Winding Swiftly

I know that carpentry isn't a craft I share with a lot of my blog friends. But here's the kind of carpentry project a knitter can get behind:


Yes, I have just built myself a yarn swift. It's something I haven't really minded not having. I wind occasional balls by hand without any fuss, and I don't get all that much yarn in skeins. But going from balls to skeins- that's a different story. See, one of the lots of free yarn I got a while back was a whole bagful- probably around 2400 yards of lovely cream sport-weight wool. And I thought 'Hmm. I don't really want to knit an all-cream sweater, but if I dyed some or all of it....'

And I poked around and looked at some dyes but I have enough other projects on my plate that dying the cream wool wasn't something I put any priority on. Enter my mother. My mother is an avid and marvelously skilled quilter, dyes some of her own fabric, and occasionally does workshops on dying. She's planning to have a dye-your-own day at her house and invited me to come and dye all that cream wool. And I said, 'Huzzah! Expert dying instruction.' And then I said, 'Oh, poot. Now I have to skein all that yarn.'

So I priced yarn swifts, and decided they were a little more than I wanted to spend for something that--however useful it would be on an ongoing basis--was really intended to facilitate one project. I considered a niddy noddy, which would have been even easier to build- but that's only really good for skeining, and if I'm going to have something like that lying around, I'd rather be able to wind from it too.

I looked online for people who had built their own, and found several very clever ideas, including people who had built swifts out of Lego and Tinker Toys. But alas, my Tinker Toys have been gone for 30 years. The most applicable plan I found was this one, done by a guy who has a heck of a lot more tools than I do. It's gorgeous. I figured that I could probably do something similar but simplify it a little- maybe substitute a square base for his elegantly crossed legs. But looking it over carefully, there was one aspect of the design I didn't care for--the way the armature is tensioned. It seemed to me that there could be some wobble in the arms. The arms basically turn on a single central bolt, which is tensioned using a washer, nut and wing-nut combination. What I really wanted was in that position was a bearing, the kind with top and bottom races, like a lazy susan. I have a little lazy susan for the kitchen, which I mainly use for frosting layer cakes, and I briefly contemplated sacrificing it for the cause. But it's plastic and I'd have had a better-than-even chance of ruining it and not getting a usable swift.

So I went back to the internet, and lo and behold, I found that you can get a four-inch lazy susan bearing at the hardware store (they stock it with cabinet hardware). Well. That simplified the whole design considerably. In fact, I think I could have made it even simpler by just mounting the top bearing plate to the arms and letting the whole thing spin on the bottom plate, but I wanted more stability, and something just a bit better looking. So I yanked some scrap out of the scrap lumber bin in the workshop and put this together in a couple of evenings. If I say so myself, it works extremely well. It spins quietly and easily on the bearing. For the speeds and loads this will see, it doesn't even need oil (the bearing is rated for something like 300 lbs). The price was right- less than $6 for the bearing and everything else I had on hand. Here's a photo of the pieces unassembled (you can click on either photo to enlarge them):


Components list:
wood base- 9" square by 3/4" thick
wood top - 4 1/4" square by 3/4" thick
1 4" four-inch lazy susan bearing
2 arms 26" long by 1 1/4 wide by 3/4" thick (1x2 or 1x1 would work fine)
4 pegs 5/8" diameter by 6" long
3 wood screws 1 1/2" long
8 wood screws 1/2" long

Tools:
drill
drill guide (optional- I found it useful for keeping the peg holes straight)
saw
clamps
router (for notching the arms together, this could also be done with a wood chisel)
screwdriver
sandpaper

Achievements

So, last night as I was headed to karate practice, I had a call from my husband. "I can't find Cookie," he said. "I'm afraid he's gotten out."

Well, that was a matter for considerable concern- he's an indoor cat and inclined to be nervous about new things. If he'd managed to go rushing through an open door before he registered it was new and strange, he'd probably panic. So I turned around and headed home. But before I started an outdoor search, I wanted to do a thorough check inside first, even though my husband had already turned the place upside down a couple of times. Because Cookie is good at hiding. He has been getting into places you'd swear were impossible. And he has this tendency to wander around staring penetratingly at places he finds interesting until he figures out how to get there.

For example, yesterday morning, he found his way to the top of one of the tall bookcases in the living room:


Doesn't he look pleased with himself?


