Marc's Miscellanea

Today was fun with hardwood. I have a small pile of dogwood I cut up a couple years ago before I even decided to build the canoe. I need some hard wood for the outer stems so I’m having a go with the dogwood. The outer stems need to be tough as they take a fair amount of abuse. Dogwood is one of the hardest woods we have around here so it seems like a good choice. The trick is getting the length I require out of a single piece. I got one of the stems out of this chunk here.

After hewing and planing it square and cutting it down to size, three strips was all I could get in the length I needed.

For the decks I’m trying to go with a very curly piece of maple I saved from the firewood pile. I cut this slab out with the chainsaw so now I need to bring it flat. The grain is very wild which makes it challenging to work but should make the finished decks really eye catching. If there’s enough thickness left in the slab I’d love to try and saw it in half and use the same piece for both decks.

After some serious elbow grease, here it is relatively flat. Lots left to go but my arms had had enough of fighting the grain and taking deep shavings to level the board quickly. Though I have my #4 smoothing plane in the picture here, most of the grunt work was done with my #7 jointer set fairly deep. The smoothing plane was just to peek at the grain and see how it’s going to be best to attack it for the final finish when it’s cut to size. Which won’t be until the canoe is in its final stages.

My other project today was to build some sawhorses. To rip the strips and machine the edges I’ll need a lot of infeed and outfeed support. I plan to use the strongback halves for that, but I need to bring them up to the height of the table saw. The router table I’m making I’ll plan to be the same height as well for simplicity.

Our current project on the farm has left us with a surplus of cedar 2×6 end cuts. They’re too short to be very useful for most things, but too large to just chuck into the firewood pile. So they’re perfect for sawhorse parts. They’re actually 2-1/4″ thick by 6-1/8″ before planing. For the sawhorses I decided to rip them in half and make them out of 2-1/4″x3″. Though I did all the angle cuts first to make things consistent and have each pair of legs match exactly. Makes for fewer cuts as well.

Here’s the setup for the gang cut I did for the tops of the legs to mate to the stretcher on top. The fence is held on by brad nails, since the circular saw has an awkward foot plate and motor spacing that doesn’t allow for clamping on the fence most of the time.

I kept this first set only two feet wide. Since the strongback is only a foot wide, I didn’t want to have a lot of extra sawhorse taking up space in the doorway. I think these will be more useful and less in the way around the shop later on. I may do the next set at three feet wide for more general duty. Or not. We’ll see how the skinny ones work out.

A couple of solid sessions in the shop and the station molds are all cut out and faired now. I’ll be so happy to finish working with plywood. It’s convenient and flat and dimensionally stable but it sure is awful to shape and cut nicely. I’ve had a lot of birch splinters in the last two days.

Felix helps out.

I got one of the farm cats to help layout the last mold. He didn’t really grasp the concept.

The centre mold (#0) is the only one that isn’t cut as a double layer, since there’s only one of its size. It was a real treat to cut through only 1/2″ instead of the full inch.

Molds anchored together with brad nails.

All the other molds were cut in pairs. You can see the brad nails sticking out here.

Part of the reason the process takes so long is you have to have your cut line off the table but still have the work supported. It makes for a lot of repositioning and reclamping. Straight cuts need a fence to be clamped on to keep the jigsaw on track. The fence needs to be 1-5/16″ from the actual cut line so there’s additional layout for that.

It would have been a bit faster if I wasn’t so fastidious about making the most of my plywood. I’m pretty cheap so when I  spend $70 on plywood I like to make sure I’ll be able to use every bit of it. I could have cut each mold set off from its neighbours with the circular saw instead of working with the half sheet from each end but my scraps would have been dramatically smaller.

I’m hoping to make a lot of the clamps and jigs needed for the rest of the build out of those scraps. Any leftover usable pieces will be a bonus.

Very much out of square.

While I was cutting out station #3 I was doing half of it in a very awkward position. I knew I was putting too much lateral pressure on the saw but I was desperately trying to keep it from touching the line. At least the angle was going into the waste side. The result was this mold pair was quite out of square compared to all the others.

