Well, it's Christmas again; must be time to build a footboard!

I started this blog about a year ago when Jill and I started building our bed.  We did a great job on the headboard, but then things stalled out on the footboard.  That's how projects go.  Most projects spend their whole life living unfinished in my shop.  But this one won't.  It's Christmas again, and I'm dedicating this week to finishing the footboard.  Or perhaps just to make real progress before it sits unfinished in my shop for another year.  Either way, it's shop time!

Our first step every morning this week is to apply another coat of finish to the headboard.  The finish is a hand-rubbed oil finish.  We apply it, sand it in with 1500 grit sandpaper, and then wipe off as much as possible, and let it dry for a day.  After seven coats, I wax it to give it a smooth sheen.  I took this picture tonight after this morning's coat had all day to dry.  It's looking really nice, and it definitely motivates me to finish the project.

And now, on to the shop.

First, a new addition to my shop -- a new bench dog.

 That's a really bad pun.  You can look up what a "bench dog" is.   But in this case, it's a nine-week old Dalmatian that we brought home last week.  Just in time for Christmas.

There are some true new additions to the shop.  Although I used several of them today, I failed to take pictures, so they don't count.  Without pictures, it's like I'm not even getting my money's worth out of it.  But I did get my money's worth out of a wonderful pattern bit that I bought from William Ng (owner and chief instructor at the William Ng School of Fine Woodworking in Anaheim, CA).  William calls it the "Big Daddy" bit.  And it is a big daddy indeed:

 

This big is capable of routing my 2" thick mahogany upper rail to final shape in one pass. 

This thing is a beast.  I get nervous using it, because it can definitely shred my entire hand and forearm in a moment's neglect.  But it is super cool.  Having it in my shop makes me more manly.  Other people want to be me.  Yep, this is the bit to have.

After trimming the upper rail to rough shape, I set up the legs, rails and the center panel for the footboard.  It's coming along nicely.

 

The center panel did give me quite a bit of grief.  The veneer glue didn't hold as well as I would have liked, so parts of the veneer were lifting just a little bit.  I injected some cyanoacrylate (super glue) and pressed it down.  That seems to have worked pretty nicely.  Tomorrow I'll sand out the panel and apply some shellac, and then it's on to final fitting and sanding of everything else before glue-up. 

But now I'm done for the night.

Headboard finished!

Well the headboard is all done!  (Except about six more coats of oil finish.)

First step was one boatload of ebony plugs.  A few pics of the first corner, which is where the plugs are most dense.

Sanding the splines took forever.  You can see in the picture that the splines are gently rounded over.  It makes them pleasant to touch.  But it took a looonnnng time to sand and polish.

Once the plugs were done, there was a lot of little things to clean up.  There were a couple minor gaps that I filled with a sawdust/glue mixture, and a few dents and dings to sand out.  I'll skip over that stuff because it was boring (although it was about two days of boring).

Today, though we applied the finish.  I'm using a hand-rubbed oil finish with a mixture that I make myself.  I mix equal parts tung oil, mineral spirits, and varnish.  We slather it on, sand it in with fine-grit sandpaper, and then rub it with paper towels until we remove all of the oil except the part that has soaked into the surface.  Applying the finish took the whole family about an hour.  We have to repeat the process six times, waiting a day for it to dry each time.

After only one coat, the finish is still very flat.  And it brought out some imperfections that I'll have to go back and correct.  But even one coat brings out the wonderful color of the mahogany and shows how the whole piece has come together.

At this point, it looks like a completed headboard.  But we've got six more coats to apply.  And each coat takes five of us working for an hour.  That's as lot of labor!  And at the end of the process, the photos will look very similar to what you see above, although there will be slightly more sheen (kind of a glow).  But in person, those extra coats make a huge different to the richness and depth of the color, and to how it feels.

So, six more coats of finish and on to the footboard!

Headboard all glued up!

The headboard is finally all glued up!

We had a few challenges along the way.

First, we glued up the three rails on the bottom.  Unfortunately, there were enough humidity changes that the middle board had stretched to the point it was longer than the other two boards, such that the boards were perfectly flush on the right but not on the left.  See the little ledge where the two boards meet?

The result is that there's a little gap when the leg is on.  Can't have that.

I adjust the length of the board with a shoulder plane and a chisel.  The shoulder plane makes the edges perfectly flat, and the chisel gets the excess material that is between the tenons.

Once the mortise and tenon joints were perfected, the next step before the glue-up was to put some shellac on the veneered panel.  The rest of the headboard will get a hand-rubbed oil finish, which can be done after glue-up, but this panel must have a finish that provides better protection against moisture changes, to keep the veneer from splitting.  So it'll be a shellac finish, which must be applied now.  I brushed on a couple coats of shellac first.

