The Workbench – Finishing Touches

February 29, 2016August 9, 2017
by Tim

After the last post I was left with a mostly complete workbench and certainly use-able. All that was left was to install the vises and a few other odds and ends. I started with installing the shoulder vise, which was simple because I had already bored all the holes and installed the nut. This is a Veritas Shoulder Vise screw and is a little long for my small vise opening, but bearable for the time being. I may try to cut the screw length down eventually.

The total opening capacity is about 4″, which is fine for probably 90% of what I typically clamp in there. I can always use the large leg vise on the other bench if I have something bigger than that. The chop is 1 1/2″ thick red oak and is maybe a little overkill. I could probably thin that down to 1″ and get a little more opening capacity, but we’ll see how this works out for now.

Up next was the tail vise. I’ve never had a tail vise before and typically just use battens and planing stops, so I didn’t want to go all out with this. The main thing that I wanted a tail vise for was fenced plane work (plow planes, rabbet planes, etc.), so I wanted something that could put the front row of dog holes as close as possible to the front of the bench. The Veritas Inset Vise fit the bill nicely and was really simple to install. I just had to bore out the cavity for the vise and drop it in.

The front row of dog holes is about an inch and a half from the front of the bench and I made a simple little jig to help me bore them out and to make sure they were all in line.

For the back row of dog holes I added 4 holes, spaced roughly 2x the reach of my Lie-Nielsen hold fasts apart. The furthest left front and back dog holes are inline with each other.

Other little finishing touches were a tongue and groove pine bottom shelf:

An oak tool rack across the back, which is really handy. I prefer a tool rack like this to a tool well, but that’s just personal preference:

And finally a cheap $9 Ikea work lamp. The Tertial Ikea lamp comes with a screw type mounting base, but I just screwed it to a scrap piece and stuck a 3/4″ dowel on the underside so I can move it around in different dog holes.

It’s a great little lamp actually and reaches right across my smaller sized bench.

The only things left were to cut the top to length and do some final shaping of the shoulder vise. I may add a light finish to the top, but as of right now I’m enjoying the raw look. Have a look here for all the final pictures and the very first The Wireless Woodworker video!

Blog

The Workbench

February 29, 2016December 18, 2016
by Tim

The workbench build is complete! See my first ever video and some final pictures of the bench. Links to the construction blog posts are at the bottom of the page.

Completed Workbench

Shoulder Vise

Front Dog Holes

Top and Tool Rack

Shoulder Vise

Bottom Shelf and Joinery

Reinforced Front Leg

Workbench Side View

The Workbench Build – Part 1 – Initial Planning

The Workbench Build – Part 2 – Design

The Workbench Build – Part 3 – Rough Construction

The Workbench Build – Part 4 – Joinery

The Workbench Build – Part 5 – Finishing Touches

News

Hello world!

February 23, 2016
by Tim

Welcome to colorlib.com. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

Blog

The Workbench – Joinery

February 15, 2016
by Tim

Now that all the rough milling, sizing, and laminating is completed we can finally get started on some of the joinery and assembly for the workbench. All the main joints are drawbored mortise and tenon construction, so let’s get started sawing and chopping!

If you remember from last time, I made all the legs and stretchers the same size. To make life easy on myself, I’m going to do the same thing for all the mortise and tenon joints. With my legs and stretchers all cut to size, I marked out the 12 tenons needed ( 1 x each of the 4 legs, 2 x each of the 4 stretchers). I used my 1″ chisel to set my mortise marking gauge, then roughly found the center of one of the legs, and marked my gauge lines referencing the marked reference face. The tenon cheeks are pretty much the same size, but it shouldn’t matter as long as I always reference the same face.

Now I get started sawing, cutting the two vertical lines first, then working in from each side. I did all of these cuts with the Lie-Nielsen rip tenon saw.

When the lines were all cut, I check for squareness, then trim up the tenon as needed with either a shoulder plane, rabbeting block plane, or chisel.

After all the tenons were cut, I had a nice set of 24 blocks for my daughter. She loves them!

Now it’s on to the mortises, which took quite a bit more effort than the tenons. I used the same mortise gauge to mark all the mortises towards the bottom of each leg (again, referencing the correct face). The bulk of the waste was removed with the brace and 1″ bit, then everything was cleaned up with that same 1″ chisel.

As you can see from the below picture, my mortises meet in the middle. No problem really, just means I’m going to have to miter the ends of my tenons a bit.

