First, I need a plan.  I sketched out the shelves in CAD and worked out the dimensions so that all the pieces fit together despite orientation.  Obviously, you don’t want gaps in between the pieces when they’re stacked together.  For this you need the right size and 90 degree corners.  I decided to use 0.5″x0.25″ rabbet joints with glue and brad nails on the corners.  The use of brad nails meant I didn’t have to use a ton of corner clamps to hold everything while the glue set.

To start I picked up three sheets of 0.5″ MDF and ripped two of the sheets into 7″ strips.  They’re 7″ because I wanted to use 0.5″ MDF for the backs of the blocsk too.

I used the CAD drawing to create a cut list and then cross cut all the pieces on the tablesaw.

I further divided the pieces into groups based on if they needed rabbet cuts at the edge or not.  I used a stacked dado blade on the table saw to create the rabbets.  The easiest way to size the rabbets is to set it close and then made some test passes adjusting as needed.  MDF is a consistent thickness so once you have the size nailed in, you’re good to go for all the pieces.  Here’s a pic cutting a test piece.

After lots of cuts all the parts have the rabbet cuts on the ends.

I wanted to use a 0.5″ thick MDF piece for the backs.  A thick back piece will make the entire shelf ridged, strong, and keep the sides from bowing in.  To fit the back, I cut more rabbets along the long edges of the pieces of each block.  To make sure I cut correctly, I laid each block out and then cut the rabbets piece by piece going around the block.

A normal full kerf tablesaw blade is 1/8″ thick.  A dado blade has two circular saw blades like you’ve probably seen in the stores and then additional chipper blades that are sandwiched in between.  You can adjust the number of chipper blades (and shims too) to make your cut wider or smaller.  These chipper blades have only a few teeth so they don’t bog the saw down.  Unfortunately, using a dado blade doesn’t always leave a nice smooth cut.  Sometimes you end up with ridges.  Well, my set does.  Maybe nicer sets don’t.  No worry though because there are hand plane that can be used to clean up the surface.  A pass or two and you have a nice flat rabbet.  Yes, planes even work on MDF.

Here are the opposing “L”s laid out.  To make the optional shelves I decided to use L brackets with 1/4″ pins.  This required drilling 1/4″ holes in the right spot.  For the flat surfaces this was easy.  Some of the pieces required drilling the holes at the corners though.

To drill the holes at the corners I glued and brad nailed the two pieces together and then took them to the drill press.  Here’s a tip.  Ideally all of my 7″ strips would be perfectly the same size.  In truth though, since I don’t have a huge 16′ table to slide sheets of MDF along while cutting, there was a little wave in the cut meaning it wasn’t a consistent 7″.  After you’ve cut the pieces there’s no way to add material back on though.  To deal with this it is best to “hide” the problem.  By “hide” I mean to put it some place where no one will see or care about it.  For the shelves this meant making sure the front of the pieces lined up at the joints and letting the back vary a little bit.  If you do this and the joint doesn’t match up perfectly on the back of the shelf no one will see it.

Once the two pieces were jointed I marked out and drilled the pin holes.  These holes are dangerously close to the edge and would probably rip out at some point in the future.  To fix this I’ll need to reinforce them.  More on that later.

Now I can start building blocks by working around the them gluing and brad nailing the joints.

Once the sides for a block are all joined it’s time to cut out the back.  This is pretty easy except for at an inside corner.  Circular saw blades cut a little further on one side of the board than the other.  If you go all the way to the line then you will have cut too far or not enough on the other side.  To deal with this, you leave a little bit uncut and then come back with a hand saw and finish the cut.

Once the back is cut out, it is test fit and then glued and brad nailed in place.  Here’s two of the “L”s with their backs in place.

This is a pic showing pieces stacking.

This is all seven pieces stacked up.  The blocks aren’t glued to each other so you can reconfigure them whenever you want.  Yes, I used an older sheet of MDF for the back of the T hence the different color.

In my next post I’ll cover my solutions for beefing up the corners with pin holes, how I messed that up, and then fixed it.

This a drawing of the complex from the visitor’s center showing how it was laid out back in the day.  At it’s peak the site generated 900,000 ft of lumber a year which seems like quite a lot.  Pine, Juniper, and Cypress was processed here.

Most of the area is overgrown with trees but they have an elevated boardwalk around some of the ruins.  There’s signs to be read around the loop pointing out types of trees and what used to be there.  One of the signs indicated that we were standing right next to where the lumber mill used to be.  I looked around for a bit for anything and finally found these rocks which were the foundation of the building.  There were a couple other similar areas and that was about it.

Luckily, there were a few recreations.  The mill had a small animal powered railroad for moving timber and there was car and track on display.  Log flumes were also used to move the timber around the area.

The mill made use of a water will to run a series of saws to cut the lumber.  They had a little recreation that runs off of electricity to show how it would have worked.  Unfortunately, it wasn’t running at the time.

