Caution, Low Flying Jatoba (JFL Part 5)

The structural part of the lamp is done to a point where I can get measurements for the inner pieces.  So it's time to move on to the part that makes the lamp interesting.  The detail work that covers the paper screens.

I start by cutting the four vertical rails to length.

And cutting the eight horizontal rails to length.

I'm going to half lap the verticals into the horizontals and each side is going to have the vertical rail offset to the left.  This means that the dado for the top and bottom horizontal rails needs to be cut differently.  To make sure I don't get confused I make a chalk line on each board where I'm going to cut the dado.  (Yes I'm easily confused.)

Here's the dado being cut into one of the top pieces.  There's lots of wood for me to hold onto the piece to the left of the blade here.

These dados don't go all the way through the rails.  The pencil line on the sacrificial fence is where I'm going to stop all of the cuts to make them consistent.

When cutting the bottom horizontals there's not a lot of wood left of the blade to safely hold on to.  So I adjust my setup.  With the Grr-Ripper and another board laying flat against the mitre gauge I can safely put these boards through the saw.

Here are all of the rails with the dados cut in them.

Now I've marked the parts of the vertical rails that are going to be notched out.  Again I didn't want to take any chances and cut the notches on the wrong sides.

Here's the setup I used.  The backing piece of jatoba on the mitre gauge is my test cut.  It's now going to be used to prevent the back of the rails from chipping out when they're being cut.

Here's a rail ready to be cut.

This inch and a half long piece of jatoba came flying of the tablesaw during one of the cuts.  It hit my safety glasses hard enough that I could hear it over the noise of the running saw, even with ear protection on.  I'm sure glad I didn't decide to, "just this one time" not put on my safety glasses.  I saw it coming too, but all I had time to do was blink as the jatoba missile  accurately honed in on my right eye.

The ends are all notched with no casualties.

I used a plane to clean up the burn marks on the rails.

Here I've used a plane to clean up the burn marks on one of the legs.

Now the pile of shavings indicates I've used the plane to clean up all of the legs.

What better place to store five foot long leg pieces than vertically?  Plus it's motivational to have the lamp partly assembled.

Now I'm cutting the notches out of the middle of the vertical rails.  These will hold smaller cross rail detail pieces.

I've upgraded my mitre guage.  I can make these cuts without risk of the wood bending by using the stop on the new mitre gauge instead of the fence.  The fence is a long ways away and would probably have deformed the rail if I ran the end along it.

Then all I need to do is flip the rail around and cut the second notch.

It takes a long time to sand jatoba and to make sure I do a good job and don't miss any sides I make a pencil mark on each face of the legs.  When the pencil mark is gone I switch down to a finer grade of sand paper.  To make sure I don't lose track of my pencil mark I align it with another mark I've made on the work bench.

I've lined up all of the horizontal rail pieces here and colour matched them.

Then I labeled each piece inside the dado so I can keep them properly paired up.

Here's a test fit of one of the sides to wrap up this post.

-G!

The last layer is the top layer (JFL Part 4)

I've been working my way from the bottom up on this project and now we've reached the top.  Much like the bottom the top is a square made of four pieces of jatoba mitred and biscuited together.

Here we have the top half cut out.

Using a square and a knife for marking I marked the next cut as precisely as possible.  This is the same procedure I followed on both pieces that make up the base of the lamp.

Once one piece is done I use it to measure the rest of the pieces.

Darn.  Out of the three squares I had to make it would be the top one that has a gap!

I used the hand plan to modify the angle on a couple of the sides to make everything join up tightly.

Next I ganged up the boards to sand the inner and outer edges.

Here I have everything laided out ready to begin the glue up.

Here's the glue up.  I put everything in the clamps then after twenty minutes I remove one clamp at a time, remove any glue squeeze out and put the clamp back on.

The next day after taking the clamps off I do a sanity check by balancing the top on the four legs.

Now I want to trim the legs to length so I tape them and clamp them together and cut all four at once.  It's nice to have a 12" mitre saw instead of a 10", it allows me to cut all four legs at once, insuring they are exactly the same length.

Here I've marked the center of each leg.

Now I've bored holes into the center of each leg.  Matching holes are drilled into the lamp's top.  Then dowels are used to join the two together.  The dowels will not be glued into the legs, that way the top can be removed so if there's ever a need the paper screens can be tightened or replaced.

Test fit.  It took the Ikea assembly tool to get the top seated.

Not bad!

Ok...maybe the holes in the legs are a little too tight.  I had to redrill the holes to get the broken dowels out.  I used sand paper on the replacement dowel to make them a little thinner.

Here's one of the holes in the top piece.  I've marked both sides of the join up with pencil so when I'm sanding I can tell I've got the join sanded down on both sides.  Next step is sanding the bottom since I'm not going to want to do it with dowels sticking out.

To fill those small holes with glue and get proper coverage I use a highly specialized and hard to come by tool.  It's a tooth pick.

Here the dowels have been seated in the holes.  There's a lot of glue squeeze out here.

I use an offset knife to clean up the glue.

Here's the top in place.  I've friction fit a few of the side rails in for effect.

That top took forever to make compared to how fast this project had been going.  The results are worth it.

-G!

It's like a wedding cake, you build it in layers (JFL Part 3)

Today we begin with the second layer of the base.  This one will have mortises in it to hold the legs firmly in place.  I cut the mortises over at the band saw.  I don't know why everyone always says 'over' at the band saw.  Norm said it on the New Yankee Workshop, Mark says it on The Wood Whisperer and it just felt right to say it here too.  It makes it sound like I have to haul these piece of wood a long distance to go to this special place where the band saw is kept.  In reality it's maybe than 6 feet from my workbench.

Honey if you need me I'll be 'over' at the band saw so don't bother trying to reach me!

Gluing and clamping is done the same way it was for the bottom layer of the base.

My test piece.  I used this to try out different finishes.  I've got Boiled linseed oil on one side and shellac on the other.  From here they look pretty similar.

Everything seems to line up nicely and sit flat in the picture below.

You can see the biscuit that's helping glue the mitered edges together sticks into the mortise just a little.  I cleaned that up with a chisel.

Look at that, I own a handsaw!  I sacrificed my jig for cutting dados to help make the tenons on the legs.  This piece helps keep the legs square as I push them across the tablesaw.

This is how I set up the saw to cut the tenons in into the ends of the legs.  The legs are over 5 feet long at this point.

This is what the tenon looks like coming off of the table saw.

This is a dado plane.  It's a hand tool that's used to smooth out wood to a fixed depth.

The shavings from the dado plane are cut free with a chisel.  This is repeated until the fit for all four legs has been fine tuned.

Here we can see the first leg fitted to the base.

I put it on the floor and that 1" by 1" hole is enough to hold the entire 5 foot leg up.

One down 3 to go.  The circle and numbers on the end of the boards is how I keep track of which one is custom fit to which mortise in the base.

All four legs are in set in the base.

In this picture I've clamped a stop block onto the mitre saw so I can cut all eight side rail pieces to exactly the same length.

Things are flying along at this point!  This project is going great!

-G!