https://cattywampuswoodworks.com/blogs/cattywampus-woodworks.atomCattywampus Woodworks - Cattywampus Woodworks2018-09-03T08:55:00-04:00Cattywampus Woodworkshttps://cattywampuswoodworks.com/blogs/cattywampus-woodworks/a-desk-fit-for-a-porch2018-09-03T08:55:00-04:002018-09-03T09:02:48-04:00A desk fit for a porchJarrett Seiple
A new day rises. Our immediate dissatisfaction of incomplete schedules and tasks not started fortunately waned with the moon. The mind sets forth a new schedule for the day, consuming all of yesterday’s tasks that were never started and today’s tasks as well. Anxiety builds. I was talking with a friend of mine the other day. Our friendship, although close, now correlates its communication with holidays and birthdays. This day was her birthday. In the most compassionate way I could text, I asked her whether she felt like she turned 46 or 28 years of age. I was then going to tell her that I felt like an old man with mental functioning that paralleled a five year old’s. Before I could type the words into the mobile phone, my friend responds “46 yet 12 years old” Hmm. I feel like I’m 5 and she feels like she is 12. This would be correct as the woman’s brain is much more mature than any dude out there. I won’t argue with the above fact, but I will say in defense: maybe the male has two brains, not just one like their female counterparts. With all of the information from the two brains flowing at such a rapid pace, the eloquent message we try to iterate comes across as something lewd and juvenile to the opposite sex. Shortly after the exchange of texts, my best friend called me. He asked me how my woodworking was coming along and if I was writing any. I replied that I had a few projects going on in the shop. I told him of an old beam that I was turning into a mantel piece had buried my shop in woodchips and sawdust. I also told him of the few home renovations I had been working on, and how my truck looked like a bad explosion in Tool World. As far as writing, I tell him I have thought about the perfect schedule in which to put pen to paper, but I could never find the time to fit that schedule into my daily routine. I told him that when I attended culinary school, there was a chef/instructor that I looked up to. This chef lived with his wife in a small cabin. Every morning, no matter the weather, he would go out on his porch and watch the sunrise. I told my friend that I needed to write as the sun rose, but unfortunately such a task only happens when I’m floating on a boat in the middle of the Pacific. I have a wife and two kids now. It’s been some time since I’ve been able to float. The following morning was different. I woke up. I grabbed a journal that has been desperately waiting for attention for the past nine months. With the journal in hand, I watched the sun rise. I wish I could say I was satisfied, but a sense of guilt and missed opportunity overrode the sense of satisfaction. Summer is coming to an end, and I waited until this end to take advantage of the great weather and the beautiful sunrise. I did this in a chair with no table around. This table..there is a bit of a story. Two cats gifted themselves to our property. With their presence, my wife’s allergies have heightened. The cats napped on the swing. The porch swing was one of those bulky metal frames with a thick fabric seat. It looks country. Not the good kind of country. It looks country and takes up too much space to only have one function. The thread holding the fabric on decided to backstitch while supporting my backside. The swing had run its course. My wife had already mentioned desires of having a table on the porch in lieu of the swing. I have a cherry desk top whose narrow dimensions would make for a fine porch table. I’ve thought of the base. Something light. Staked legs. Maybe floating top on large sliding dovetails. I’ve researched some old Irish tables and like them quite well. If truth be told, I’ve spent over a week of nights drawing, thinking, researching. I told myself I’d just go out and build it so it could be ready for the weekend. That’s when the week passed. Another weekend is only a few days out. As I’ve mentioned a time or two in the above sentences, I’m married. Being married, I’ve been blessed with the ability to always have the opposite idea than my spouse has. After building several of the wrong style pieces of furniture for the house, I thought I had stumbled on something that could change mankind for the better. During the process of taking my wife’s conversations too literal and analyzing every word, I found myself forgetting to tell her what I wanted a certain piece of furniture to look like. It is my strongest