Southwest Christmas Tree 2018

Our Southwest Christmas Tree aka Yucca flower stalk has re-emerged this year albeit with only a couple new additions as we steadily replace the ornaments made in China with ornaments handmade by our friends and family members.  This year a fine hummingbird carved by Tom McDevitt of McWidget Studios joins the throng adding song, crackle and movement amidst the yucca flowers.  Also, a family heirloom, yes, handmade, though by whom, unknown, hangs now.  It's a cut glass crystal that once graced the family dining room chandelier.  Other handmade ornaments can be seen in the background:

The Baltic birch scroll saw cut angel mentioned in last year's Southwest Christmas Tree blogpost was fabricated in a limited number for Etsy with two finishes even.

Happiest Holidays to all and best wishes for a great year ahead.

Twin Hungarian Shelves

The wedges must scare people. I find it unbelievable that the best shelf system out there, to my mind, is still not, as of this date, available even at IKEA. The wedges satisfy me: nothing like tapping in the wedge, the last step of mounting the shelf, and seeing the shelf align rigidly 90º to the vertical standard. Hungarian shelves are dynamic and interesting with elements of simple machines: wedges, fulcrums, levers. It's almost as if Hungarian shelves are busy working right in front of you supporting their loads.

These twin Hungarian shelf units were designed to fill the voids on either side of a large fireplace and chimney as well as provide both library space for books and display space for artifacts, sculpture and artwork. Though the eye wants desperately to make these shelves appear symmetrical they are not, every shelf width and vertical spacing actually different. The lowest shelf is 12” wide, stepping down 1/2” per shelf until the top one is 10 1/2”. The height between shelves also decreases 1” per shelf.  Compare to the pillars, not really parallel, at the Parthenon. All the shelves are solid red oak, one of the 12” shelves actually a single piece of wood, quite a rare find at a lumberyard these days.

The joint that joins the shelf to the upright standard is technically called a cross lap joint. Because the notches or slots in each standard must be exactly in line I cut all the notches simultaneously by clamping them together, then clamping a guide at right angles to the set and running a router with a straight bit through all the standards. Typically I do the same thing to the shelves by standing them all together on their long front edge and routing notches on the back side. Alternatively, I've clamped the shelves together, placed them back side down on a table saw sled and pushed them through a dado blade. In this case, however, their large size and varying widths made this difficult. Thus I opted to cut the shelf notches with a tenon saw and chisel, thus proving two things: that Hungarian shelves can be made with just hand tools and that retired guys have more time on their hands.

I should add that SketchUp helped give birth to these twins, my first foray into using this 3-D CAD program for furniture design (dimensions removed for clarity):

I want to thank my fellow Columbia alumnus David Heim, a SketchUp for woodworking expert, for his generous advice and even a little personal YouTube tutorial critique of my design. I used his extremely well-written and helpful book SketchUp Success for Woodworkers every step of the way.

I also want to thank Tony Fuhrman of Summit Woodworking in Tucson for use of his shop facilities, as well as thank my favorite mechanical engineer Kyle Colavito for first introducing me to Hungarian shelves many years ago.  Find pics of my other Hungarian shelves by searching this blog or on the very first page of Google images.

Thank you so much to these and all my other patrons...
and, of course, Happy Thanksgiving!!

Find useful wooden objects including wedges for Hungarian shelves at:  FlyingCircusStudios.Etsy.com 

Meyers Collaboration X

Clearly there's some tomfoolery going on here. Or is it teddy-foolery for this turkey with inflated vest, spectacle and oversized pocket watch is a bit reminiscent of President Teddy Roosevelt, well noted, you know, for his bullying, braggadocio and bluster. But note the red tie: did Teddy wear those? Of course, this turkey is really a pilgrim, and all these references are likely connected. Anyway, quite a neat bird, a lovely product of Sara's craftsmanship, a perfect complement to our Thanksgiving celebrations.

As before the word collaboration is used loosely as the handmade frame of oak takes so little time to construct compared to the exquisite needlepoint stitching. I did, however, help out in one other way: spending near an hour going through dozens of bins at Ace Hardware until I found the exactly sized set of washers which compose all the circular forms here, each then painstakingly wrapped with thread.  The gold chain was found in a flea market in Sierra Vista.

Find our online shop at:  FlyingCircusStudios.Etsy.com

Pipe Clamp Supports -- Tool Tip #20

One of the old saws of woodworking is that you can never have enough clamps. I will attest that this is certainly true despite owning a fair number of them, relying mostly on the inexpensive but powerful pipe clamps by Pony, Bessey, Harbor Freight, etc. If you've done more than two glue-ups with these you've already run across the issue of the tail end of the pipe falling and the jaws bucking up off the workbench. This is not a frustration, of course, when the clamp length is appropriate to the width of the glue-up, but during multiple glue-ups one migrates inevitably toward clamps too long for the job.