I let the shellac dry for a week, and then sand it and apply some more finish using a french polish technique.

Next step was to glue it all up.  Jill and I did that Saturday morning.  Unfortunately, it did not go smoothly.  We ran into some snags, and nearly had a significant disaster.  Fortunately, Jill was pretty even-keeled and we got it squared away without any problems.  I didn't get any pictures of the glue-up itself, but we got a glued-up headboard to show for it.

With the glue-up finished, I pinned the mortise and tenon joints.  These joints are strong enough that pinning is not really necessary, but the pins will guarantee that these joints are still holding strong 100 years from now.  I start by drilling a 1/4" hole in the middle of the mortises for the ebony plugs.  I drill deep enough to go through the tenons but not all the way through the leg.

I then take a piece of 1/4" oak dowel with a little glue and drive it into the hole with a drift pin and a hammer.

Next, it's time to trim those "horns" off the legs and upper rail, and to trim the inner portion of that joint to create a roundover in the inner corner.  We start by placing the template over the corner and tracing the profile.

A jigsaw trims away the waste.

I clamp the template back on and use a router with a flush trim bit to get a perfect edge on both sides.  I use a rasp and file to clean it up, and then sand it clean.

At the ledge/upper rail joint, there will be an ebony spline on the outer and inner edges.  I cut the mortise for the inner spline before the glue up, but now it's time to cut the channel for the outer spline.  I do that with a router using a 5/16" slot-cutting bit.  I trim it up with a chisel and it's ready for the ebony.

I trim some ebony to be exactly the thickness of the channel and glue it in place.

Once I have the ebony glued into the inner and outer edge, I trim it with a special bit that William Ng designed specifically for trimming Greene & Greene style ebony splines.  It has a pair of bearings above and below the cutter, and the bearings are a little wider than the cutter so they leave the ebony proud of the mahobany.

And here's what it looks like after trimming the ebony.

Next time, I'll finish the splines on the left side, then a lot of little details (and boatloads of ebony plugs).

Joinery, Roundovers and Sanding, Oh My!

We fell a little short of our goal of gluing up the headboard this weekend.  Sanding always takes longer than I expect.  But it's not a race.  Once you finish a project, you never remember how long it took.  But you will always notice and remember the little things that didn't come out right because you rushed.  Plus, this weekend was the Superbowl, so we didn't have as much time in the shop.  (We had a great time at our friends' Superbowl party, but it was more because of the company than the game itself.  Wow, that was a bad game.  And a bad halftime show.  And the weakest lineup of commercials in years.  Thank goodness we had a good time in the shop, or this would have been a disappointing weekend!)

Saturday, I cleaned up the joinery on all those spindles.  They were a little tight before, so assembling all 20 spindle joints during glue-up would have been challenging.  So I trimmed a bit off each wall of each mortise, and now they slide together much easier.

Today, Jill spent a couple hours sanding.  The large surfaces get a workover from my Dynabrade pneumatic orbital sander.  We work through a series of progressively finer grits -- 120, 180, 240, 320, and 400.  Anything over 320 is overkill, but then again, overkill is underrated.  Sanding this lower rail took about 45 minutes.  Jill probably takes a little more time than necessary, but the result comes out great.  Boy, sanding takes a long time!

Next, we sand the edges.  The sanding block and a little elbow grease is more effective on the edges than the pneumatic sander.  The edges take a while because the flush router bit (which we used to shape the profiles with the template) occasionally leaves burn marks and  a little tearout.  It's not too bad, but it takes a long time to sand out those imperfections.

Meanwhile, I rounded over all the edges of these boards and the spindles at the router table.  I also shaped the upper portion of the top rail.  This shaping, the roundovers, and the yet-to-be-inlaid ebony plugs are little details that make the bed much more artful than just a bunch of rectangular boards glued together.

Right now, the roundover on the spindles stops about 1/2" short of the joint.  Once everything is glued up, I'll trim that last bit by hand.  I don't round it over yet because I want to avoid rounding over too far and having a little gap at the corner of the joint.

I also coated the veneered panel in Danish Oil.  Normally, we apply our finish after everything is glued up and sanded once more.  But this panel will get a coat of shellac to provide some additional protection.  Since the rest of the bed will be finished with a hand-rubbed oil, the shellac needs to be applied to the panel now while the panel is still separated from the other parts.  The Danish Oil under the shellac brings out the color of the veneered panels very nicely.  Here are some pics of the upper portion of the headboard, without the legs and without the lower two rails.

We have a lot of sanding to do before we can glue this up.  I underestimated the sanding.  But that's OK.  I'm still hopefull that we can get the headboard glued up next weekend.  We'll see.