Small bookcase pt. 4

Chopping all the dadoes took time! In all, there are 12 in this little cabinet, and all needed to be fitted and get matching shoulders cut.

The main dilemma in laying out the dadoes was what to do where the interior vertical element and the top shelf cross. I didn't want to compromise the integrity of the top shelf too much, so decided to make the dadoes (or mortises?) short, each one only using half the breadth of the shelf. That's kind of visible above.

Before assembly, I lightly smoothed all the inside panels. I worked on the floor, and used the threshold as a planing stop.

Lots of glue for this project! This is some sort of normal hardware store PVA.

Lacking any long bar or pipe clamps, I decided to try using these lightweight nylon webbing come-alongs for assembly. They do a pretty admirable job of holding everything together while the glue cures, though they damage the sharp corners of the cabinet by crushing the wood fibers. Not to worry, I will hit the entire outside of the cabinet with the smoothing plane once the glue is dry. These come-alongs seem like a natural resource for a space-limited woodworker, and I'll try to develop better clamping methods using them in the future. Before the glue cures, I checked it by measuring corner-to-corner and encouraged it into a close approximation of square

Small bookcase pt. 3

With the simple casework completed, it is now time to start chopping stopped dadoes for my shelves.

I matched the case sides and marked them together so that the shelves are guaranteed to line up.

I stopped the dado 15mm from the edge of the case. I don't plan to put a face frame on this piece, and wanted the shelves to appear to be floating.

After marking the edge with the knife, I relieved a wedge shape of waste on the inside with the knife.

I marked the depth of the cut with my router plane, and then sawed down to that depth with the dozuki.

After getting one edge of the cut started, I used the shelf itself to mark the opposing side.

The other side got the same treatment, and the dado's end is defined with the chisel.

First I hog out most of the waste with a chisel.

And then clean up the bottom of the cut with a little router plane.

The shelves need a small relief to fit into the dado. I define the shoulders with a chisel, and relieve the edges a tad with a plane.

Bukowski's Market

Lately I've been watching the auctions at Bukowski's Market for inspiration. Furniture here is a notch or two above Craigslist, but not deemed worthy enough for Bukowski's upscale real auction-auctions. What's nice is the variety of furniture exhibited: midcentury Scandinavian, Art Nouveau (jugend), and traditional Scandinavian (allmoge, dare I say "Furniture of Necessity"?) are all well-represented. And the pieces are professionally photographed from all interesting angles with nice, even lighting.

I've been pasting scores of images from these auctions in a folder labelled "Inspiration" to keep for future reference.

Small bookcase pt. 2

After getting all my stock to width, I had to cut the legs and top to length. I used a regular old utility knife to prepare a knife wall for the saw to run in. Despite the width of the cut, I did it with my dozuki. I wanted to use as few and as simple tools as possible for this project.

I even decided to forgo a bevel gauge, and instead drew my 1:6 dovetail on the CAD drawing made on my Android phone (using the awsome Inard CAD app). I then printed the drawing and glued it on some scrap card.

The dovetails were laid out in pencil.

Sawing the tails with the dozuki saw.

I tried drilling out the waste, to reduce time and noise spent chopping. There was some blowout, so I wouldn't recommend doing this unless you deeply score your waste lines with the knife first.

Whoops! But this was easily fixed, I just made the tail smaller. 

To mark the pins, I set it up like this and used the knife.

When it wouldn't reach I took the blade out and used it by iteself.

Chopping out dovetails is a loud, concussive endeavor for doing in an apartment. Maybe a coping saw would be better here... 

I bevel the backside of the tails to make mating the tails and pins easier.

In situ.

Small bookcase pt. 1

After a long hiatus, I have decided to breathe some life back into this blog. My woodworking was cut short last spring due to other interests taking time, and we have since I last posted moved to Stockholm. While my workspace was limited before, inspiring the name of this blog, it is now entirely non-existent.

But I hope that maybe I can inspire other apartment-bound craftspeople to explore the possibility of developing their craft despite lacking a workspace.

We need a small bookcase in one of the rooms in our new apartment, the "loggia" as it's called on the floorplan.

I had an offcut of 28mm thick laminated pine 60 cm deep by about 80 wide. I took a bit of 15x44mm stock from my pile, and got four cheap laminated pine bookshelves. All just homecenter stuff. To start with I would need to rip the 60cm piece into three pieces each just shy of 20cm wide.

I set up a workspace in my loggia, using an Alvar Aalto bench and our "sofa" with its new deep bench as my worksurface (no prize for guessing the origin of the off cut). One of the shelves leveled things out.

I used a saw guide and my jigsaw. Of course one could use a handsaw. Careful there with the saw... 

The three pieces would need to have their edges dressed, so I set up the kitchen table as a planing bench clamping to this scrap of post.

Eventually I moved the clamp closest to me so I wouldn't run into it.

Then I planed the shelves down to the same width. Stock preparation finished!