Imagine having a workshop with every conceivable tool, both power and hand, available to you instantly. Imagine having not just the core tools but all the accessories to get the most out of each-all the bits, clamps, attachments, collars and jigs to provide you with maximum flexibility and productivity.
Imagine possessing not only these mechanical devices but the skill and experience necessary to put them to work for you. What incredible, glorious work you could do! You could build or fix anything.
For me, this fantasy became a reality, if only for a few days, in the workshop of Michael Lew, an attorney-CPA who is as comfortable in jeans and flannel shirts as he is in his daytime pin stripes.
I first met Lew while doing research for an earlier Know-how article on specialty lumber at Wood World in Glenview. Lew happened into the store and was introduced to me as an advanced hobbyist. If the truth be known, he is a professional, and a visit to his north suburban home that night substantiated this conclusion.
In his spare time, Lew builds fine furniture. It is one-of-a-kind stuff, with fastenerless joinery, impeccable finish and solid-brass hardware. He selects and matches wood for his work with the sensitivity of an old-world artisan.
On my first visit to his home, I admired-no, coveted is more accurate-his 8-foot, pickled-oak computer work center, a piece that took a full year to design and build. I lusted after his immense display cabinet in the family room. The tour yielded room after room of treasures designed and crafted by Lew.
Equally stunning was my first glimpse of the place where he works his magic. Lew`s basement shop is paradise for anyone with a consuming interest in woodworking. Since 1979, when he and his wife, Tammy, an accomplished jewelry designer, moved into the house, he has transformed 600 square feet of subterranean space into a power-tool fantasyland.
Lew`s shop is equipped with top-of-the-line commercial-grade hardware. Most of the machines are made by Delta-powerful tools that rip and plane and shape with ease. Lew`s inventory of stationary power tools includes a Delta Unisaw table saw, a thickness planer, a jointer/planer (for finishing board edges and cutting wood joints), a shaper (for cutting decorative moldings and wood joints), a band saw, a drill press, a radial arm saw, a lathe (for turning wood) and a combination belt/disc sander.
In addition, Lew maintains a wide assortment of portable power tools, featuring routers, circular saws, jigsaws and sanders. His collection of hand tools is fabulous and includes an impressive array of planes and chisels.
”You certainly don`t need all of these,” Lew said, ”but in the course of my travels and finding stuff on sale, I`ve collected quite a few tools.”
He has been at it for a long time, starting out in the mid-1960s with an introductory woodworking course at the Loyola Park Fieldhouse. Since then, he has been mostly self-taught, with a foundation in the basics gleaned from high school textbooks on the subject.
Like a babe in Toyland, I found it difficult to tear myself away from the place. Without hesitation, Lew agreed to my proposition that I return and, under his direction, complete a project in his ultimate home workshop.
After we spent the better part of a Sunday afternoon wrestling with design and purchasing decisions, the project took shape: We would build a cart to hold my television set and VCR as well as store a collection of videotapes. We sought to build the cart from one sheet of oak plywood, complete the project in one day and employ as wide a range of tools as possible.
The cart would have three shelves; the one in the middle would be adjustable. A 12-inch storage compartment would have two doors and a closed back. The sides would be solid, with a slight radius to the top. Edges would be laminated with a quarter-inch screen (edging). No metal fasteners (nails or screws) would be used in the project; we would depend on dado and glue joints to bind wood fibers together. (A dado joint is made by cutting a channel in a wooden surface to accept cross pieces, such as shelves, to provide support and rigidity.)
The materials, with a total cost of less than $120, consisted of:
– A 4-by-8-foot sheet of oak plywood, finished on both sides.
– A scrap piece of quarter-inch oak plywood for storage-compartment backing.
– A 1-by-3-inch-by-8-foot piece of quartersawn oak, to be used for edging.
– Oak edge tape, glue-backed strips of veneer, to be laminated to doors to achieve a finished appearance.
– Door hardware of two sets of hinges, knobs and closures.
– Four casters.
– Four clips to hold the adjustable shelf.
Completing our work for the afternoon was the creation of a rough drawing of the piece, detailing precise dimensions for each part. We then created a cutting diagram for the plywood to determine the most economical means of obtaining the pieces we would need. This was a critical phase of our preparation because it proved we had enough material to get the job done.
I returned several weeks later, ready for action. It would be several hours, however, before saw dust would fly because Lew and I spent the time talking about priorities in building a workshop and the merits of individual tools. And we discussed the different routes that can be taken to achieve results in wooodworking.
”The heart of any shop is the table saw,” said Lew. Although he owns a Delta Unisaw (about an $1,800 package), he recommends the Delta 10-inch Contractor`s saw, which offers the same quality for a price of about $700.
