This first image is a Stickley Blanket Chest which is what we decided to use as our guide.  The key problems with reproducing this exact chest are that it's taller than typical bench height, deeper, and not quite as long as we would prefer for the space in which we want to place it.  Simply stretching it out isn't the perfect solution because it changes the proportions.  Also, that lid doesn't look very comfortable for sitting on.

(source: uknown)

This bench is closer to the overall length/width/height we're looking for, but we're not huge fans of the Greene & Greene (cloud lifts, ebony plugs) and Asian aesthetic (flared legs, shallow arc).

(source: Stickley 21st Century Collection)

And this bench is a little too boxy, too squatty, we don't care for the inlay, and the photo was chosen mostly for the interesting options of how to structure the interior compartment. 

Finding Inspiration: The Mirror

From a design point of view we both agreed that the width of the bench should complement the width of the mirror hanging above it.  We prefer them to be physically separate pieces, but it's important to design them together, since they're going to be contributing parts of the same solution.

This mirror is too medieval, but it has hooks.  (source: Floating Stone Woodworks)

(source: www.lightinguniverse.com/)

And this mirror is juuuuust about perfect, except it doesn't have a shelf to put mail on, or hooks to hang keys from.  We'll use this mirror as our jumping off point in this design.

Build It Before You Build It

Sketchup.  Lots and lots of Sketchup.  We've been planning this project for over a year now.  The first 3D model I created for the bench mimicked the panel sides of the Stickley Blanket Chest, and my first attempt at guessing the joinery resulted in my typical over-complication.  After a visit to the showroom I came home and reworked the joinery a bit until I was satisfied.  

I then drew both the mirror and the bench to scale on pink resin paper, cut them out and taped them to the wall in the location they will eventually be placed.  This turned out to be well worth the time and effort.  We quickly realized that with the size bench we wanted, the panel sidewalls' 3/4" thick "legs" were too wimpy.  It made the whole bench look weak, cheap, and the 2" wide vertical stiles of the mirror seemed stronger by comparison.  Based on this observation we decided the bench needed solid leg construction instead of the frame and panel approach as represented by the Stickley Blanket Chest.

My first draft of the mirror was too tall.  Carolyn had the clever idea to cut the drawing in half, horizontally, so that I could slide the top half of the mirror down, thereby shrinking the height without adjusting the width, until we found the sweet spot.  A few adjustments of how high to hang it on the wall, holding a jacket up on the drawn hook to make sure there was enough elevation above the bench lid and we locked it down.

Now back to Sketchup.  Rebuild most of the bench because the proportions changed again due to the addition of 2"x2" legs, and adjust the vertical proportions of the mirror because we shortened it.

Here is the end result:

The Cut List

From this 3D model I'm able to generate a cut list of every component, organized by wood species and thickness.

A Little Warning About Cut Lists

Cut lists are helpful for calculating how much lumber you need to buy and help you organize your project (in your mind).  Whenever possible you should measure against the project itself for the simple reason that you may have slipped up at some point on one of your cuts, and a fraction of an inch can compound itself across an entire project.  If you cut all of your parts according to the dimensions on the cut list and never double-check your work against your actual results, you'll end up with parts that don't fit correctly come assembly time.  Here's a more wordy and/or better explanation by someone else.

Next post: The Search for A Better Lumber Mill