Fundamentals of Hand Tools Session 5: Make the Bottom and Align the Joints

I'm planing the top of the box next. That's the last part we have to deal with. As you know, when you joined wood, it leaves teeny, little ripples in the surface. That's just inevitable when you use the machine. You know, it's easy to sand those ripples out, but it's a heck a lot easier just to take a small plane like this block plane, get 'em out in a couple passes, a little sanding and you're done. So here's one of these done. Let's take the other one out here. Stick it in the vise, make sure the grain goes in the right direction. You'll see the rising grain going away from you. Goodbye ripples. They're history. Nice, wide shaving. Full length. That's all it takes. Okay, the next step is to dry assemble the box. We've got the two sides cut the length, the grooves cut in 'em. We can fit those right here into front and back pieces. And what we need to do is to take some measurements, because we need to cut this plywood bottom to the exact size to fit in between the grooves and in-between the front and back of the box. So to cut the plywood just perfect is really important, because that will help to square the box up when we clamp it up. Gonna measure the distance between this groove and this groove, so the bottom squares the box up when we go to glue it. Of course, to make that measurement across here, we've gotta make sure that these pieces are sitting in here nice and square. So I'm just going to put my square in here. Check this one. Check this one. They should be pretty self squaring, because they're sitting right down at the bottom of those dados. But here we go, make the measurement, subtract a 32nd of an inch or so away from that. And then when you can cross cut this bottom piece to exact length. And to get the width of the piece, we're going to assemble the box, again, of course, without any glue on it, and then just measure the distance from here, from inside to inside. Of course, there's no groove on the inside of the front or back piece. You could do it, but I didn't want to run a groove all the way through the piece 'cause it would show on the ends. So instead I've just made a bottom that just stops right here and here. It's supported to the ends. It's just a small bottom. It'll be fine. So cut the bottom to size. Let's just make sure that it fits just right. This would be a good idea before you put any glue on anything, after you cut that to length and to the width. Assemble the box. Can't try this out too many times. Here we go. No gaps anywhere around. It's nice and square. And I think we're ready for glue. I've sanded the inside of the box a little bit after planing. It didn't take very much. I only have to put glue on the inside of these dados, and you don't need a whole lot, 'cause you don't want to spend a lot of time cleaning up any excess glue. It wouldn't be a bad idea, but certainly not essential to pre-finish the inside of the box. So you don't have to get into internal corners when you're putting on your finish, but we're gonna be using a simple oil finish. So doing the inside of the box is really no problem at all. Okay, maybe you don't want to go all the way down to the bottom, because the size of the box don't extend that far. Let's just stand these up in here now. The trick on this part, and it's really not much of one at all, is that when you push this piece in, you wanna make sure that it's even with the top of the box. You won't be able to shift it back and forth once it's home. So I'm just going to kind of guide it in by dropping this corner in first, making sure it feels flush, and then pushing down like this. And if things don't end up exactly flush, and this is just a teeny bit off, that's okay, we're gonna be able to go all around the top of the box with a plane later on and even it up. Then we'll drop this piece in here the same way, starting with the top corner, and lowering it down like this. Feeling it's right. Giving it a push. Okay, and now you can't forget this part, and that is to slide the bottom in. It's kind of hard to take this apart, and put the bottom in later. There we go. Just slides right down in there. Then some glue on the dados in this part. Again, not so much, 'cause you don't wanna spend a lot of time cleaning up glue. And I put glue all the way down into the bottom of the dado as you can see, so that is actually a glue surface area, normally isn't, but in this box it is. Okay. That's plenty. This goes right on here. We're gonna even up the top of the box with the side pieces. Get that corner right. Get that corner right. Here and here, and then just push down. Okay, and from here on out, it's pretty simple. You don't need a whole lot of glue pressure. So one clamp on either side will bring everything home, just like downtown. Here we go. Another clamp over here. It's good to have pads on your clamps or use some protective wood pieces, so you don't leave any squeeze marks on your finished piece. Now that the glue is dry, we can take the clamps off and move on to the next step, which is even in the top-up. You know, we planed the top edges just to make sure they were smooth. But you know, there's no guarantee that when you glue the box up that all these things will, the joints up here will be even. So we're gonna take care of that next. So let's take the clamps off. Now we gotta come up with some way to hold this thing in order to plane all the way around the top edge. And I think the best way to do that is just to open a clamp up. Stick it in the