Living on the Edge
In every project, there is at least one process that takes much
longer than expected. It doesn’t matter if it’s the fi rst piece
of furniture you’ve made or the fi ve hundredth, somewhere
between rough lumber and fi nished furniture is the point I call
"hitting the wall." When I estimated commercial millwork proj-
ects and people asked how I fi gured labor hours, I told them it
was simple. First, you fi gure out how many days something will
take. Then you change days to weeks and multiply by three.
Work on the reproduction of the Gustav Stickley poppy table
was moving right along when Christopher Schwarz and I had
a Friday-afternoon conversation about how little tables were
great projects. They don’t use much material, there aren’t any
doors to fi t or drawers to fuss with and they don’t take long at
all. Then he left town for a week. On Monday morning, I hit the
wall.
I readily admit that I, like most woodworkers I know, am really
awful about predicting how long it will take to make some-
thing. On Friday, I was on schedule: The parts were all made,
the joints were cut, my fi rst dry assembly went smoothly. Over
the weekend, the carving on the tops, where I usually get
bogged down, took less time than I expected, and on Monday
morning, it took less than an hour to handplane and scrape all
the fl at surfaces to a shimmering smoothness. And then I began
to work on the edges.
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What I neglected to consider was that even though the table
is small, the actual length around the perimeter is a long and
twisting road. Getting any one area smooth was easy enough.
Band saw and router marks were removed with a rasp. Rough
rasp marks were removed with a smaller modeler’s rasp, and
a cabinet scraper and #240-grit Abranet took care of the rest.
The problem was compounded by the shape of the top, shelf
and legs. Each turn meant a different direction to the grain.
The little buds on the legs, and the cut-outs at the top of each
leg went from edge grain to end grain and back again several
times in just a few inches.
I planned on a Danish oil and wax fi nish, and wanted the edg-
es as smooth as the top so that the color and texture would
be consistent. Each different type of grain and each transition
between grain types meant a slightly different approach, or a
different angle of attack. The tools that worked well in some
places would not fi t in others so I had to improvise with a dif-
ferent tool or work backward or upside down. When I put the
fi rst coat of oil on the table, I was happy with how it looked,
but at the same time relieved that it was over.
The back door of our shop opens to the loading dock for our
building. I like to work next to the open door for the fresh
air and good light. The loading dock is also the quasi-offi cial
smoking area for the building, and the smokers like to peek
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