JA Woodworking Project Thread

[jawoodworking]

Hello All,

I am a longtime lurker here at GJ and have enjoyed every minute of it. I stumbled across the forum while searching for restoration ideas for vintage industrial desks. Ever since then, I have been travelling further and further down the rabbit hole of tool collecting and shop tweaking.

I figured it was time to start my own project thread, which will be pretty much totally dedicated to "restoration" and "salvage" type projects, which is where my creativity has been leaning recently.

A little background before jumping into the projects. I have owned a custom woodworking company for the past 7 years. We specialize in custom furniture and cabinetry. My company is run along side my father's comapny, which manufacures custom interior shutters. Together, we have 10 employees, a 12,000 square foot shop, and dozens of awesome tools!

In the early years of my business, I was a one-man show, doing everything necessary to complete the job...selling, building, finishing, installing. Well, as we have grown, and as I have hired more and more employees, I am doing less and less actual woodworking. I joke with my employees that if I am in the shop buiding a project, I failed somewhere along the way. When you have 4 employees, your full-time job as the boss is to run the business, not build projects.

As a result, I had no outlet for my creativity. It was a slow realization that I constantly need to be working on something. I need to be designing and building, learning and honing new skills.

As stated earlier, my current passion is restoring old things (furniture, machines, etc) and building projects out of salvaged material. I have been collecting stuff (junk?) at a rate that far exceeds my ability to utilize that stuff, but the discovery and acquisition is almost as fun as the creation itself!

Without further ado, here are a few pictures of my current shop.

Shutter assembly area in the foreground, with melamine and plywood storage in the middle of the picture.

The same shutter assembly area in the forground and a bunch of shapers and boring machines along the back wall. The shapers are used for both shutter parts production and cabinet door parts production.

This picture shows two of the workhorses in the shop, the 36" Timesaver widebelt sander and the 10' Grizzly sliding table saw. Also seen to the left of the widebelt is a 15" planer and an 8" jointer. There is a brand new edgebander behind the widebelt, and 3 downdraft sanding tables in the background.

Another assembly area, with a smattering of smaller machines...band saw, edge sander, spindle sander, dedicated dado table saw, cabinet saw, cut-off saw, double-line boring machine.

The area where we build our cabinets. We have two 5'x10' assembly tables, a 4'x6' mobile table, and several other cabinet specific machines.

We do all of our own finishing and have a 12' finishing booth, complete with severalk paint pots, air-assisted airless spray guns, and two drying racks.

After that introduction and bragging about my shop, projects soon to follow.

 

[brianh]

Nice shop. mine was that clean once.

I am still a 1 man shop I would not be a good boss.

 

[jawoodworking]

Before I upload the first restoration project, I thought I would show a little of the woodworking projects we get to make for clients each and every week.

Console table with Rosewood veneer and black stained Maple supports:

Stained Alder console. Doors are framed in embossed leather and furniture tacks:

TV stand constructed from solid Walnut and Walnut veneer:

End table with Rosewood veneer and 1/2" Aluminum legs:

Boys bedroom unit:

With any luck, my personal restoration projects will look half as good as the furniture my employees and I make.

 

[RivennHewn]

Definitely looking forward to seeing more.

 

[jawoodworking]

Brian, with 10 guys running around the shop, it doesn't always look that clean. I must have taken these right after we cleaned. The shop tends to look more like this. It is kind of hard to tell from this angle, but there is so much stuff scattered all about, that we cannot even move our carts from one area to another. Recently, we have been so busy, that this is becoming the norm, rather than the exception.

 

[jawoodworking]

RivenHewn, I have been loving your "Making of a Table" thread. It was one of the main inspirations for me to start a similar thread for my own creations! Keep up the good work.

 

[turbowoodworker]

Subscribed and inspired!

 

[RivennHewn]

JA,

Thanks so much.

I'll be following your thread for sure.

By the way, I'd kill for your shop!

 

[jawoodworking]

When I get into the office in the morning I will post the latest project I completed...a restoration of a pair of vintage metal office chairs, but until then, I thought I would show everybody what my shop looks like at home.

The left hand wall of a simple 10'x10' shed is all I have to work with during the evenings and on the weekends. My company's shop is 19 miles away, and with a wife and two kids, the weekends pretty much fill up with activities and adventures, so driving out there on the weekends is a rarity. But, rather than cry about it, I decided to make the best of it.

As soon as the weather warmed up this spring, I emptied out the shed, threw away tons of ****, donated a pile of stuff, and organized the rest. My brother and I scavenged a bunch of office filing cabinets from a dumpster, and I turned the humble shed into the little workshop that could!