belief that since I didn’t mention how I wanted it, my wife chose my very idea and made life easy. Since then, I have noticed over a dozen instances where if I don’t mention a thing, we agree on the idea in my head. If I mention it, idea gets nixed. So what in the hell happened when I started to silently build the table base and she comes up with this idea of nesting tables, so a table could be for the kids unless we need to expand the table for whatever activity may arise? Nesting tables are a great idea, until you go to use them. I’m not throwing the nesting table idea out the window, I’m just thinking of making it useful. What if the nester has extendable legs? What if you mitered some cherry together to form a chase and then had a smaller cherry leg to run up inside to be doweled through? Two tables for activities at different heights that can be formed into one longer dining table. Ever heard of that acronym “K.I.S.S? Me neither. But if such an acronym existed, I’d take a guess that it meant “Keep it Sophisticated, Sucker!”. Nesting benches with sculpted seats to allow the buttocks a bit of comfort. Should the benches be waterfall? Should they have staked legs? If so, is 16 degrees an appropriate angle? Green wood legs with air dried seat? Yes. Yes to all. Now let’s draw it out, build it, and see if we could have gotten any farther from the plans with the completed bench.]]>
https://cattywampuswoodworks.com/blogs/cattywampus-woodworks/88879041-go-fund-some-of-this2016-02-19T13:07:00-05:002021-11-21T12:30:14-05:00Go Fund Some of This!! Jarrett Seiple]]>
https://cattywampuswoodworks.com/blogs/cattywampus-woodworks/88878977-a-childs-first-tent2015-11-07T12:09:06-05:002021-11-21T12:31:38-05:00A child's first tent93819896Click to enlarge/print plans
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https://cattywampuswoodworks.com/blogs/cattywampus-woodworks/88878913-version-1-02015-10-09T19:29:48-04:002021-11-21T12:32:37-05:00Version 1.093819896
The sister gets a coffee table that quickly becomes useless in storage since her two active boys prefer to use it as a springboard overhanging an imaginary pool (oak floor with fireplace hearth).
The wife of a woodworker will one day get a bed that doesn't need a bedskirt and a trunk to hide the ugly commercial metal frame that was only going to be in place for two days until the sleigh bed was built.
The daughter of a woodworker gets the prize. The daughter has quickly become the queen of the family and hasn't even reached her second year at being a daughter. No surprise to anyone. The woodworker has taken a fancy to building usable items for his daughter. This is mainly influenced by the demanding..I mean demand...of his intelligent wife.
Speaking of demand, the woodworker has seen a demand for the items he has built his daughter. This is highly influenced by the woodworker's wife being extremely educated in early childhood development and knowing just what a child needs.
Pint-sized chairs, tables, beds, and stools...who wouldn't see a miniature version of something and not think of it as being cute and perfectly practical for the child?
This is where Version 1.0 kicks in. My wife tells me that a stool is badly needed. A stool is needed in the kitchen so Sydney can access her play kitchen with ease. A stool is needed in the bathroom so we can give Sydney a bath, and so she can brush her teeth/fix her hair (when she finally decides to grow some hair!). A stool is needed in every room.
I built a stool that I believed would fit the bill. Height seemed right. Width seemed right in even the small rooms. Perfect I thought. Then it was put to use and the imperfections immediately rose to the surface. Wrong ratio of inset of the leg to the length of the top. Couple this and the fact that no floor in our circa 1945 house is level and a recipe for a rocking stool has been made.
How to combat that? Simple! Keep the stool and live in constant fear while building and selling what would be the replacements! The corrected version, Version 2.0, only graces the interior of our house when I'm packing it up for shipment to a customer. On the rare occasion, someone will feel sympathy for my wife and daughter and buy a stool from me just to gift it to my wife so she no longer has to worry about Sydney toppling off of her teetering top-heavy stool.
The corrected version starts out basic. A stool needs to be stout, but not tank-like. A wide board with a relief cut in it will be much more stable than two 3" x 3" oak legs. An angle introduced to the legs will help exponentially with the stability. A stretcher between the wide board legs will help ease the load as its transferred down to the floor.
