Copper Veneer Is Beautiful

I am in the middle of a project building floor to ceiling bookshelves across one wall of our living room. It’s a rather larger project than I normally take on and has provided many unique and stimulating challenges both in design and fabrication... We decided on a gentle arch at the top of each book case and in order for them not to look ordinary and drab I’m experimenting with some antiqued copper veneers that I got from Veneer Supplies.com The same place I got the wonderful dark burl I used to make our Veneered Mantle. I chickened out and didn’t buy any of the really weird and wonderful copper patinas available, but opted for a sheet of just the antiqued stuff to experiment with.  this stuff is beautiful.

This is just a test run to hang one up so that She Who Must Be Obeyed can get a feel for it and make sure that it’s what she wants before I commit to making a dozen of these things. There are only 6 bookshelves, but there will be an arch at the top section, and an arch below the library ladder rail 8 feet up. With each part of this project I keep thinking that won’t be a lot of extra work, and then I remember that oh, there are six bookshelves so I have to do it six times. And then with these I have to make twice that number. But it will be worth it, these look fantastic.

Now if only I could make the stain on the routed edge look a bit more even. I will have to sand that a lot more aggressively to smooth out the wood before applying the stain on the real ones.

Dont worry about the slightly funky edges. I made it an inch or so wider than it needs to be and will trim those off to perfection on the table saw before putting it into place.

Veneered Mantle

We recently “finished” some small additions to the house. A 2 month estimated project that took 7 months to complete. Then it was my turn to start working on the parts of the project that I wanted to do. That has also stretched out a bit in time, but at least now my long suffering wife knows she couldn’t get it done any faster by hiring an actual contractor ;)

We both hated the family room fireplace (and don’t even get me started on the living room fireplace, that is another blog entry and is now completely gone) it had a real flue at least, unlike the living room “fireplace” but was such a small firebox that once you put 2 logs into it the fire didn’t even start until it was up above the top of the hood. It was built into one of these great mantle/surround things. They look nice from a distance but up close they are just a bunch of particle board moldings screwed together, really clunky and not very nice or useful at all.

As part of the addition we had a hearth built and what turned out to be a very nice faux stone chimney made. I’m really happy with the way the stone turned out but I wanted a nicer mantle than what they would give me. Offers of a nice piece of reclaimed lumber or something doesn’t really fit with what I wanted so I asked then to just give me a 2x4 cleat across the stone onto which I could attach a mantle I could build myself.

The wiring from the outlets along that wall also ran through that space so I was able to bring it up through the mantle and mount another outlet on to what will be inside the mantle for plugging in lamps and clocks or anything else without having a cord falling over the side which was important to me as that always looked horrible on the existing mantle.




The box is pretty simple. Half inch plywood with an inside system of supports to make sure it stays square and strong. I drilled them out in the middle though so that any wires I ran to anything could get back and forth. The cut out on the top will be removable panels with some holes drilled for cords to come through up where you need them.

Then I went to test fit the box only to discover that the 2x4s they put up were not really alined with each other and weren’t actually straight either. Several hours of messing around with an oscillating saw and a lot of sawdust later and I had straightened up the cleat good enough for the box to fit snugly over and let it get right back against the stone. In retrospect I should have disconnected the wires and just taken off their cleats and added fresh ones of my own but somehow that didn’t occur to me at the time. The rule is doing it wrong takes a lot more time and effort than doing it right ;)



After trimming and shimming the cleats it fit very nice and tight and I only had to take a cold chisel to a couple of stone corners to make it fit fully into the stone face. I ran into another problem which you can see in the first picture above. The electrical wire was getting crimped by the support blocks and keeping them from being flush with the cleat. I could have removed the wire and pulled it through the supports, but I wanted to be able to take off the mantle in the future if the veneer failed or if something happened that I needed to change or fix it. So back to the oscillating saw and I cut some notches into the cleat to allow the wire to safely snake around the support blocks. This removes some of the structure of the thing since they won’t be pressed against the cleat, but it turned out that didn’t matter, it’s plenty strong even before I screwed it into the cleat from top and bottom. Now that the box was complete and fitted it was time to decide about the veneer.

