The mania of perfection -inset pulls, carved fronts and a fear of commitment...

It's not often that I get so obsessed about something.  I've been screwing around with "the perfect" drawer front for a dresser I've been working on, not able to decide what I want to carve on the drawer fronts. Spending some time in Hawaii recently has my head filled with visions of tribal artwork, and I've been playing around with designs for weeks. Ugh, I've always regarded a carving design like marriage - once you commit, you're committed, right? 

So I've been having appropriate fear of commitment feelings with these drawer fronts. 

I'm not a huge fan of hardware in drawer fronts - I feel like knobs or pulls distract from the piece. Or - at least - they distract me. I decided to play around with an inset pull, to see if I liked the effect on these drawer fronts. 

Inset pulls utilize the face of the drawer to create a recess, eliminating the need for a knob. I grabbed a piece of scrap - to test a idea I've had rolling around in my head. 

I drew a few lines on the scrap, the same size was the actual drawer face,  

and then went to the mortiser. I want this inset pull to be diamond-shaped, so I rotated the 3/4" mortising bit

to 45 degrees. 

All lined up -

and drilled. 

You need two different router bits to complete the pull - a cove bit for the back of the pull,

which makes this cut. 

And a small roundover for the front. 

 Which gives you this result. 

 I've rounded over the top edges of the diamond, but the bearing on the router bit doesn't really allow the bit to get too close to the corners. Still - I could envision what the drawer face was going to look like - so I decided to try again, this time with an actual piece of oak, not scrap.

I cut a small piece,. 

and went through the same process.

Practice really does make perfect.

Rounded over and waiting to the corners to be squared by hand.

Yup, that's pretty much what I could see in my head. I wonder if other woodworkers have visions of things before they actually make them. 

Finally - my goal is to carve a small area around those inset pulls - just a simple set of triangles, sort of randomly placed. My mind kept pulling me back to some simple tribal design, almost as if these triangles were carved with a simple pocketknife, a little crude and imperfect.

I cut some small triangles out of masonite, and started playing with their placement. 

Once I was satisfied with the layout, I drew directly on the wood. 

The carving has commenced! 

Next time I write about this, I hope to be able to show some pictures of the finished piece. I'm ready to move onto the next project!

The Secret of Trees

What a terrific little video! 

Shake your (Dj)Bouti....

Once you get a catchy song in your head, it's hard to get it out. Right? 

Shake, shake, shake....

That has nothing whatsoever with this post. 

When someone brought this hand-carved table to my shop for repair, and told me it was from Djbouti, my head started playing an endless loop of this song inside. When you're trapped working in a shop all day, it's easy to get silly about stuff like this; I make no apologies for this.

The good news? What a cool table - carved from a SOLID LOG - the top and base are all one piece. Can you imagine the skill it takes to carve this from one log? 

There was one slight problem - Djbouti is way more humid than Las Vegas, and when the table was transported here - it started losing moisture. 

Within a month, huge cracks started developing. 

In fact, one whole area broke off.

This table needed some TLC.

We had a discussion about the table - and the chance that - given its construction and the moisture content of the log, this table was probably going to continue cracking.

Our best remedy was to separate the base from the top. The owner of the table decided that he would put a glass top on the base, which would probably remain stable and not crack any more. 

And the top? I would try to repair it - and turn it into a wall piece. 

I pulled out a thin kerf flexible saw and separated the top from the base. I rocked it with my wood-awesome-ness, because - honestly, you can't even tell the table top was once attached!  The base actually looks better separated!  

I touched up the tops of the three elephant trunks with a bit of sandpaper, testing the three points for "flatness" on my table saw top. Once it was perfectly flat, I stained the wood to match the rest.  Phase one - completed!

The table top  - now that's another story! It was in horrible shape - in fact, it's not very often that I say this - but I wasn't even sure I was going to be able to restore it. Then I remembered - a while back, my buddy Eddie gave me a set of burn-in shellac sticks. 

And a burn-in knife. 

Truth be told - I had to pull up a video on YouTube to see how these are supposed to be used. I think I learned about these in college, a hundred years ago. 

One of the really helpful tips I learned was that the knife - if it's never been used - needs a little TLC. I lightly touched up the edges of it on some 400 grit paper, to eliminate any burrs. 

The set of burn-in sticks supply you with just about every color you'll need for a repair. And the good news is - you can mix them together to create custom colors. 



Basically, you plug in the knife until it heats up, and then melt a dab of the shellac onto the blade. I found it easiest to to this while the blade was flat, so I could mix the colors together onto it - like a small palette. 

Turn the knife sideways and the shellac drips down onto the tip of the knife, where you can direct the flow where you want it. They recommend that you use a shade to match the lightest color of the area you're repairing - but when I did that, it was too light and didn't match well at all. 



