WTO Rite of Passage: Roubo Build Thread


bgreenb

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Brian, I noticed in one of your pics, the board coming thru the planer on it's edge. Do others dimension the width of their boards with the planer? Never thought about doing that.

Coop, in general I don't, although sometimes if you have a bunch of parts of the same width, like drawer parts, it's easier to just gang them up and send them through.  In this case it's the way to go because the boards are so long and thick, I think they'd be likely to bow on a long rip like that on the TS.  Not to mention that in a case like this where you REALLY need all of them to be of consistent width, you'll probably get better results at the planer than at the TS unless you have a power feeder.

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Brian, I noticed in one of your pics, the board coming thru the planer on it's edge. Do others dimension the width of their boards with the planer? Never thought about doing that.

I do it that way routinely.   Like Brian said you get exact width and a nice clean edge.   

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Super Glue was invented to put wounds together in Vietnam.  It works great for little slices, including fingernails.  I like the little Locktite bottles with a squeezer on each side, and spin to click top to open.  I keep an unopened one in the first aid kit.

Edited by Tom King
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Not much progress the last couple nights, unless by "progress" you mean "sanding drywall taping compound so my wife gets off my back about the basement."  But I did get a few minutes tonight to mill up the end cap from a piece of 16/4 walnut that I had left over from my coffee table build...

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And my OCD got the better of me.  Gluing in a patch and re-routing the screw cavity tomorrow.  Couldn't deal with being off by 1/32.  Just worried about problems down the line during vise installation.

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Also got the shop organized and ready to go for the next step.  Hopefully more tomorrow.

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No pics of your lovely drywall job? ☺ 

HA.  Not a chance.  I think "serviceable" would be more appropriate here...but it's in the basement, so who cares.  Just wanna get that crap done so I can move on to more fun stuff.

Lots of progress yesterday.  It was my birthday, so I took the day off and spent a bunch of time in the shop without anyone bothering me.  After I re-routed the screw cavity and cleaned up my patch, I got to work on the end cap mortise.  I ended up using the router table with a stop block, as I wasn't comfortable using a handheld router and edge guide on a piece this small.  Plus I prefer the RT anyway.  I just feel more comfortable controlling the workpiece as opposed to the tool.  After squaring up the end of the mortise (which isn't necessary but made me feel good), I had a nearly perfect fitting mortise:

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Couple swipes with the RBP over the slab tenon took "nearly perfect fitting" to "perfect fitting":

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At this point, I could do no more work on the end cap, as I'm still waiting for my drill press to arrive, but I figured would mark out for holes using the template provided:

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I also labeled all the holes in terms of their size and depth so that I'll be ready to drill when I get the DP set up.  You probably can't see the pencil on the walnut, but it's there.  You might notice there are two sets of holes where the screw and flange bolts go.  That's because I originally used the template that I printed out *with scaling*.  I had two templates printed - one with scaling and one without.  This would've been a major screw up.  Glad I caught it.

With the end cap in limbo, I got to work on the dog strip.  Here's my setup:

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Once I had the template in place for each dog hole, I used the Dewalt router with a 1/2" spiral bit and a guide bushing to route out the bulk of the waste.  The bushing left about 1/8" of material, which I cleaned out with the Bosch router and the top bearing bit.  This was a lot of routing, and a huge mess.  Have I mentioned how much I hate handheld routing?

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Once the dog strip was done, I glued it on to the slab.  At this point there wasn't a whole lot I could do other than random little stuff, so I batched out all of my dog stock and made one sample dog to make sure everything worked and fit properly. 315520EC-6594-4DEE-9725-F01A35971275_zps

At this point I was pretty tired, so I cleaned the shop up and got a bunch of random other stuff done, like installing casters on my drum sander so that I could move it out of the way.  I also cleared out a spot for my new DP, and did some general organization.  Emptied the dust collector and sharpened my plane irons.  So here is where we stand now:

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It'll be a bit before I provide any more updates, as I'll be out of town this weekend.  My DP is arriving in the meantime, so my next step will be setting it up for use on the end cap.  So stay tuned for more updates next week.

 

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You are really moving along. What size pattern bit are you using?

Thanks Mike.  In this case I believe it was a 3/4" pattern bit.  In general I use William Ng's big daddy pattern bit, but it's too big for a handheld operation.  I have various other pattern bits, and I believe I just grabbed the one that looked the sharpest here :)

 Happy Birthday Bud!! Hope you had a nice day to yourself with no screaming kids or nagging wives....:)

You didnt say, but did you square up the dog holes after routing with a chisel or corner chisel? Looking good man, good work.

Thanks!  It was indeed a good birthday.  No screaming kids, no nagging wives, lots of shop time, and a delicious birthday cake.  Can't go wrong.

