Preliminaries - Milling

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Chris Hall
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Re: Preliminaries - Milling

Tue Feb 14, 2012 10:46 pm

So long as your moniker isn't sukebe-jiji...
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Chris Hall
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Re: Preliminaries - Milling

Wed Feb 15, 2012 5:11 pm

I didn't have anything suitable in my stock pile for the tool box's floor, so I went to the hardwood supply place today. I was looking for a wood that was at least of medium density, was quartersawn, and which was a light color. The only wood they had which fit that bill was Yellow Heart, aka Pau Amarella. Not the easiest wood to work, but I am a glutton for punishment at times. They let me buy just over 26" of material:
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Then after ripping a few inches of the tangential grain portion off the plank, I re-sawed the remainder into three roughly equal pieces:
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Then a run through the jointer and planer, leaving the boards over-sized, straight and flat:
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I'll let them sit a couple of days now. Two will be needed for the floor, and the third is a spare. They will finish out at 0.375" thick (about 9.5mm).
ya
yanai

Re: Preliminaries - Milling

Wed Feb 15, 2012 10:11 pm

Chris Hall wrote:So long as your moniker isn't sukebe-jiji...
or "ero-oyaji" ... shouldn't give her any ideas.

the yellow heart has a nice tone to it. what makes it difficult to work? is it a pretty stable wood? i've seen some at the online wood sites here in japan and was wondering about it.
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Re: Preliminaries - Milling

Wed Feb 15, 2012 11:09 pm

It's a bit weird to plane. It can plane nice and glossy and then the odd place it will tear out badly, and quite unexpectedly. It seems like the layer of tisse in the growth rings are, here and there, weakly attached - not sure if I'm explaining this very well....

This piece seemed quite stable during re-sawing and initial dimensioning.
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Re: Preliminaries - Milling

Fri Feb 17, 2012 5:25 pm

Moving the panel along a little further today, starting with edge jointing:
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I love the shavings off this wood:
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Then it was time to edge glue the boards together:
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Glue up complete, here are my floor and lid panels ready for final planing:
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do
dom

Re: Preliminaries - Milling

Fri Feb 17, 2012 11:38 pm

This is wood I'm hoping to use. Most of it is recycled and milled quite thin already. I think I might have to shrink some of the tool box dimensions to fit the wood, not sure if this is a good idea? The wood is Kauri, huon pine, sasafrass and golden cedar.
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Re: Preliminaries - Milling

Sat Feb 18, 2012 12:12 am

Interesting cluster of materials. Have you completed the design for your toolbox yet? You may be able to find a way to juggle the wood you have with the tools you want to put in the box. You may have to shuffle the tools around or put different tool in. If it came down to it though, possibly you could obtain a tiny bit more material? I'd be curious to see what your design is looking like at this point.
ti
timoore

Re: Preliminaries - Milling

Sat Feb 18, 2012 4:26 am

Chris Hall wrote:
Glue up complete, here are my floor and lid panels ready for final planing:
I'm surprised that you glued the floor and lid panels; perhaps that's my noobness showing. I thought that the lid was held together by the dovetailed battens and the floor boards were kept in place by the joints with the uprights.

?
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Re: Preliminaries - Milling

Sat Feb 18, 2012 9:23 am

Hi Tim,

I'm glad I can surprise folks with the use of glue! :D

It would be perfectly possible to hold the two lid boards together with the dovetailed battens, using a pair of pins crosswise at each batten where the lid board edges come together. The problem with the pins is that any expansion/contraction of the lid boards would crush against the pins, and being side grain in those locations, both the pins and the boards, the crush would deform the wood slightly. Then when the board moved again, the joint would be loose. There would be a possibility that the two lid boards could become open along their joined edge, allowing dust and debris to get into the space.

If the lid boards were thicker, say 0.5", then it would be more reasonable to tongue and groove them together- possibly even with a dovetailed tongue and groove. Even then I would still choose to edge glue the boards. Long sliding dovetails are tricky to fit well and in some cases can go together 80% of the way and get stuck. In this project, we use untapered dovetailed cross battens. Because the movement of the lid boards can deform or impair the fit of a tapered dovetail batten, the joint tends to work loose over time. If you pin it, then the joint will become loose by the seasonal movement crushing the long grain of the male dovetail slightly. With an untapered dovetailed connection, and glued boards, though there is a trick to fitting the parts together, the one-piece board can be pinned to the batten in the middle and that will allow for seasonal movement while keeping the lid boards centered to the battens and without any gap opening up in between the boards.

There is one solution which would allow for no glue: use a single board wide enough for the lid. A 14~15" wide vertical grain piece of wood is not impossible to find, but is not fair for me to specify. I've been making use largely of what I have one my scrap pile, so that lead to the edge gluing. It wouldn't be a reasonable expectation on my part that group members obtain really wide vertical grain material for this project. A 15" wide VG piece of wood comes from a tree at least 36" in diameter, and that sort of material is not available everywhere and can be quite costly. Not sure I'd want to use such material for a tool box....

Now, with the floor pan the situation is much the same, however the main purpose of the joint there between the partitions and the floor is twofold:

1) the partitions are there to stiffen the floor panel and are connected to prevent it deflecting down under load

2) the floor panel, by having a shallow dado cut in its top surface, keeps the partitions from bowing or deflecting sideways.

The connections are dovetail wedged pins, and there are two per partition. Seasonal movement could cause some slight long grain crushing of the floor panel mortises or the sides of the pins, however the joint is mechanically connected cross wise: the wedges expanding the pins push against end grain in the floor panel mortises, and thus the connection won't be degraded by seasonal movement. I expect the seasonal movement effect to be at an absolute minimum though by way of choosing to use VG material for the floor panels.

If study group members do not have floor panels with vertical grain, the potential for movement is greater and I will recommend they use on central wedged pin per partition instead of two. That way the boards can be kept centered at least.

~C
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Re: Preliminaries - Milling

Sat Feb 18, 2012 2:05 pm

This is a photo of the air dried white birch I picked up a last week from a local sawyer to use for my toolbox. I'm not sure how it will mill up, hope it's not going to be twisty. It's going to be a close call as to whether or not I have enough of the birch, I bought all the sawyer had.

I do have some white pine as a back up plan, although I am not sure how well soft pine tenons would stand up to the fittings of the m&t joints, the edges and shoulders of the mortise and tenons might get rounded off if there is a lot of trial assembly/disassembly (and I think there will be).

Then again, maybe a pine box with a white birch lid and trays would work and look good?

Marv
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