Back to Woodworking

The new house has a nice big 2 car garage out back for my woodworking shop. About 24x24, 9ft ceiling. It's uninsulated and had a concrete floor, one window and a loft for storage. The loft has about 7-8ft of space with full standing height, the rest slopes down to 4ft in the back, 1 ft in the front. The loft will store our Christmas decorations, camping equipment, and anything else that is rarely used.

Before moving in I put in a plywood subfloor over 2x4 sleepers. We even put a coat of paint down to make it easier on the eyes.

Though the shop is still a disaster area as everything is spread around on the floor, I wanted to get some more work done on Joshua's new bunk bed so I did a bit of sanding and glued up the other bottom panel this morning.

I've got more hardwood flooring and trim to install in the house, but I can't do that while Joshua is sleeping and it was nice to take a break from home renovation to do some 'real' woodworking again.

Silence is Golden

The vast majority of my woodworking is done with powertools. The mitre saw to cut to rough length, the table saw to rip to rough width. Flatten two sides using the 6" jointer, then plane to the final thickness.

Back to the table saw to rip it to the final width and the mitre saw to the correct length. Depending on the piece it may be sanded before or after assembly with a 5" random orbital sander. Maybe I'll need to add a profile or dado using the router, pocket holes using a drill or biscuit slots with a biscuit cutter.

All these tools are noisy and generate lots of dust. I attempt to catch most of the dust at the source with a shop vac or the 1hp dust collection system. There's also an air filtration unit hanging in the middle of the shop to catch more of the fine particles.

I always wear safety glasses (prescription for me) and over the ear hearing protection when using these tools. I'm happy that these tools perform well and allow me to do more woodworking in the little time that I have available to do it.

However once in awhile I get to do a little bit of work with my meager collection of hand tools. Yesterday while I waiting for some glued up panels to dry I used my bargain basement hand plane to ease the edges on the rails and styles of the head/footboards.

Just two or three swipes of the plane produces some fine shavings and eased corners. No noise or dust. Nice.

Panel Dry Fit

It's good to see some real progress being made.

I recalibrated my mitre saw using the method described in this post, then cut all the rails and stiles to length.

Next, I cut the 3/8" panel groove in all the rails and stiles using my Canadian Tire dado blade - it's an okay blade but don't buy it unless it's on sale for 50% off - this usually happens at least twice a year.

Finally I planed three of the large panels to fit the groove, then trimmed them to fit into the frames. The rails and stiles are joined with loose tenons which seems a great way to join them, much easier than cutting the tenons on the rails/stiles. This is the first time I've used a loose tenon and I think it's my new favourite (too soon to tell for sure).

I still have to sand the panels before I actually glue this panel up. 3 more to go after this one. As well, I still have to glue up 6 more panels.

Stock Preperation

I spent a few hours prepping rail and style stock, cutting the mattress support boards and then gluing up half the panels for the frame-n-panels headboard/footboards. Generated another two or three bags full of sawdust. The work is progressing nicely.

Mortise x 7

Finished up cutting the next 7 mortises for the safety rails on the bunk bed legs. Cleaned up some sawdust and that was it for the night.

Mortise Jig #2

The legs in the bunk bed each need two 1-1/8"x 4-1/8" x 1-1/4" mortises to recieve the safety rails for the top bunk. Though I could cut these with the router using an edge guide, I prefer to use a patterning bit and a custom jig to make sure I don't make any mistakes.

I use my Freud FT2000e plunge router, along with the template guide kit and 3/8" spiral upcut bit. The 3/4" (external diameter) adapter means I need to add 3/16" on each side of the mortise template to get it the correct size.

So the 1-1/8" width needs to be 1-1/2" in the template, the 4-1/8" needs to be 4-1/2". Here's a sketchup model of the jig I made up using 5/8" hardboard.

Here are the pieces cut and ready to be glued up and below you can see the first mortise cut and the jig clamped to the leg ready for the next mortise.

Clean up, clean up, everybody do their share

That's the song we sing at the end of the night when we are at playgroup for my son. Last night I cleaned up the piles of shavings from yesterday's planing. Ended up with another 2 full garbage bags, so I've got 4 total from this project. Lots more to follow.

I also put a 45 degree chamfer on the all four edges of each leg. I used a chamfer bit in my handheld Porter Cable 690 router (this one). What a great little router. Another one of those tools that puts a smile on your face everytime you use it. It's well designed and a pleasure to use.

One accessory I'd like to try for this router is the D-Handle base. (See it on amazon here) I see Norm using it all the time and it looks like it would be really handy.

Bags and Bags of Shavings

The author of the article that I am following to build the bunk bed mentions that you'll have to do a lot of work with the planer for this project and after last nights work I can see what he meant.

First I had to glue up the leg caps which just about drained what is left of my 4L jug of glue. Since I've had that jug for 5 or 6 years I guess I can't complain. I stacked the legs one atop another to distribute the clamping pressure and used all my Bessey + one old pipe clamp to hold them together. Similarily to when I laminated the legs up I could have used a few more clamps - when will Lee Valley have another sale???

Once the glue was dry I used the table saw to cut the oversized leg caps a little closer to the size of the legs, so that there was about 1/8" leftover. Then I used the router and a flush trim bit to trim the caps flush.

