sean.titmas

There is a visually transformative effect that mahogany goes through when viewed under Natural sunlight that can not be replicated under artificial light. While indoors and under artificial light, the mahogany takes on a brownish- red earth tone, however, sunlight turns it into a more shimmering, fiery red while possessing an intensity without being overbearing or nauseatingly unnatural. it kind of makes me want to cut a hole in my roof just so I can light up the table.

I think it’s been at least six months since I put the 3rd coat of tongue oil on the Korean rice chest. It’s been sitting in the corner of the living room and I’ve kind of forgotten about it, but today I decided to put a fourth coat of oil on it. The original plan was to put 8 or 10 applications of tongue oil, and at my current rate of one coat every six months, I should be done in another 4 or 5 years. 😆 I definitely think I’ll have to speed the process up a little bit.
I was experimenting with photographing and lighting the rice chest inside in the living room, but the light just didn’t seem to be strong enough or perhaps I just don’t know what I’m doing. But then I realized that nothing beats the greatest light source ever created, the Sun. I think this is the first time I’ve ever seen the rice chest outside in the sunlight, and I have to say I’m blown away by the color of this mahogany.
Once I put the final coat of oil on, I can then install the locking hardware that I made for it and I’m really looking forward to that.

Return to the land of the ‘porkroll, egg, potato, and cheese on a hard roll’ breakfast sandwich… New Jersey! Last week my brother and his wife and my sister and my niece and myself all met up in New Jersey to go visit some dead relatives and a few living ones. I’ve been to my grandfather‘s grave at his funeral, but while there, we also found my great grandfather, and my great great grandfather, who served with the New Jersey regiment during the Civil War. This was kind of like a scavenger hunt because we didn’t really know exactly where everyone was buried. We just had the name of the town that they were buried in, and they were scattered between the city of Paterson and Monmouth county, New Jersey. My great grandfather, John Titmas, was a silkweaver, and we got to visit the factory complex where he would’ve originally worked with One of these giant weaving looms. One of my grandfathers was a motorcycle patrol officer in Asbury Park, New Jersey. That’s a photo of me and my brother trying to pathetically re-create the cool factor that my grandfather exuded while sitting on his motorcycle in front of the Asbury Park convention center. I don’t think we even come close to being as cool as my grandpa. Also got to swing by a few of the houses in Belmar where I lived as a kid, plus my high school, Asbury Park high school Bishops! Despite the near frigid temperatures of 40°, it was definitely a successful trip. It’s always kind of weird going back and visiting places that you are more familiar with as a memory, then you are with the actual experience.

Fresh out of the oven. Although I might’ve overdone it a little bit because I went past the fiery red that I was aiming for and landed on chocolate mahogany. And I’m fairly certain I know where I went wrong. When it came time to flood the surface of the wood with the quebracho bark tea, I decided to mix up a fresh batch so that I didn’t run out halfway through coating the table. But instead of using a fresh container, I reused the old container that had 3 ounces of liquid left in it. The ratio is two scoops of powder to 6 ounces of water. Instead, I added two scoops, and then just filled up the already half filled the container up to the 6 ounce line. so basically I made a double concentration of tanic acid.
I think that may have been what caused the wood to turn so dark. but either way, what’s done is done and hopefully when I get some shellac and wax on this thing, I’ll find myself liking it more than I do now.
I asked the shop kittens opinion on the matter and she was more miffed at the fact that I woke her up then whether or not I overcooked my mahogany in the ammonia oven.

Polissior, quebracho, ammonia, and shellac, oh my!
Those are the basic ingredients that produced the finishing samples. Started with the polissoir to burnish the surface of the wood. Followed that up with some quebracho bark tea to elevate the tannin levels in the wood. Then it was on to the fuming tent with the ammonia for about six hours. after the wood had plenty of time to off-gas the ammonia, the surface was lightly burnished again with a 3M white pad before applying three very light coats of shellac. With the final step being a light burnishing of the surface with steel wool, wax, and mineral spirits to produce a warm satin sheen.
And in case I like the way the samples came out, I recorded the recipe on the back of each sample. Just so long as I can remember what all of those letter/number combinations mean.

Just remember, kids, safety third!
Y’all wanna take a guess at what king of science experiment I’m getting involved in?