I screwed the file cabinets together and to the framework of the shed, so at least things are stable. I still need to add some kind of top to the file cabinets, but for now, I at least have a place to stack my projects and tools among the bikes, lawnmowers, and other yard stuff.

And since the shed is so small, my fabrication often spills out into the yard and onto the patio. As you can see, some OSB and a fire pit is my stand in for a paint booth.

Thanks for reading.

 

[jawoodworking]

OK, enough delaying, onto the projects.

Like many others here on the forum, I have a half a dozen projects going at any one time. Some progress faster than others. The most recent one to be completed is a pair of vintage metal office chairs. I picked them up at an auction for $16. Overall, they were in great condition for being 46 years old, but the color was awful.

I started by disassembling the chairs, scuff sanded the metal, and primed with a spray can of metal primer. I then painted them gloss white. I figured a white frame would give me a blank slate when it came time to pick out the color of the cushions. It would also allow me to change my mind and recover the cushions in any color and not have to repaint the frames.

I was going to use vinyl, and while at the fabric store, I chickened out and made the safe decision to go with black. That way the chair will pretty much work in any room in our house, since these chairs are actually going to see daily use. At first I thought a bright colored vinyl like red or yellow would be nice, but decided that it would be just a tad to loud for our small home.

Beginning with the plastic arms, I rough cut the vinyl, sprayed on Dap contact cement on both surfaces, and began the process of wrapping. The middle of the arm was easy, but the front and back were tricky. Thankfully I had four arms on which to practice!

Next, I tackled the back cushions. The backs were a curved metal plate with 1" foam. The vinyl was adhered to the metal using contact cement. This was a new process for me, but the more I use it, the more I think contact cement may be a miracle adhesive when it comes to upholstery! Once again, the corners took a bit of patience, but they worked out in the end.

The visible metal was then covered in a second piece of vinyl, and the seam around the perimeter is hidden by the frame of the chair.

Lastly, I tackled the seat cushions. As you can see, on the original chairs, the seats had a metal plate, and the vinyl was cut and sewn to follow the curve of the seat. My sewing skills are non-existent, so I chose the easy way out. I cut my own base plate out of 3/4" plywood, eased the edges with an 1/8" round over bit, added a 3" HD foam cushion, and stapled the vinyl to the underside.

Once again, the process was fairly straight forward until I reached the corners. Dang curves! I tried to make the folds match as much as possible from left to right, and tried to make then as crisp and tight as possible.

In the end, I am happy with the final product. The whole purpose of this project was not to have a perfectly reupholstered set of chairs, but to learn new skills and challenge myself. As my sewing skills improve, I can always take apart the original seat cushions and use them as a pattern for a new ones. For now, they have taken up residency in our house, and most importantly, my wife and sons love them!

 

[Jim_No_Garage]

JA - Nice work on the chairs!

I worked with my wife to reupholster the seat of an office chair recently and SHOULD have used contact cement to hold the foam to the base. I was in a hurry. The foam shifted a little while pulling, tugging and stapling the fabric into place. It ticked me off but I got over it since. She sit's on it daily and doesn't complain about the thin foam along the front edge of the seat cushion.

The funny thing is my wife's grandmother ran an upholstery business most of her life - she was probably cursing at me in Polish from above while we were working on the cushion.

I work in an office and like to do project that have physical results - woodturning, wood working and things like that since I don't get that satisfaction at work. I'm a little burnt out so I've been on hiatus for too long - I need to get back in the game . . . .

Jim

 

[jawoodworking]

Jim, thanks for stopping by. We can be our own worst enemy. Sometimes I want to get a project done so bad that I will end up rushing, or cutting corners, and make stupid mistakes, only to curse myself afterwards everytime I look at it.

jawoodworking

 

[jawoodworking]

This next project was quick and simple, which was a nice change of pace.

On Thursday after work I got the hankering to make something. After rummaging through the scrap piles in the back corner of the shop, I came up with a piece of a gear I found at an abandoned grain silo in central Idaho, and some spalted Alder from the lumber pile. One hour later, I had a bookend!

My wife and I are avid readers and book collectors (so much so that we turned one of the two bedrooms in our small 1000 sq ft home into a library), so a bookend would fit right in. In all the excitement of the "on-the-fly" design and build, I totally forgot about scale. This thing turned out huge! I have it stacked against some of the tallest books we own, and it is barely small enough!

I started by cutting the ragged ends of the gear into a 90 degree corner using an angle grinder and then I routed out three 1/8" deep recesses to accept those ends. After scrubbing any loose rust and dirt off the cast iron gear I polished it with paste wax in order to accent the patina. After lacquering the Alder, I drilled two pilot holes and connected the pieces using some screws. All in all, I am pretty happy with the final product. It was especially nice to start and finish a project in the same day.

