Arched Garden Bridge

I have a lava-lined ditch dividing my yard with a garden and compost bin on the far side of it. The old 4x6 plank was a bit sketchy for wobbly seniors to use so replacing it was rather important. For this project I used 2 4x12 x 10' as the main beams and covered those with 2x6 x 4' planks. Here is how it went. 

Always looking for a deal, I picked up the 2  4x12's from the reject pile at the local lumber yard. These 2 were in that pile because they were curved - which suited my plans just fine. Fitting within the rectangular confines of 12" x 10' of the beam face, I pieced together a 22' pole that I used to scribe the inner and outer arcs. These are concentric and yielded about a 4x6 curved beam. 

To cut the curves, I bought a very nasty Diablo carbide tipped sawzall blade and started cutting. Working slowly I was able to get OK curves that I smoothed out with planes. The concave edge required I make a radiused plane body but I just rounded the bottom of a conventional kanna dai that I had. Worked fine for this rough task.  

Surely I did not need to cut dovetails into the beams for cross members, but my irrational ways have been on display on this blog for a long time. I wanted my cheapo beams to be parallel and not roll under load. I laid out the dovetails before I cut the curves. I used my Skilsaw to cut one side of each dovetail groove at 15 degrees but it only tilts to one side and these were stop dovetail grooves so I had to hand cut the other side and chisel the waste out. Slow. 

The cross beams were all resawed and ripped from some hefty cutoffs I had around. They are overkill but I wanted to get those cutoffs out of my shed (to make room for more cutoffs). 

Test fit. Getting heavier...

Next up was to notch out recesses for the eventual handrail posts. There would be 3 on each side of the bridge. A bit sparse and not what you would see at Nikko. 

These vertical posts are also from an old cutoff. While the bottom is square, I did taper the upper portion of the sides of each post. 

For the handrail itself, I ripped some strips of western red cedar and laminated those together with Gorilla Glue, using the beam as the form to create the curve. It sprang back a little after unclamping but that is actually welcome since it effectively increases the radius of the handrail curve. Tenons on the tops of the posts were transferred onto the handrails, which were then mortised. More Gorilla glue fixed the handrails to the posts. 

At this point I caulked and painted the bridge because we live in a rain forest part of the year. After that I had to wait until a stout visitor was able to help me carry the bridge up to the concrete abutments I had poured earlier. Some #4 rebar pins secured the bridge to the abutments. 

To plank the bridge I cut a bunch of 2x6 x 4' pieces of construction grade DF and took a 3" propane torch to them to make them "age" quicker and to match an adjacent shed. A couple coats of Copper Brown preservative made them very dark and able to shed water, but a few months will pass and they will lighten back up. 

I also cobbled together some rock and cement ramps to ease the transition to the bridge. I have since tried to hide the exposed concrete and that blue drain pipe but this is how it looked right after installation. In a few years it will be all dark and mossy. 

Mix and Match Sewing Table

The goal was to build a solid sewing table with an ample work surface - from a mix of kitchen cabinet construction leftovers, cutoffs, and other scrap I had in the shed. Of course, I had to put cabinets in the laundry room first, naturally. But after building kitchen cabinets and 2 vanities from scratch, I cheated and bought used cabinets for our laundry room to save time. That purchase for $500 yielded these sapele and birch ply cabinets (which I had to modify to fit and work for us): 

Intervening cabinet project.

The purchase also included another low sapele cabinet and a heavy 1 1/2" x 23" x 10' solid maple countertop - with a bar sink at one end. I cut off the gross the bar sink, dug out busted fasteners, sanded top and bottom, rounded over all corners and refinished this weighty countertop. It looked good, fit in our space, but I had nothing to support it. 

Maple countertop - from above. 

So I came up with these base units. Legs are 8/4 maple scrap, drawer rails are also maple. Drawer fronts are quality 3/4" beech ply and drawer boxes are mixed cheapo 3/4" birch ply.  

The external frames are mortise and tenoned and the drawer rails are 3/4" solid maple that are notched into the legs of the frame. No fancy drawer slides on this project. The drawers are simply not used that often, so wear should not be an issue. 

Surely you could replace the frames with all plywood, but that is not much fun. Here is what the frames looked like during construction. The upper rails of the frames are screwed to the maple countertop so I made notches in the top drawer rails to allow room for insertion of long screws. Finish is 3 coats of oil-based polyurethane. 

Conclusion: While this is a solid work table, many sewing tables have a well that the machine drops into to allow a for single flush work surface for sewing. I may still add a well, but it has not been a high priority item for my seamstress. 

Take on a TV Tansu

Mizuya tansu style, before final sprayed lacquer finish.

This was a piece I built recently from provided plans and for someone else's client. The wood is sapele "ribbon mahogany", either quarter sawn solid or veneered plywood. This piece is inspired by a mizuya tansu, but it is not constructed like the originals. It is a more modern build that incorporates all kinds of metal fasteners and Blum drawer slides. Eventually the cabinet was to have an electric TV lift installed into it. However, you could easily build this thing to suit your purposes. Of course I injected some mortise and tenon joinery into it to strengthen a few key areas in the frame. 

