Woodworking follies

I spent much of yesterday in the basement, attempting to build a corner bookcase. In the process, I think I managed to make enough mistakes to add up to a regular month of work. As I've mentioned before, I'm making a set of bookcases for my office, and the work hasn't been progressing very quickly (more through lack of free time than anything else . . . at least, that was the excuse I used to use).

The corner units will have fixed shelves, rather than adjustable shelves like the normal bookcases, and frame-and-panel doors because the space is too awkward to use for regular book storage anyway. I'm already expecting the doors to be quite a challenge, based on how the main carcass has gone so far.

The front of the unit needs an angled face, to allow sufficient access to the interior space. I hadn't given much thought to how to cut the shelves to create this angle, and it turned out to be "interesting". The panels were too big to cut the angle safely on the tablesaw, which would normally have been my first choice. The circular saw would have done the job, but even with a "finishing" blade, the circular saw leaves too rough a cut. I ended up pulling out my old jigsaw with a fine-tooth blade to do the job.

I marked my cut line, clamped a guide to the line and then started the cut. About six inches into the cut, the saw started jumping into my hand, which isn't normal on any cut. I stopped the saw and tried to pull the blade out of the cut . . . and it wouldn't come out. The blade had bent into the guide and locked itself into the "good" side of the cut line. I had to force the damned thing out, leaving a pretty obvious gash in the workpiece.

I foolishly tried a second blade, which didn't even get as far as the first one had before it bent and bound in the cut. I ended up having to rough-cut the rest of the line with a Japanese pullsaw. Ironically, the handsaw left a better edge than the "finish" blade in the jigsaw had done, but I was still left with that ugly gash where the jigsaw blades had given up the ghost.

I thought to myself that since I just had to "neaten-up" the edge, I could use my router with a template-guided bit to produce a clean, straight edge. And it was perhaps the first good thought I had on this particular stage of the project. I'd recently bought a big (for my router anyway) 3/4" template bit, so it was the obvious choice for the task. I put the bit into the router collet, tightened up the collet nuts, and then had a mental image of turning on the router and the router — and me — spinning around the bit. It wasn't that bad, but I now really have to get myself a router with a "soft-start" feature: there was a very strong twist as the router started with that big hunk of steel and carbide in the collet.

End of the long, pointless story right? Well, not quite. You see, I'd carefully chosen a good, straight piece of MDF to use as the guide so that the bearing on the router bit had a sturdy edge to bear against. And it worked well. The second time. Because the first time, I'd used simple hand-clamps to hold the guide to the workpiece . . . and that big router bit had just pushed the guide about an inch back into the workpiece before I realized I had a problem. Now I had a lovely deep 3/4" wide, 1" deep gouge in the shelf. And there was no way to hide it.

At this point, I was ready to have a nice bonfire, but another mistake came to my rescue. For once, two of my mistakes actually worked to cancel one another . . . you see, I had cut the shelf too big for the space in the cabinet it was going to occupy, so I had to trim it down anyway . . . and that gouge was just outside the area that I needed to trim. After a quick trip to the tablesaw, I was able to start again with the router, this time using stronger clamps to hold the guide to the workpiece. It worked like a charm.

On to the next folly.

Because Jon is always niggling me about my trust in wood glue (he feels that any wood joint needs a mechanical reinforcement because the glue might eventually fail), I felt I should use biscuits to assemble the portions of this carcass which would never be visible. Biscuits (or in some areas "plates") are small pieces of compressed wood shaped like a flat football. They're available in several different sizes, but as I was joining 3/4" thick plywood, I used the #10 biscuits.

Biscuit joinery has a lot to be said in its favour: it's fast, neat, and accurate. It's almost completely replaced dowel joints for this kind of assembly, because the biscuits are much more forgiving of minor misalignments in the slots than dowels ever could be. The biscuit joiner is basically a cutting disk on a plunger: you align the fence against the workpiece and push the joiner into the wood to scoop out an oval slot. It's practically fool-proof. Note that word "practically".

I was careful: I measured and marked all my workpieces before doing anything else. I clamped things into place to be sure that the slots would align exactly. I did it all "by the book". I even did a "dry" assembly (without glue) to ensure that everything fit properly and there would be no problem. It all fit together just the way it should.

I took it all apart and started applying glue and inserting biscuits. As soon as the glue touches the biscuit, it starts to expand, which locks it into the slot you cut into the workpiece. It works very quickly, so you need to be fast once you've started a glue-up (more so than with regular glue-joints because of that expansion in the biscuits themselves).

I got all the biscuits glued in, started putting the matching faces together and pulling the joints tight. It was looking good . . . except for the middle shelf. It refused to align and was preventing the rest of the carcase from seating. I tried applying clamps, but nothing was working. The glue was setting up and the biscuits were locking in place, but the faces and edges were not touching. I was panicking (Elizabeth said I was sounding like Darren McGavin as the Dad in A Christmas Story during his battle with the furnace).

Just as I was about to totally give up, I noticed the reason for the shelf not fitting: I'd somehow put it in upside down so that the slots on the opposite sides were not aligning. It took me nearly as long to get the shelf out, and caused some minor damage to the almost-glued-up unit, but once it was out of the way, the rest of the job was simple.

After the glue had set, I was able to cut the exposed biscuit-halves using a Japanese-style flush-cut saw, and today I'll have to re-mark and re-cut new biscuit slots to get that shelf in, but at least I was able to salvage the major pieces of the unit.

Today is round two.