On August 6 I will be getting married, in Hungary, to my beautiful Hungarian fianceé Kata. Just a few weeks ago I was in Hungary to sort out a few things to do with the wedding and decided to take a gift with me for her parents. I thought a handmade gift would mean more than just something bought. So I decided to make them a clock. I was fortunate to get some inch thick mahogany from my uncle. It took a bit of work to get it workable as it was part of a fire surround. Have a look at the process below. (click on a picture to see a larger image)
I used Google SketchUp to come up with a design. Instead of the finger joints I decided to go with dovetails, and as you will see later the top and bottom will be slightly different.
The wood arrived, and as you can see below it was a bit banged up and would take some work to get to a stage that it could be worked.
After trying a few different ways, to remove the paint/varnish (I'm not too sure exactly what it was) and the adhesive on the other side, the only way that seemed to work was my no.5 jack plane (This of course was after struggling to pull out 5 or 6 nails that were very well hammered into the wood and I still don't know why they were even there in the first place). Getting the blade as sharp as possible and using all the elbow grease available, after 45mins I had something that looked a bit more respectable.
Once the initial clean up was done, it was time to mark out the board (I did this with a thin pen as it was easier to see on the darker wood. Try not to make too many mistakes with this as the markings may start to confuse you as you can't rub them out). When I got the board marked out it was time to cut out the pieces. Remember, measure once cut twice!
I really should have listened to my own advice above. Having cut the piece for the curves I realised they were the wrong length so I had to cut them again, luckily I had enough left over to do this.
With the pieces cut to length (and some cut again), I split the pieces down the middle to give me the correct thickness and glued up the parts for the front and the back.Cutting out the dovetails was the next challenge. Reading lots of articles and watching lots of videos on the Internet does help, but seeing people make beautiful joints with what looked like the minimum of ease made me think that maybe they weren't really that difficult. I was wrong. A little bit of glue mixed with some sawdust filled up the gaps pretty well. You just have to keep telling yourself 'the next ones will be better'. Here they are getting glues up.
Once the carcass was glued up, I cut out the hole for the clock face and the curves with my router. Oh, and I also routed the top and bottom with roman ogee and cove cutters respectively.
I glued the top and bottom on and went over the whole thing with 80, 120, 240 and 320 grit sandpapers. Now for the finish, 3 coats of oil followed by the coats of wax and I had the finished product