To control this little bucking bronco I always put a long strip of wood about 7/8” thick underneath all the ends of the hanging tails. This does the job nicely of keeping all the pipe clamps level and in a single plane so the boards can be laid in with no difficulty. I've thought of using pipe insulation placed on the tail for the same purpose, but such insulation is not thick enough. Too recently it occurred to me that your typical pool noodle would provide exactly the right thickness to keep the tail from falling. So now instead of a bunch of bucking broncos, we corral a well broke line of Ponies. Hope this helps.

(The astute observer will observe that the photos show a situation where the noodle was actually not needed, but I was nonetheless eager to share the use of my other noodle.)

Find the online shop at:  FlyingCircusStudios.Etsy.com

Lotion as Hand Cleaner -- Tool Tip #19

One of the neatest things about my 1970 Toyota Land Cruiser FJ40 were the convenient repair kits that Toyota provided. Packaged in their individual red boxes were everything you needed to rebuild, say, a universal joint or a brake assembly or the master clutch cylinder. I think the idea was that if you filled a modest satchel with a bunch of these kits you really could head out in the boonies and fix most anything on the run. I, however, worked on our FJ40 in the driveway, used quite a few of those little red boxes and got my hands mighty dirty. Back then I used Goop or Gunk or Gorp, whatever, to dissolve the grease and grime, pretty nasty products actually, maybe a step away from washing your hands in gasoline. Took quite a while before I incidentally discovered that most any ordinary hand or body lotion also works well as a hand cleaner. Frankly, for myself, those expensive balms and creams that are supposed to do magic for working hands are mostly hype.

Ever since this discovery, several times a day, I slather lotion on generously as a hand cleaner, and using no water (reduce cracking!) just dry my hands on paper toweling or a terrycloth towel...works quite well. The dirt and grime transfers to the toweling.  Plus your hands don't end up marinated in petrochemicals or dried out by soap and water. Those little lotion tubes and bottles turn out to be perfect to drop in a tool bag during installations.  Alas, I've come up with a fairly lame excuse to post a couple pics of my favorite vehicle, but on the otherhand certain individuals in your life may appreciate hands that feel more like 220 grit than 40 grit.  To see all 18 previous tool tips type "tool tip" into the search this blog window.  You might find something you can use in your own shop.

Useful wooden objects including hand carved teaspoons at:  FlyingCircusStudios.Etsy.com 

Meyers Collaboration IX

As with all our previous collaborations, in which my wife Sara does the needlepoint, and I make a custom frame, 98% of the labor is hers and about 2% mine.  We are particularly fond if this particular piece for its lovely colors and simple symbolic elements.  Take the heart to symbolize our love for one another rather than a heart perched over a handlebar moustache symbolizing my love for cycling.

I finally abandoned using biscuits to secure the miters in small frames as they inevitably interfere with the rabbet cut for the glass and mat.  Discreet brads secure the corners instead in the black walnut frame.

This beautiful work is photographed with the glass intact, the reduction in reflectivity due to the use of non-glare glass, something we should have used all along.

Useful wooden objects including hand carved teaspoons at:  FlyingCircusStudios.Etsy.com 

SketchUp Success for Woodworkers -- Woodworking Tip #22

The 22nd woodworking tip is:  buy this book and use it to learn SketchUp!!

And yes, here I thought I was the only woodworker graduate from Columbia. Turns out I was wrong, for David Heim, one of my fellow alumni, is not only a fine fine woodworker, specifically wood turning, but also one of the country's leading experts on the use of the 3D modeling program SketchUp as applicable to furniture making, cabinetry and all the other lovely objects made from wood. SketchUp is a complete drawing program, useful not just to woodworkers, but to interior designers, architects, landscapers, city planners, etc. What David Heim has done in his excellent book SketchUp Success for Woodworkers recently published by Spring House Press is extracted and tuned the aspects of the program which enable woodworkers to produce attractive, realistic 3D models of their ideas, designs and projects.  (At this point I have finally stopped my word processing program's constant urge to turn SketchUp into ketchup.)

If you stop reading here, my advice to you woodworkers is get David's book and learn SketchUp! While you're at it also visit his online shop at Etsy:  www.etsy.com/shop/DavidHeim  to see some of his beautiful turnings.  You can also buy his book through his Etsy shop.

So how does design happen? Starting to learn SketchUp got me reflecting about the evolution of the design tools I've utilized throughout my woodworking career. Now please don't ask why I still have this, but it all begins here:

Back in the day, while the girls were sewing and muffining in Home EC class, the boys were combating Sputnik by taking Mechanical Drawing. I don't think this was an elective either; it was a manly skill.  The main object of the course was converting some fanciful 3D object, often resembling the parapet of a Medieval castle, into front, top and side views. A lot of your grade depended on placing a dotted line where superman's Xray vision would have detected a change in form on the opposite side.