vise, like so, gently, so you don't scratch the bejesus out of it. And then the next step is to kind of see, well, where do we need to plane? And I'm just gonna use my finger to feel how even or not the joints are. And each one is off just a little bit. So the standard procedure for evening up things that aren't quite level with each other is to draw a line, a whole bunch of lines with your pencil across the joint. And the rule now is that the joint isn't even until the pencil lines on both sides are gone. Otherwise if you don't do this marking, you can fool yourself into thinking that the joint is even. Might look even, but when you go to put a finish on it, you see that it truly isn't. So we're gonna use a block plane, small one handed tool for going all the way around here. And this is a little tricky, because what you don't want to do is to blow out the grain by planning across the edge of the board. So what we're gonna do is to do just a little sanding around the long grain like this, which we would do anyway before finishing the box, 'cause you never really want a project to go to finishing having sharp edges anywhere. I mean, not only are they uncomfortable on your hand, but generally, when you're finishing something, a sharp edge will be a problem, because when you're wiping the finish off or sanding or whatever it is, you'll almost always go through it wherever there's a sharp edge. So this just puts a little bit around in the sun here. It's kind of like a small insurance policy and we'll go back and do this again afterwards. Okay. So just remind you again, before you start planning anything, you wanna take a piece of wax, paraffin wax or candy wax and rope a few strokes on it. Don't go crazy with it. And let's take a look at our grain direction. It looks like it going that way on this piece. So growth rings run uphill in this direction. So that's gonna be my first attempt to plane this in that direction to make sure that nothing tears out. If I go the opposite direction, chances are that the wood is gonna chip out ahead of the plane and leaving a whole bunch of divots, also called tear out. But you're never really sure about this. You gotta do a trial run and see how it goes. I also see that this piece here is a little higher than this. So maybe I should take a few licks this way first to get the highest point even. And let's see which way the grain runs on that one. The growth rings are pointing uphill towards you. So I'm gonna start with a couple of passes going this way on this piece. You can see a bumping right into another high spot here. So when you're doing this kind of operation, you have to kind of go around it and tackle it selectively in certain areas. And I'm gonna keep on doing this until, there, and I've just cut into the marks that I've made on this piece while planing this piece. So that means that these two pieces right around here are even, so now I can go this way and this piece, which is higher than that one. And do I feel or see any tear out? No, so that direction of planning is gonna work out just fine. Remember, this joint is even, so I can keep planing across it. And I wanna keep going this way until the marks on this piece are gone. That will indicate that this piece is level with that piece. And I'm starting here instead of ready at the very end, 'cause I don't wanna make this corner any lower than it is. And I'm just starting to cut into that piece here. So now let's see what this happening at this corner. This piece is a little bit higher than this. Oh, we got all the opportunities here to plane all the way around. So which way should we make the plane go on this piece. I look at the grain on the inside here, and it seems the growth rings are fairly parallel to the top. So it probably, just probably, it doesn't really matter which direction I go. So for convenience sake, I'm gonna go this way. One lick. Let's what happens. Any tear out? Not really. So I'll try it again. Nice and smooth. Now, all the pencil marks are gone here. All the pencil marks are gone here. I still have pencil marks left on this piece and this is still a little high then. So I can leave this corner alone and start the plane about here. Work my way to that side, like this until it just starts to kiss this board, which it just started to do. And now I can go down the length of this one. Okay, we look at grain direction again. It looks like the growth rings are rising this direction. So I'll go that way. I mean, you never know how this is gonna all work out. You just gotta be prepared for everything. And this is higher than this, which I can feel. So let's go all the way down here and see how that works. Yeah, just starting to hit the marks on this piece, leaving that alone. So how about going on this piece again? If I recall, we had to go your way on this. So this is where it gets a little tricky, 'cause you're gonna come out over this piece, and you don't want this to chip out. So just gonna sand it a little more like this, a little bevel on the edge there will prevent tear out. There we go. So I've gone all the way around now. And the next step really is to find out if the top is level, because when we put the lid on here, we don't want the lid, which we assume is level itself, to wobble on this thing. So if I put this on a flat surface, just assume this is real flat. What you wanna do is to see if it rocks corner to corner at all. And if it does, which it doesn't in this case, a small miracle, then you're gonna want to do some more planning to get the corners right. So