A Quick and Basic Frame Saw

I bought some rough cut green oak from a local supplier early this spring, for making into some plant trellises and a little perch on a maple tree for the kids. Feeling that this by itself was not enough of a challenge apparently, I decided to try to do a bit of carving on the tops of the posts to make these installations more interesting.

Rather like when I tried to carve the transition pieces for the handrail on my back stairs, I quickly realized I am a terrible wood carver. When I'm trying to remove material, I'm constantly feeling like it is going poorly. I feel as clumsy as if I were trying to stack up marbles with chopsticks while wearing wool mittens. One thought that is difficult to banish is "If only I had a different tool this would be going better...".

With the handrail I ended up using a carving wheel on an angle grinder, but I wanted to try to stick with hand tools on this project. One issue was that the green oak in thick sections will quickly load up even a coarse coping saw blade. My carpentry sized ryoba does pretty well, but the blade is wide so it can't turn in a cut very much. A pruning saw does ok, but mine is not as sharp as it could be and the blade is still pretty wide.

I had the idea of using a bow saw type blade with gnarly teeth to do some of the rough material removal. Bahco/Sandvik makes some nice ones in 530mm length, available from Amazon. I bought one for green wood, one for dry wood.

Now we just needed something to hold the blade and tension it. I sketched up a frame for the blade in Inkscape, printed the parts on large paper and cut them out with scissors to make templates. You can download the SVG file here.

Some well seasoned beech wood was pulled from my stash and chopped to length.

Marked around the template pieces.

Roughed the parts out with the bandsaw.

Sanded the cut edges, eased the corners with the router, then sanded the faces

I made some through mortises using forstner bits on the drill press

followed by some chisel work.

The matching tenons were done with a dozuki saw

and a chisel to finish things up and tune the fit.

The fit and quality of the mortises and tenons leaves something to be desired, and I had cut the center brace piece too short to be able to make the tenons come all the way out the far side of the end pieces.

I made the best of it and figured it would be ok. I beveled the inside edges of the exterior side of the mortises to come down to the meet the end of the tenons, which makes it almost look like I intended them to be short.

For the top tensioner, I used some stainless 8mm OD tubing I had sitting around, which took a nice internal thread for an M6 flat head stainless screw.

The blade is retained with some stainless dowel pins, which fit snugly in cross drilled holes in the wood.

After some test fitting, I finished the three wood pieces with three coats of Waterlox.

The blade actually stretches more than I had anticipated and I had to cut the tension tube at the top a little shorter. Still could use more trimming in fact to get more tension, but the shorter it gets the more poorly the tenoned center brace fits the side pieces.

How is the performance? Well, I quickly determined having this saw is not making me better at carving. Ugh! But on the plus side I have a handsome homemade saw hung up in the shop, and Child 3 had fun doing the project with me.

Herb Basket from scrap Red Cedar and Canvas

We were going to a saturday afternoon party at my work friend Branden's house, and I planned on bringing along some spring garden stuff as a little gift. But what to bring it in? An old plastic bag? Hmm... I've got all those scraps of clear red cedar in the basement which I'm generating by building our fence...



I doodled up a design in Inkscape one day while I was eating my lunch. You can find the vector file here, with scale of 1 pixel = 1mm.

To make cutting out the patterned pieces easier, I made a full scale version of these pieces.

I printed this and cut out the pieces with scissors, then traced around them with pencil on the wood. The bandsaw made quick work of the cutting out, and my block plane, spokeshave, and sander smoothed out the saw marks.

I knocked it together with minimal work mostly on Friday night using the stainless torx drive wood screws I favor for nearly every purpose fit into predrilled holes.

The width looked a bit much, so I redid the handle to fit in a different way and thus make the basket narrower by 38mm. Also, using 19mm thick wood for the two bottom pieces looked chunky, so I used a scrap of about 12mm thick spanish cedar.

