At The Shop (9/26)
Yet another new feature to the blog! Every Friday we will be posting a nice and concise recap of everything that went on in the shop and the office during the previous five days. Whether it is a shop project, a customer’s job, design work, or some aspect of the business end of things, here is where you can read about each week’s events.
Shop Projects:
Router Tabletop
This week saw a complete overhaul of1 the tabletop to our router table. About three years ago I bought a shaper/router table from Grizzly tools. It seemed like a great purchase and for the most part it has been a great tool, but after extensive use, we found out it had some critical issues that detracted from its overall usefulness.
The first and largest issue was the size of the tabletop or, more appropriately, the minuteness of the tabletop. The top measured just 18″ square and when you add a fence on top, the workable surface shrank significantly. For most applications the surface area was not an issue, but when I was shaping parts for the latest coffee table I built, or dovetailing a large turned leg for a pub table, it presented some issues that had to be worked out. So, the old top was replaced with a 34″ wide, 28″ deep work surface. The top was built from two layers of 3/4″ MDF, trimmed in oak, and laminated with a piece of scrap Formica. I also included three t-tracks as you can see. A huge improvement!
The second improvement was making a new fence and this solved two issues in one. The stock fence was very short, 3″ tall, and did not provide as much vertical support as we needed. The fence also had a very limited range of travel fore and aft, once again somewhere in the ballpark of 3″-4″, which was the biggest frustration of all. When routing the dovetails on the turned leg for the pub tables, I actually had to create my own fence system since the stock one would not back away from the router bit far enough. The new fence has a huge 13″ range of fore and aft motion, is 8″ tall, and has a built in t-track to accommodate any stop blocks and other jigs necessary.
Even though the creation of a new top didn’t solve every issue with this shaper/router machine, it will make it so much more versatile, useful, and easier to work with!
Mortising Jig
The next shop project we tackled was a new mortising jig. We already have a jig to route out mortises, but it really only works well on large pieces of material. The jig worked great on the latest dining table, but when building the mirror frame, we realized it was almost impossible to mortise small pieces. The original mortising jig attached to the plunge router and routed out material by moving the entire unit along the workpiece, which is a very difficult process for small, skinny, or odd shaped pieces.
The new jig, taken from a plan on Fine Woodworking’s website, brings the work piece and the router to the jig, rather than the router and jig to the workpiece. The jig consists of a flat surface that slides fore and aft, allowing the mortise to be lined up on the workpiece, two clamps that hold the piece securely in place, and two stop blocks that limit the travel of the router. Once all adjustments are made, the plunge router is set onto the jig, the motor is started, the bit is lowered, and the mortise is routed. No more balancing the router on the workpiece struggling to keep it level. This jig allows for perfectly accurate, repeatable mortise cuts., which is a necessity for furniture building.
Customer Projects:
We are also continuing to work on a custom easel and picture frame for a client. The easel parts are being turned and carved by a company in New York and we are mortise-and-tenoning, assembling, and finishing the them. Currently the parts are still in the design phase, but as soon as they are in production we will post drawings of the final design and our progress.
Quotes:
As usual we had a few quotes go out the door this week, including our first ever repair job and one for a huge built-in entertainment center. The repair quote is pretty simple, involving minor strengthening and re-gluing of two dining chairs. Hopefully both quotes come back as orders soon!
Business:
On the business side of things we have been busy! Once again, I have made dozens of sales calls to interior designers in surrounding markets, introducing them to our company and what we do. It can get pretty tedious, but is necessary. Speaking of tedious, back when we began J. Alexander Fine Woodworking, we created a new and separate Quickbooks file to track all the finances. Well, six months later, my father and I have decided to bring J. Alexander under the already existing Patchin Enterprises corporation, rather than running it as a standalone business. Well, this means I get to take six months worth of J. Alexander financial data from one QB file and merge it into an already existing QB file. There is no easy way that I know of. It requires manually transferring of every order, bill, check, and deposit ever entered! I am seriously dreading this task!
So, that pretty much wraps up what happened around here this past week. Thanks for reading and I hope you are looking forward to next week’s report.