I’ve been wanting to invest in the tools to do real veneering for a long time. Since this was a Significant Other approved project I was able to justify the purchase of a lower end vacuum pump and veneer press. Unfortunately the mantle box is a little longer than 4’ and I only bought the 4’ veneer compression bag. Instead of just buying a larger bag and waiting for it to arrive I decided to go with regular wood working glue and lots and lots of clamps and cauls.

I ordered some beautiful Redwood Burl veneer from VeneerSupplies.com along with the bag and vacuum pump. When it arrived I realized I had another problem. It would have to be flattened in order to properly adhere to the workpiece. For this at least I was able to use the vacuum bag and veneer press. The internet has many products you can spray on the veneer to soften it for flattening and many recipes for DIY flattening and much discussion claiming its pressure or temperature or chemical that you use that is better. It was actually hard to choose a mode of working on this that I knew would work given how many ideas are out there and how adamant the various players are. I ended up using a formula of mostly water with a small amount of glycerine in it. The glycerine to soften the wood, but not so much that it would affect the staining or finishing or glue up process. I gave the pieces a gentle spray, packed them between sheets of masonite and loaded them into the vacuum press overnight.

What came out was beautiful and flat and ready for book matching and layup. I gave it a quick wipe down with some isopropyl alcohol to remove the surface glycerine as my tests with small pieces showed that really did mess up the absorption of the oil finish if I didn’t do so. This was also a very oily veneer which would affect the adhesion of the finish without doing this. Acetone would probably have worked better.

I’ve never done anything with veneer before at all so this was an adventure. Instead of cutting the pieces to make them line up perfectly I used fine sandpaper on a wooden block. Taking 2 pieces of veneer that matched and folding them over so the two edges that would match up were together. Then clamping that between 2 pieces of wood without about half an MM or more if necessary to get the angle right, sticking out. Then gently used that sanding block to sand them down flat with the wood they were clamped between. When they were taken out they would open out and fit together perfectly. Again without all the proper tools I didn’t bother with veneer tape, just blue masking tape to hold them together as I prepared them to be glued to the box.

Lots and lots of clamps and cauls later I was really happy with the result. Don’t look too closely at the corners and edges that got dinged. This was a very fragile veneer. I hid most of those spots during finishing either with a little spot of veneer roughly matched or some appropriately colored stain.
   
















The final veneer before finishing really looked nice and made me very happy!

First a coat of Linseed oil to really bring out the color and figure. It darkened up a little more than I would have liked, maybe danish oil next time which I think has less of a darkening effect from what I’ve seen. Perhaps I didn’t experiment with different finishes on this enough before jumping in, but it still turned out fantastic.

Steampunk Photo Cube Lamp

A little over a year ago a friend of mine saw This Instructable for the “Architectonic Photo Cube” and I offered to build it for her if she ordered the pictures printed to glass. That was not long after we had moved and what with life in general the pictures sat here for a year before I got around to putting them together. I decided to use brass fittings rather than the standard zinc plated and build a nice oak/brass base for the lamp. Since she had waited so long I spent some extra effort on the switch putting in a little knife switch to control the lamp and since it had a second position that would have been boring as just “still off” I put a Candle Flicker LED on the second position so that the lamp can be operated in either lamp mode, or candle mode.

Assembling the photo plates I did pretty much according to the instructable. They look really nice in brass. The corner braces that I got in brass were larger 2” than the ones called for in the instructable so my angle brackers are closer together in the middle a bit, but it wasn’t a problem and looks just as good.

The springs are completely decorative and serve no purpose other than decoration. I was thinking I’d have to wind some copper coils to make them look good against the brass, but I just bought a couple of packs of assorted springs at HD and they were enough to fit. I might have gotten shorter screws than these too as the whole thing is rather more spiky than it technically needs to be but it’s still a stylistic approach.

