My First 100% Hand Tool Project

[bob blakeborough]

Hey everyone,

This is my first 100% hand tool made project. In actuality, it is the first genuine project I have ever completed. Up until this point it has been pretty much nothing but practicing sawing straight lines and dovetails. I guess I have made some picture frames and the like, but other than that it has been taking old pieces of unfinished flooring, planing them flat, squaring them up, and joining two pieces together and that's it. Hahaha! Good practice though I must admit...

It is based on the 1839 School Box from an older PW magazine. Even though this box is pretty simple compared to some of the amazing stuff many of you make on this forum, I am very proud of this piece. It is built out of some old SYP we recycled from some pallets. I know it is far from perfect, and it is actually the first time I have ever tried using shellac on anything (I need a whole lot more practice on this front! ), so the finish is definitely a bit sketchy, but my wonderful bride loves it (says it looks "distressed", which I think is her kind way of saying grungy lol) so I gave it to her to use as a sewing box...

Anyways, any critiques are welcome, and there are many that can be given, but overall I am just happy to finally take a project from beginning to end and have a result that is not completely embarrassing...

Thanks for looking!

[john davey]

Bob, nice job. An excellent first project and an excellent pallet wood project to boot. Looks like that practice worked wonders as you satisfied yourself as well as the misses .

[jay gill]

Bob, it looks great!!

[Glen Butler]

I am in awe because I have never done anything without a power tool. Very impressive. One question: What is the line down the tailboard?

[Mark Baldwin III]

Man, I really need to get back to practicing dovetails. That's very nice.
Glen, the line down the tailboard is a layout line from the marking the dovetails. Some like to remove it, some don't, matter of personal taste.

[Jim Matthews]

Nicely done.

The finish looks fine in the photos.
What's on the bottom? This will be slid around, over the years.

[gary Zimmel]

100% hand done project. My hat is off to you Bob, nicely done.

[Pam Niedermayer]

Nice job, Bob, looks great.

Pam

[bob blakeborough]

Hey thanks for all the kind comments everyone! I just realised I can almost claim it was hand tool only, but I remember that the strips of ash glued to the top as dust protective edging were actually table saw cut-offs I recycled off the floor, and I drilled the hinge screw holes and lock hole with a cordless drill... Other than that, all stock was thicknessed, prepped, cut, joined and finished by hand. Dang! Now I feel like I can't say it is 100% hand tool... I think we can keep a secret though right???

Other than the ash strips, I was just informed by my buddy that the pallets we used were actually Eastern White Pine and not SYP (so I apparently still need more study on wood identification) The bottom skirt is also pine, so it may take a bit of a beating as the years go on but I am not stressed about it. I anticipated this to be an item that gets used and grows character as time goes on. I did leave the tail lines because I love the look of it. Some people say that it leaves a piece looking unfinished, and that is fine by me. It give me a good feeling seeing those lines knowing it has been done by hand and feels a bit more homemade rather than purchased. Besides, it gives guests who don't woodwork something to ask about and start conversation. One last detail I did that seems to garner comments from people I have shown is the chain on the outside rather than the inside. I don't know exactly what attracts me to the look, but I think it goes back to my younger years when I wore a chain on my wallet from my back pocket. Hahaha! That's the best I can come up with...

[Jim Koepke]

Well Bob, it looks like the practice paid off.

Nice piece.

Some of my first projects were made from recycled pallets. That got the bug in me.

jtk

[David Keller NC]

Anyways, any critiques are welcome, and there are many that can be given, but overall I am just happy to finally take a project from beginning to end and have a result that is not completely embarrassing...

If this is your first attempt at a 100% hand tool project, you've succeeded where many have failed. Just getting everything to go together square and straight is a victory when you're first taking up the hand tool challenge.

