Altar build


Bombarde16

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Just to keep things seasonal...and because I'm sharing space with the family cars my daughter decided it'd be a good place to store the pumpkin she brought home from school.

As expected, all the thicknessing for the top is done. Lucked out that everything came together and looked pretty at 9/16" so I stopped there. Also took time to rip final dimensions on the frame for the inscription box. Those boards are now down in the basement awaiting crosscutting and dovetailing. It'll be nice to finish the rips on the stock for the top: Once the second bay of the garage is clear I'll be able to move my car back inside.

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Did some stock selection for the inscription box, it was pretty obvious which faces wanted to be the show pieces and which ones wanted to hide inside. On a whim, I took one of the scraps and carved my first letter. Naturally, I chose the easiest letter in the alphabet:

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OK, it's a start. (And all the experienced carvers in the room said, "Awwww, that's cute.") Plenty of time to practice before I have to do the real deal. On the plus side, the wood carved a lot easier than I expected. Maybe it's not ash after all. On the down side, it's not as visible as one would expect. Perhaps I'm going to end up gilding the inscription after all.

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By municipal statute, Sundays are quiet days. I cleaned out the garage and trucked more scraps to the burn pile. With all the material for the top at the correct thickness, it's also time for the final decisions on which frame members will be the show pieces and which will be lower in the pile. No way to do that but to spread a ratty blanket on the floor and start moving pieces about. To the uninitiated, this process looks remarkably like goofing around.

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The shorter board on the left will yield two pieces. The grain looks like flatsawn pine in this shot, but from another angle...

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...it's actually ray flecking. Wild stuff. I also tested a cutoff in ammonia fumes. For the moment, this looks like the most promising path for finishing.

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It's not a perfect match for any of the other finishes in the sanctuary. (I counted at least five or six different ways of staining oak last time I checked.) But it's a sight better than anything you can get from a stain and it seems like it's what the wood really wants to do. The question is whether or not every piece of wood will react the same way. I'll have to keep sample offcuts and do a test run later to determine whether I can put the whole altar through the vapors.

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... it's also time for the final decisions on which frame members will be the show pieces and which will be lower in the pile. No way to do that but to spread a ratty blanket on the floor and start moving pieces about. To the uninitiated, this process looks remarkably like goofing around.

Surely not! That's serious thinking time I see there...

...it's actually ray flecking. Wild stuff. I also tested a cutoff in ammonia fumes. For the moment, this looks like the most promising path for finishing.

It's not a perfect match for any of the other finishes in the sanctuary. (I counted at least five or six different ways of staining oak last time I checked.)

The question is whether or not every piece of wood will react the same way. I'll have to keep sample offcuts and do a test run later to determine whether I can put the whole altar through the vapors.

Tea and crumpets tannins? Less smelly anyway...

Wonderful WIP - especially as I'm not doing all the hard work! Keep the photos coming, Rob.

John

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Finished at last with milling in the garage, so it's down to the basement to start on joinery. First order of business is dovetailing the inscription box together.

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Even though this is fairly hard wood (whatever it is), I have to say it chops pretty easily. (My last couple of dovetails were in conifers and those certainly aren't fun to chop or pare.) Got the tails chopped tonight. Will probably have some time tomorrow to start scribing the pins. Might actually have to clean off my bench to do that, though.

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Maybe sharpening helped, maybe practice is making perfect, maybe who knows...But after cutting Japanese dovetails in 1 1/2" softwood, cutting these traditional dovetails in 5/8" hardwood seemed much easier. Glued and in the clamps now using the only reference surface I have that's sufficiently large: The kitchen counter.

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Dovetailed box done, it's time to start on the six mitered frames that will make up the top. Eventually, I need to build a proper miter sled for my table saw. But in the interest of speed, I took a long, hard look at my chop saw. It's a 10 year old DeWalt 10" that I've bounced from jobsite to jobsite, but it was calling out to me, "Rob! Just use me and be done quicker." Turns out the 45 degree stop was dead on and the only inaccuracy was that the blade was a fraction of a degree off vertical. A compressed nugget of sawdust had built up on the head of that adjustment stop. I scraped that off, adjusted the stop a mere sixth of a turn and was rewarded with exactly the precision I need.

Sometimes, the quickest solution really is the best. All 24 of the frame pieces have their first sides mitered and, after the trick-or-treaters go through their yearly insulin spike'n'crash, it'll be time to set up stop blocks to do the other side.

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Nice thing about a generous allowance for snipe is that I'll have more than enough test pieces to set up rabbets and experiment with finishes. Miters are all cut. Now I just need to decide if I want to do these with biscuits or splines and a wing cutter in the router. Maybe I'll just have to try both and see.

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Great thread keep it up rob. Are you planning on steam bending the lower arches that would work well and be much faster than all those laminations?

Possibly so. But the arches are 1" thick and the harvest of old boards didn't yield anything in that area. Moreover, I've never done bent laminations before and am taking this as a chance to learn something new.

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Splurged on a sheet of melamine to create a dedicated clamping surface for these frames. This allowed me to mark the surface with layout lines that are exactly square to the dovetailed box I already built. It also allows me to move the gluing operation to the guest room and not take up the kitchen counter for the rest of the weekend.

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Complete with strategically positioned (and copiously waxed) channels to ensure the piece isn't being mashed down onto its own squeeze out. The plywood cauls pushing down on the joint are likewise grooved and waxed. Those might actually stay in my kit, as clamping the vertical alignment of a miter joint is a fairly common trick.

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After pondering what sort of joinery to do for these, I concluded that I'll simply butt the miters together now and then slot for splines later. I reasoned that a moment's inattention in cutting any sort of joinery (be it biscuits or loose splines) would actually make the alignment question worse, not better. I have a huge spline cutting jig that I made years ago, so it'll be a quick job to slot these on the table saw later.

One in the clamps. Five to go.

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What's this "rest of the weekend" jazz? Allowing a generous two hours of in-the-clamps time per frame, you should have them all done by sunup. :)

That brought a smile to my face. I can just imagine the scene chez rmac:

4:19am - Empty cans of Jolt strewn across the floor. The television silently flickers with community announcements on public access. Russ keeps his bleary-eyed vigil beside subassembly number six, slowly chanting "dry...dry...dry...dry..."

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Got the short, inner pieces glued into the top frame. Next step will be cutting the panels to size and rabbeting them to fit into the frame.

Wow Rob it looks like your hammerin' down on this build,

Thanks, but quoth Han Solo, "Great kid...don't get cocky." The top is the easiest component in that it's all square stock and right angle joints. Things will slow down when we get into the curves.

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Panels rabbeted flush to the top:

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At last, it's time to start gluing things together! Beyond that, I got halfway through resawing the wood for the arcs. I had a pile of offcuts steeping in ammonia vapors just to see how they'd do. Overall verdict: Satisfactory and we'll go ahead with fuming the whole piece.

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Got started on clamping the frames together and then turned my attention to some more carving practice. I can see how this gets to be addictive.

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Blew out one of the inside corners of the "M"; but everything else seems to work well enough. For what it's worth, I settled on a font called "MoolBoran" than comes with OpenOffice. This is still just practice on one of the flatsawn rejects. The actual piece is rift sawn and planed much cleaner so the grain won't distract as much.

Lastly, I've had some finishing experiments going. It's looking like the oak is happiest being fumed and oiled, while whatever this other wood is wants a mere high-grit sanding followed by paste wax. We go where the wood leads.

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