”These saws are made of cast iron and built to very high tolerances,”
he said. ”They are very stable and will lock and maintain accuracy for repeated cuts-straighter and truer cuts with less burning.”
Conversely, Lew finds radial arm saws ”okay for rough carpentry but not usable for fine furnituremaking. They are good for crosscutting long, narrow boards, but the inherent design of the machine makes it relatively inaccurate compared to a table saw,” he said. If you are in the market for one, Lew says DeWalt is a leading manufacturer.
Next priority in Lew`s basic shop is the router, which when mounted to a specialized table can be used for joint-cutting. According to Lew, the best value for the money is the Bosch 1604D 3/4-horsepower router. ”At $175, it has the power and rigidity, plus it will accept bits with both one-quarter-and one-half-inch shanks.”
Third on his priority list of tools is the drill press, which Lew finds extremely versatile. He finds all his other tools to be useful but not essential in a basic workshop because, for the most part, their functions can be duplicated (perhaps with less ease and accuracy) on the machines already described. He acknowledges that a device such as his surface planer-used to smooth rough-sawn stock or for thickness reduction-is a luxury. Few shops or even commercial operations have them.
”There are many ways to achieve the same objective with tools,” said Lew. ”To cut a rabbet (a groove for a joint), for example, you can use a table saw with a combination blade, a shaper, a jointer, a router or (cut it) by hand with a rabbet plane.
”That`s part of the fun of planning,” he added. ”Sometimes you do it a different way just for the challenge. As a rule, though, I try to use the technique that will provide the most accuracy and get the job done the most quickly.”
The first step before ripping into our oak plywood was to study the grain and select the best sections for the pieces that would show, namely the sides and storage doors. In the process of manufacturing veneer, successive sections of timber are laid out like a book so that mirror grain patterns appear side by side. The trick is to pick the most attractive sections of grain and then match them, by slicing down the ”spine of the book” so that the grain repeats.
The worst thing to do is just rip into a sheet and cut the first dimension. ”You have to learn how to read the grain, and that comes with experience,” said Lew. It is easy to tell the difference when you compare pieces that have been cut thoughtfully instead of randomly.
My hope at the outset was to be an active participant in bringing shape and substance to this simple TV stand, but in practice I stood by and marveled at Lew`s skill and style. He was meticulous in his every move-measuring carefully, adjusting the saw, even the way he pushed the stock through the saw evidenced a special sensitivity to the craft and an immense respect for the physical properties of machines and materials.
After all the pieces were liberated from their original 32-square-foot prison, each was surface-planed smooth. Then one-quarter-inch strips were cut from the quartersawn oak board. This stock is milled against the grain so that when it is ripped for use as edging or screen, a straight, true grain pattern is revealed.
The strips were laminated to the edges of the plywood with white glue to create a pleasing, finished look. Always glue immediately after cutting and don`t sand the edges, said Lew, who applied the glue with a special roller device and then brushed it smooth. Next, the pieces were clamped together. Lew has an entire wall of pipe clamps-more than 30-and we used all of them for the project.
For the doors, an iron-on oak tape was used to conceal the plywood edges. Tape was used because it is thinner and it is more convenient when dealing with clearances required for the door opening. It could easily have been used for the entire project, and it would have looked good, too. The edge strips specified, however, added an element to the design that Lew sought to achieve. Next, a Sandvick Swedish Scraper, a thin square of metal with one sharp edge, was used to trim off the excess glue and edge material. The scraper is pulled in long, smooth strokes along the edge to shave off a little material at a time until the two surfaces are flush.
Dados were cut on a table saw using a dado head, a special blade that allowed us to cut a three-quarter-inch swath through the stock in a single pass. All cuts were planned carefully, and a setup was not changed until all similar cuts had been made. Also, the intended kerf line (the width of the saw blade) on veneered surfaces was shielded with tape before ripping to minimize shattering of the wood fibers along the edge.
Next, all the pieces of the basic assembly were dry-fitted and then glued together, with much adjusting and shifting and worrying before the last clamp was twisted tight. After drying, the doors and back were fitted and all hardware was installed.
Elapsed time from start to finish of the project (not counting staining and varnishing) was about 22 hours. Recognize, though, that we spent many nonproductive hours in conversation, waiting for glueups to dry and the like. Lew figures the project could normally be finished in little more than a day under routine circumstances and if edge tape was used throughout.
When all was said and done, we had used every stationary power tool in the shop, including the surface planer (to smooth the quartersawn oak).
Working with Mike Lew for two days imbued me with a better appreciation of what woodworking is all about. It also gave me something more substantial than the solid oak TV cart that now sits in my living room.
Lew expressed it best when he remembered his introduction to the craft at the Loyola Fieldhouse: ”The important thing was to get the confidence to know that you could do it and to have someone there to help answer your questions.”
