Todd Ferrante
08-04-2008, 10:24 AM
This is the first piece of furniture I've made since high school. After years of building up my shop, I promised my wife I would finally make some mission bookcases for our living room. Before diving into such a major project, I wanted to do something of a bit smaller scale to re-wet my feet and practice some techniques necessary for mission furniture. My wife wanted a plant stand for the front porch, so I figured that no matter how bad my "experiment" turned out, it wouldn't matter.
I did the design using Solidworks CAD software, back in April, basing it on several pieces I found scattered on the internet. The cool thing is that this design could be tweaked in the computer to make a coffee table, end tables, or TV stand. I've been working on it in fits and starts ever since. One of those fits was when I spent a day hand cutting mortises and about two weeks for my back to recover. That experience prompted the purchase of a mortising machine off Craigslist. Just the kind of lesson I wanted to learn from this project. Another lesson learned is that the dado blade sets I had for my table saw are inadequate for furniture quality work. The bottoms of the dados, and cheeks of the tennons end up far from smooth. I'll do dados and tennons in the future using a table mounted router. I also ended up purchasing a Bosch rotary orbital sander for the sanding work. In high school we only did hand sanding. The ROS is a vast improvement.
Anyway, this weekend I did the final finish sanding, put on three coats of spray lacquer, and two coats of paste wax. The final result is too nice to put on the porch, so it looks like it will end up in the living room.
Todd F.
I did the design using Solidworks CAD software, back in April, basing it on several pieces I found scattered on the internet. The cool thing is that this design could be tweaked in the computer to make a coffee table, end tables, or TV stand. I've been working on it in fits and starts ever since. One of those fits was when I spent a day hand cutting mortises and about two weeks for my back to recover. That experience prompted the purchase of a mortising machine off Craigslist. Just the kind of lesson I wanted to learn from this project. Another lesson learned is that the dado blade sets I had for my table saw are inadequate for furniture quality work. The bottoms of the dados, and cheeks of the tennons end up far from smooth. I'll do dados and tennons in the future using a table mounted router. I also ended up purchasing a Bosch rotary orbital sander for the sanding work. In high school we only did hand sanding. The ROS is a vast improvement.
Anyway, this weekend I did the final finish sanding, put on three coats of spray lacquer, and two coats of paste wax. The final result is too nice to put on the porch, so it looks like it will end up in the living room.
Todd F.