Router Table (Pt. 7)

I’m behind on getting updates on this project published, the following photos are from last weekend. While I didn’t get much accomplished, it’s starting to look like a router table. The two main things I got done where mounting the drawers, & sizing of the on of switch mount. I did one thing I won’t soon forget, chopping a mortise in plywood, murders a chisels cutting edge.

Waterstone flattening

I finally broke down and purchased some waterstones so that I could take my sharpening skills to the next level. In my opinion the only real drawback to waterstones is that they don’t stay flat. Thus as soon as I placed my order, I spent a little time searching the net looking for the best flattening method. Lots of methods exist, but the two most common are: a coarse diamond honing stone, or sandpaper on a surface plate.

While diamond hones will do a great job of quickly removing material they are notoriously unflat, and thus in my opinion not acceptable. I have a surface plate, and while it is flat, I don’t like the idea of constantly having sandpaper glued to it. Additionally a 70 pound surface plate isn’t very portable. What I finally decided on (shown below) was a hybrid approach.

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Finished shoe racks

I finished Rebecca’s shoe racks a few days ago, And tonight, I could no longer smell the finish, so it was safe to bring them inside.  I had originally thought about finishing them with polyurethane, but at the last minute, I decided to finish them with boiled linseed oil  cut with 50% mineral spirits. They didn’t turn out as nice as I would of liked, but Rebecca loves them none the less. The main flaw with the design is the dado joints used to join the top cross beams to the sides.  Getting all of them cut to just the right length and thickness was tedious.  Ultimately, I spent more time with chisels fine tuning the fit than I would have liked. If I had to do it again, I would use through dovetails.

Hard maple chisel mallet

I ordered some bench chisels earlier this week, but chisels aren’t very useful without a mallet to pound on them with. Instead of purchasing a mallet with my chisels, I decided to save my money and make my own. While watching a cubs game I knocked out this design in SketchUp. It’s pretty simple, the head is a lamination of 4 1/2″ thick boards, and the handle is 3/4″ thick stock rounded over with the router. The only non-trivial  design element was the wedged tenon that secured the head to the handle. Thankfully fine woodworking came to my rescue with this article about wedged mortise & tenon joints.

Assembly was pretty strait forward and only took a few hours  spread out over 3 days. The first evening I spent an hour or so rough milling the stock to size.  I spent about two hours in the shop on the second night.  I profiled the handle on the table saw using my dado blades, and then rounded over the edges at the router table. Making the head was a three step processes. The first step was to glue two 1/2″ thick boards together to make one 1″ thick board, that was then cut in half to form the two sides of the head.  Step two was to route a half thickness tenon into each of the head halves. The final step was to precisely glue together the two halves forming the head with a tapered mortise in the center of it. On the final day (yesterday) I finished up, by fitting the head to the handle, & applying a couple coats of boiled linseed oil.