It was a pretty simple setup though.  The water wheel would have turned a shaft that was probably geared using belts and wheels which would have been connected to various machines.  Fro the saws, a crankshaft would have moved the frame holding the saw blades up and down cutting the lumber.

To move logs felled in the area, a carriage like the one shown below would have been used.  Chains and hooks hung from the platform between the two large wheels and were used to lift the log to move it.

This type of extinguisher is filled with water and then pressurized through a Schrader valve like you have on a tire up to 100psi.  I put water in mine and then put about 10 psi.  It started leaking around the collar nut (the big nut in the pic below) which didn’t surprise me that much.  It was made in 1980 and rubber O-rings have a limited life.

I took the valve assembly back off and replaced the big O-ring with one from the hardware store.

The surface inside the neck of the water tank, called a cylinder, had some corrosion on it that I cleaned up using a little Brasso.  Anything other than a clean smooth surface can result in leaks.

That’s a little better.  I smeared some Plumber’s silocon on this surface and reassembled the extinguisher.

I put 10 psi back on it and heard some faint hissing from the nozzle and the Schrader valve.  I removed the Schrader valve, blew it out, and put some silicone on the rubber surface.  The main valve inside of the extinguisher is held closed with a spring under the brass nut seen in the second picture.  I removed all of this, cleaned up the mating surfaces and reassembled it.

I put 10 psi back on it and listened.  No leaks this time.  I slowly increased the pressure up about 50 psi when I heard a “tink” and saw water leaking out of the bottom.  That’s not good.

I took off the bottom plastic foot and was greeted with a small pinhole in the bottom of the cylinder.  It looks like a little bit of rust had built up around here and weakened the cylinder.  It also looks like there are a couple more bad spots near the hole.

At this point I threw in the towel on the extinguisher.  Maybe I’ll run across a good cylinder in the future or find someone who can weld stainless.  But for now I’ve just put it aside.  You can’t win them all I suppose.

Before I can get to the lathe, I need to make a couple passes through the band saw.  The first pass cuts out the spatula as viewed from the top.  For the next pass, the spatula is flipped on its side to remove material from on top and under the blade (the flat part).  Now its off to the lathe.

I put the blade end into the small jaws on my chuck and held the other end with my tail stock.  Unfortunately, the only tail stock I have is a cup style so I’m not able to easily put a rounded end on the handle.  I might have to pick up a cone style tail stock soon.  I roughed the handle out with a roughing gouge and then cleaned the surface up with the skew chisel.  I’m really liking the skew.  The surface it leaves is great which means less sanding.   I then put a few grooves in it to add some detail.

At this point the lathe portion of the project is over and it is time for sanding.  I used a combination of belt sander, random orbit sander, and hand sanding to get the spatula smoothed out.  Here’s a picture of it after the belt sander.

After some random orbit and hand sanding to 320 grit here’s the final shape.

Now all that is left is to dab on some mineral oil.  I also made another, smaller, spatula out of some Soft Maple I had laying around.  The larger one has a 3″ wide blade and the smaller one has a 1.5″ blade.  While the Magnolia one looks more interesting I prefer the Maple one.  But I could be biased because Maple is one of my favorite woods.

Overall, this is a fun project that is finished relatively quickly.  Most of it isn’t done on the lathe but I think it still counts as a turned project.  Give it a try!

I made the engines out of the same 1-3/8″ Poplar dowel that I made the Apollo CSM out of.  So far I’ve got three of them done.  There’s diamond shaped support structure on the actual engine that I’ve added to my wooden version to add a little detail.  So far I only have three completed.

As opposed to describing what I did, I decided to record a video of making one.  I think some additional lighting would help but you can see what I’m doing.  I’ve sped it up by 15x so it’s only a couple of minutes long. I tried to keep my head out of the shot.  I make use of mostly skew chisels but a flat nosed scraper also makes an appearance.  I use a card stock template that I reference frequently in the video.  There’s also two outside calipers that I use to check the sizes of various parts.

Here’s the picture showing where the piece is located on the real rocket.

As always, I start with a block of laminated pine.

I roughed it into a cylinder and brought it down to a slightly oversized.  I made a tenon at one end to go into the chuck.  I then used the skew chisel for some finishing passes.  It worked great and left a smooth surface.  I’m still a little apprehensive using the the skew but didn’t have any issues.

The ring needs to be pretty thin near the top to fit onto the second stage and the entire ring must be hollow to clear the nozzles of the second stage.  To do this required turning the part around several times on the lathe.  First, I drilled the largest hole I could using a Forstner bit to about three quarters depth of the piece.

Next, I hogged the inside out and focused on getting the right thickness at the end of the piece to snuggly fit the second stage.  To get the size correct, I used some calipers.

I cleaned up the inside a little more and then flipped the part over.  I used the Forstner bit again to drill through the piece.

Here’s the piece after drilling.  The inside dimension of this end isn’t critical but does need to be large enough to clear the nozzles.