Years later when I took up professional woodworking, home computers, let alone drawing software, had not yet been invented, and thus dredging up this old junior high school skill proved most useful. At this point we call it "drafting."  I found myself even building drafting tables for myself and customers as well as gathering a nice collection of those green plastic Staedtler templates.  These templates helped me learn such important things as curves are French.  Still the plans did not appear all that different from those in 8^th grade:

Continuing on: thanks to the urging of our son Josh we were one of the first families on the block to own a computer, a handmade XT. Fast forward years later Josh has opened his bicycle trailer and accessory business BikeShopHub and required a CAD-CAM program to operate a ShopBot CNC tool in the manufacture of his novel bicycle travel case the Cello. The Cello amazingly converted a BOB one-wheeled bicycle trailer into a travel luggage box for not only itself but also the bike that pulled it! The chosen program was bobCAD-CAM (ironic, but no relationship to the trailer company), and thus thanks to my son I myself moved to the next stage in design: computer aided drafting using BobCAD-CAM. Without question the greatest benefit of CAD was what I call “dimensional integrity,” no more struggling with finest line on a triangle scale to extract a particular dimension or carefully adding up a series of dimensions to verify sums. Any part of a plan could be measured, and the numbers were precise, perfect, always added up!

So now I have reached the latest stage in the evolution of my design career: starting to learn SketchUp using David Heim's excellent book SketchUp Success for Woodworkers. My first recommendation and his too is to pass over the online program and download SketchUp Make 2017 (still available free as of this posting). Then with program running follow David's clear step-by-step instructions: from choosing a template to setting up your first file to learning the basic tools to creating your first board. He is easy to follow. The centerpiece of the book, his four rules for success, makes enormous sense to anyone who has ever encountered a table saw and attests to his major investment in both mastering and adapting SketchUp for fine woodworkers. What I particularly like about David's approach is that he walks you so very carefully through the SketchUp learning curve. I would not expect to become adept overnight, but you could not have a better guide.

Perhaps only second to the joy of creating, for a custom fine woodworker, is the joy of working directly with your clients, getting to know them and their vision of the environment they desire to inhabit. Yet with few exceptions the difficulty has always been offering a clear picture of what exactly they were commissioning. Shop drawing and blueprints are generally insufficient in this regard. Once I even had to build a piece completely over again because I could not see the “picture in the head.”

I only wish I had had a tool like SketchUp throughout my career. I could have then offered to clients a fully 3-dimensional model, built in the chosen woods and with the right stain color, something they could “walk” around. In the later chapters of his book David explains how you can import any wood grain or texture to your model or even render it realistically. Clients are always finding photographs of some piece or environment they like, and you will even learn how to initiate your design using one of these. Both client and creator benefit. You will be able to push, pull, stretch, shrink, reshape, add components, subtract components until the picture in your own head is achieved.

Afterword: SketchUp and computer assisted manufacturing (CAM)

Though in most cases I did not use the CAM side of bobCAD-CAM, occasionally it came in very handy especially when both precision and duplication were required such as cutting the triangular solid oak countertops that formed this 15-sided customer service center. The screen shot of the bobCAD-CAM file used to cut these on ShopBot is pictured above along with the finished product. SketchUp Success for Woodworkers does not cover using SketchUp files (.skp) to operate CNC machinery, but a quick look on the web indicates that conversion to CNC files is possible. I am no expert on drawing programs, but I do know a good guidebook when I see one. David Heim's book is the first place to go if you want this powerful tool in your tool bag...happy sketching!

I would be remiss not to mention that Flying Circus Studios is also on Etsy.

Double-Sided Sandpaper -- Woodworking Tip #21

I'd say at this point in my woodworking career I've folded 17,635 pieces of sandpaper for the purpose of hand-sanding. By hand-sanding I mean just that, nothing more than hand and sandpaper. Technically, of course, using a sanding block is hand-sanding, but so often more precision is required for such tasks as smoothing a joint, removing a blemish or scratch, especially smoothing curves or contours, etc. Nothing like fingers and a little piece of folded sandpaper does the trick. Doubling the sandpaper by folding it in half seems natural and provides better purchase. Years ago I thought wouldn't hand-sanding be easier if the two smooth sides were not always slipping and sliding about? This could be accomplished merely by gluing the fold together. As is often the case with our own best interests this fine approach to sanding was defiantly deferred. Until last week. I finally took the typical quarter sheet strip of sandpaper (2.75”x 9”) used on a standard sanding block, cut it in half, creased the pieces in two, sprayed the backsides with light duty adhesive and then folded the tacky surfaces together.  Voilà!  Using three sanding block strips I made a half dozen of these all at once.

The grip provided by the well-attached double surface allows use of every bit of the sandpaper right to the edges and corners. Five of these double-sided sandpapers proved sufficient to rough sand very effectively 10 of my wooden teaspoons. Even the hardest part, sanding the bowl of the spoon, went quite smoothly. While this specialty type of sandpaper is produced commercially, it is not commonly available. Gluing your own is quick, easy, inexpensive and right out of your own stock of sandpaper. In this case I am using Norton ProSand 180 grit, one of my own favorites. My regret is not doing this with piece #1 vs #17635. Try it yourself; you will be pleasantly pleased!

The Etsy Shop