I recently completed a build of a small cabinet, following the course posted by the awesome Matt Estlea over at the Free Online Woodworking School. This was a step up in complexity from anything I had tried before, and I’m extremely happy with the result. Matt’s style of teaching is excellent and I highly recommend watching his videos to anyone interested in improving their woodwork. I posted a series of photos on Instagram.
As someone that has led software development teams for most of my career, I believe very deeply in the value of iteratively improving your processes. The core mechanic behind this is the humble retrospective. There’s many ways to do one, personally I like to stick with the basic 3 questions.
- What went well?
- What didn’t go well?
- What am I going to focus on fixing with the next build.
What Went Well?
- The school’s project tutorial is excellent. Matt walks through the process step by step, builds on earlier lessons and makes the whole process seem simple.
- The final product looks amazing! I chose some beautiful wood and despite many other issues and mistakes in the build, it really saved the project in the end.
- I am most proud of the finish. I really took my time, I used multiple layers of pure tung oil over a week. While it is a slow method, I think it’s totally worth it. I also put a final coat of paste wax on to finish. This final step also gave it a wonderfully soft feel to touch, which I wasn’t expecting.
- I made an early mistake with a measurement of the shelf, and it was short by about half an inch. To fix this I first tried to edge joint a small piece of walnut to the front. When I got to finally put things together this really didn’t work, the colour change was jarring. I pulled out my trusty router plane and made enough room to edge join another piece of maple as a final fix. I left the walnut to provide a strip on the shelf once the door was open. I felt like I turned a compounded mistake into something that feels like a feature.
What Didn’t Go Well?
A lot of what frustrated me here was really focussed on the wood choice I made.
- Figured maple is beautiful, but damn is it difficult to work with. All those beautiful ripples also indicate regularly changing wood grain, which my fledgling planing skills really didn’t have the experience to deal with. I almost backed out more than once. The secret is sharp blades, tiny amount of exposed blade (there were times I was scraping dust), and a short mouth (as short as possible so the wood is less likely to ‘ride’ into the plane). Even this was not enough at times. I broke down and bought a new blade with a 50 degree bevel. The higher bevel angle means far less tear out, because you’re much less likely to catch under the wood fibres. The high angle bevel is harder work, but it was a small price to pay for excellent results.
- Wood orientation is extra important with figured maple. The most frustrating thing for me with the end result is the clashing directions of the ‘tiger stripes’. If I was to start again, I would make sure all of the figured maple swirls were banding in the same direction.
- The last learning with the wood is to test out the amount of figure each piece has as early as possible. Admittedly I’m not certain how to solve this, but I suspect perhaps lightly wiping the wood with a wet towel or something would help bring out the figures more clearly earlier in the process. Once I started applying the finish and seeing the figured wood start to ‘pop’, some pieces really started to stand out more than others and upset the balance.
Then we get on to the actual mechanical mistakes.
- I didn’t spend enough time making sure the edges of the main body that sit on the plinth had hard, straight lines. This isn’t something a lot of people might notice, but it stands out to me every time I look at it.
- The shadow gap on the door isn’t even. I used folded paper to work on this, and I think that was a mistake. The folded paper was able to squash down further than the hinges did on the final product, which made it uneven. Unfortunately I didn’t notice this until I reattached the door, after the finish was complete. I might go back and fix this one day. The learning is to use veneer or small shims next time, rather than paper.
- I had a mishap on the inside face of the top rail on the door frame on the router table (which I’ll do a write up for some day). I thought I would be able to patch it up with the ol’ glue and sawdust trick. Before the finish went on it wasn’t too bad, but once it had a coat of finish it was impossible to ignore. I should have just redone it at the time…
- Lastly, buying hinges is hard. Don’t buy them online! I bought 8 different types in total and didn’t use any of them for various reasons. The most common reason was the huge gap between the leaves when closed. I finally settled on a set I picked up from Rona, which I still don’t love but were acceptable. I’ve since bought cheap ones from Lee Valley that look better; I wish they have arrived earlier.
What Will I Focus on for Next Time?
Two big things stand out for me.
- Take my time. I’m usually very good at this because woodworking is meditation for me, but some days I just want things to move forward. These are the days I make the mistakes I most regret. I’m going to make sure I have a couple of smaller side projects ready to go on those days.
- Look ahead. A couple of times I got caught out because I didn’t look ahead at what the repercussions would be for leaving something in a certain state (e.g. not completely flattening where the body meets the plinth with a hard edge). This might be something experience will help with also, but I want to be on the look out.