Yay!

Seems like the box stores just don’t carry the types of kits that the lamp book recommended. But, I was able to cobble together a kit from the parts they had. Cost too much, but oh well. I might attemp re-leveling the feet. They looked ok on the bench, but not on the table (probably need to flatten the bench, which might wait for a new top to the bench in a few years).

Lessons Learned:

• Do your stock shaping before your miter cuts.
• Miter cuts are hard to get right – I’m not super happy with how these came out. Maybe one the shooting board is complete, I’ll be able to fine tune these better.
• Ceder is nasty stuff. Wear proper dust mask and ventilate/filter, whenever sanding or even using a fine pitched saw.
• Pine is probably too fragile for large splines.
• Splines wider than a saw kerf are hard to get right. Maybe now that the plow plane is fixed, this will be easier in the future (more on this in the next post).
• Getting the rice paper tight was one of my initial worries, but the book’s trick for spraying it down, after the glue has dried, to shrink the paper worked great.
• I do like the open time of hide glue, but if the room (ie garage) is a little on the cool side, then it is a good idea to keep it in a glass of warm water, so it doesn’t turn into silk thin threads of stretchy mozzarella too soon.
• I still like the expanding style glue for some things.
• A router plane sure would have been helpful attaching the top to the legs, but I’m not sure that the super small one required for this project would get used on other projects. Just a regular chisel seemed to do ok, even if a little time consuming.

I’m not sure if I’ll be making another lamp in this style, give how long the project took. By maybe. I’d like to see if I could do a better job on the top, which didn’t come out quite as nice as I would have liked.