LumberJocks raised the bar again with over 50 entries in our Bookcase Challenge. You proved that it’s possible to be very creative even with such a common project and you made the judging process extremely tough for the editors of the Popular Woodworking.

Here’s the summary of the event as well as the announcement of the winner and runner-ups by Glen Huey, Senior Editor of PW:

“Congratulations everyone. The LumberJocks excelled at designing great looking, buildable bookcases and we were certainly impressed with the group as a whole. This became a difficult task for the Popular Woodworking editors. We individually studied the entries to arrive at our own favorites, then brought those to a group meeting hoping we might see a consensus winner. Instead, we had 11 bookcases to work with to try and determine a winning design. Each design had aspects that we both liked and disliked (editors can be particular when it comes to projects for articles, you know). Even the top entries have design or possible construction techniques we would like to see tweaked, but here goes the list.”

“At the top of our list, after much discussion, is Ryan’s Shoji Screen Inspired Bookcase. This is a very nice design and will be a great article in our magazine. We look forward to working with Ryan as his bookcase comes to life in the pages of PW. Congratulations on his upcoming or recent family addition, too.”

“Close behind Ryan’s bookcase was Daniel’s A&C Bookcase with Magazine Drawers. This piece was very close to the top and had strong support from each editor. In the end, we felt that Daniel’s bookcase displayed too strong of a mixture of many A&C designs. And, the magazine drawers, when fully loaded, would be extremely heavy to access.”

“Also a strong contender was Charlie’s Sliding Dovetails Bookcase. What slowed our enthusiasm for this design was the difficulty of sliding dovetails, but when discussed further and a few suggestions were made in how this might become an easier project with a simple adjustment in joinery, Charlie’s design gained momentum, but was just nosed out by Ryan’s design.”

And here are three random winners of the LJ shirt:

• Jeff
• RLS
• MsDebbieP

Congratulations!

You can sharpen your woodworking skills with helpful tips and techniques from the editors of Woodsmith and ShopNotes magazines. Get a FREE tips sent to your email address each week! Got to Woodworking Tips.com and sign up today.

Here?s last week?s tip from Woodsmith online editor Ted Raife:

My oscillating disc sander has built-in dust collection and it works great ? but only when the holes in the sanding disc are aligned with the vacuum holes in the sander?s pad. And this simple requirement isn?t always as easy as it sounds. So rather than rely on a good aim when installing the discs, I put together a simple tool that makes hitting the mark a sure thing.

As you can see in Figure 1, the tool is nothing more than two dowels glued into a small block of wood. The diameter of the dowels and their spacing in the block matches that of the holes in the discs and sanding pad.

To use the tool, you simply place a disc over the dowels and then insert them into the holes in the pad (Figure 2). Slip the disc off of the dowels and onto the pad and you?re ready to go.

Good Woodworking,

Ted Raife
Online Editor, Woodsmith

Send for a preview issue of Woodsmith magazine

Yup, today is Nicole’s birthday. So let’s talk about Nicole for a little bit. For those of you who don’t know, Nicole is my wife. She also plays some important behind the scenes roles here at the Wood Whisperer, the most important of which is marketing and what I like to call “sittin’ there and lookin’ pretty.” But the truth is, her role in the show has decreased over the past year simply because of the demands of her day job. A job that keeps The Wood Whisperer Cruise Ship afloat, and allows us to take chances and capitalize on opportunities when they arise. And all of this means a better show and a better experience at TheWoodWhisperer.com. So I just wanted to take a moment to publicly thank the one person who truly makes all this possible, my adorable wife Nicole. Oh yea, and happy birthday!!!

Now that shop class is as common in high schools as poodle skirts, lots of woodworkers worry about passing on our enthusiasm for the craft to the next generation. In my house, I?ve started treating my kids more like apprentices, and it seems to be working.

They help clean the shop. They assist me on projects at assembly time. They can work on their own projects on the side when I don?t need them. And ? here?s the odd part ? I pay them (a pittance) for their help and swear them to secrecy on the ?arts and mysteries? of the craft.

This weekend has been a perfect example. I assembled a large run of shelving that I plan to install in the recipient?s home this week. There was a lot of tedious gluing, clamping and clean-up work involved, so I hired 7-year-old Katy to help.

First, I showed her the ?secret? to making the lacquer finish perfectly smooth to the touch ? a folded up brown paper bag. We rubbed all the surfaces vigorously, which knocked down any surface imperfections without cutting through the film finish. Katy did the shelves; I did the uprights.

?Cool,? she said. ?It works!?