The base is cut from a piece of 3/4 oak with oak molding around the bottom piece and the top piece has a small routed ogee at the top. The bottom has a cutout under the top part to fit the electronics.

This is a 7 watt Phillips LEd bulb, but we ultimately went with a 3 watt one to just illuminate the photos without trying to actually cast light, it was a better look. The 10mm candle flicker LED is also visible in this picture as well as the brass shelf brackets that I used to hold the top in place. Since the angle brackets I used were 2” ones the tab from those brackets fits perfectly between the nuts on the bottom 2 screws and do an excellent job of holding it to the base but still allowing you to easily lift it off to turn around to show the other pictures.

The corners I used these brass corner brackets that are also just available at HD, they are supposed to go on the top of a box, but I thought they looked cool on the bottom of this where they sort of overhang the curve of the molding. Underneath them is just a regular stick on plastic non-slip foot thing to raise it up enough for the cord to get out.

The control system required some extra parts to make the knife switch safe, obviously you can’t put the 120v for the light through the knife switch. That black box there is a little 6v power supply that I just soldered to the power plug directly. That is that runs to the knife switch and powers the candle flicker LED. When the switch is in the other position it turns on a Solid State Relay that isolates the knife switch from the mains power needed for the LED bulb. I considered building a custom LED array to light it all from low voltage, but this offers more options for lighting and was actually much simpler.  The 6v power supply there is just slightly too tall to fit glued in there with a cover over the entire assembly so I made a cutout for it. I could have dremeled or notched the bottom of the plate to cover it completely but I had made enough sawdust at this point and needed to finish the product ;) There are no exposed high voltage wires inside there even if little fingers should turn the lamp over and poke around.

See how well the brass shelf supports fit between the angle bracket screws. Measuring for where to drill the holes was tricky as the offset of the shelf supports was 3/8” and my table saw has come out of alignment a bit so that piece wasn’t quite square and the routed profile meant getting a measurement to the actual edge was a pain. But it’s close enough to centered that it looks fine unless you attack it with a ruler.

The cord completes the steampunk/vintage feel of the thing. Ordered a spool of absolutely beautiful fabric woven wire from Sundial Wire.

In the dark my camera made it look more like a steampunk nuclear reactor ;)

Kitchen Bookshelves

(this post was originally written on December 19th, 2010 and posted on my old blog server. I am moving it to my new blogger account.)

It has become necessary to begin a small woodworking project for the preservation of sanity. The kitchen needs a skinny, open frame book shelf for cook books and such to get them off the counter. I have quite a bit of lumber that needs to be used up for projects so a little complexity is added by having to make use of whats already taking up space in the garage. Some good pine 6 inches and some more that is 3 inches which I'll joint together for a 9 inch shelf which is wide enough for most of the cook books. It's a little skinny for stability but I can screw it to the back of a cabinet to make sure nobody pulls it over on themselves.

Used biscuit joints to join those 2 pieces together for the full width of the shelf. If I was buying lumber of the proper width this step wouldn't be necessary.

clamps are a bit big for these little shelves but I have enough of the bigger ones to do all 6 shelves at once. After they are clamped I ran them through the thickness planer to eliminate any differences between the 2 pieces and they feel much more like a single piece of wood except for the changes of grain. But those will be less obvious after finishing. My planer is a cheap one and it leaves a bit of a dwell as it goes in and comes out of the blades, if I had remembered this I would have made each shelf an extra 4" longer so that I could trim off the section that got that flaw, but it isn't too bad really, makes it look a bit more like recycled lumber and have some extra character.

After trimming the edges so they are the same finished size I ran them through the router table for a nice ogee edge. If I had planned ahead I might have added edge bocks to the outfeed side to avoid the little bit of tear out on that side, but only 1 actually looked bad enough to notice and I sanded them out fairly good.