Finish nails and Titebond glue would work great, but why not use a little joinery and hide glue?
Joinery. Teach a child the way things work! Let me phrase that differently...Teach a child the way things used to work and should work but don't because the old was replaced with cheap plastic thoughtless items that cannot be repaired. Enhance the joinery with contrasting woods so the child can understand what is happening when the stool is used.
Hide glue. Repairable. In 100 years when the stool finally comes loose at the joints, just heat the hide glue up, realign everything, add a bit more hide glue, and the stool will serve many more generations to come.
Give a little thought into what you purchase for the wee ones. When given the ability, they will educate themselves. Further their education by teaching them how things are made. Teach them why they are made that way. Show them the impractical items. Teach them why they are impractical, but not by purchase and use!
Note: Don't ask DOW where to get Hide Glue. They may not understand that a glue that has been in existence for eternity is better than any formula they can muster up.]]>
https://cattywampuswoodworks.com/blogs/cattywampus-woodworks/88878849-on-assembly2015-10-07T11:51:17-04:002021-11-21T12:33:58-05:00On Assembly93819896
The Palisades Restaurant and the cafe tables we built with inlaid logo for Tangent Outdoors.
I also try to not get distracted with bent laminations, as beautiful as they may be. Again, are they natural? Do they keep the qualities of the wood? Thinking along these lines (AND COST!!) usually allows my epoxy usage to stay to a bare minimum. Once I started slowly replacing epoxy with Titebond in even major glue-ups, I noticed no real difference in tightness, glue lines, and longevity of the joint. Nothing proves this more than a cutting board. Strips of wood, sometimes heated and dried from the abuse of the mistaken placement of the dishwasher, never set flat on its plane when stored, the cutting board doesn't have an easy life. The more I think about it, the more a cutting board has in common with the life of a boat.
Before the glue is even reached for, a check should be done for tightness and accuracy of joints. There should be no daylight seen once dry assembled. If there is, a quick swipe of the hand plane or even cardscraper can help remedy the problem. One rule that almost always seems to get lost in the sawdust is that during assembly, the clamp is not a tool to rectify a measurement, nor should it have to suck the daylight out of an accidental saw kerf. A clamp should simply be there to hold the joint barely tight enough until the glue dries. If you find yourself clamping down with all your might, chances are you will not only have a distorted and out of square piece of work, but you will also squeeze the glue right out of the joint, weakening the bond before it ever has a chance to cure.
Once assured that the joints are true, be sure that plenty of clamps are on hand and also dig around in your scrap pile to make clamping cauls to keep everything in alignment. I usually elevate and clamp on runners that I know are Once you have a system in place, cover all caul edges, aligning pieces and clamp ends that may be exposed to glue with packaging tape.
Here is the trick to keep it simple and speedy. I usually have two small disposable plumbing brushes on hand. One is for water, the other for glue. Don't worry about cross contamination, unless you plan on eating or drinking it. Submerge the one brush in water and lightly dampen the edge to be glued.
Now lightly dampen its mate to be glued to it. Now take the bottle of glue (Titebond Waterproof) and run a small bead down the center of the plane to be glued.
Take the other brush and spread the bead out. You will find that the dampened wood will easily let you spread the glue. Mate the two pieces together. If mating multiple strips, continue until all strips are done, only applying glue to one side of mating pieces. Wipe up any drips with a damp cloth .
Clamp and tighten just enough so that glue barely squeezes out of some of the joints.
The water technique will allow more open assembly time and also will keep you from putting excessive amounts of glue in a joint just to squeeze it out and ruin your hand planes and chisels on later. What I just said may seem elementary and slightly backwards (adding water to glue) but it's the small steps that save time and allow for a great build and satisfied customer.