I flipped the part over a final time and made some passes to clean up the inside.  After that I did some light sanding.

Looks like it fits pretty well.

Here it is in the stack with the rest of the rocket.  It doesn’t add much to the height.

Up next is the first stage.  I’ve been putting it off some because I’m not sure how I’m going to make the four conical fairings that are on the bottom of the stage.  They’ll have to be made as separate pieces and then glued on.  Ideally I’d like to make them out of wood.  I just haven’t figured out a way to make the inside surface of the conical pieces fit the diameter of the stage body.  If anyone has thoughts, please comment.

The DVD is 90 minutes long and is what you’d expect out of a wood turning DVD.  There’s someone standing at a lathe narrating while doing certain things on the late.  They illustrate, effortlessly, things that don’t go so well for you.  The picture and sound quality are pretty good.  The camera work is nice and every so often you’ll be treated to an additional view in the main shot to show another perspective.  He talks about both the straight and curved edge skew during the sharpening section but only uses the curved skew on the lathe.  He covers ten different types of cut including the planing cut I’m illustrating below.  The planing cut is a finishing cut that leaves behind a smooth surface.

He also covers V cuts for starting details and then shows how to use Rolling and Coving cuts to get the shape you want.  He also covers the Saucer cut which leaves a concave surface.  Using this cut, he creates a captured ring which I haven’t yet been able to duplicate.  Below, I’m showing some of the shapes you can create using the skew and the great surface it leaves behind.

Another cut covered is the shoulder cut.  He shows how to use the chisel to cleanly cut endgrain.  Shown below on the left, is the surface left behind using a parting tool.  On the right, is the surface that is the result of a skew chisel.   The surface on the left would take a long time to clean up with sandpaper.  The more sanding I can avoid the better.

While the skew chisel cuts cleanly and leaves a great surface it can be unforgiving.  If you drop the tip into the surface or don’t support the cutting edge properly it’ll gouge a spiral on your workpiece in the or remove a big chunk blink of an eye. Shown below is the kind of damage the skew can cause.  He covers what causes these issues and how to avoid them.   He also suggests using a dead center in the headstock instead of a spur.  This way, if there is a catch, the wood will stop spinning which reduces the shock and impact of a catch.

There are also some sections on cutting pommels, the pealing cut, working with knots and twisted grain, and end scraping.  He wraps the whole video up by using a very large skew to turn an teeny tiny top.

Nothing will replace actual experience at the lathe but the DVD will greatly reduce the slope of the learning curve with the skew.  My method of watching instructional videos is to watch it once through and then come back and watch specific sections on what I’m interested in or having trouble with.  The chapters on the DVD make this easy to do.  Overall, the video is very good and worth checking out if you’re interested in learning more about the skew.

Here’s the NASA pic to show where this section is located on the rocket.

As before, this stage will be turned out of some laminated pieces of southern yellow pine.

I roughed it into shape with a gouge and then brought it close to the final size with a skew chisel. I put a tenon on the left (top) side of the stage to fit into the ring I made previously.

I took the stage on and off several times to make sure the fit was good with the ring.  Here’s a pic of a test fit.  Unfortunately, after additional sanding later the diameters no longer match as well.

Once I was happy with the size of the tenon and outside diameter, I started work on the nozzle end of the stage.  There’s no way I can turn the five nozzles in place.  The plan was to finish the stage off leaving an area to put the nozzles.  I used a cutoff tool to define the end of the stage and mark the depth of the bottom of the stage.

From the previous step I connected the two cuts with a flat surface and trimmed off the extra.  I really couldn’t run the stage in the lathe held like this.  Any pressure would cause the stage to start to wobble.  Holding it by hand at low speed, I was able to get the little nub trimmed off though.  Still, a steady rest would be a great aide here.

In order to give the J-2 nozzle on the end of the S-IVB stage a place to go I drilled a shallow hole into the top of the stage on the drill press.

Next, comes making the five J-2 engines.  I started with pieces of Poplar dowel I had laying around.

First, I turned the top end of the nozzle and left it a little long to fit inside the stage.

Again, I used the cutoff tool to mark the end of the nozzle and the correct diameter.  With these two locations defined, I started to create the bell shape of the nozzle.

I made a template to use on the nozzles to get them all close to the same shape.  To create the template, I printed a line drawing of the stage and then glued the nozzle drawing to a piece of hard board.  A little cutting and sanding left me with a good template.  I’d turn some and then check it against the template.  After a few iterations I had a well shaped nozzle.

After repeating the above four more times I finally had five little nozzles.  They’re close to being the same.

To give the nozzles a place to rest, I marked off points to drill using the line drawing referenced above.  Seen below, I used the drill press to drill the holes.

After some fitting, all of the nozzles were inserted to the correct height.  I need to get some thin super glue to hold them all in place.  The glue I had was too thick to wick into the joint.

Finally, here’s all the pieces together.