Goodbye Anna Maria Island. Goodbye to 130 Andersen windows and 38 doors. Goodbye to 2000 linear feet of 2 x 6 bucking material and 3000 tap cons. Goodbye to 2500 fin screws and 1500 jamb screws. Goodbye to 550 sausage tubes of Dymonic sealant and 20 gallons of Protecto wrap masonry waterproofing. Goodbye to Rossbuilt construction’s latest luxury waterfront home project (always a pleasure to work their projects). Goodbye to awe inspiring beach front views and saddest of all goodbyes, goodbye to 6 delicious weeks of the Anna Maria General store, and their tasty hot sandwiches from the grill. (This one hurts the most!)
But all is not lost.
Hello to Siesta Key!(last photo) and Perrone Construction and their latest luxury waterfront home project(also always a pleasure to be a part of their projects)
Hello to 50 Andersen windows and 15 French doors. Hello to 8 ESW sliders(32 individual panels) and one 6’x10’ Eurowall front entry pivot door. Hello to homemade lunches and awesome inspiring beach front views.
And a most grateful Hello to another six weeks of challenges and opportunities that come with starting a new project

I think the beauty in using reclaimed lumber to build furniture is the fact that there are clues and artifacts from a previous life. Case in point, the lumber used for this table had originally lived its life as a door and therefore there are some screw holes and wooden dowels that need to be addressed. While it’s true that I could have worked around those apparent imperfections and chosen a pristine piece of wood, I feel that incorporating those “defects” only adds to the beauty, character and story of the finished table.

Hell Bent for leather! OK, maybe not that extreme. But definitely hell-bent for a leather top table. The original craftsman table had an emerald green ceramic tile inset on the top. Ceramic tile seemed like an odd option for a tabletop until I realized, after a little bit of research, that this technically wasn’t a table per se, but more of a plant stand. And so now the presence of ceramic tile makes sense. But I definitely prefer the leather option. The tricky part is getting the Poplar wood panel at just the right thickness so that when it’s overlaid with leather it will flush out with the surrounding mahogany. I figured the best way to do that was to dry assemble the table top and then use my router plane to gouge out around the perimeter of the panel exactly 1.2 mm below the surface for the thickness of the leather. Then I disassembled the table top and planed down the interior of the panel to match. And, of course, during all of the dry assembling and disassembling there was some minor damage that occurred to some of the edges of the table top pieces that required a Dutchman-like repair. Fortunately I saved the scrap cuts from the tenons so that the wood color and grain would be an exact match. I think once a finish is applied and the wood darkens a bit the repairs will be virtually unnoticeable, if they’re not already now. And as a sidenote, was anybody else in the dark about there being an eclipse today? No pun intended. Well, apparently there was and fortunately for me I had my eclipse glasses. I even held them over the lens of my camera phone to try to shoot some video of it. Not good quality but interesting nonetheless.

I used to say, “When the rubber meets the road”, but I think it’s more fitting now to say, “When the glue meets the wood”. Once I get to the stage where glue is involved, there’s really no turning back to fix any mistakes or to react to any poor planning on my part without considerable damage to the overall project. So to that end, I rehearsed the glue-up procedure like I was training for an acrobatic exposition. I rehearsed the moves to the point where everything had found a place, the clamps, the cauls, the wedges, the glue, the brushes, the glue dish, and even the scheduling of each movement. I even filmed a 10 minute video of the first glue-up so that I could go back and watch it, prior to the subsequent three glue-ups, to see if there was any place that I could make improvement. It may seem a bit obsessive, and I would agree with you if you thought that, but that’s the point for this journey, to analyze and reanalyze every step of what I’m doing in an effort to teach myself something new or correct old bad habits. And I think my efforts paid off because each frame that I glued up was done in a relaxed, methodical manner that produced good results, and it was actually quite enjoyable. Despite having thought of all of those factors, the one factor I didn’t think of was the shop cat. it’s part of her typical routine that when I am in the shop, she will jump up on the bench and give me the dead-eye look in hopes of getting some treats. Funny thing is though, she never once got up on the bench while I was doing the glue up. Maybe on some level that cat is smarter than me.

delicious lunch time

When the two Greek guys on the crew want to cook lunch for everybody, you say, Yes please and Thank you.

“You can never have too many clamps”. Yeah yeah yeah, blah blah blah. That’s a cute, saying and all, but what are you do when you run out of clamps in the middle of a glue up? Well, in this case, I just grabbed some rope and a couple of sticks and kind of borrowed the idea of a frame saw tensioner apparatus. After wrapping the rope around four times, and securing it with a knot, i then inserted a stick in the middle of the four strands and gave it a few twisty-turns, generating more than enough clamping force for the middle of the table legs.