With the base sub-assembly complete and test fit, I clamped it all together, the flipped it over to mark the mortises on the underside of the top. It’s not a perfect size, it’s actually a little bit narrower than the top, but the important thing here is to get the front legs in line with the front of the top. I don’t really care if the back legs are flush with the back of the top.

Same procedure as before – bore out most of the waste…

then clean up with a chisel.

Now for a test fit!

It looks great, so I’m going to go ahead and drawbore the leg sub-assembly together. The pegs are about 1/2″ in diameter, with a healthy 1/8″ of drawbore action. This seemed to cinch everything up nice and tight. I’m using glue for these joints, but won’t for the top joints. If I ever want to take it apart I should just be able to drill out the top pegs to remove the legs.

Before I flipped everything over for the final time, I added a little support for the shoulder vise. I’m not sure if this is really necessary, but makes me feel better if I ever want to put something heavy on that section.

There we have it – flipped over and almost ready to go!

It was a bear to flip over, so I’m hoping I only have to do that once. The top of the top is obviously a bit messy with glue squeeze out, but a quick flattening did the trick there.

At this point I have a perfectly use-able workbench and I’ve got to say it’s a great size. It fits exactly where I was planning, and isn’t too large that I can’t move it around when I need too, or too small that it moves around when doing heavy planing. Now all that’s left is to finish up the vises, add some dog holes, and do some final finishing touches. Until then, I’m enjoying the bench so far!

Blog

The Workbench – Rough Construction

February 3, 2016
by Tim

Last post we finally decided on a final design for the workbench. There are tons of resources out there showing you how to build a workbench, most of which are excellent, so I’m going to try to keep this section relatively short (we’ll see how that works out!). There is nothing new with the process that I’ll be going through, so this is going to be basically just documenting the process. I’ll try not to go into too much detail about any one step, but feel free to let me know if you have any questions on any step.

The lumber for the bench has been sitting in the shop for a couple months now, so has had plenty of time to acclimate. I have about 80 board feet of 8/4 ash material, of which the board widths vary between about 7″ and 8″.

To make all the dimension-ing easy, I’ll take the narrowest board and make that the width for all of the stock. This will limit the amount of material lost and will make rough cutting all the lumber a snap. In my case the narrowest board is about 7″, so I’ll rip all the boards to 3.5″ widths.

I did do all of this ripping on the table saw. Just like having the lumber yard do the S3S-ing, I enjoy working with hand tools, but I’d like to have this done in a reasonable amount of time. All of that ripping would have taken me ages to do by hand and I have no problem using power tools. I did do the cross cutting by hand, if that makes up for it!

I grabbed all the top pieces and laid them out, then marked the grain direction on each one to help with flattening the bench later. I tried to pick the straightest grain sections for the top, but it looks likely there there will be a couple places with reversing grain.

Once all the pieces were rough sized, marked for grain direction, and laid out in order, it was time to start laminating the top. Pretty straightforward here, just lots of clamps and lots of glue.

To ensure that the joint goes together without any gaps I took a few swipes with a block plane on each mating face. This gives just a slight hollow to each face, making sure that they mate up nicely.

I added one piece at a time just to make it easier on myself. It took a bit longer that way (the main section of the top is 11 boards wide), but once the glue goes on the pieces are really slippery, so trying to line up more than one piece is tricky. Even with just one piece I found lining them up difficult, so I used some f-clamps directly on the joint line to make sure they stay in line when tightening the rest of the clamps.

The shoulder vise actually helped out quite a bit in terms of lining up the top pieces. Just like a normal shoulder vise, my small one also requires a threaded rod be inserted through the entire depth of the top. I talked about this previously, but it essentially helps to counteract the clamping force and not let the vise tear itself apart. Since I don’t have a drill bit that’s 24″ long, I needed to bore this hole as I went. What I did was actually drill this hole in each piece separately, then use it to align each top piece as I laminated them together (I just stuck an old drill bit through the hole to line them up, then removed it after all the clamps were on – don’t want it glued in place!). I had some clean-up work to do when the glue squeezed into the hole after each piece was added, but it was no problem boring 3-4″ in to get rid of that.

The legs and stretchers are also laminated together (and the shoulder vise components). These were a bit easier to deal with because they weren’t so long, but still…more glue…more clamps.