BTW, here is the grain silo where I found it. Such a cool place.

jawoodworking

 

[Craptain]

It is an enjoyable start to what I hope is an ongoing thread. You have started what I keep threatening to do. Perhaps you (and many many others) will get me motivated. The quicker "one day" projects seem like the way to go, at least at first.

For upholstery tips and tricks maybe nine4gmc can help as I believe he does it for a living.

 

[jawoodworking]

I didn't do a whole lot of project work over the Memorial day weekend, just a bunch of random stuff...2 mountain bike rides, 2 indoor soccer games, chopped down a tree with my brother, yard work, and dumpster diving with my 8 yo son. I did cap the 3 day weekend off by finishing one of the house projects that has been on my list for a couple of years though, which was jacking up two sagging floor supports under our 90 year old home.

For years I have know that I needed to go into the crawlspace and clean out decades worth of debris, sweep away the cobwebs, bug bomb, and fix a sagging section of floor. I finally set a goal for myself to have the crawlspace taken care of before we tackle our next huge house project, our kitchen renovation. Since that project is starting in a month, time was ticking away!

I finally cleaned up the crawlspace a few months ago, so all I had left was to repair the sagging floor, which was due to a concrete footing that had shifted over the years. I crawled under the house on Memorial day evening, aligned a pair of old cast iron jacks, and commenced lifting the floor by about 1/2".

Talk about a feeling of power! I obviously had nothing to do with it, but it is amazing to be able to use a simple screw jack to lift up part of your home! I then removed the old crooked post, made a new 8" square post, complete with a 5 degree bottom angle to match the crooked footing, and lowered everything back into place.

Here is a shot of jacks lifting the floor:

The post that I removed was a 2x6 connected to a 4x4, which was supposed to hold two overlapping 4x6's. The sag was also attributed to the fact that the far 4x6 was more than halfway off the support.

In the end it was rather anti-climactic, which of course is what I wanted, but it is not everyday that you lift the bottom floor of your 2-story home by 1/2"!

Here is a shot of the cool old tools that made it all possible, Swett 15 ton cast iron screw jacks. I found these at the local scrap yard a few months ago, and $14 was all it took to make sure they left with me.

Man...that is the reason I love and hate scrap yards all at the same time...they don't care about anything but scrap rate, so they will sell you awesome old stuff for pennies, but they will also destroy awesome old stuff because all they care about is scrap rate!

Thanks for reading.

jawoodworking

 

[jawoodworking]

I finished up my latest project, an All Steel Equipment tanker desk restoration, last week, and have been loving the final product!

Here is what the tanker desk looked like when I bought it for $10 from an online auction site.

It was free from large dents, had no visible rust, and didn't seem to be missing any parts, which is not always the case with old steel office furniture.

I loved the fact that the desk had a pencil drawer and the three small drawers on the left, which would give it a bit more usability over one that had file drawers on the bottom of both sides. I also loved the style of the feet.

I scuff sanded every square inch, primed using a metal specific primer, and used spot putty to fill in a dozen or so dents and dings.

I painted the desk using insanely expensive automotive enamel, which was worth every single penny!

jawoodworking

 

[jawoodworking]

Next, I turned my attention and creative energies to the top, which I wanted to make out of wood, for several reasons, some of which are quite obvious. I am a woodworker at heart, and while I find it exciting to dabble with metal and stone, I am drawn back to the beauty of wood. I wanted a top that had warmth and texture, to juxtapose nicely against the metal base, yet still pay homage to the desk's industrial roots.

I racked my brain for weeks looking for the perfect solution, yet, in the end, the answer actually found me. We had two LVL's, sitting in a corner, leftover from a cancelled project a few weeks ago. One afternoon, while cleaning up clutter, they caught my eye, and right then I knew that they would become the new desk top.

Each LVL measured 1.5" thick, 22.5" wide, and 84" long, and both had a slight cup across the width. As such, I decided to rip them in half before sending through the wide belt.

Initially, my idea was to edge glue the LVL's to achieve the 30"x72" desk top. The problem is that even a nicely sanded LVL is **** ugly! It is construction grade material after all, made for strength, not beauty.

So, instead of edge gluing the LVL's, I ripped each board into 1.5" wide strips, turned those strips 90 degrees, and glued 20 strips together to get the 30" wide top.

Now, instead of looking at the pine face of the LVL, I am looking at 260 layers of fir veneer instead.