During sanding I accidentally knocked the frame off the table and the handle broke, so I redid the handle to make it stronger, and put a bit of epoxy in the joint before screwing it together. Probably this basket is still too fragile and it could use epoxy in the other joints and an even stronger handle design. Red cedar does split relatively easily, so maybe next time I'll use a piece of cherry or beech for the handle. A stretcher piece running longitudinally between the two bottom cross pieces would also help with strength and wouldn't add much weight. A few coats of waterlox wouldn't go amiss. Eh, maybe next time!

After sanding, I took the frame upstairs and made up a quick lining with some pre-washed cotton canvas I had in my fabric stash.

 Running short on time, I didn't do the best job and did not even take the time to wind a bobbin and change the thread on my sewing machine. But it was soon finished and secured to the frame with stainless screws (not torx unfortunately; those were too long) and stainless countersunk washers.

I left one end of the canvas liner open, to allow long items like green onions, to stick out.

Child 3 and I went outside to cut some green onions, sorrell, mustard greens, tatsoi, and tokyo bekana.

These were bunched up with rubber bands.

Child 1 made some labels with her calligraphy pens,

which I soon learned were loaded with water soluble ink :(

Ready to go, only an hour late to the party!

Two custom cedar storm doors

I needed two storm/screen doors for exterior entry doors at my house. Previously I had bought a custom spanish cedar door with matching storm unit from Vintage Doors, which was very nice but quite expensive. I got a quote from them for these two new storm doors for about $1600, which I felt was going to be painful to shell out. Pricing out two doors worth of 25mm spanish cedar at Anderson McQuaid indicated I would need maybe $300 worth of wood to do the project myself, and there are only a few joints to worry about, so I decided to just build them.

A Contoured Hand Rail

One of the last things I needed to do to close out a building permit I opened 6 years ago was to make a handrail for the back stairway from the kitchen down to the back door. There was only rail for a little bit of the stairs when we moved in, but the building inspector said I should have a rail. Of course I had to make this simple sounding project into a complex journey.



The space is challenging to work with, rail wise. The stairway itself would not meet modern code; it is too narrow and the winder steps are not wide enough. I suspect it may also be too steep. Putting a rail in it makes it even narrower and harder to carry things up and down, so I wanted to minimize the passageway width that would be taken up by the rail and wall supports. The slope described by the points where the tread nosing meets the wall changes as the stairs go from straight to winding, which means the rail must also change slope midway up the wall.

A typical home depot stair rail would be much too big for the space. I could have used a dowel rod, but I felt I wanted a profile that was both classic looking as well as narrow. The partial rail that remains in the top of the stairway has a nice profile, and I found a rail with a similar profile at J.P. Moriarty, a small molding shop down the street from me in Somerville which specializes in historical millwork. Unfortunately, the profile I wanted is not a stock part, so with setup charges it was going to cost me about $800 for 8m of rail. The eye watering price combined with a very long lead time led me down the path of thinking: "Hey, I could just make that...". Yeah, we all know how that goes!

The flooring in that area of the house is soft wood, probably flat sawn longleaf pine. To fit in with that, I picked up some lengths of tight grained clear fir from Anderson McQuaid and glued them together to make a cross section big enough for the rail profile.

I made a drawing of the major features I desired on the rail, which I thought I could work using the table saw, router table, some antique molding planes, and sandpaper. I didn't end up making exactly this but it captures the general idea. Units are in Stupid:

Straight Rail
The table saw got it started with a series of 45 degree cuts.

Then a large diameter core box bit on the router table, followed by a large diameter roundover.

Then some hand work with an ebay antique round profile molding plane (which needed a lot of sharpening to make usable),

and a bead profile molding plane

A bit of work with the block plane, and finally some sanding. The fir is quite splintery, which I learned well while hand sanding in the quirk bead with a folded piece of paper.

While perusing the code stuff on the internet, I realized my handrail would not be code compliant; it needed to be thinner at the top and with a deeper inset closer to the top to make it even more grippable. So I had to remachine most of it again the next day after planing it down some more.