Finally, after all the glue and clamps, it was time to prepare everything for joinery. There was obviously quite a bit of glue residue along all the joints, but most of this scraped off pretty easily with a few swipes of the No 80 cabinet scraper. Once I could see what I was working with, I got started on planing everything down. For the legs and stretchers I picked out one face and edge to use as my reference surfaces and made sure that both were as flat as I could get them and perpendicular to each other. This was fairly quick work with the Stanley 5c jack plane, which is sharpened with a pretty hefty 8″ camber. To clean up all the awesome hand plane texture of the jack plane, I used the Millers Falls No 22 jointer plane. The other two surfaces don’t matter so much, but they will be the show surfaces, so I cleaned them all up nicely.

The procedure for the top was pretty much the same, just quite a bit bigger! I’m not sure what the top assembly weighed, but it was tough to move around by myself. I wrestled it upside down (the bottom is the reference face for the legs) on a couple of sawbenches and got to work.

Same deal as the other pieces – started with the jack plane and finished up with the jointer. It should be noted that I did add the shoulder vise section before flattening using the same laminating procedure as before. After an hour or so of back breaking work (planing at sawbench height is not recommended!), I had a nice crunchy pile of shavings, and a nice flat top (albeit the bottom of the top).

At this point I’m all set to start attaching the legs. It’s not worth flattening the top of the top yet, because nothing is being referenced from that, so I left it rough. It was also helpful not flipping the top over yet, it weighs a ton! Everything will be attached with drawbored mortise and tenons, but that is a story for next time. The workbench is done at the moment, it’s just a matter of getting the pictures and posts all sorted, so I promise to be quicker with the next post!

Markup

Markup: HTML Tags and Formatting

January 11, 2016
by Tim

Headings

Header one

Header two

Header three

Header four

Header five

Header six

Blockquotes

Single line blockquote:

Stay hungry. Stay foolish.

Multi line blockquote with a cite reference:

People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.

Steve Jobs – Apple Worldwide Developers’ Conference, 1997

Tables

Employee	Salary
John Doe	$1	Because that’s all Steve Jobs needed for a salary.
Jane Doe	$100K	For all the blogging she does.
Fred Bloggs	$100M	Pictures are worth a thousand words, right? So Jane x 1,000.
Jane Bloggs	$100B	With hair like that?! Enough said…

Definition Lists

Definition List Title: Definition list division.
Startup: A startup company or startup is a company or temporary organization designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model.
#dowork: Coined by Rob Dyrdek and his personal body guard Christopher “Big Black” Boykins, “Do Work” works as a self motivator, to motivating your friends.
Do It Live: I’ll let Bill O’Reilly will explain this one.

Unordered Lists (Nested)

List item one
- List item one
  - List item one
  - List item two
  - List item three
  - List item four
- List item two
- List item three
- List item four
List item two
List item three
List item four

Ordered List (Nested)

List item one
1. List item one
  1. List item one
  2. List item two
  3. List item three
  4. List item four
2. List item two
3. List item three
4. List item four
List item two
List item three
List item four

HTML Tags

These supported tags come from the WordPress.com code FAQ.

Address Tag

1 Infinite Loop
Cupertino, CA 95014
United States

Anchor Tag (aka. Link)

This is an example of a link.

Abbreviation Tag

The abbreviation srsly stands for “seriously”.

Acronym Tag (deprecated in HTML5)

The acronym ftw stands for “for the win”.

Big Tag (deprecated in HTML5)

These tests are a big deal, but this tag is no longer supported in HTML5.

Cite Tag

“Code is poetry.” —Automattic

Code Tag

You will learn later on in these tests that word-wrap: break-word; will be your best friend.

Delete Tag

This tag will let you ~~strikeout text~~, but this tag is no longer supported in HTML5 (use the <strike> instead).

Emphasize Tag

The emphasize tag should italicize text.

Insert Tag

This tag should denote inserted text.

Keyboard Tag

This scarcely known tag emulates keyboard text, which is usually styled like the <code> tag.

Preformatted Tag

This tag styles large blocks of code.

.post-title {
	margin: 0 0 5px;
	font-weight: bold;
	font-size: 38px;
	line-height: 1.2;
	and here's a line of some really, really, really, really long text, just to see how the PRE tag handles it and to find out how it overflows;
}

Quote Tag

Developers, developers, developers… –Steve Ballmer

Strike Tag (deprecated in HTML5)

This tag shows strike-through text

Strong Tag

This tag shows bold text.

Subscript Tag

Getting our science styling on with H₂O, which should push the “2” down.

Superscript Tag

Still sticking with science and Isaac Newton’s E = MC², which should lift the 2 up.

Teletype Tag (deprecated in HTML5)

This rarely used tag emulates teletype text, which is usually styled like the <code> tag.

