Shopsmith Forums

NPNH

no picture-never happened

Dusty:

I can't think of a single project that went together.........perfectly. There is always something, that perhaps only you will ever know.

I'll have to admit that my projects go together much better know thanks to quality measuring equipment like the Starrett combination square, the Wixey digital angle gauge, and the Shopsmith dial indicator kit. With the power tools carefully alligned and "squared", my final cuts assemble much better. I'm also going to have to give kudos to my Incra 5000 miter sled. This accessory will cut boards square and to the exact lengths. The 5000 is money well spent.

Many woodworkers are under the impression that you must have a 6" or 8" or larger width jointer in order to flatten a board. Not so! I now clamp rough sawn boards to the bench and with winding sticks and hand planes I can prep a board for a trip thru the planer very quickly. My 4" Shopsmith joiner is now only used for edge jointing.

8iowa wrote:....
Many woodworkers are under the impression that you must have a 6" or 8" or larger width jointer in order to flatten a board. Not so! I now clamp rough sawn boards to the bench and with winding sticks and hand planes I can prep a board for a trip thru the planer very quickly. My 4" Shopsmith joiner is now only used for edge jointing.

Excellent method!!!!!

Dusty - All is not lost! There are at least a couple of fixes that will cover or heal any noticeable mis size. Even to your sharp eye!! I'll bring them up at the end of the post, but first want to discuss how that error happened.

I believe I found a couple of procedural errors that made it easy to come up with a sniped edge on a shelf. I believe the mis-shaped single cross piece (shelf) was caused more by procedure than machining. Here's what I picked up from your first post - - "I had planed and jointed all of the materials to be used. I very carefully cut all of the pieces to length." ---Then later --- "I ripped all of the materials at once using the same setup. I then passed each piece across the jointer to mill the edges. They were all smooth and square to the face. I did everything I could to get this one right but somehow I failed to do that. One shelf, at one end is too narrow. Not very much but definitely noticeable."

The first procedural error was to cut the length of the shelves prior to making sure both edges were parallel and smooth. If the shelves had been longer (by 3 inches or so) any snipe could be removed during cross cutting.

Assuming the shelves were too wide to gang mill the second edges with a planer, a better method at that late stage of shelf making would have been a hand plane or the conical sanding disk, rather than the jointer.


THE FIX(S)
In saying all this, I assume you were using solid wood. If this is the case, the upright of the the shelf could be sanded/scraped/planed to slope (or ease) the edge of the vertical to meet the cross piece. Sanding can solve many mis-fits.

Or you could make and add some molding to the front of the unit, covering the small error. Such molding could have a slim overlapping edge covering the gap, or you might be able to form the back of the molding to widen a little at the point of the narrower piece.

You can turn the case around, if you have not yet put a back on it.

One of the most time consuming operations in my shop is to come up with fixes to cover or hide errors. I'm remembering the six light cabinet door that I drilled on the opposite end for the door pull. Finally decided to rip that stile in half and attach a new half stile. You've seen the picture!

ANOTHER NOTE! Sometimes, the frugal mindset of wood workers, wanting to use as little wood as possible, will cause them to cross cut to length too soon in the total operation. This will save wood, if everything else works out, but the gremlins are always active. I've been there-done that!

Hi Dusty,

I was doing a lot of assembly today myself. One thing I like to do is a dry fit. This will show some of the problems before it is tooooooooo late to change them. You still can mess up when you do the glue up but at least a lot of the larger errors should not be there.

On my sand-ed project I was biscuit cutting oak trim for the table top and got my "a" table end "b" trim piece confused and cut the "b" part slots to fit the "a" end... Didn't take to long for me to find the error as they didn't match and since I had the part marked I'm glad I was test fitting as I went along. Got the correct "a" trim piece and got that matching the "a" end.

To fix the "b" trim part I had to glue a biscuits in the 3 slots which were wrong, saw them off flush and this morning I re-cut them in the right places. Since the joint are all inside no one is ever going to see the little error I had, especially since it all glued up now.