So, after an exhaustive search, we finally located him in one of these places...atop the other tall bookcase in the living room. The one we would have sworn he couldn't get into, because there is a rim that goes around the edge with only a few inches gap between it and the ceiling. The rim which, it turns out, conceals the top of the bookcase from the ground, making it a perfect hiding place for a cat.

I know how he did it- he launched himself from the top of the other bookcase above, and threaded the gap at the side, which is a bit wider than the one in front. Of course, once he'd done that, he had no idea how to get himself down. Straight down to the floor is nearly seven feet- that's enough to make even a cat as athletic as Cookie think twice, or three times or four. We stood there and watched him get one paw over the edge, look down and then retreat, several times.

It finally took a chair, a step stool, one human pushing and the other pulling to extricate him from his predicament. Once he was down, though, he didn't seem at all discommoded. Just rather dusty and in need of a thorough wash.

In other news, I wrote out a plan for the decreases on the colorwork mittens yesterday. I'd actually stopped knitting on them for a day because I was starting to have the sinking feeling I was going to run out of yarn. Fortunately, I remembered that my mother had some of the same gray, and I've asked her to hang onto it for a few days, in case I need it to finish these. So these are moving again.



And last but not least, having found myself home early last night, I turned to thinking about various projects in process, and decided to knock one off the list. Last year, I started to build a kayak cart. After trying it out, I found that it needed cross-bracing (which I'd known, but hadn't taken the time to do), and also that it needed to be reduced in height, as the center of gravity was too high, and it wasn't very stable. So last night I went down into the wood shop, took it apart, lowered the height and added cross-bracing.

So here it is, that rare creature- a carpentry FO!

Off the Bench

Today I wrapped up a lengthy carpentry project. Not because it was long or complex though- it had just been around a while. When I bought my house, lo these seven years ago- (What? Seven? *counts on fingers* Yes, seven. Aieee.)- where was I? Oh, seven years ago, the former owners abandoned quite a few odds and ends in their struggle to stuff several tons of clutter into a moving van. Much of it, I simply threw out, but there were some items my thrifty compulsions just wouldn't let me trash. One of them was this bench:



Now, this was clearly something that had been knocked together out of scrap lumber in the wake of some home improvement project or other, but it was a more-or-less functional piece of furniture. However, brief experimentation soon proved that anyone attempting to sit on it had a better than even chance of getting a splinter...well, we won't go into detail on just how I determined this wasn't a good thing to sit on, okay? So it was removed to the basement until it could be rehabilitated into something less likely to draw blood or cause pain in the posterior.

Earlier this spring, I decided its time had come. I ripped off the top boards (too warped to save) and sanded down the body of the bench. My original plan had been to put on a wooden seat and use this as a sort of window seat in the library, but once I had it sanded down, I decided that the original construction was pretty crude, and that it really wasn't a good candidate for indoor furniture. So instead, I repainted the frame with three coats of exterior latex, and replaced the top surface with plastic decking material- suitable for people to sit on in wet bathing suits.

Woats thinks it's pretty nifty.

Me, I'm just glad it's no longer taking up space in the basement, and has been restored to functionality. One project down, 673 to go....

Open and Shut

So, at the end of the last post, we had a correctly-sized door with solid edges, the hollow bits having been filled in by scrap lumber. I'm told by just about every carpenter I know that putting the door frame in first and then trying to hang the door is extremely difficult. The door needs to be straight and plumb on three axes- up and down, side to side, and in/out.

Fortunately, there isn't any need to do that. My plan (on advice received)was to build a door frame and 'pre-hang' the door. I cut a top lintel a bit wider than the door, and side pieces a little longer than the door-plus-lintel combination. Then I test fit the whole mess in the door opening. Several times. (This involved a lot of trying to balance three boards at once while cursing and dropping them. I believe that part could be omitted, though I'm not sure how.)

Then it was time to mortise hinges. (The mortise is the little recess on the door and doorframe that the hinge fits into so that there's room to close the door without leaving a huge gap on the hinge side.) This was a part of the project to which I devoted a lot of thought. Traditionally mortising is done with a chisel. Which not only I didn't have, but I strongly suspected that doing it well would take a fair bit of practice that I also didn't have. But I do have a router, and with some thought, I came up with a jig to let me produce mortises the right size for my hinges. After carefully measuring locations on both the frame and the door, I cut.





I would strongly recommend not wearing a shirt with a low neckline for this operation , as it generates a lot of sawdust. And here's the doorframe.