As we were bagging the lacquer, both of us noticed that there were some small dings and scratches in the color. This is was the result of the parts getting moved around more than I like. So I swore Katy to secrecy again and introduced her to the mystery of stain pens. In this case, the best match wasn?t one of my stain pens (which I keep hidden away), it was a black Sharpie marker.

In fact, Katy became incredulous when I took her picture at work with the marker.

?What if someone sees the picture and figures out our secret?? she asked. ?Then they?ll know!?

Then we glued up the shelves. I applied the glue. Katy added the Dominos. We both applied the clamps and cleaned the glue squeeze-out. Assembly can be stressful for me, but Katy?s amazement at how the project came together kept my anxiety in check.

We did four major glue-ups this weekend, and by the fourth one, Katy dove into the work like she had been doing it all her life. I wonder if learning woodworking is like learning a foreign language ? it might be easier when you are young.

As I added the kicks to the cabinet, Katy worked at the bench at her own project ? she?s transforming my discarded shop jigs for this shelving project into a wooden alligator.

Then I paid her (about $1 an hour for the shop time) and I asked her if she?d come along on the installation next week. With hesitation, she said: ?Yes! Hurray!?

Next step: Getting the apprentices to fetch the small beer for the master.

? Christopher Schwarz

Part IV 

All right then! Here it was, around the beginning of April, and I had a plan for the new shop (more or less) in hand. It was time to go ahead with the construction... or so I had thought, anyway.

I got a contractor lined up to do the concrete. I had decided that work was simply too much for me to handle on my own, and that it would probably serve me better to have it done by somebody else. I didn't have the equipment, nor did I have the help (or the back) to put down the concrete by myself. I might have mentioned that North Idaho was undergoing an unprecedented building boom at the time. What that meant for me was a wait for the permit. Permits usually take just a couple weeks. Usually, this might not be an issue, but the concrete guy I had lined up had a very tight schedule. Well, it turned out I had a couple of issues that permitting wouldn't allow, mainly the bathroom I had discussed previously. With that, I took the plan home and removed it entirely from the design (which actually helped me out budget-wise), but as it would have it I couldn't take the time off of work to get back to the permit office for two week. When I did finally, it was two more weeks before I got the plan reviewed and approved. I called the concrete guy up, and turns out I was past his window of availability. I would have to find another.

That delay led to a two week long search for another concrete contractor. The only one I could find available was still three weeks out before he could start, but he didn't do excavating - though he knew someone who did. So, I contacted him, and he was three weeks out too. So - what I thought might be a two to three week period of getting the permit reviewed and groundbreaking turned out to be entirely too optimistic. By the time I got the excavator there it was the end of May, a full 5 weeks later than I'd hoped.

Being an architect, I'm familiar with the whole process so didn't let it get me down, and just chalking it up to the way things work. But - when this showed up out front of the house early one morning, I started getting a little excited:

It's not really the machine I would have chosen for the task, but as long as the hole got dug, I wasn't going to worry. I had considered doing it myself... had I done it; I would have rented a loader with a backhoe mounted on the back. A track-hoe (like above) tends to rip up the lawn too much when you turn on it... It's also a very small bucket - which can be a good thing, both for digging utility trenches and when you have a plan with a lot of little corners... But I don't have a great deal of experience in digging foundations, and what little I had done was over 20 years ago... I figured it best to leave it to someone who knew more. Besides, the cost of renting a backhoe for myself would have been 2/3rds of the price of paying someone else to do it, so I figured it was better hired out.

It was finally time to break ground. Here's where the shop was to go shown in the site plan again:

Here is a photo of the yard, talen looking north from the end of the patio:

The scarring you see in the center of the yard was from an old willow tree that had to come down a few years prior when a windstorm had knocked the main portion of it's trunk down. The scarring was from the year previously when I finally got the stump out of the ground using a skid-steer I had rented when putting in the pavers for the patio, which you can see in the lower left. Within an hour or two, the trench for the main footings were dug:

Finally, something was happening. I was still worried about the excavation, though - I thought it odd that he would only dig the trench and not strip the topsoil within the footprint of the building first. In the end, it turned out I didn't need to worry about it. The fellow was a young guy, for whom renting himself and his track-hoe out was his main method of income in the warmer months. While young, in the end it turned out he was hard working, honest, and truly concerned with doing a good job - and for not really all that much money, either. But I didn't know that yet at this point, so was concerned. Even though it was taken care of later and I was satisfied with his work, I do wish it had been done properly. But with the building environment the way it was, I was just happy to have somebody to do the job.

Up next, the foundation!