It is also true that hand crafted items often should not look "store" bought items. Some years back I posted some climbing bears I made. Since it is easy to make duplicate parts with the over head router and by mirroring them you can get them all to look pretty much alike. When I first made them 30 years before I was using a jig saw and a hand sketch so they were a bit more free form. The first one this time was done on the computer and adjusted to work with a 1/4" router bit and mirrored. When I looked at the first sample I didn't like it, looked to much like someone was stamping them out in a factory somewhere. Had to redo the jig so they were not quite mirror image and then I liked them... had that hand built look.

If it really bothers any one then say it is "art" and not a woodworking project... The artist touch and some obscure reference to vanishing points and perspective might earn your project a special place for its unique finer point of the shelf. Maybe a title like "The Third Shelf" might be work as well.

Ed

Dusty:
Go to a high quality antique shop and start looking very closely at some of the fine old antiques, some of which sell for thousands of dollars, built by "real craftsmen"...
If you don't start seeing plenty of misfits and glitches you are not looking close enough.
My wife has a walnut dresser that was an antique when she got it as a teenager. It has a dental molding across the top of the mirror frame. On one tooth it has a saw kerf that extends up about 3/8th of an inch up into the molding. Just on that one tooth. Oops.
I received a high quality walnut spindle bed that my grandparents bought new in 1934. If you lay in it and look up you can see where they had mis-bored one of the spindle holes in the bottom of the top rail of the headboard and moved over almost 1/4" and re-drilled it. Oops.
I was in George Washington's home last year (he was not home) and was looking at a lot of the furniture there as a woodworker and was kind of surprised at how poor the work was on a few pieces. If some of it had come from your shop you would have probably have hauled it off covered by an old tarp so nobody could see it.

mickyd wrote:... I look at it as if I just can't stand it, I can always remake it. With my candle lanterns, I accepted a couple of flaws that were pretty gross on a close inspection but now that they are completed and on the mantel, only a close inspection reveals them.

Made some nice shelves from Woodsmith plans (modified somewhat, for shipping concerns mostly) and sent to relatives. Later, my dad asked the key question: "how did you get everything so 'perfect'?"
The answer: "Yours is Version 6. Let's just say our house has no shortage of shelves."

{But when I got home and looked over at the shelf on the wall, it looked just fine.}

Have you ever been snipe hunting, or smoked a snipe? lol

[quote="dusty"]Well I found out what went wrong. No, not really. It sorta went as usual. There is no great mystery to be solved. The shelf was actually narrower than it was suppose to be]


Dusty,

Apart for referring to birds. Snipe also refers to the Jointer.

I had plenty of snipe from my Jointer till I discovered the knives were the same hieght as the outfeed table. I found if I set the knives .010 proud of the outfeed table, the snipe went away.

Brent

Hey Dusty!Chin up lad! I will bet you, in a year or so, you'll look at this project and smile. How hard that piece seemed back then! No one, and I mean no one is completely satisfied with our work. That's just how an artisans DNA is. But, with every little boo-boo, goof, bad technique will reveal itself to you, but only if you keep building and learning. The key is, in my opinion, is now go back, and figure out WHAT it was that caused the varied measurements, that you were so careful with, and still fell short.(or long!) I would bet you a million bucks, it was something in the process that went unoticed.When it comes to light, you'll say"OHHYEAH! That's what happened! Then you'll have actually LEARNED something, and next time,they will all be dead nuts accurate. I suppose my point is, I understand the "what am I an Idiot?" feeling very well. And now I'm gettin old, it's getting harder, just by nature! Just remember this, there are billions of dollars spent in the woodworking industry to "correct" some easily made mistakes. Power tools in general come to mind. They were born from the"why didn't I think of this sooner?" gene. I could not imagine how hard it was to cut a 26 inch white oak board into beautiful fretwork with a COPING SAW! Someone figured out a better way. They learned. I have a massive collection of colored touchup pens,colored wax sticks, all for bugga boos I get in my work. And no one has ever seen my goofs in 35 years of running a comercial shop. I have done the exact same thing you described, and more than once. It was always something I forgot to take in account while building. Don't get discouraged, and we all feel ya. jimsjinx