With the leg blanks set aside next is to rough out the
upper and lower rails that tie into the legs plus the top. The legs are made from 6/4 material while the
rails and the top are made from 5/4 material.
That’s because the rails are set in a bit from the front of the legs to
provide a shadow line. The drawings below
shows the parts and what I mean.
The 5/4 material is rough-sawn just like the 6/4 so I
will need to go through the same process to get flat, smooth and square
boards. Here are the three boards I
started with, the good news being that they are not as curved as the 6/4
planks.
While they may not be as curved and not as bowed, they
are still not flat. The process starts
with cutting the planks into rough lengths of 36” and 42”. Here you can see how much bow the have when
clamped down so they can be ripped lengthwise.
Once ripped the apparent bow is greatly reduced which
means less material to be removed before I can get flat boards. The photo below really shows the improvement
in apparent flatness.
Now it’s time to set the planer up again and start
running the pieces through it. I start
by taking off 1/16” per pass but after a couple passes as the cut gets wider
since the crown is being removed the cut is reduced to 1/32” per pass. Once the first side is fairly flat the piece
can be flipped and work on the second side can begin. I emptied the shop vac before starting and
may need to again before all is done.
Several passes later the boards looked pretty good that
is until I checked for flatness as four of them had a little twist. I hate that, of all the problems it is the
hardest to remove. Cup or curve are not
too hard to correct but twist is the one that gives me the most fits. A jointer makes the correction easier but I
don’t have one so end up using either a big hand plane or a power plane. Oh well, using the 18” long, 7 pound hand
plane gives me my cardo workout for the day.
Anyway, after flattening the offending boards and
squaring up the edges on the table saw I had a nice stack of square, flat
smooth material.
Since some of the boards had moved around after being cut
and surfaced I thought it’s a good idea to set the just milled pieces off the
side for a bit to see if they had stabilized or wanted to move around some more. Here are all the 6/4 and 5/4 pieces set on
slats on the floor with spaces between them so the air can freely circulate.
While waiting to see if the thicker material was stable,
I moved on to roughing out material for door frames and spacers on the
sides. The drawing shows these
parts. The door frame material starts
out at 13/16” thick and will probably end up between that and ¾”. It all depends on how much I have to remove
to get rid of the surfacing scallops.
The spacers also start out at 13/16” thick but will end up at about ½”
thick. There are a couple of ways to get
there but I will go through that later.
Below are the boards used and how the pieces get laid out
on them. There were a few knot holes,
cracks and the like to work around but all in all after some time measuring and
thinking a pretty efficient layout emerged.
I just hate to waste good material.
After cutting the short spacers that go on the side, I
needed to cut them down to ½” thick.
There are a couple of ways to do this.
One is to run them through the planer and turn the ¼” of oak that needs
to be removed into sawdust. The second
way and what I am going to do is cut a thin slice off the piece using the
bandsaw.
First, a little back story on
the bandsaw. When I got it in 2000 it
had some significant alignment problems that really impacted the quality of the
cut. After spending some time on the
phone with the manufacture we got it so the cuts were satisfactory. There was still a problem with the blade
fluttering while running which gave rougher cuts than what I thought it
should. At the time I could not make any
finer adjustments so that’s the way I have been using it for the past 18
years. Now before starting to rip the
spacer pieces I wanted to have a go at refining the alignment. Back in 2000 my only really good straight
edge was a 4’ level which was too short to align the wheels. However, not so long ago I broke down and got
an 8’ level. Not for the leveling
function but as a precision straight edge and that’s what I will use on the
bandsaw. 
What I believe needed checking and adjustment is the alignment of the
wheels. They need to set along the same
vertical axis, neither canted or offset.
In other words, both of the wheels need to be in the same plane. Here I have clamped a couple of spacers
exactly the same thickness to the level then held them tight to the outer rim
of the top wheel.
Below the left photo shows a closer view of the top wheel
where you can see the spacer is touching both the top and bottom of the wheel. The right photo shows the bottom of the
bottom wheel with almost a ¼” wide gap.
The gap at the top of the bottom wheel was only slightly less than that
so I had two problems, the wheels were both canted and offset.
By adjusting the top and bottom wheels I was able to
correct both problems and align all four contact points so they just touched
the spacers. Below is the bottom of the
bottom wheel in proper alignment where it should be.
When I restarted the bandsaw the blade fluttering was
gone and a test cut proved to be way smoother than anything I had ever gotten
before.
Next up – Bandsawing, a Revision & Work on Doors
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