let's put this back in here, because we want to sand this a little bit also. And I always use a narrow sanding block like this with a cork bottom on it that I made in my shop, rather than a wide block, which is more tippy. So this part is kind of a no-brainer. Just sand all the way along here, neat side, you know, until any marks you may have left with a plane are gone. And see there's one mark right here. After sanding this side, I can see that some sanding dust has filled in and turned white some low spots on the wood, little divots, some tear out. So the question is, well, what do you do about it? We wanna get rid of it. So there's a couple of options here. One is that you can just continue to sand the heck out of the whole thing, which is okay. But you know, the reason I use the plane to begin with, rather than just seeing this whole thing, is because a plane will make the surface smoother and straighter than sandpaper will. Sandpaper, no matter how carefully you hold your block, will tend to round over everything eventually. A plane will make it nice and straight and smooth. You'll catch all the low spots. You'll end up with even a better looking surface under a thin finish. Under a thicker finish, it doesn't matter so much. Anyway, back to our tear out problem right here, what can we do about that? Well, as I said, the first option is just to continue to sand in the heck out of that spot, which is acceptable. Or I could turn this box around, and I'm doing this just for my own convenience, plane in the opposite direction, because it was going this way that made the tear out. And sometimes, in a piece of wood, you'd think that the grain direction is always going the same way on every board, and it's certainly not like that. In an ideal world, it would be, but in the real world, grain can change direction, go up and down like this, you slice the line through that. You got grain that changes direction every inch or so. So I could try planing the opposite direction right here and see what happens. You can see that white spot starting to go away, but you're really never sure whether you've conquered the tear out or not until you sand. Sanding reveals all. And when I'm sanding, by the way, I'm using a really fine paper. This is 220 grit paper, which is kind of the the last paper you would use if you were sanding through a series of grits. So the point is to plane the surface as best you can to make the surface as clear as possible, not clear, that's kind of fuzzy, but what I'm doing is cutting the cells of the wood cleanly with the knife in the plane, the blade in the plane, and that makes their ability to reflect light the best. So a very light sanding is essential for me whenever I plane, because that reveals any little problems I may have encountered with tear out. And here now, I see in this a little more, I can see there's white specks right here. It's just a subtle touch, but that means there's a little bit of tear out right there. Now, here's another method for dealing with tear out, and that is to use a scraper instead, because the scraper is high angle of attack means that you won't get more tear out no matter which way you go. With a plane, you always have to go with the grain. With a scraper, you can go against the grain, with the grain, it doesn't really matter. So I'm gonna use a card scraper, and this technique is simple. I'm just gonna not even bend it. Just typical. I'm just gonna pull it across this edge until those white spots disappear. Now they're gone. And verify that there's no tear out left there with my fine 220 grit paper, and that's all done. I left a little couple of marks in the plane blade going across the grain, and they're all gone. So we are good all the way around. The last thing I wanna do, as long as they have the vise way open, is to turn the box over. And I wanna ease these sharp edges along here, 'cause you don't, as I said before, you don't want sharp edges anywhere. And one really quick way to do that is just to use a scraper, pull it at an angle all the way across here like this. And then give that a very light sanding. And we're good to go. So just to recap what I was doing before, the technique of using a block plane when you're going around the perimeter of a surface like this, is a little tricky. You don't wanna push so hard that you'll blow out the grain on the opposite side, so you probably saw that, as I was planing, I kind of slowed down and even wiggle the plane a little bit to help ease it through its cut. 'Cause you just don't want to keep on going and have this chip out badly. So I also skewed the plane like this to get better support on the opposite piece here as they went across here. And as I said earlier, that skewing the blade lowers the effective angle of attack, so you don't have to use as much force when you're planing through a surface like this. It makes it easier. And I'm also holding the plane between my thumb and forefinger. And that helps me to balance this on a narrow edge. So learning to use a plane like this is a skill that takes time to develop. You really have to just take some practice boards and kind of have at it until you learn the memory of how to hold the plane and how to push it. Well, now that we're done with the base of the box, we can set this aside and move on to the lid, which is gonna have a lip all the way around it, so the lid fits exactly in here, and a chamfered top, and I'll tell you, I've developed a really neat jig for chamfering that top that's gonna make life a lot easier. Just you wait.