Ouch...

Nice curves....

Blimey, my hands hurt. I've just spent hours taking miniscule shavings off one of the table legs with a plane that looks about as old as I feel! The plane is one of Daren's 'Rounds and Hollows' set that have curved blades, thus enabling you to plane into the curve - but it's really, really narrow and takes ages! Doing both legs took about 3 days in total.



Next up sanding... and sanding.... and sanding.....and................



This is all about getting just the right amount of curve in just the right place. Needless to say, my carpal tunnel is suffering the most after more than a week in this position.

Next up... saw kerfing

With the pieces all glued together, next it was time to shape the pieces using a technique called saw kerfing. This involves running the table saw over the piece numerous times, each time adjusting the blade height to create the desired shape - in this case 125 saw cuts (and height changes) per leg! And about 6 hours in the machine room.



What you are left with is a series of grooves that then have to be planed out by by hand.



From here on in it's all handwork....

The right angle

I have to say, I never thought I was that bad at maths. Strike that. I'm not that bad at maths. But when you're standing looking at six pieces of wood, each of which needs two (different) angles cut on either end, suddenly brain freeze sets in and you find yourself languishing in a special needs category all of your own. And then the brain thaws out again and you realise it wasn't so bad (or difficult) after all. Just needed a bit of concentration.

And that's exactly what happened.



Then comes the next challenge - fastening your six beautifully angled pieces of wood together! This had to be done in stages to ensure all the joints were right. Joining four pieces together wasn't too bad, once I'd made a set of blocks to hold the pieces in place...




Adding in piece number 5 also meant also adding in some downward pressure and a new set of blocks...




And the final piece - well, a minor miracle really!

Table talk

Sorry, I've been really crap again about keeping this up to date - so you'll be getting daily blogs this week by way of recompense....

So, now it's all about the Adya Table - a coffee table with concealed magazine shelf in honduras rosewood. This design is all about the wood - it's strength, it's ability and pushing that strength and ability to its limit. It's all about the material. And in one sense, less about the design. Though, that is not strictly true as it is via the design that we get to make all this happen.

First step (and definitely the easiest) was prepping the table top and shelf - board selection, rough cutting both to size, planing and thicknessing. Am I the only one who can see Snoopy in the top...



It gets to a point sometimes when you've looked at a piece of wood for so long that all you can see in it is cartoon animals and weird shapes!

Next up, it was a case of cutting all the pieces to size - the table top is made up of six pieces of rosewood - gluing them together and planing the whole new single piece flat - much easier said than done given rosewood's propensity to tear out at the mere mention of a plane! At least I knew what to expect this time after the whole box debacle and hence had my scraper plane freshly sharpened and permanently within arm's reach.

More boxing

The box hinges were pretty straightforward but the finished article wasn't as good as it should have been so I decided to make a second box - this time in oak and maple. Daren puts a lot of emphasis on the importance of making the box well on this course and says it makes a real difference to the quality of the furniture you then go on to make so I figured a mediocre box would lead to mediocre furniture, which I have no interest in making whatsoever.


It just shows how the rosewood box taught me though. It took the best part of a month to make whereas my subsequent effort took only a week and looks a million times better.


Cutting the components



Ensuring everything's square in the glue-up



The finished box


Complete with oak liners