A piece of blue tape acted like a dam, stopping the flow of shellac at the edge.

When the shellac cooled, I peeled off the tape and worked on smoothing out the shellac. 

It took a few sessions to fill these cracks with the correct color - but the end result was WAY worth it.

 You can barely spot the cracks in the wood.

  Seriously - can you see them?

I don't often do repairs like this one, and I find them to be very stressful! I did a little dance around the woodshop (Shake, shake, shake....) when this repair was complete!  

Taking a day off...

Once a month, I try to get out of the shop and do something new. The good news is - there's always something to explore here - whether it's a new restaurant, the farmer's markets, an exhibit or a museum - whatever. 

This week, I stopped by The Mob Museum. I'd heard a lot of mixed reviews, and decided it was time to check it out. 

 You start at the top - the third floor and enter a police line-up area.

You can even pose for a picture in it, with your friends. 

Luckily, there are guards everywhere, protecting innocent citizens from being muscled. (That's a joke.)

 Apparently, it was Spring Break for kids here in Vegas, so the place was bustling with children everywhere. That struck me as odd, considering the graphic content of violence at the museum. 

Like this barber chair where a famous Mob hit took place. 

You can read about the hit here.

Or these "tools" of the trade."

I didn't realize there was such a huge "Cleveland connection" with the Mob. Hell, I lived near Cleveland when some of the bombings and hits took place - but I was a kid, and oblivious to the violence back then. Here's an ID of a prominent mobster, with his Cleveland address clearly written on it. 

Each floor of the museum was devoted to a different theme - the top floor was mostly history of the Mob - how it started and was formed through the years. I never realized that the Hoover Dam played a pretty big part in establishing Las Vegas as a resting place for the Mob.  

The cool part was all the memorabilia - like these old comic books, 

 or this Tommy Gun that you could shoot. 

 I was going to say - one thing that bothered me, but I don't think that's the right way to put it - was the desensitization of the "hits" that this museum depicted. There are hundreds of photos of dead bodies. As you walk through the halls, you're seeing corpse after corpse - and normally - that would make you squeamish, right? After a while - those images just seem routine, and that struck me odd. Of course, watching all the kids play with the machine guns, or sit in the electric chair, seemed odd too. 

WTF kind of person would bring their kid here? I don't get that. 

Did you know the mob tried to smuggle drugs into the country using these canned tomatoes? You can't make this shit up! 

This Italian restaurant was a front for much illegal activity,

 but looked like a regular "mom and pop" operation. 

Far from it!

The building that houses the museum is the actual old federal courthouse, and the second floor is the actual courtroom where the Kefauver hearings took place in the 1950s. This isn't a great picture of it, but here it is - 

they play an interesting film while you're sitting in the courtroom. 

It's hard to ignore the history in that room. 

The room stacked with money was pretty impressive! I love this address book  - I forget who it belonged to , but there - plain as day - is Oscar Goodman's address.  

He was the mobster's lawyer at the time, but later became the mayor of Las Vegas. Oscar - people either love him or hate him - but he was instrumental in getting this museum built. 

Again - it's hard to ignore the sheer violence contained in this building. Umm - read this sign below and tell me if kids should be here?

The wall commemorating "The Mob's Greatest Hits" featured photos of dozens of assassinations. Bizarre. 

Did you know that when casinos close up and are imploded, they actually take the old chips and destroy them? In this case, they actually added them into the concrete used in the footer of the new casino going in its place.  

You know the first thing that leapt into my head was wondering what else was cast into that concrete footer!

The bottom and final floor of the museum was devoted to more recent Vegas connections with the Mob. 

Cassius Clay was the first boxer not controlled by the Mob. You might know him as Mohammed Ali.

There was a fun wall of Hollywood depictions of the Mob, including my favorite - Carmella Soprano 

and her ruthless husband - Tony. There was even a display for The Sopranos, featuring some outfits that Tony wore during some of the episodes. (I remember that shirt, Ton!)

The last floor also featured modern day government methods for fighting mobbed up businesses - which now includes the broader influence of women. 

There was a fascinating film clip discussing the ties between Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby and the assassination of JFK and the influence of the Mob. Wow. Hard to ignore that connection. 

Four and a half hours later - I ended the tour in The Mob Museum's gift shop - a fitting way to end the day, since it features capitalism as its best. Who can resist a Brass Knuckle Meat tenderizer?

Or the Soprano's cookbook with Carmella's famous Baked ZIti recipe? I may have to go back and buy this!

This mug was pretty nice, too - 

but one of my favorite items was this tee-shirt. 

I SAW NOTHING AT THE MOB MUSEUM

All in all - a terrific way to spend the afternoon. Las Vegas locals get in for ten bucks - but it may take a bit more money with a therapist to get all those images out of my head. 

Dr. Melfi - where are you?