My favorite part of the desk its by far the top. Both its look and its size. My previous desk was a hollow core door at just 60" wide and 24" deep. The extra 12" of width and 6" of depth are huge for me. It gives me the ability to spread out papers, files, and catalogs...or, it allows me to add even more clutter to the top of the desk!

All told, I spent $105 on materials and 17 hrs in order to give this tanker desk another lease on life!

Thanks for reading
jawoodworking

 

[jawoodworking]

If anybody wants to read a more in-depth write up on this project, I have it posted over on the blog on my company's web site.

http://jawoodworking.com/tanker-desk-restoration/

jawoodworking

 

[Garage Coffee Roaster]

Loving the look of the top. Did you apply finish to it yet? Any pictures if yes.

 

[jawoodworking]

Here is a photo. I sprayed on 4 coats of sanding sealer and 2 coats of catalyzed lacquer.

jawoodworking

 

[skippy24]

That desk is pretty sweet. I looked at your company's website. You do some really awesome work!

 

[RivennHewn]

Desk top came out great.

Nicely done!

 

[captain14]

Love the desktop. Unique solution to fit your needs. I assume the desk is in yiur office at work?

 

[aggierailroad]

Desk is pretty sweet. Glad to see more woodworkers around here!

 

[mypov]

yep...Subscribed, your work is fantastic. I am nearly done an apprenticeship in Mechanics, and have always wanted to be a carpenter, but I am excited to have an outlet in working with wood in my garage. I the look and feel of old wood, you guys do amazing stuff, really like the look of that TV/entertainment unit.
Thanks for posting, looking forward to seeing more of your creations/restorations.

 

[jawoodworking]

Skippy, RivenHewn, MyPOV: Thanks for the compliments. It is fun to share the work I do and get feedback from someone other than my employees and wife!

Captain14: The desk is in my office. I don't know if I mentioned it earlier, but my desk for the first 7 years was a hollow core door. I was overdue for an upgrade.

You can also see that the office itself is overdue for an upgrade. I am hoping to replace all the old oak trim, remove the ugly wallpaper, and replace the carpet with some hardwood flooring. Our offices and showroom are pretty much early 90's decor. Unfortunately, too many things compete for time and money, so it seems to be perpetually on the back burner.

jawoodworking

 

[Lawson4450]

I'm into woodworking too nice work there

 

[ford33]

I like the work you did on the desk. The top is very creative. Good luck with your next project and keep showing your creativity.

 

[Toolfool]

I like the way the desk top turned out. I might try that.

 

[jawoodworking]

It has been a while since I posted any projects, so I figured I should show one of the latest completions.

This project is an example of designing on the fly. It started out as one of those emergency battery boxes you see in warehouses. I found it in the dumpster, and knew I wanted to use the metal frame and door for a medicine cabinet type piece. I drilled out the rivets so I could just use the door and frame.

I found some scrap walnut and just started shaping with no real final design in mind. I am not sure how much I like the curves, but that is what I ended up with.

The metal was all white, so I lightly sanded it and painted it bright red. It was too boring, so I masked off the face and painted a gloss white racing stripe, which adds just the right amount of flair.

Inside, I milled and attached two fixed walnut shelves. I may add some hooks on the inside to hang keys, but I am not sure of its final resting place, so I am holding off.

In order to add a bit more details to the door, I scrounged up some items I have collected over the years. I added a name plate off of a random electric motor to add a bit of industrial styling, as well as a random tag from some scientific machine.

The lock was already part of the cabinet, and it doubles as the knob to open the door. The light at the top of the door is original to the cabinet. I cut off the rest of the light, glued the lense to a washer, and glued the washer to the back of the door.

It was a fun little project. Took about 2 hours and a few bucks worth of paint.

 

[skippy24]

Nice work!

 

[TauntDevil]

All this looks amazing!

So just a question... you wouldnt happen to have a wood lathe and do small projects would you? Something I want which is small and just need one (or two) in the near future.

 

[jawoodworking]

All this looks amazing!

So just a question... you wouldnt happen to have a wood lathe and do small projects would you? Something I want which is small and just need one (or two) in the near future.

Actually, turning and carving are two woodworking skills I have neve done. Not sure why. I don't own a lathe and have always sent out any turning work we have needed for a client's project. But I have been keeping my eyes open for an older used model on Craigslist, so that may be changing soon.

Jawoodworking

 

[biowrench]

In order to add a bit more details to the door, I scrounged up some items I have collected over the years. I added a name plate off of a random electric motor to add a bit of industrial styling, as well as a random tag from some scientific machine.

That's great! The surplus stores around here are lousy with instrument nameplates for pennies apiece, now I've got some ideas for using them.