With the door now hinged to one side of the doorframe, I nailed the remaining pieces of the doorframe into a U-shape around the door and laid the whole thing flat on the table. That meant the the door and frame were all on the same level. I took strips of trim and nailed them to the frame behind the door to act as a jamb. (That being the stop that prevents the door from getting pushed into the closet and ripping the hinges out of the wood. Never underestimate leverage.)



Now was another good time to recheck the fit. And a good thing I did, since the door hole wasn't really square, and I'd been a little too aggressive in trying to get a tight fit. Some filing and planing of the outside of the door frame ensued. Once everything fit, I took the door out of the frame and stained the frame (never stain in situ if you can avoid it, that's my plan). Also, I stained the edges of the door where I'd filled in the scrap lumber.



Then it was finally time to install. This is another highly technical procedure. You put the door into the opening, hammer in bits of wedge-shaped scrap lumber to keep it from moving around, realize that the door is too tight. Curse a lot. Take the wedges out and cut them thinner. Put a level on it. Realize that the hammering has disturbed the level. Finally get everything precariously into balance, and put a bunch of long nails through it to hold the frame in the door opening. Then obsessively recheck levels and finally? Open and shut the new door twenty or thirty times- just because you can.




And last but not least, you cut some trim and nail it over the juncture of the door frame and door opening to hide the mess of wedges and nails back there. Just on the outside, because fortunately I'm not so anal as to worry about what someone hiding in the closet with think of my workmanship. (It was kind of a relief to discover this, after the whole painting thing.) The trim incidentally, was the bit that took a long hiatus before I finally finished.



I used a spare knob I had lying around, since this was such a funny little space and so low, I wasn't concerned about having an actual knob that turned. I also adjusted it to have just enough friction with the door frame to hold it closed without the need for a latch. The other two doors I mentioned? They were a little larger, and so I actually cut out the part of the hollow-core door that had the doorknob, and put in the strike plate, using the router again to cut out the space where the latch goes. Those got finished first, due to the one opening into the dining room (and therefore public) area of the house.



And boy, is it good to have this done. I can't say that hanging doors is the sort of thing I'd recommend to someone looking for a good time. But in the interest in saving a fortune in custom carpentry, I'm very glad to have done it. Or in other words? It feels so good when you stop.

The Birth of a Door

Today I finally finished the last step in a fairly extended project. (Not, you understand, that the project has taken so long, but rather I put off doing the last bit for a really embarrassingly long time...)

Anyway, it all started two years ago, when we ripped the roof off our house and built a second story. When we put the stairs up to the new second story, it wasn't practical to put a full-size closet underneath. Rather than give up the space under the stairs, however, I opted to leave the space accessible, with openings for half-height doors on both sides, and an even smaller space under the stairs themselves, accessible from the bedroom. Small is relative of course- we can fit four guitar cases in that space.

Anyway, rather than add custom doors to an already expensive project, I decided to build them myself. I even had a plan- there were several hollow core doors that had been removed during construction and weren't needed (the new doors going in were prehung pine-panel doors).

So, I started with a bare opening.

The contractor had installed baseboard across the bottom of the opening, and there was also framing down there. So my first task was to install a few spacers and then put in a sill, that would stick up a bit over the baseboard. The baseboard is pine, so just leaving it hanging in space would be asking for it to get broken. So I rounded over the corners on a length of pine board with the router, and installed the sill:


I also covered bare bits of the stair with a scrap of luan plywood (leftover from the backs of bookcases) and a bit of trim, and painted the inside of the closet. Why? I have no idea. I just felt compelled to do it. Apparently I felt compelled to paint my knees and elbows as well- the space was a tad too deep to paint from the outside- and kind of a tight fit for a painter to crawl into and paint from the inside. But I persevered.


Next step was to figure out the size of the door. Of course the opening wasn't square, so I left a little clearance plus space for the frame and arrived at an estimated size. Then I took a chunk of hollow-core door (left from the other door- I had two spares, but why cut up a door if you don't have to?) and cut it down to finished size.



Of course now you can see that the door isn't solid. (Have you ever wondered what was inside a door? I can now tell you that they have spacers made of chipboard or something similar.)


In order to give the door a solid edge all around, I cut pieces of scrap wood to exact size and fitted and glued them all along the unsupported edges.




This was done in stages- mainly because I didn't have enough clamps to do two sides at once- but this is a good place to break. Next post, building the doorframe, mortising hinges, and prehanging the door.