The uprights are 4 1x2 hardwood pieces. Not just putting them on the 4 corners but adding a bit of character. The back ones are flush with the back, but stand proud of the edge far enough to clear the beading I'm going to route down each edge of the uprights. The front ones I started an inch back but the same amount proud as the rear ones. Since we loose an inch front to back the stability of the thing is further reduced, and it's going to be tall about 14" between each shelf as I want the top shelf to be high but it's going to be screwed to the cabinet anyway.

just checking the back cutouts. That upright isn't the final one, it's actually 3" wide instead of 2 and just a short scrap piece that I used to setup the beading bit in the router table. They look pretty good I thought.

Rough assembly. I thought about doing some fancy tenon joinery inside the cutouts, but that would have been difficult and this was a quick weekend sanity project. So after lining up just placed an inset screw through to hold the shelf. After this was dry I plugged the screw holes and sanded them flush. Almost invisible and yet still very strong.

The finish is a mahogany gel stain and spar urethane varnish. I dont normally like gel stains but this gave the pine a really nice dark and even finish that would not have been possible with a regular stain. Also I left some extra stain in the beading for further antiquing. It looks really nice and is only a little darker than the stain of the cabinets it's attached to.

The natural uneven take up of even the gel stain made the wood look much more interesting, I like the effect on the uprights very much. I could have reduced this with a pre-coat of a 3 pound cut shellac prior to staining, this is a great technique for any non-hardwood you're finishing with any stain but it would have added an extra day to the project, and it really does look good the way it came out.

screwing it to the side of that cabinet makes it rock solid. Another detail was a little 1 inch cutout at the bottom of the back upright. This lets it sit flush instead of against the quarter round molding that runs along the bottom of the cabinets. All in all I'm very happy with it, the spousal approval level is high for a short duration very inexpensive project and it looks great.

(notes from the future: I love these shelves.)

Built In Bookshelves

(following in the proud tradition of repeating history I am manually moving my old blog posts from my server to blogger. This post was originally written on October 3rd 2007)

Turning some wasted space into a little library nook for my daughter.

The front of our house has 3 little gable window bits jutting out from the roof. They look nice and pretty from the outside, but they are so skinny that they don’t provide much usable space on the inside. One of them opens into my daughters room and gives her a second window out the front, but it’s down this short skinny useless hallway like feature. It was dark (even with the window) and really too skinny to put any furniture in or to use for anything.

My first thought was to pull out the knee wall entirely, or at least push it back a few feet under the roof to increase the size of the room a bit. After careful consideration though I recalled my last few experiences trying to do drywall work. The framing is no big deal, these are not weight bearing walls, but the thought of purchasing some drywall and installing it and doing a good enough job taping and mudding it so that I wouldn’t be looking at it and cringing every time I walked into her room talked me out of that. So instead I decided on some built in bookshelves along the side wall instead.

I made a couple of experimental cuts into the wall to locate the roof angle. Each of the 3 shelves would go into a joist space up to the roof without messing with the studs at all. The height you see in the shelves was dictated by the roof angle. Each one ended up being 13 inches shorter than the previous one. So after measuring the height from the top of the floor molding to where it would hit roof and subtracting a quarter inch for my own inaccuracy, then doing the same for the width of the 3 joist spaces I set about building 3 plywood boxes.

The first joist space was a little skinnier than the other 2 which were standard 16” on center studs. I measured and then subtracted a quarter inch to give me some wiggle room, both for my own imperfect skills as well as the fact that they joists probably weren’t exactly straight all the way down either. An 8th on each side can be easily shimmed and then covered by molding.

The only other complicated part of the boxes was the depth. I made the sides where it was going to be flush with the wall 3/4” longer so that they would come up and meet the drywall. The edges that were going to meet the studs and be covered with internal moldings I made 3/4 short so that they would not stick up past that. You can almost see it in that picture where the tops are a little longer than the sides in the middle one, and longer than just the outside sides on the others.