POLLISOIR -vs- Sandpaper. Pardon my French, but it’s not even stinking’ close. Pollisoir for the win by a mile. Up until recently, before I started this journey a few years ago, sandpaper had always been my go to method for preparing a wood surface prior to applying a finish. And since I didn’t know of anything else, it seem to work adequately. But then I came across a blog by Chris Schwarz at @lostartpress where he extols the virtues of using a pollisoir to burnish the wood surface versus using sandpaper to abraid the surface. A pollisoir is basically a tightly wound hank of corn broom fibers that are used to burnish the wood surface by compressing the top layer of wood fibers. I was immediately sold on the idea, not only because of the illustrious results, but also because it doesn’t use my least favorite and somewhat expensive woodworking consumable, sandpaper. Now don’t get me wrong, sandpaper is not evil and it has its place, however, it’s just that I would prefer to find another more traditional way to finish the surface of the wood. and I’m quite certain I have found it. And I even found a gentleman by the name of Don Williams who sells them from his website, https://donsbarn.com/pollisoirs/ . Chris Schwarz also wrote a blog about using a stainless steel chain mail pot-scrubber to burnish wood surfaces. Those two items in combination with a simple card scraper burnishing rod, I’m now able to produce a beautiful sheen and a smooth, tactile luster to these table parts that I don’t even think is reasonably possible with sandpaper. i’m not sure specifically what the finish schedule will be for this table, but the last video shows what’s possible with just a little bit of pollisoir burnishing and some buffed out furniture wax.

R U serious!? Auriou hand cut rasps made in France. Pronounced like the letters, R. U. And yes, these are about as serious as you can get. For such a humble tool, it doesn’t get much of the limelight like some of my other woodworking tools, but it definitely has earned a place at my bench. During their manufacture the teeth on these rasps are struck one at a time by hand, giving them a uniquely human randomness to their pattern and it’s this pattern that makes them excel at doing what they do. Mass-produced machine cut rasps on the other hand, because their teeth are perfectly lined up in a row, tend to chatter around during use because of the deep grooves cut by successive teeth. Thereby making it less than ideal for producing smooth surfaces. I think it is a well-deserved middle finger to the cult of mass-produced modern tools that the imperfectly placed hand cut teeth on the Auriou rasps are by far the superior tool for the job. Their hefty price tag bares that out, but that is a burden I will gladly carry. And on a somewhat completely unrelated topic, I finally found a use for all of those nice tightly curled wood shavings that I’ve been saving. It’s a great fix for when you get carried away with the paring chisel on the tenons and the fit becomes too loose. just glue it to the cheek of the tenon and trim it to fit, and now the tenon fits with just the right amount of snugness.

Tiny dovetails. But to be more accurate, tiny sliding dovetails. Actually, tiny blind sliding dovetails. The brackets on the original table seem to have no other joinery or method of attachment other than just two finish nails securing it to the face of the table legs. This is one area where I decided to upgrade from the original method and use sliding dovetails. Not only for a more secure attachment, but also for the challenge of having to accurately cut eight of these little blind sliding dovetail sockets. At only a quarter of an inch deep, these dovetails needed to be cut accurately because there is not much material there to work with. Using a scrap stick of material with a 10° bevel down one side made it easy to accurately pare both the male and female parts of the sliding dovetail so that the resultant fit is extremely precise. I cut the male parts of the dovetail just a fraction of a millimeter oversized so that I could sneak up on a nice snug fit. And what really helped to achieve that fitment is this wonderful little rebate plane that I have. This was a gift from my brother Ryan from a recent trip to Bristol England, where he came across an old man with a shop who sold nothing but vintage woodworking tools that were used in the Bristol shipyards in the 17th 18th and 19th centuries. This one is from approximately 1840, making it close to 180 years old and by far, the oldest tool I own.

Todays view from the “office”.

You can chop mortises, you can chop broccoli, and you can even chop tenons. The grain pattern of this particular Mahogany follows the straight and narrow path which makes chopping these short tenons a viable option. And for as much as I love using the router plane to clean up the cheeks of the tenons , it is curiously satisfying and even quite efficient and accurate to use this Sweetheart era Stanley paring chisel to bring them to final dimension. Plus, I get to make cute curly cues with each pass.

After viewing and reading three of David Charlesworth‘s videos and three books I’ve come to realize the incredible level of precision that is possible with just a few basic woodworking tools that are set up in a specific manner, and used in a specific sequence. For example, the first photo shows the knife line left by the wheel gauge, if you look real closely, you can see that one side of the cut is perpendicular to the edge of the board while the other one is at a slight angle. As the bench plane takes shavings off of the top of that wood it eventually gets down to the perpendicular line, revealing the slightly polished beveled edge that the first red arrow points to. It’s at that point where there are two, maybe three more passes allowed with the bench plane to get to the bottom of the taper, leaving the piece of wood exactly at the right width +/- 2 thou inch. It’s almost as if the mark left by the wheel gauge is giving me a slight warning sign that I’m about to reach the gauge line and that I need to choose my “less than 1 thou thick” passes with the plane carefully. I thought I knew how to use a bench plane, but apparently there’s still a lot that I don’t know or that I’m just beginning to learn. The other set of photos that show the large tri square gauging the width of the leg assembly, both the top and bottom of the legs, shows that with a few precise stop cuts on the small 5 inch area of wood that joins the top stretcher to the legs. I’m able to adjust the width between the lower legs to be exactly what the drawings show. keep in mind, there is only one clamp holding pressure and it’s at the top of a 24 inch tall leg assembly and the only thing that is guiding the spacing of the lower legs is that small length of wood joint between the top leg and stretcher. Bonus point #2 is having a set of full size drawings so that I can actually lay the leg assembly on top of the lower stretcher, and use those inside faces as a guide to make my knife line for the shoulder of the tenons. this table is really teaching me a lot and there is such a fine level of precision that I’m aiming for, that I need to wear my reading glasses just so I can see the lines clearly.

