Knot a Wine Rack…

It has been about a year since I started this blog. 2010 was one of the worst years I have lived through. Almost nothing went right, I never caught a break and almost every single thing I tried to do, blew up in my face. I feel like a complete failure.

Having said that, I’m not alone. It was hard for almost everybody I talk with. I got a message from WordPress telling me enough people viewed my blog to fill two 747 air planes. Lot of good it did. I got very few comments and even less interest in my wine racks. It’s very disapointing and some what frustrating.

I’m going to try an keep the shop going, but I don’t see how. I don’t have any emotional attachment to it really. Carpentry and wood working is what I have been doing for a living for a long time and I don’t really know what else to do. I going to try and keep going until I can’t anymore. I enjoy the work but it’s not who I am or what I’m about as a person, just a way to try and make money.

This is a piece I built last month for a lady. It is to be used as a night stand. The shelves are for shoes and slippers. She gave me some rough idea of dimensions that would fit in the room and how high it should be for a reading lamp.

I looked through my piles of hardwood lumber and dried logs, but there wasn’t enough to make all the parts I needed in the sizes I wanted. Here is a shot of some Clear Verticle Grain Fir that I re sawed. It came out of a nasty looking old 6 x 12 beam, salvaged from a construction site. While it had some defects and a big knot, it is beautiful material.

It must have been a giant old growth tree by the close growth rings and how many there are. I’m always in awe when I think that every grain was a year… we must be looking at decades… generations to grow this tree.

Here is what’s left of a 2 x 12 somebody gave me fifteen years ago. It has some curly grain to it that is very delicate and most gorgeous. I used it for the legs and the laminated edge-band on the top.

I love the look and color of fir. It is very difficult to work with because it can be splintery and it’s not hard enough to resist dings and dents in furniture. I went with it anyway because it was free. Here are a bunch of parts and you can see that I cut the drawer fronts out of the face frame and glued it back together so that the grain would run through.

Here I am with the tenon cutting machine I built, making round tenons to join the legs with the shelves. I call it the pencil sharpener, because it’s like sharpening big pencils.

When working with fir, you need to have very sharp blades, bits and planer knives or else you get heart breaking tear out or splinters. Sometimes you may run a bunch of pieces through the router table very carefully and think you have it licked… then WHAM, a blow out that rips the piece apart so that the material is wasted.

There are tricks to dealing with this like “Climb Cutting” where you run the work backwards agains the bit so it doesn’t grab the splintery grain…. or making multiple passes, taking a small amount at a time… or both. But, still you never know when the fir will bite you.

I was lucky this time, because I used every trick I know to machine all these parts right the first time. I barely had enough material to design this piece and no spare boards for mistakes and mishaps. In the end, there was barely enough scrap to kindle a fire!

I didn’t make the same mistake that I did on the last piece I built where I flipped the face frame in my haste to glue up the carcase. It’s subtle, but for those who know to look, they are rewarded with the grain running through the frame and drawer fronts.

I mortised my signature drawer pulls that matched the grain too. The last two from a batch of pulls I ran years ago. It takes six router set-ups to make them, so I do it in big batches of all kinds of woods so i don’t have to stop in the middle of a piece and make some.

The thing that took me the longest and was the most difficult, was to design the shelves. The boards I had were just too narrow to use. So I had to come up with a way to make them wider. I drew a dozen solutions but the one I liked the most couldn’t be built. I mean I could draw it, but there was no way to glue and assemble it… looked nice though.

The feature strip in the top is from my dwindling stash of old growth California Redwood. You can’t see in the photos, but there are small “Bird’s Eyes” in the Redwood.

There were two defects in the board I used for the field in the top. I could cut one out, but not both. So, the squiggle you see is a huge splintery check that ran through the whole beam. I glued it and clamped it. When it was planed off it came out smooth. Hey, it was made by hand! This ain’t IKEA.

I sprayed three coats of poly-urethane varnish on it, sanding between the first split-coat and second full wet coat. Then I rubbed out the top coat with double ought steel wool. It gets rid of any sheen and makes it velvety smooth to the touch. It’s virtually water and alcohol proof and pretty stain resistant too. Sometimes candle wax will stain it, but it is the toughest finish I know how to apply.

Over time, it will get used, dented, scratched and dinged. Like I’ve said before, some day after I’m long gone, somebody will pick this piece up, see my signature on the bottom and know that it took took time out of my life to make.

What Next?