Anyone doing this, take the time to make your cuts as smooth and close to the line as possible. It’s much faster than having to clean up the cut afterwards.

My friend the sureform tool.

The tool that has proved indispensable for this work is the sureform tool. It’s like a small cheese grater that you use on wood. I had first envisioned using my spokeshave to do the cleanup and fairing of the mold edges. That’s what the ideal tool would be if these were solid wood boards. The plywood doesn’t shape very well at all with the spokeshave, and it dulls the blade very quickly.

The sureform chews through it rapidly and leaves a surprisingly good finish for what it is. Blades are cheap and other than breaking off a few of the teeth it didn’t seem to change its performance at all throughout the job.

So a lot of plywood grating got my high edge down into orthogonality with its reference face. Most of the molds didn’t need so much grating. Which makes them ready for this:

Most of the cleanup I accomplished with 50 grit sandpaper wrapped around a thin strip of cedar. I got the idea from Nick Offerman in one of his youtube segments of this canoe build. It lets you keep the sandpaper following the curve and prevents it from developing any flat spots.

As you go you keep running your fingers along the edge to check for any peaks or hollows. That’s where you get the splinters. Any big bumps get sureformed off and the small stuff gets smoothed down by the sandpaper. Peaks are easier to deal with than hollows. Luckily I kept my saw on the waste side of the line so didn’t have to deal with any glue-in repairs. A few came very close though.

Storage for the strips once they’re milled.

I spent a couple of hours making up the first of the storage racks that I’ll use to store the cedar strips once they’re made. The rack above is a metre across and I’ll have two more just like it. The three racks evenly spaced should support the length of the strips. This setup should allow me to keep the material out of the way against the back of the shop, while still making them easy to grab as I plank the canoe.

Having five levels should let me keep the strips organized by how light or dark they are. Individual boards will be kept together as they’re ripped so I can bookmatch the strips as they go on. I also want to keep the hull from ending up with all the light or dark wood in one place. I’m not sure what if any pattern I’ll go for, but I need to see how the strips turn out before I plan too much.

The first step in building the canoe is turning a cedar log into planks. The final strips will be 1 inch high by 3/16″ thick. Those strips will be ripped out of planks 1″ thick which will be cut out of the log on the sawmill. The wood is still green at this point so the planks will need to be put aside to dry before it can be ripped down on the table saw into strips.

The sawmill at the farm is a Mobile Dimension Model 128 from the early 80’s. It has a main blade 30″ in diameter that can make a vertical cut up to 12″ deep and two edger blades that make horizontal cuts up to 4″ wide. You can put on wider edger blades to make bigger horizontal cuts, but ours is pretty much always set up with the 4″ edgers. The log is put into the cradle and held in place with spring loaded steel dogs on rails and the saw moves down a track to make each board. So with the blades set up as they are you can make up to a 4×12 piece of lumber in one cut.

Most of the time we cut all our boards vertically. So a log that was 15″ in diameter we could get two rows of 1×6’s (the bottom 3″ is lost because it’s pinned in the dogs), or one row of 1×12’s.

The planks I’ve made are 4″ wide since that’s the width that the edger blade on the sawmill can cut in one pass. Wider boards would make less waste (in the form of sawdust), but by using the edger to cut some of the planks width wise I can choose the grain orientation better. I want to make the strips for the canoe mostly flat-grain in orientation so I need the planks to be edge-grain cut. That is to say the grain would be perpendicular to the board so that when the board is ripped into strips the grain will be parallel to the strips.

The log I chose is 16″ in diameter. Once the waste cuts are trimmed off the sides it gave 3 rows of 1×4’s. The top and bottom rows were cut vertically while the middle row was cut horizontally. This gives me four boards that have the grain perfectly perpendicular to the width, and eight boards that are pretty close. When I rip the planks into strips those ones will get put aside for doing the hull above the waterline where it’s most visible.

These boards are going to have to dry out quite a bit before they’ll rip nicely on the table saw. They’ll go down to the back of the wood shop where they’ll be left alone for awhile before I get back to them.