You can keep your shallow and formulaic three hour superhero action movies, no, thanks. Besides, it takes me about 10 sittings just to get through it. But a three hour DVD produced by @lienielsentoolworks starring David Charlesworth, that’s just my speed. Not only did I watch it straight through, I’ve already watched it three times. I’m not sure if it’s my interest in the subject matter or the ease at which David talks about such a complex task, the cutting of mortise and tenon joints, but this is just my speed. Of all the joinery that I’ve cut before, this is the one that I thought I knew the most about, or at least had the most proficiency in cutting. After watching his video, I realized just how wrong I was, and how much there was I needed to learn. It was so good in fact, I even took notes.

We just took delivery of 130 Andersen windows @andersen_windows on our current job for RossBuilt @rossbuilt with 35 French doors and side lights to be delivered next week from @universalwindowsolutions Working with these trade partners is always an enjoyable process, and this one is shaping up to be no different. It’s always interesting working on the beach this time of year in Florida because the weather is usually supercharged, it’s either blistering hot and humid with the “feels like” temperature of 115 or we get afternoon thunder storms moving through with the occasional water spout. And as always, it’s a challenge to keep the 60 foot boom lift from getting stuck in the soft sand. but I’ve been here, doing this long enough, to really enjoy the work no matter the conditions.

Did somebody order bacon and eggs for their job site breakfast? Best way to start a new project.

If I had a profile on a social media dating app, the heading would read, “Single white male in search of woodworking advice”. but seriously though, anybody have any thoughts or suggestions about the length of these tenons? I’m referring to the bottom portion of each of them where there are curves that expose a lot of short grain on the piece entering the mortise I’m concerned that the short grain at the very tip of those corners, especially the one on the bottom of the table, might cause issues with cracking or chipping in the long term. Should those tenons extend all the way to the bottom of the arc, or is what’s outlined in red sufficient?

Spoke shaves and a rasp for a fine fair curve. After using the one master leg, that was previously brought to shape, it was only a matter of tracing the curve on the remaining seven and using the coping saw and a tenon saw to cut out the bulk of the waste. Further refinement of the leg was accomplished by using first, a hand stitched rasp to moderately smooth out the curve, and than that was followed up with both a flat and curved spokeshave to just kiss the pencil line. Because each individual leg curve is unique in its shape, and slightly different from the others, I decided to gang four of them up at a time and take a few more passes with the spokeshave to get them all similar in shape. I don’t think I would have enjoyed the process nearly as much if it weren’t for my two beautifully designed and flawlessly made spokeshaves from Lie-Nielsen, and designed by Brian Boggs. @lienielsentoolworks , @brianboggschairmakers And in case you were wondering, a toothbrush is the best way I have found to keep the tight, narrow throat and mouth of my planes and shaves free of chips and debris so that it doesn’t clog while using. While I am usually very critical of my work, I think the shop cat approves of my methods. Either that or she’s just trying to get my attention for a few more treats.

I can’t say enough good things about the crew of guys that I get to work with every day. They show up and put in 100% every day, and today was no exception. We had 28 sliding door panels that had to get moved from the pool cabana building up into the main level of the house. Each one weighing about 380 pounds. Since the front steps haven’t been built, yet, we decided to fly them over with the boom lift. It took us half a day Thursday afternoon to load the panels, and Friday morning we started installing them and we were finished before lunch. I say that’s a successful install.

Full scale drawings for the win! When I started this project and decided to draw the table in full scale, I really didn’t have an understanding of just how useful it would be, beyond just having a reason to buy some really cool new pencils. Thanks @graeskyecreative for recommending them. Being able to directly transfer dimensions or curves from the drawing to the actual piece of wood was a fairly simple process, and virtually eliminated any user error on my part. After book matching the leg stock and labeling them, the table legs were then laid on top of the drawing and the radius for the inside of the leg was scribed using my new Trammell points. The fact that I was able to precisely transfer those specific lines accurately from the drawing to the stock reassured me that this table, when completed, should accurately resemble my drawing. I think the next step will be to cut and finish the inside shape of the leg piece and then use that one as a template to trace out the remaining seven legs.