I had not worked sapele before so there was a learning curve for how to plane it with a hand plane and not have a lot of tear-out. As mentioned elsewhere, I do not have a jointer, so all solid wood parts were straightened and flattened on one side with a Veritas bevel-up jointer plane. 

The nugget of insight in this process is how to sharpen the plane iron. The thing that worked for me? Sharpen the blade at 50 degrees. This with the 12 degree Veritas low-angle bed give you 62 degrees - and you get a decent finish with minimal tear-out. You will need to sharpen frequently. I panned a lot of rocks and sand before I found that nugget on Reddit from an Aussie woodworker who works a lot of woods with interlocked grain. Cheers mate! 

Since the cabinet is 6' wide, 40" tall, and 18" deep, it takes some planning to build it in a small shop like mine - about the size of a 1 car garage. All plywood cutting had to be completed before assembly began. Don't know about you, but I like to have actual dimensions from an assembled frame before I go filling in the openings with expensive plywoods. So there was a lot of material and equipment shuffling throughout the build process, which slowed it down a bit. We make due. 

A picture is worth a thousand words. 

The build called for a solid 3/4 sapele top (grooved), frame, door and end frames, and drawer fronts. 1/4" plywood was spec'd for the door and side panels, and 3/4 ply for the bottom and removable back panels (for equipment access). All that added up to a fairly hefty cabinet - another consideration when assembling it solo. 

Ready for back panel fitting and drawer slides.

The door frames have open M&T joints at the corners and blind ones at the mid rail. Kumiko are 3/8" square and half-lapped and glued at all intersections. These are pinned into the frames and then the door panels are pinned to the kumiko. Carefully. End panels use 1/2" stub tenons on the rails to provide some shear strength and stiles and rails are grooved to receive the 1/4" ply panels.  

Close-up of end panel. 

The hardware lends some authenticity to the look of the piece. It was sourced from Morikuni Tansu Hardware Co. in Japan. They have a nice selection of furniture hardware and regularly ship internationally. See this link to check them out: 

  https://cabinet-hardware.morikunijapan.com/ 

 

Back panels are both removable via flat head machine screws and T-nuts. Here is the back before final frame assembly. The open slots you see are for electronics ventilation. That is a separate removable panel. 

And once the unit was sprayed with lacquer, here is the result: 

POC Bypass Doors

OK, been a LONG time since my last post, but here goes:

Our new entryway had a gaping unfinished closet doorway that was in dire need of some kind of door. Since the plan was to keep it looking sorta like a typical entryway (genkan) you might see in Japan, I picked out some straight grain Port Orford cedar from the wood shed. As is often the case, a limited supply of material impacted the design.   

The rough opening was unfinished sheetrock and framing that first needed to be trimmed out with POC jambs and casing. Because I did not want nail holes in the side jambs, I took the path rarely traveled and glued the side jambs to the framing. Of course I did my best to flatten and plumb that framing before doing so. I am guessing there is a better way to do this next time. 

The head jamb sits in a 1/8" rabbet atop the side jambs, but was added after the sides had set. I did dry fit everything beforehand and made registration marks to ensure decent fit later. It worked out OK. You could pre-assemble, but it is a bit unwieldly to handle while attempting to glue the sides...

A basic Johnson bypass door kit (big box store special) was used, but I bought a longer kit and cut it down since the rail length was custom. Install the kit track while also shimming the the head jamb to ensure it is straight and well seated on the side jambs. A simple POC trim strip covers the hardware. Screws are OK in the head jamb since they will be hidden by the trim strip. 

Doors: 

OK, so eventually I had the dimensions for the doors. I made them square and straight and made no effort to fit/scribe the doors to the side jamb oddities. 

Stiles were through mortised for the 3 rails, and blind mortised for the lattice support rails (3). The lower panels required stop grooves in the stiles and bottom and mid rails (not yet done in above pic). But the picky part of the project was cutting the lattice rails. These were notched for each of the lattice strips. So 15 strips per door, 2 doors, 3 rails each door = 90 notches. I cut the notch kerfs on the table saw then chiseled out the waste. Carefully. The lattice strips were just glued into these notches (and inserted in the mortises in the mid and top rails during final assembly). 

The lattice parts with tenons.

Rails and panel parts early on.

Another challenge was resawing the lower panel parts from a 6 x 6 chunk of POC on my wimpy 14" bandsaw. Since the final panel thickness was to be 3/8" and I have no jointer and had to manually flatten one face before pushing boards through a planer, it took a while. I did that flattening before I resawed off each piece. Resaw, flatten face of chunk, resaw next, etc.  

Panels were carefully glued up and finish planed to fit the grooves in the stiles and rails. 

2 panels before final trimming.

Dry fit test.

 

Weights press the lattice strips into the notches during gluing.

Frame glue up.

Once the two doors are glued and the excess tenon ends planed off, they were hung in the doorway track per the Johnson instructions and provided hardware. No finish was applied to the finished doors, I just left the hand planed surface. This is typical and allows the aromatic POC to add a pleasant smell to your closet and entryway. A year later and the doors seem to be standing up to the daily traffic and abuse - and they still smell pretty good.