Dovetail Class

I'm teaching a dovetail class this Saturday for beginner and intermediate woodworkers.
Here I have all of the stock prepped: 6 total quartersawn mahogany dovetail alignment boards and 4 poplar practice pieces per student.

We'll be using David Barron's dovetail guide for the class. I really think this tool will change the way dovetails are taught in the coming years. I firmly believe the guide allows beginners to build muscle memory as well as their sawing skills while being able to accomplish very nice dovetails. It takes a lot of the stress off a beginner and I'm very excited to start teaching this method!

Image Source: Barron, David. Dovetail Guides. Digital image. http://davidbarronfurniture.co.uk/. David Barron, 2011. Web. 13 Nov. 2014. <http://davidbarronfurniture.co.uk/david_barron_tools.asp?pg=1&id=5>.

Walnut Knockbox

Here's a dovetailed knockbox I've recently completed for a client in Florida. It's made of some nice air dried American Black Walnut, from the Amish in Ohio. Finished with a few coats of Osmo. A little metal housing rests inside of it.

Mahogany Trestle Table

Here is a Mahogany trestle table I finished recently. The table was done entirely by hand except for the cove molding. The base is finished with Osmo oil/wax. The top is finished with candlelight oil stain, sanding sealer, pore filler, three coats of 50/50 polyurethane, three full coats of polyurethane, and finally a French polishing buffing compound.

The joinery consists of drawbored mortise & tenons and through wedged mortise & tenons. All hand cut and chopped. All of the curves and heavy chamfers were made with a spokeshave. A 50° pitch smooth plane left the final surface on all flat areas and the spokeshave for the curved.

1881 J. Kellogg Double Bead

I just received this 3/16 double bead plane from Patrick Leach of The Superior Works. It is boxed with boxwood and made of quartersawn beech. The double bead allows you to plane in both directions so you can always plane with the grain and allows you to put a bead on both sides of a board. The heel (the back of the plane) is stamped “3/16” and “1881”. The toe (the front of the plane) is stamped “J. KELLOGG” and “AMHERST MS.” After a little research here is what I found out about the plane & maker:

DATM Information

James was part of Kellogg, Fox & Washburn until 1839, Kellogg & Fox from 1839-1840 and J. Kellogg & Son from 1865-1867. William Kellogg, his son, continued to use his mark after his retirement in 1867

Identifying Marks

J.KELLOGG/AMHERST.MS

General Information

Kellog’s first company was purchased from Eli Dickinson and became a wildly successful manufacturer of planes. At one point, a portion of Amherst was called “Kelloggville” and was occupied by two of his factories; even producing 150 to 200 planes a day, they were often unable to fill all the orders they received. They are often deemed the highest quality planes ever manufactured on a large scale and collectors abound on the internet praising their worth. In 1886, the dam supplying power for the factories was washed away and production remained idle for several years.

Source: Davistown Museum 

I’m going to clean this up and put it to use very soon. Thank you Patrick.

To Build A Moxing Bird

I do not have a good workbench. That's a hard confession to make. I've been telling myself I'll build my Roubo soon for three years now. Because I don't have a good bench I haven't taken the time or money to install good vises. The Moxon vise solves a lot of my problems. It provides solid workholding for most of my joinery needs and it's portable. That's a big deal for me. Here's how I made mine:

I used Benchcrafted hardware and their plans for the vise as well.

I milled my hard maple stock to Benchcrafted's specifications: 1 3/4" thick, 36" x 5 1/2" for the fixed jaw, 32" x 5 5/8" for the movable jaw, and 22 1/4" x 2" for the stabilizer block. All I had to do was mark out my layout lines, drill a few holes with a 3/4" forstner bit, and chop a couple mortises. Then glue the stabilizer block to the back of the fixed jaw. That's it. You're done. Apply the suede included with your hardware and you can start working.

If you'd like to carve the stopped chamfer and Lamb's Tongues that adorn either side of the vise there are a few more steps. But nothing that will take more than an afternoon to accomplish. The first thing I did was download this template from Chris Schwarz's article on the Lee Valley page and resized it to 1 3/8" wide. I printed it on cardstock so I could trace it easily.