The holes to hold the shelf support things were fairly easy. I purchased a piece of pegboard and just clamped it inside the case and drilled through each hole down a row. This made sure they were straight and even. As long as you clamp it down the same amount on each side they will line up for level shelves. I didn’t have to make any special preparations to install them. I just cut the appropriate size holes in each joist space, removing the drywall bits still clinging to the joists in the middle and screwed them to the joists.

I’m actually pretty proud of the molding. I’ve never really gotten my miter box to cough up decent 45 degree angles, but I’m getting the hang of it. I had to build out the crown molding and add those side pieces to it so that the side molding pieces would be even with the bottom of it instead of proud of it if I hadn’t done that, so there was some extra work there.

The side moldings are just regular, pre primed stuff from the hardware store. The moldings down the middle between the boxes are custom made and run through the router to round the edges and put those coves down them. They had to be custom since they needed to be the correct width to cover the stud which still runs between the shelves and cover the plywood up to flush with the inside of the box.

One tool that I will never again be without when doing molding is my nail gun! My mom sometimes buys me tools for my birthday ;) And last year I got a little compressor and nail gun kit with her help. In learning to use it I learned that the longer nails really dont like to go where you want them to, they can bend along the grain and pop out on the totally wrong side of the piece rather than go straight. You really do have to pay attention to the grain and adjust the angle you’re shooting at. But for shorter brads to hold on a molding while the glue sets they are the ideal tool.

Here’s the final product after repainting the room from the nasty light green to a nice bright yellow as well. I added that light sconce as well. When the wall was open it was easy to get power from the outlet on the other wall inside the attic space and route some new romex to that switch and then up to the light. That lamp is above the roofline, so I had to use an old work box and push the romex up behind the insulation, but it wasn’t very difficult. The dangers of doing your own electrical work, as well as when using the aforementioned nail gun are beyond the scope of this little article...

Box Shelves

(In the time honored tradition of repeating history I am manually moving old blog posts that I still deem of any worth from my old server to blogger. This entry was originally written on October 11th, 2008)

The family room here was getting a little overrun and there just wasn’t any good place to store anything. I quickly learned that a set of these shelving units in any quality material would set us back more than a grand! So I decided that I needed more projects and set about to build some.

There are 3 units, above arranged in an L shape dividing the room into the TV room behind them and the playroom on the other side. I had done an almost identical, but white painted, set of these 2 years ago for my nephew so I already had a bit of a head start on the layout but I decided to add in some improvements. The base cabinets here would be large drawers and I wanted to make the entire thing out of actual wood (or at least plywood with a good veneer for finishing) which would complicate the joinery a lot. I couldn’t use the same rabbit joints that I had on the previous one as the ply wood edges would show. Luckily since the last box making project I had invested in a few new power tools that would make it possible, a new table saw that was actually capable of cutting a straight line and a 45 degree bevel as well as my new pride and joy of the shop a Festool Domino joiner. Which was a ludicrously expensive loose mortise and tenon joiner but worth every penny as I don’t think I could have finished this project without it.


I dont have any good drawings or plans, the design was basically copied from a catalog that my wife liked. I adjusted the size slightly to reduce waste in cutting from 4x8 sheets of oak plywood, but didn’t make any other major changes for the size anyway. I built the bottom cabinets first as they were the most complicated with the drawers. I had never tried to install drawer slides in anything before and I was a little nervous about it all coming out square enough to make them work. Here again the domino jointer came in terribly handy as it’s alignment was so close to perfect as to not matter.

Assembling the drawers was actually really easy. A dado to hold the bottom and 4 tenons in each side. Since the drawers were entirely internal I didn’t worry about fancy joinery here just a tenon supported butt joint. I did keep forgetting to adjust the depth of cut on the domino though. The tenons are longer than the depth of the plywood so I had to cut deeper into the side of the back piece than the face of the sides. And when you forget to adjust that you plow through the front... Luckily these ended up being either on the back of the drawer which nobody else will ever see or on the front and hidden behind the drawer front so no harm done. Better to get the hang of it here than on the main case pieces.