The straight rail sections turned out well and they were not that hard to make. So far so good.


Joins and Ends
The inspector said you cannot have the ends of rails hanging in space, they must join to other rails or terminate against the wall. The principle being that your clothes might get caught on a loose end and cause you to fall down the stairs.

Mitering the rail for this would be the obvious thing to do, and that works ok for a dowel rail. But with a profile rail needing to join at corners with the rail at different angles on adjacent walls, the join would be pretty ugly. And in my opinion the most elegant rails have smoothly contoured joins. I aspired to make an elegant rail, even though it is just for the back stairs.

I bought the polished nickel finish rail supports from Crown City Hardware. After consulting some online resources to see how high the handrail should be from the tread nose, I started laying out the supports on the wall. Keeping within the code range, I could make the rail work in 4 segments on 3 walls. This meant I needed two complex joins (for the corners of the walls), one simple join (for the change in rail slope on one wall), and two end terminators.

My big idea for making these pieces "easy" was to glue up cheap doug fir 4x4 from home depot, and to install the rails against the blocks.

Then I could draw in how I wanted the blocks to be shaped to bridge between the rails:

Take them out for shaping, then put the rail back together again.

Then repeat with refinements. A few kinks came up with this plan, as usual..

First of all, since I had to thin the rail for compliance, I no longer had enough meat on the bottom to use a regular handrail connector bolt. If I were doing this again, I would thin the top grasping section, while leaving more material at the bottom for the bolts. My substitute was to use pocket screws.

I wanted to have the rail be removeable for painting, etc., so I made the rail in three sections. Joins within a section were done with a glued spline (later I realized I put the spline grain the wrong way, dang it) and pocket screws with plugs. Between sections, just the pocket screws. This worked ok, but probably not as convenient and effective as rail bolts.

Rough shaping of the joins and ends was easy to accomplish on the bandsaw. But when I got down to the carving needed to make the rail profile on the contoured pieces, I got hopelessly bogged down.

The doug fir was a terrible choice for carving. The grain is widely spaced, with the ring being hard and full of resin, so relatively tough to cut with a chisel. The wood between rings is super soft and doesn't slice but instead crushes and tears like cork. The combination of these two material domains made life extremely difficult. Cutting with a chisel or gouge is hard because the instant you get through the sticky hard ring, the tool plunges into the corky layer and rips it up. Abrasives attack the corky domain preferentially, so after sanding you are left with a ribbed surface instead of a flat one.

I should have just used cherry or something for the entire rail and joining sections. Maybe it would have cost a few hundred extra dollars in wood, but I spent more than this on tools alone trying desperately to solve this carving challenge. Carving the inside curve of the corner joins presented special difficulty since access with the gouge was limited.

I wasted loads of time and money buying, sharpening and fighting with a whole slew of gouges, spoke shaves, and chisels:

Also tried rotary burrs in my die grinder (like a big dremel), but these were far too slow at removing material. Finally I tried a power carving wheel on my angle grinder. The salesman at Woodcraft recommended a spiky tungsten carbide wheel called the Holey Galahad, rather than the chainsaw toothed wheel I had initially gone in for.

This worked very well on doug fir and finally let me make some progress. Still not easy, but I got it into some semblance of the right profile.

Just clamping these sections to work on them was difficult.


Results
Becky had taken the kids to her parents' for the week, and I took vacation to work on the house. I had grandiose plans about all the stuff I could accomplish in a whole week alone at home, but I easily spent half the time struggling with these rail join pieces. Very frustrating! I didn't even finish this rail by the time the family returned. Child 3 helped me do the finishing and a few last reinforcements. Here he is helping me install it.

Child 1 tries out the new rail.

So now the rail is in.

The quality of the carving on the joins is borderline embarrassing,

but I think I can live with it.

Besides, I already spent way too much time on this rail and I can't stomach spending more on it. So I'm going to declare victory and move on. If I ever make another handrail, I'll be in a good position to do a better job with a lot less blundering around.