To layout the Lamb's Tongue, mark a point (mine was about 5 inches in, but go with whatever you think looks good) and trace your template. Then flip it over and trace it on the other face of the chop. Then use your marking gauge to scribe a line from the top of one end of the template to the other, then repeat on the opposite face. Keep the same setting so things remain even.

I used my handsaw to cut right down to the corner of the template. This will help out a lot later. Repeat on the opposite end.

Then (still using the handsaw) I made a cut every half inch, making sure not to go past my scribe lines.

After that I used a 3/8" mortise chisel to pop the waste out. Be careful not to go too deep. You don't want to rip out a big chunk. Take it slow and you'll be fine.

After chopping out the waste I used a spokeshave set for a heavy cut to take out the bulk of the material. A drawknife would be ideal here, but I don't have one. As I got close to my scribe lines I set the spokeshave for a light cut and eased up to the lines. Then I used a rabbeting block plane to get into the corners, planing across the grain.

Now it's time to work on the Lamb's Tongue. I used my fret saw to saw out most of the waste. On a smaller Lamb's Tongue you can use a bench chisel for the whole process, but I did not want to remove this much waste in hard maple with a chisel alone. Keep your saw at a consistent angle and change the pitch of the blade to follow the outline. It's ok to stay away from the line. Clean up after this doesn't take too long.

It should look something like this after the fret saw.

I used a 1/2" bench chisel to pare close to the line. I kept the chisel skewed and worked across the grain taking light cuts. It doesn't seem to matter if you go up or downhill here. It was more comfortable for me to go up.

To carve the tip of the Lamb's Tongue I used a #6, 14mm gouge. I think any gouge #3-#6 would do fine here. Use a scooping action to remove the waste.

I used a medium file (use push strokes in a diagonal direction) & followed the curve to refine the shape.

You should have a nice flowing line on both faces. If it's off, lightly use the file to refine the curve. Now you can sand. I used a dowel wrapped in paper, again following the curve, and went through 0000 steel wool.

All that's left to do is apply your suede with contact cement and finish with whatever you'd like. I just went with a few coats of Tung oil. This vise has become a close friend in my shop.

How to Price Your Work

Calculating your shop rate is like any other project. There are clear steps to take, one at a time.

When I started to charge for my work I had no idea what to do. I couldn't find any online guides and most people I talked to said they didn't really know either. So, this might sound boring but this is how I do it. I love making fine furniture, but I also have to run a business, so I have to treat the pricing the way any other business would. This would be different for a hobbyist because they are not necessarily earning their livelihood from this.

The short version is:

1. I calculate my monthly fixed overhead.
2. I calculate my monthly administrative/non-productive overhead.
3. I figure out what I want to pay myself.
4. I figure out my profit margin.

Then I do some simple arithmetic and I find out my shop labor rate. This is the rate I will charge my client in addition to the cost of materials (plus 20% extra to the materials cost to deal with waste). I used to struggle with this because I wanted to charge everyone the bare bones minimum because I'm a nice guy and want to give everyone a good deal. But the thing is, you can charge a fair rate, make a profit so your business can grow, and it doesn't mean you're not a nice person. I used to think making a profit was morally wrong, but you can't survive or grow without it.

So with all of that in mind, I can walk you through how to use all of this information to figure out your shop labor rate.

Fixed Overhead - If you're running your shop from home (like me) this is a percentage of your mortgage, your gas, water, and electric bill, your phone, your taxes, and your insurance. If you're renting a space this is easier to calculate, it's just whatever your expenses are at that space. I'm going to use my actual numbers for this so you can get a feeling for this. All of that added up for me is about $1,600 a month. About 15% of this is for business purposes. So to calculate my fixed overhead, I multiply 1,600x0.15 and get $240. This is my monthly fixed overhead. Now I take the amount of hours I spend in the shop per week, which for me is about 40. I multiply that by 4 to get 160, the amount of hours I spend per month in my shop. Then I divide my monthly overhead, $240, by my monthly hours in the shop, 160, to get the hourly rate of $1.46 (rounding up to the higher cent). This means I need to charge $1.46 to cover the fixed overhead for each hour spent in my shop.

