Bookshelves in Blood and Steel

This is my current project, and is facing some major challenges, and is skirting the edge of miserable failure. The material is Bloodwood and I was able to find a really beautiful piece to work with. Unfortunately, since cutting it the material has twisted significantly. The original design for the bookshelf was to run four vertical bars through it and use flanges to trap the shelves in place. Since the material twisted, and cupped a bit, there is no way in hell this is going to work, and besides aligning and drilling the holes would be a nightmare.

Enter my brother into the fray. I'm lucky that he happens to have a machine shop. So I altered the design and am using 1.5" round steel stock, and the results I think are better than the original design. I wanted it to feel very open instead of being Just Another Box With Shelves In It. The wood I have is incredibly beautiful, and I wanted to free it up as much as possible to breathe. I will make bookends most likely, or maybe try for some riverbed rocks to use as bookends.

The hope with this new design is that with the pieces bolted down to heavy duty steel, the twist won't be a problem anymore. Once wood has twisted, usually the advice is to throw it out. Cupping can often be fixed, but twisting is something that is in the layout of the fibers of the wood. This wood, when bought, had been cut and was supposed to have been dried properly. However, because of how it was stored, the weight of other wood on top of it probably prevented the twist from coming out. After it was cut and planed, the twist showed up. I can see why it did, the grain pattern is not even, which makes for a spectacular piece of wood but opens me up to this kind of issue. I'll hope that the steel and the weight of the books deals with the problem.

So far the shelves have taken on Tung Oil, and I am beginning to Lacquer them now. I'll let the Lacquer cure out, then will get the holes drilled for mounting, before rubbing out the Lacquer flat for the final finish.

By the way, the Sagulator is an indispensable calculator for anyone who is building wood shelves. It will let you know if your design is going to fail miserably or not.

Japanese Inspired Coffee Table

This was my first big furniture project. Having some computer skills comes in handy, as I am able to model my ideas out in Rhino before cutting wood. It allows me to make sure I have the feeling I want from the piece and know what I am getting into. I model all of the cuts and joints as well, and I try to design for simplicity in construction since I have limited access to tools.

This was my first experience with Bloodwood, and how I learned the hard way not to use Shellac directly on Bloodwood. One thing I strive for is to work with the natural colors of the wood, I am not a big fan of staining or obscuring the wood in any way. In order to provide a nice contrast with the Bloodwood, I chose Wenge which is a favorite wood of mine. The colors go beautifully, and it makes for an unusual looking table. Besides the bold stripe down the middle, I added some accents in the apron that seamlessly appear out of the legs. Overall I am very pleased with the design... I don't like frilly or overly fancy things: first, they're hard to make, and second, I think they look stupid. I aim for clean, modern looks as this suits my aesthetic tastes and also, I can make them.

The trickiest part of this design was the joints of apron and legs. The legs are assembled from four pieces of 0.5 x 3 x 12 inch pieces of Wenge. The edges are cut with the table saw to 45 degrees, then they are assembled into the blocky legs. There is a nice trick to this, you lay the pieces out side by side with the joint surfaces face down on a table, then duct tape down the edges where they line up. This lets you flip them over as a unit, run glue down the joints, then roll them up and tape the final edge. The tape prevents the glue from spilling to the outside surface, and holds the pieces square. It's a nice, and cheap method if you don't have fancy pants clamps to hold them in place.

Once the legs are cut, I made some square caps on the table saw and cut a bevel in with the router, then ran them upside down on the table saw to cut the slots where the apron would come together. I then drilled and chiseled out the slots. The bloodwood highlights were added to the short crossmembers of the apron with a lap joint, and a gooseneck. I was worried about strength in case the tabletop warped so tried to design the joint to resist the upward pressure well. The angles on the apron ends represent a 30 degree right angle triangle which has a nice feeling to it.

The tabletop panels use a lap joint, I don't have any equipment to make anything more fancy than this and it seems fine so far. Another trick when gluing together long panels like this is to run tape all along the seams of the join (the photo is of another similar table I built afterwards). When you clamp it all together, any glue squeezeout ends up on the tape. There are no worries then about glue cleanup, just pull the tape off when you're done.

The table assembles pretty simply, though there was some painful hand-tuning of the intersection of the apron with the legs. Because everything is hand-sanded, the apron would vary in thickness by a millimeter or so and that caused a lot of unhappy times. After shellacing though, the results I thought were very beautiful.

This project suffered badly from sandpaper contamination, so I had to redo the finish a few times (the pain). Nothing would stick. Furthermore I had really soaked the Wenge with Tung Oil, so much so that there was little chance of it ever properly curing out. That gave me many, many days of re-sanding and re-attempting to put a finish on. Very sad and tedious, and could have been avoided by (a) being sparing with the Tung Oil, there is no need to flood, and (b) making sure to clean all sanding dust. Failure to do so can prevent the finish from adhering. See my on Sandpaper Contamination.

Finishing Bloodwood

The tables below are made with center strips that feature Bloodwood, which is a gorgeous crimson color with orange and yellow highlights. Like Purpleheart, it features chatoyancy and the associated play of color with a changing orientation towards the light source.

Like Purpleheart, this wood has some caveats for finishing. As waterborne finishes make a mess of Purpleheart, Shellac makes a mess of Bloodwood. The reason for this is that the colorant in Bloodwood is rapidly brought into solution by alcohol, which is the solvent for Shellac. Alcohol and water are both polar solvents, unlike mineral spirits, turpentine, etc., which are used as solvents for oil based varnishes. When building with Bloodwood, this aspect of the finish has to be taken into account. Any attempts to pad or french polish on shellac is going to fill the pad with Bloodwood dye and bring red color elsewhere into your project.

Furthermore, the movement of the dye is likely to reduce the overall contrast in the appearance of the Bloodwood.

It is possible to spray on waterborne finishes onto Bloodwood, and in this case, I would recommend spraying them on very lightly to begin with so that they dry almost immediately (waterborne tends to dry fast anyway). Build up the first couple of coats very slowly in this manner until a barrier is formed over the wood.

If a "colorless" waterborne finish is used (the manufacturers will often say "water clear" or "crystal clear" to denote these finishes), the effect on Bloodwood can be quite striking. After the application of a blonde shellac or any oil based finish, Bloodwood takes on a color similar to the tones one sees in fire. By going for a crystal clear waterborne finish, the wood is left with a very pure and striking red tone. Varathane in fact appears somewhat bluish, and this can even be topcoated with Shellac in the case of a piece like my tables here (the Purpleheart would be taped off to protect it from the Varathane seal coat).

Otherwise, striking finishes can be had with any of the standard finish types when applied to Bloodwood.