Since you asked for critiques, here are a few - not so much critiques, but observations that will give you more control over the next project:

1) Mitered corners. This is a very difficult thing to get right with either power tools or hand tools when it comes to wrapping a case. The key is cut the parts long by about a 32nd of an inch, and to have (and build) something called a "donkey's ear shooting board". There are lots of versions on the net, and they're all easy to build. The good news here is that this is one task that no power tool woodworker, no matter how advanced, experienced or successful, can do as well as a hand tool woodworker. The reason is that the hand tool woodworker can cleanly remove 2 thousandths or less off of the length of a mitered piece without blowing the back of the cut out - something that is impossible (and downright dangerous) with a power tool. And by the use of the donkey's ear shooting board and some blue painter's tape, you can adjust the angle of the miter in 1/4 degree increments to account for slight variations in the squareness of your carcasse - also impossible with power tools.

2) Wood selection - I immediately recognized your wood as EWP and not SWP, even before I read your confirmation at the bottom of the thread. Save the first SWP projects for a workbench or other workshop fixture. You will be shocked at how difficult it is to work and finish SYP compared to EWP. There's good reason the Shakers choose to use EWP for their furniture projects (SYP in the form of "hard pine" grows in New England as well as the South). Other excellent hand tool woods to explore are south american mahogany (not african mahogany! - it will give you fits), cherry, walnut, beech, northern white cedar, basswood, and cypress. More challenging are the hard and soft maples, and figured maples, but they can still be worked with hand tools. Oak, ash, hickory and the exotics other than mahogany would be best left until you gain more experience. But clear, especially old-growth, Eastern White Pine is the king of workability.

3) Finishing. As you've found out, there are a few no-no's when using a thin film finish, and a few no-no's when using dyes or stains on the pines. Specifically, you should never sand the edges on a piece once a film finish has been applied. That's a guarantee of sand-throughs. Instead, you want to apply shellac as follows:

a) Always start from shellac flakes from a reputable source, and use 100% denatured alcohol (never everclear or other distilled liquor in an attempt to go "green" - distilled spirits always contain a minimum of 5% water, which will cause you no end of issues). Don't use premixed or spray shellacs. These are OK as seal coats for a varnish finish, but generally don't dry nearly as hard as fresh shellac made from flakes.

b) Apply thin coats of shellac. Until you gain a lot of experience with it, I would not use a concentration of over 1.5 lbs/gallon of alcohol (called a "1.5 lb. cut"), and only then for the first 3 build coats. Succeeding coats should be applied at about a 1 lb. cut or so.

c) You can sand shellac if you allow it to harden for a minimum of 24 hours, longer if it's humid. The acid test is the appearance of your sandpaper - if it has areas of melted goo on the paper, the shellac isn't hard enough.

d) Seek out and use lubricated sandpaper to sand the shellac. So-called "stearated" sandpaper is one such animal. The lubrication cuts down on heat build-up, which will cut down on the "corning" (melting of blobs of shellac on your sandpaper).

e) If you wish to brush shellac, you will get way better results with a golden taklon brush meant for watercolors. You can buy one at any Art store. Windsor-Newton watercolor brushes is one brand. They're expensive - don't be shocked. But if you use it solely with shellac, you will still be using the same brush 20 years from now.

4) Dye/Stain finishes and pine. No doubt you've noticed that the color your shellac has imparted is much darker in some places than others. That's an artifact of the grade of shellac you used, or potentially of a dye stain (if you used one). Eastern white pine, and for that matter, all pines are a funny beast when it comes to colorizing with dye or stain. All of them will absorb lots and lots of dye/stain in the latewood, and not much at all in the early wood. The effect is a distinct "tiger-striping" that most of us find undesirable and ugly. It also looks fake when the intent is to mimic an antique, because pine darkens in exactly the opposite way to how a dye or stain is absorbed. But there's a solution other than waiting 100 years for a "pumpkin" look to pine. One simply applies 2 to 3 coats of a highly refined shellac (super-blonde is usually how it's sold) without any colorant to the raw wood, then one adds small amounts of an alcohol dye to the subsequent coats. Presto, 100 years in one day in the shop.