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https://cattywampuswoodworks.com/blogs/cattywampus-woodworks/88878785-woodworkers-disguised-as-healthcare-professionals2015-10-05T20:22:40-04:002021-11-21T12:34:49-05:00Woodworkers disguised as Healthcare Professionals93819896
12' oak doors that opened into the lobby, a beautiful curved staircase with a detailed iron hand rail, paintings old and young by local artisans,
The dining room had copper chaffing dishes, wooden tables, and clawfoot chairs. The funny part about it all is that we spent the better part of our woodworking conversation (we try to entertain the wives by not speaking the language of the woodshop all of the time) talking about the plastic interior plantation shutters.
Phil and I have many similarities with our projects and desire to complete projects that we'll probably never have time to complete. We did everything but take the shutter out of the window while seated at our table. We discussed the varying hinge mechanisms and rods and hooks that can be implemented to make the shutter work in various windows. The build would be much like model making...small parts that have to be placed with precision or else you might as well have a bunch of kindling connected to a rod that functions just as good as it sounds. I'll let Phil take the lead and make sets for his house (aka locate hardware that doesn't make it such a pain) before I join in on the shutter making.
My wife and I departed their company and the beautiful Inn since I had to return to reality at the hospital on the following day. That evening once we got home, I continued to set up my shop for a production run of children's furniture and began to make use of the dust collection cyclone lid I bought at the hardware store.
The system is almost caveman like with simplicity, just introduce a bit of an angle and you'll get a torrent of wind mimicking a cyclone, which drops most sawdust and debri in the 5 gallon bucket and only lets the fine dust continue on to the Shop Vac. I want this system to use for both my router table and my orbital sanders. For the time being, it will also serve my compound chop saw. With that said, I wanted it to be extremely portable yet pack everything with it, and still be able to use the Shop Vac independent of the "dust bucket". I'm far from done, but you get the idea from the pictures below. A little scrap plywood, some oversized casters to run over whatever may be in its path (two straight wheels in back, one swivel wheel in front), and a shape to take up as less of a footprint as possible. I'm mounting the bucket with something that most folk forget about working with in shops...magnets. This way I don't have to cut out a precise ring for it to fit into and it will always lock into place after I dump it....and it will be a breeze to take off and dump since there are no straps or wing-nuts to undo. I'm also robbing an extension cord wind-up out of an old hospital cart and I'm going to wire it to a gang box loaded with 4 outlets that turn the vacuum on whenever power gets supplied to the tool in the outlet. It may stay at 90% complete until spring. Time and aggravation of not having all of the features will tell.
If you don't have any dust collection in your shop, this is certainly the way to start out, and if you have a large dust collector, remember it won't do as good as a job with collecting the fine particulate that sanding creates. Speaking of large dust collectors, be sure you opt for the same cyclone system, but use a trash can as shown in the bottom picture. The setup will save your collector from years of abuse and save your back making it easy to dispense shavings and such.
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https://cattywampuswoodworks.com/blogs/cattywampus-woodworks/88878721-old-stanley-no-52015-10-04T06:56:38-04:002021-11-21T12:36:14-05:00Old Stanley No. 593819896
With its helical cutterhead, 15" wide mouth, 1' deep throat, and 5hp motor, it will make anyone that catches sight of it do the "Tim the Tool Man" grunt. The downside: Once the 78 4-sided blades are dull, it costs $150 to have them sharpened and every time I fire it up, I owe a little something to American Electric Power Company.
Back to hand tools:
The Stanley No.5 is more commonly known as a Jack Plane, used to surface lumber. It was the plane that most carpenters preferred to take to the job because it was the "Jack of all Trades" as far as planes are concerned. Its primary function is to surface rough lumber, but depending on how deep you set the blade, one can easily use this plane in place of a block, scrub, or jointer plane.