There's actually no need to square anything up, because the dog hole strip is actually made of two pieces - the strip itself and then a "backer" strip.  So all you're really doing is routing angled dadoes with a ledge, and then closing the whole thing off with the filler strip.  You can see it better in this post in Tom's Roubo thread:

http://www.woodtalkonline.com/topic/18581-please-no-not-another-roubo-build-thread/?do=findComment&comment=197385

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Thanks Mike.  In this case I believe it was a 3/4" pattern bit.  In general I use William Ng's big daddy pattern bit, but it's too big for a handheld operation.  I have various other pattern bits, and I believe I just grabbed the one that looked the sharpest here :)

Thanks!  It was indeed a good birthday.  No screaming kids, no nagging wives, lots of shop time, and a delicious birthday cake.  Can't go wrong.

There's actually no need to square anything up, because the dog hole strip is actually made of two pieces - the strip itself and then a "backer" strip.  So all you're really doing is routing angled dadoes with a ledge, and then closing the whole thing off with the filler strip.  You can see it better in this post in Tom's Roubo thread:

http://www.woodtalkonline.com/topic/18581-please-no-not-another-roubo-build-thread/?do=findComment&comment=197385

Ahhh i get it now! :D Sent from my SGH-I337M using Tapatalk
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Great progress. 2 questions, I'll throw out to any who have built the bench.  When you rough cut your slab boards,  what thicknesses did you start with?  Aka, did you rough cut to 4.5" to start then mill and finish thickness?  I'm working will some wide boards to start with.

2) what kind of drill press did you order? 

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Great progress. 2 questions, I'll throw out to any who have built the bench.  When you rough cut your slab boards,  what thicknesses did you start with?  Aka, did you rough cut to 4.5" to start then mill and finish thickness?  I'm working will some wide boards to start with.

2) what kind of drill press did you order? 

I rough cut to about 4.5, then planed to about 4.25 before passing through the planer to 4" He ordered the same drill I have http://www.woodtalkonline.com/index.php?/topic/17784-Jet-JDP-17-716300-Drill-Press Sent from my 831C using Tapatalk
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Great progress. 2 questions, I'll throw out to any who have built the bench.  When you rough cut your slab boards,  what thicknesses did you start with?  Aka, did you rough cut to 4.5" to start then mill and finish thickness?  I'm working will some wide boards to start with.

2) what kind of drill press did you order? 

I milled everything to about 4 1/8" before glue up, mainly because that was the dimension of my thinnest 2-3 boards. Once I had the slabs glued up I did a final milling and ended up at about 3 31/32. That's where I stand now. I expect that after final flattening I will be probably slightly south of 3 15/16. 

As Tom mentioned above, I went with the same drill press that he got, almost solely from his recommendation. Looking forward to putting it through its paces

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B00NF6P8PI/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?qid=1445651373&sr=8-1&pi=SY200_QL40&keywords=Jet+17+drill+press&dpPl=1&dpID=31y5g0gvO6L&ref=plSrch

 

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Ugh.  Last night was one of those nights in the shop.  My drill press arrived on Tuesday, and I spent Tuesday night getting it all set up and drilling some test holes to get used to it.  Then last night I set about drilling all the holes in the end cap.  This actually went pretty smoothly, and the DP performed flawlessly.  Ended up with a nicely drilled end cap with all the holes in the right places:

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(Picture taken pre-cleanup of elongated slots).

So far so good, but this is where things went awry.  When I went to drill the holes into the tenon, I drilled them off course.  It's almost comical how far off they are.  Looks like I did it drunk.  This isn't the biggest deal in the world, as I recognized it, and I drew layout lines very carefully to show where the bolts traveled.  So then I went to lay out exactly how far back into the slab I needed to drill the holes for the barrel nuts.  So I put the bolt all the way through the hole in the end cap, and then I referenced the end cap off of the end of the tenon instead of the shoulder.  IDIOT.  And the funny thing is that when I did it, I said to myself "that's odd, these bolts really don't seem long enough - they aren't biting that far into the meat of the top."

Lesson that should be obvious but sometimes isn't:  If layout looks weird, it's probably wrong, or at the very least deserves some attention and thought.  Call it a corollary of "measure twice cut once."  

Like an idiot, I went ahead and drilled the holes anyway.  On top of drilling in the wrong location length wise, I also drilled in the wrong spot width wise.  This further mistake has no bearing on anything because wrong location is wrong location, but it just adds to the comedy of errors that was last night.  

I'm very frustrated with myself because I usually do lots of sanity checks before I drill/cut.  In any case, I went ahead and did the proper layout and drilled the holes in their proper location and got the barrel nuts installed.  Everything went fairly smooth there, although my final error of the night was losing one of the washers for the bolts.  Ugh.  Now I gotta go buy a washer and spraypaint it black to match.  

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You can see the error there.  What the hell was I doing????  Anyway, I filled those holes about 3/4 of the way with structural epoxy mixture this morning, so hopefully that will be cured by tonight.  I plan on turning some dowels to fill the rest of the holes, then cut flush and sand.  It's the bottom of the workbench, but I still don't want it to look like I got drunk and decided to do some drillin'.  

A note on the barrel nuts:  kind of annoying that they stick out so far as to interfere with routing the slots for the tail vise rails.

I'm very nervous about the vise installation given how last night went.  I feel like this is a situation where compounding tiny errors are going to result in a very frustrating experience for me.

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