I can’t over state just how cool these joints are. The stuff just glues up beautifully and pulls all together perfectly. Here’s a shot of the inside after it’s all glued up and the clamps removed.

The challenge with the outside case was the edges. I didn’t want to do a lot of fancy edge work and I didn’t want the plywood edges to show and it all needed to look clean since it was going to end up in the middle of the room instead of against the wall. The pretty much limited me to doing a 45 degree angle and bring the edges together. The domino joiner came to the rescue here also. The fence has a setting exactly for this. All along the inside of this joint are tenons at an angle to mate the 2 together, and again it performed wonderfully. Holding the fence on the 45 degree cut was a little tricky and I blew a couple of them getting the hang of it, but it was easy to just add more. Then some glue and pound it all together and the tenons pull them together wonderfully. Still required a huge number of clamps, but the edges look really nice. The new table saw I added to the shop (garage...) for this helped too, the old contractor saw I had couldn’t cut a straight line without kickback much less a precise angle, but the new one was able to cut the angles and do it without too much tear out or anything. I was quite happy with it.

The kick plate I did with just 2 or 3 passes through the router and flat on the sides so that it would mate up with the ones on either side. The bottom of the case is also held in with dominos and is really strong without my having to mess with dados of the proper size to hold the plywood. It would have made the joint edge look better if it had been recessed into the sides, but I dont actually own a dado yet that can do this, so I compromised. The side moldings were also custom made on the router and are tacked on with my other favorite tool the air brad nailer. There are dominos along the front of the bottom into the kick plate as well to keep it from coming unglued if someone should step in the middle on it someday or something. Probably not necessary as the drawer will be on top of it.

The drawer fronts are a traditional framed panel. The edges I put a bead on with the router. I was forced to invest in a new powered miter box to accurately cut the 45 degree edges here, but when setup properly it did a really nice job, and again you see a domino tenon in there. A little glue and a few clamps brought the thing together beautifully!

There pictured with the domino jointer is the frame! After a lot of finishing and assembly I actually got around to mounting the drawers and giving them a test.

Full extension slides and I even measured close enough that they didn’t bind or leave excessive gaps! These drawers are big enough that you could curl up in one if you really wanted to. I couldn’t be happier with the way they turned out.

Here’s Ben testing out the structural capacity of the first one to be carried in finished by jumping up and down on it. He tucked in his own shirt for this picture too :)

The top pieces were easier in that they were smaller and I had already done quite a bit of the 45 degree joinery with the domino now, but were more complicated in that they had 45 degree joints on every face but the front. No bottom to leave flat and make things easier. I also discovered that it is not possible to assemble a 45 degree angle joint around an entire box like this by yourself with the tenons in. The top joint in them had to be left to be simply glued, but I dont think that will make them any less strong.

The inner divders and shelves were again butt jointed with the dominos providing the strength. If I were to do it over again i would invest in the dado blade to cut grooves for them, or perhaps a router bit of the correct size to cut the dados as you can tell they are butt joints if you look too close. No matter how careful I was with cutting the plywood that edge will never be perfect and even though most folks dont notice that, I know that it’s there.

Finished product though turned out terrific. Makes the room in there and makes me very happy. Even with purchasing that ludicrously expensive joinery tool though the entire project only cost a little more than purchasing something made out of particle board would have cost. And now I have the tools and the skills to move on to the next project.

(notes from the future: we’ve moved since these picts were taken. In the slightly smaller new house they are no longer together as a unit. 2 of them are in the kids workroom and the third in Ben’s room as his bookshelves. They still look terrific and the only things I’d have done differently would have been not to buy the plywood from Home Depot as it turned out to have many voids in the inner laminations that caused some cracking in the outer veneer, home depot carry lousy quality plywood?! Thats unbelievable! and I’d have been more careful watering those plants we put on top of them as water did run between the 2 in the middle messing up that finish. I couldn’t see it the way they were in the old house and wasn’t aware of it, but in the new positions I see it all the time and am eventually going to get around to sanding it a bit and applying from fresh finish.)