Nice job, and welcome to the slippery slope.

[Joel Goodman]

I drilled the hinge screw holes and lock hole with a cordless drill... Other than that, all stock was thicknessed, prepped, cut, joined and finished by hand. Dang! Now I feel like I can't say it is 100% hand tool... I think we can keep a secret though right???

Looks great. Pick up a few eggbeater drills -- then you'll have one more thing "hand tool". They're pretty cheap and it's handy to have a few. And they never need recharging!

[bob blakeborough]

Hey thanks David! All points are well received and appreciated...

The mitred corners were right of the saw just cleaning up slightly with a block plane. I will be building a 45° shooting board for sure...

For the shellac mix, I used about 3/4's of a 1/4lb bag mixed with 500ml of 99% Methyl Hydrate (in Canada it seems one cannot buy DNA for some reason). The flakes were purchased from Lee Valley so I believe they would be of decent quality. I applied it using a bores hair brush also from Lee Valley, but I cannot speak for the quality as I know little about brush's, but at around $20.00 it seemed to cost more than the ones I was looking at in the big box stores if that is any indicator. I did a total of 4 coats taking 24 hours between sanding and applying again. I sanded with 220 grit Norton brand sandpaper except for the final coat for which I used 600 grit.

I quickly learned there is a lot more to using shellac than just slapping it on! Haha! It is comments like yours which will help me progress along the road to better finished pieces...


I should note that while this is my first "project", I have been practicing cutting dovetails for over a year now. It is kind of embarrassing to say that up until now I just haven't had the confidence to actually have a plan to start and finish a piece rather than just trying to join two pieces of wood together. I have a huge box FULL of my practice pieces, so I finally bit the bullet and asked a local accomplished woodworker I met taking a shooting board class at Lee Valley if he would work with me side by side and help guide me through the process. He graciously accepted and this piece was his idea for a first project. We did it kind of as a guild piece where he and I and another fellow who was also interested got together every Sunday for a few weeks and each did exactly the same box, using each other for guidance and inspiration. It was really helpful to learn from each others successes and failures. In the end I decided to take the almost finished box home and tried to shellac it without any help. This has been a great experience as now I actually have the confidence now to tackle pieces on my own, and on top of it all we have started a small hand tool wordworking group where we will get together and do these guild type builds on a regular basis. I am truely loving the woodworking community!

[David Keller NC]

Bob, a couple of other thoughts:

Learning to apply shellac is, like any woodworking task, something that responds to practice. The reason I noted all those things about doing it is that many, many first-timers assume its properties will be like something they're already familiar with - polyurethane. And as you now know, nothing could be furnther from the truth. However, shellac has enormous benefits over the plastic-in-the-can stuff they sell at the big box stores. So much so that I doubt I'll ever use polyurethane on any woodworking project ever again. It's not appropriate on a period reprodcution that I'm typically building, and contrary to its reputation, poly u isn't a very tough coating. In fact, it's downright fragile and takes -forever- to harden properly (about one month at normal room temperatures).

So I would say your investment in time to learn to work with shellac will be well, well worth it. It's only drawback is that it will not stand up to really hot objects (like a pan off of the stove, or a boiling cup of water). But that's what coasters are for, and there are few finishes of any type available to the consumer that will remain unscathed from a scalding cup of coffee.

Finally - About the miters; A donkey's ear shooting board is not the same thing as a 45 degree shooting board. They have 2 different applications. The 45 degree shooting board is typically used to shoot molding that lays flat - think picture frame. A donkey's ear shooting board is intended to shoot miters in the application that you used them on the school box - in the standing orientation. Standing miters are far more common when building furniture than molding that lays flat - you might want to consider building the donkey's ear first, and the 45 degree second.

[mike holden]

Congratulations!
That is a fine job you have done.
Mike