I should mention before I glued up the leg caps that I ran all the legs through the jointer to clean up two faces, than through the table saw to cut them close to width, than finally the planer to get the width correct before adding the caps. Running the 7' leg through the jointer was challenging in my small shop area.

The last step was to plane all of the legs down to 3 5/8". This is what generated another two garbage cans full of shavings and clogged up the dang dryer hose I use to connect the planer to the dust collection pipe. I eventually gave up clearing the hose and just pulled the dust collection bit off the planer and let the shavings fly. I ended up with quite a pile of shavings, but all four legs are squared up and ready to go.

Milling Leg Caps

The solid legs for the bunk bed are made up of three laminated boards, which leaves two sides of the leg with lamination lines that are to be covered with leg cap strips. These strips will be cut from a 2x10 and planed down to 1/4" before being glued to the legs.

The glued up legs are rough cut to 7', 4 1/2" wide so I started with a 4 1/2"x7' piece of 2X lumber which is actually 1 1/2" thick. I used the tablesaw to resaw this into 3x3/8" caps. I took three cuts for the resaw, the first cut was a little less than halfway through. I used a featherboard to keep the wood tight against the fence and a push block (upper left of picture) to finish off the cut.

For the second cut, I flipped the board and again used the featherboard and push block to cut less than halfway through the board. This left about 3/8" of material to cut away.

Finally I raised the blade and cut through the remaining bit of wood. After pushing the start of the piece through the blade I inserted a scrap wedge to act as a splitter (I should have one installed on the insert).

I cut up three boards and ended up with 9 leg cap strips. For me this was a 'scary' operation on the tablesaw. Raising the blade high and running long pieces through it is a bit nerve-racking. I took my time and made sure to use the pushblock anytime I got near the end of the piece, and also kept myself away from the back of the board in case of kickback. In the end I had no problems and am glad it's over.

Back to work

After time off for vacation and sickness I am back in the shop and finally started on the bunk bed. I dug through the wood pile to get to the 2x10s stacked underneath the 2x8s (duh!) and selected two nice ones and one ugly one to glue up to form the blanks for two legs.

I first cut them down to 7' to get them to the approximate length of the legs. Then I ran each through the planer a few times to clean up the surface, ripped them in half and glued them up to form two leg blanks. After letting the glue dry I'll scrap it off then put them through the jointer and planer to square up the blanks.

It took about 45 minutes between starting the planing and finishing the clamping. Note to wife : need more clamps (these 24" bessey clamps will do nicely). Planing the 10" wide boards generates a lot of sawdust - more than my 1hp and dryer vent hose can easily handle. I need to run rigid ducting to the planer to give it more suction power.

Air Drying Construction Lumber

The rough lumber required for the bunk bed works out to be about 370BF of construction grade spruce. The idea is to save money on the lumber and air dry it in the basement before using it to build the bunk beds.

I couldn't find a good article on the web about drying construction lumber, but the sidebar in the CHW article says stack the lumber and let it dry for about a month before using it, with an oscillating fan to help the drying process.

Before picking up the lumber I cut up some 2x2 stock to get enough stickers to support the pile every 24". I also laid out some plastic where the pile would sit on the concrete floor to prevent the moisture coming up through the concrete.

My workshop is located in my basement, so bringing home the lumber was quite a workout. Each piece was moved four times : stack to truck, truck to front entrance, front entrance to stairs and finally stairs to pile. My father-in-law whose truck was used to bring home the lumber has a bad knee so couldn't help, and Rosemary was off with Joshua so it was all me. Good times.

Once I had the lumber stacked in the basement I added a box fan at one end and a dehumidifier at the other. You can see some melamine shelves I added to the top of the pile to help keep it from warping, I'll dig up some more weight this weekend to add to the pile. Concrete blocks would work well but I don't have any lying around so I'll have to see what other heavy scrap I have to use.

Next Project - Bunkbed

Our son Joshua is just about ready to start climbing out of his crib. We started looking for a bed for him on the weekend but didn't really find anything that we really liked. Closest thing was a solid maple trundle bed, but we didn't like how high the bed was because of the trundle.

I dug through my old Canadian Home Workshop magazines and found a November 2000 article on how to make a bunk bed using construction lumber. The author (Steve Maxwell) used construction grade 2x10 lumber to build a nice looking bunk bed with frame and panel construction for the head and foot boards.

Though there is a parts list in the article, there is no mention of how many BF of 2x10s are needed. I made up the different parts as components in a Sketchup model and then copied them onto some 2x10x8 and 2x10x10 components to calculate how many 2x10s are needed. The construction lumber needs about a month to dry out so it can be usable for furniture making so I don't want to be short lumber, nor do I want a bunch of extra 2x10 lumber cluttering my workshop.

I ended up with a total of 19 - 2x10x10s and 7 - 2x10x8s. I rounded up the 2x10x8s to 11 to allow for warpage/shrinkage/mistakes, and to make it a nice round total of 30 boards required.

I exported the Sketchup image to 2D to post below. All the parts on the left are different colours, but the colours don't all show up in the cut layout on the right. Probably a buggy display driver on my PC.