Administrative & Non-Productive Overhead - This is basically everything that's not your fixed overhead. This can be highly variable, changing month to month, but you can get a pretty good ballpark idea of what you're spending here. This is your cost to maintain your vehicle and fill it up with gas to go deliver a piece or drive to the mill, your advertising costs, your marketing costs, office supplies, tool maintenance, web hosting fees, etc. It's hard to pin a number on this but generally it's about 20% of your fixed overhead, so to keep this simple we'll keep it at that. You'll figure this out with time and experience. So 20% of my $240 fixed overhead is $48. So now we're going to add those two together and divide them by our monthly shop hours to get our general overhead cost of $1.80/hour.

What to Pay Yourself - This is something only you can answer, but I suggest you pay yourself a livable wage. Don't plan on paying yourself $4 an hour because you think your love of the craft will sustain you. Trust me, passion for 17th Century New England carving and French marquetry won't help you when you can't pay to keep the lights on in your shop. In fact, your passion, knowledge, and skill should be what gives you the confidence to pay yourself a fair wage. Furthermore, most people now equate high price with high quality. You will lose out on far more jobs by charging too little than by charging too much. When I first started I paid myself $8 an hour, after a few years I moved up to $15, and now I'm paying myself $30 an hour. This sounds high, but when you develop niche skills and can deliver you should be confident in paying yourself a good wage. I remember telling some clients I hadn't seen in a few years I had raised my rate. I was so nervous it actually made me feel sick. The first thing they said was, "We're happy to hear that! You always charged too little." Don't be afraid to ask for what your time and efforts are worth. So if we go with $30 an hour, that now means I am charging, with my overhead worked in, $31.80/per hour.

Profit - All businesses need a profit. Without it you cannot grow, which mostly means you will not survive as a business. By grow I don't mean start an international furniture conglomerate. I mean you can buy better tools, put some AC in your shop, put up more lights so it's not so dim when you're working nights, pay for some advertising or marketing. It also means when something breaks you can have it repaired, it means you can put a little cash in your savings account for once, and if you have to take sick time or attend a wedding you can do that without putting yourself in the hole. Hell, you may even be able to take a vacation, like a real person! The average profit margin for a cabinetmaking shop in America is 15%. That sounds like a lot, but if we take 15% of our $31.80 hourly shop rate and add it up we see that we only have to increase our hourly rate by $4.77 to run a profitable business at $36.57. I recommend rounding up to the next dollar, so that puts my shop labor rate at $37. That sounds like a lot. But if you're just starting out and want to charge say $10 an hour for your work, that puts you at $11.80 for your hourly rate + overhead, then add $1.77 for your profit, for a total of $13.57 ($14). That's really not much, and now you can save up and buy the tools you need so you can continue to hone your craft. Or take a class!

Almost done, we just have to finish a few things up.

Materials - Some people mark up the cost for the materials. I think that's pretty lame and don't do it. However you do need to charge for the waste, otherwise you are just paying out of your pocket for odds and ends you may not be able to use again. In general you will have about 20% waste on a project. So a real world example: I needed 30 board feet of 8/4 mahogany for a table. 20% of 30 is 6, so I charged for 36bf of lumber. At $15/bf, that's $540. Without charging for the waste you're taking about 6bf worth of mahogany out of your own pocket, that's $90.

So now we've figured out our shop labor rate ($37) and how we will charge for materials. I know it will take me 40 hours to build the table by hand, I know it cost me $540 for my 30bf (give or take) of mahogany, so now I know I need to charge $2,020 for my handmade mahogany table. This is a perfectly reasonable cost for a high quality, hand-crafted table. There are MANY people who are more than happy to pay this price. Now if you want to talk about finding those people that's a whole other topic...

I hope that helped anyone looking for some information on this. I know it was long winded but I have not seen a very good answer to this before. If anyone else would like to pitch in please do!