Variable Tag

This allows you to denote variables.

Markup

Markup: Image Alignment

January 10, 2016
by Tim

Welcome to image alignment! The best way to demonstrate the ebb and flow of the various image positioning options is to nestle them snuggly among an ocean of words. Grab a paddle and let’s get started.

On the topic of alignment, it should be noted that users can choose from the options of None, Left, Right, and Center. In addition, they also get the options of Thumbnail, Medium, Large & Fullsize.

The image above happens to be centered.

The rest of this paragraph is filler for the sake of seeing the text wrap around the 150×150 image, which is left aligned.

As you can see the should be some space above, below, and to the right of the image. The text should not be creeping on the image. Creeping is just not right. Images need breathing room too. Let them speak like you words. Let them do their jobs without any hassle from the text. In about one more sentence here, we’ll see that the text moves from the right of the image down below the image in seamless transition. Again, letting the do it’s thang. Mission accomplished!

And now for a massively large image. It also has no alignment.

The image above, though 1200px wide, should not overflow the content area. It should remain contained with no visible disruption to the flow of content.

And now we’re going to shift things to the right align. Again, there should be plenty of room above, below, and to the left of the image. Just look at him there… Hey guy! Way to rock that right side. I don’t care what the left aligned image says, you look great. Don’t let anyone else tell you differently.

In just a bit here, you should see the text start to wrap below the right aligned image and settle in nicely. There should still be plenty of room and everything should be sitting pretty. Yeah… Just like that. It never felt so good to be right.

And just when you thought we were done, we’re going to do them all over again with captions!

Image Alignment 580x300 — Look at 580×300 getting some caption love.

The image above happens to be centered. The caption also has a link in it, just to see if it does anything funky.

Image Alignment 150x150 — Itty-bitty caption.

The rest of this paragraph is filler for the sake of seeing the text wrap around the 150×150 image, which is left aligned.

And now for a massively large image. It also has no alignment.

Image Alignment 1200x400 — Massive image comment for your eyeballs.

The image above, though 1200px wide, should not overflow the content area. It should remain contained with no visible disruption to the flow of content.

Image Alignment 300x200 — Feels good to be right all the time.

And that’s a wrap, yo! You survived the tumultuous waters of alignment. Image alignment achievement unlocked!

Markup

Markup: Text Alignment

January 9, 2016
by Tim

Default

This is a paragraph. It should not have any alignment of any kind. It should just flow like you would normally expect. Nothing fancy. Just straight up text, free flowing, with love. Completely neutral and not picking a side or sitting on the fence. It just is. It just freaking is. It likes where it is. It does not feel compelled to pick a side. Leave him be. It will just be better that way. Trust me.

Left Align

This is a paragraph. It is left aligned. Because of this, it is a bit more liberal in it’s views. It’s favorite color is green. Left align tends to be more eco-friendly, but it provides no concrete evidence that it really is. Even though it likes share the wealth evenly, it leaves the equal distribution up to justified alignment.

Center Align

This is a paragraph. It is center aligned. Center is, but nature, a fence sitter. A flip flopper. It has a difficult time making up its mind. It wants to pick a side. Really, it does. It has the best intentions, but it tends to complicate matters more than help. The best you can do is try to win it over and hope for the best. I hear center align does take bribes.

Right Align

This is a paragraph. It is right aligned. It is a bit more conservative in it’s views. It’s prefers to not be told what to do or how to do it. Right align totally owns a slew of guns and loves to head to the range for some practice. Which is cool and all. I mean, it’s a pretty good shot from at least four or five football fields away. Dead on. So boss.

Justify Align

This is a paragraph. It is justify aligned. It gets really mad when people associate it with Justin Timberlake. Typically, justified is pretty straight laced. It likes everything to be in it’s place and not all cattywampus like the rest of the aligns. I am not saying that makes it better than the rest of the aligns, but it does tend to put off more of an elitist attitude.

News

Template: Sticky

January 7, 2016
by Tim

This is a sticky post.

There are a few things to verify:

The sticky post should be distinctly recognizable in some way in comparison to normal posts. You can style the .sticky class if you are using the post_class() function to generate your post classes, which is a best practice.
They should show at the very top of the blog index page, even though they could be several posts back chronologically.
They should still show up again in their chronologically correct postion in time, but without the sticky indicator.
If you have a plugin or widget that lists popular posts or comments, make sure that this sticky post is not always at the top of those lists unless it really is popular.