A great deal can be said about the history of a plane when looking at the blade. The camber that the blade was ground down to and the treatment of the corners can usually dictate what wood/what kind of woodworking it was most used on. My jack plane blade looks to be unmolested, but I'm about ready to change that. I deal with all kinds of hard and soft wood, rarely clear. With that being the case, I'm going to grind a 8" radius on each side, allowing the plane to shave over knots and varying grade with minimal tearout. I'm going to keep the same camber, but sharpen her up to snuff on a glass block with high grit and it should be ready to rock!]]>
https://cattywampuswoodworks.com/blogs/cattywampus-woodworks/88878657-one-mans-treasure2015-10-03T10:58:38-04:002016-02-20T14:32:36-05:00One Man's Treasure93819896
I went on a bit of a spree at the hospital in which I work. I collected items inspectors deemed "no longer usable" and brought them to my shop. It began as pure innocence with a laptop cart...as innocent as a 120lb cart can be. Being concerned with gas mileage and living some distance from work, I'd rarely drive my truck. This gave a high entertainment value to the patients that could sit up in their bed...watching me try to rein a unwieldy cart into the back seat of a midsized sedan. It took a few months, but the inspector finally made enough trips to our hospital, discontinuing all carts. I became blessed with six weighted tool stands on heavy duty casters.
Stools were next. A stool is of utmost importance in the shop. Without, a great deal of creative ability is lost since one cannot sit back and take a look at how the entire piece of furniture is coming together. More importantly, opinions are lost due to the fact that the friends that voice them won't stop by the shop and stay a spell due to the lack of places they can sit and drink a beer while they watch you work.
By this time, the hospital maintenance crew began calling the loading dock on which they would stage items to be taken to the dump "Jarrett's Porch" since I would load up most items, making their load barely worth hauling off. A stool was placed on my porch. It was tall, black, had a good back, working hydraulics, and a solid metal ring for a foot rest. It was such a fine deal that I felt as if I was stealing it, so I took the wrench that I always carry in the pocket of my chef's pants and had the thing broken down and in the trunk of my car in under five minutes.
I still don't know the appropriate name of the stool I collected next. Some doctors call it a "stitching stool" while others call it a "dentists stool". I believe its just an exam stool...not to ever have its name reversed and used for a stool exam...I hope!
Whatever their name, I collected three. Took me two trips, so I had to hide them in the linen hallway since people caught on to what I was doing and wanted to take part in collecting hospital trash for their own use.
Next on the list was sheets of glass that protect the desks in Administration. Glass to protect. The notion has always seemed odd to me. I understand in a widow type form, but why would you add 100lbs to protect a robust desk that has a good solid finish? Because its not a robust desk, its made from particles and glue and the finish is more of a surface than it is a true finish. The notion of a glass top had to be purely for fashion and nothing else. Coffee rings and fingerprints: fashionable indeed!
The glass not living up to its hype found its way to my loading dock. The following day, it found its way home and I put it to immediate use in a gun cabinet I was building with a friend.
Next was an armoire from a patient room remodel. The free standing structure who's only purpose was to hold an occasional coat was built like a tank. It now houses hundreds of pounds of power tools and nail guns...to prevent them from dust and wandering eyes.
The final load I have Women's Center to thank. I've been waiting for years to turn my mitre saw stand into a mitre saw station. With the cabinetry and countertops I was able to do just that.
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Once the countertops were in place, it became abruptly apparent that my obsession had become a problem. I noticed I have all these nice features in my shop, but I couldn't use them because there was no room due to the collection of junk that was waiting to be turned into something. It became so bad that I couldn't do the simplest task without shuffling everything from one side of the shop to the other. I had antique chests, antique refrigerators, pie cabinets, tons of scrap stainless steel, angle iron, wire, lights, even kitchen sinks. I was going to move it all to the barn beside my shop, but it too was full of many of the same items.
Finally, the line had been drawn as a lightning bolt through my brain. Twelve loads to the scrap yard and dump later, I returned many items and gave them a few more. I have recycled enough. To all the hospital employees that I have infected with the Collecting Disease, I am deeply sorry. I hope you find strength to build your immune system back because nothing will cure it, although I have found a good slap from the spouse does help slow it down at times.
Now its time to get back to woodworking. So please, all I ask is that you don't tempt me with calls of antique appliances or old wooden pieces of furniture.
#Hoardernomore]]>