There is. Yes, there’s a secret to making sanding go quickly, easily and painlessly, and if you keep reading, I’ll tell you what it is.

You’re welcome.

Overview

To be perfectly honest, most folks sand way too much. The goal is to sand very little, yet still get great results. That’s entirely possible, but in order to do that, you need to know a few things; which paper and grits to use, when to switch grits or papers, how to use sandpaper efficiently, and most importantly, the object of each sanding step. After all, if you don’t know what each sanding step is meant to accomplish, how can you know when to stop sanding?

The Steps

The first round of sanding has two goals: flatten the wood and remove tool marks. That’s all you need to do, and you want to do it as quickly as possible. Therefore, use the coarsest paper that’s practical: usually, 80-grit. Using a harsh grit does this job quickly. If 80 doesn’t do it fast enough, go down a grit to 60, then back to 80, but remember, the goal is to get it flat and remove tool marks quickly.

Once the wood is flat and free of tool marks, you move on to the second, third and all other sanding steps. They all share just one goal: to replace the sanding scratches from the previous grit with finer scratches. You do that by sanding with a grit close to the last one. For instance, go from 60 to 80, from 80 to 120, from 120 to 180, and from 180 to 220.

The Paper

When sanding raw wood, I prefer aluminum oxide grit. It’s sharp, cuts fast and because it is usually friable, it fractures as you use it so that it continues to present a sharp cutting surface to the wood. However, that does not mean you should overuse it. Sanding with dull aluminum oxide paper is false economy; it makes you work harder, go slower and accomplish less. Switch to a fresh sheet frequently and never mind if you haven’t worn away every single bit of grit on the surface.

Now for the tough part: how to tell when it is time to stop sanding and move on to the next grit. I’ve explained what the objective of each step is, but to know when to stop, you need the best sanding techniques, both by hand and with a machine. That’s because the technique itself will tell you when to stop sanding. This may sound hard to believe, but it is true. Bear with me and I’ll show you what I mean.

By Hand

Wrap the sandpaper around a comfortable, hand-sized block lined with cork or rubber on the sanding face. Sand diagonally to the grain. Yes, I said diagonally, NOT with the grain. Diagonal sanding cuts the wood quickly and prevents “washboarding,” which often happens, especially on soft woods, when sanding with the grain. Washboarding occurs when the softer early wood bands erode more quickly than the harder latewood lines.

Now for the clever part. Switch grits, and sand diagonally in the OPPOSITE direction. Conveniently, your new scratches will be at right angles to the previous sanding scratches. As soon as all the scratches from the previous sanding are gone, you are done with that grit. That’s easy to see, since they go in the opposite direction of how you are now sanding. Clever, eh? Now move to the next grit and, once again, change diagonals.

Random Orbit Sander

There’s a trick for random orbit sanders as well. You’ve heard “slow and steady wins the race?” With a random orbit sander, the seemingly contradictory trick is to slow down in order to speed up.

There are two rules: don’t press down on the sander too hard, and don’t move it faster than one inch per second. Pressing down will slow the orbital movement, and that means it’s less efficient and won’t sand as fast. Moving the sander too quickly will create “pigtails,” but worse, it will make it almost impossible to know when to stop sanding. You may find yourself scrubbing forever.

However, if you move the sander only one inch per second, you only need to go over each area ONCE. At that speed, one pass will make the sander dwell about five seconds on each spot. Assuming you didn’t skip a grit, that’s just long enough to remove the previous sanding scratches. Hence, move the sander slower, and you’ll get done sanding faster. You’ll also know exactly when to move to the next paper.

Before you insist that you normally move the sander that speed, please take the speed test. See the scale on the left? Start at the top and move your finger to the bottom, but take a full 9.5 seconds to do it. Now be honest; is that really how slowly you usually move your sander?

I thought not.

An Extra-Special Step

One of my favorite sanding tricks is to follow my final grit, often 180, with the same grit, but in garnet paper. This time, sand by hand, going with the grain. The slightly dull garnet paper leaves a surface that takes stain more evenly, and it even helps burnish end grain, limiting its stain absorption somewhat.

Why does this work? Although aluminum oxide paper is usually friable, garnet paper is not. As you use it, the grit quickly rounds over, leaving a softer, U-shaped scratch rather than the harsher, V-shaped scratches typical of aluminum oxide. By using the same grit size, you quickly and easily align the scratches with the wood grain while softening them up at the same time.

Now that you know the timesaving sanding tricks the pros use, go on out there and sand, quickly and easily.

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Thanks to some excellent drafting by our senior art director, Jeff Jacobson, the bed was off to a great start. If you like what you see, gather up some 6/4 mahogany and maybe some fancier figured 4/4 stock for the bed’s center panels. Buy a sheet of quality plywood, too: you’re going to need it to make a stack of templates and jigs.

Starting with Four Big Templates and Two “Minis”

Look closely at the photo of the bed, and you’ll see that this bedframe has two sizes of “S”-shaped cloud lifts: tiny ones at the crests of the top rails, then a series of larger repeats that ripple down the top and bottom rails and the legs. These larger ones match one another. The smaller size is based on a pair of 3/16″-radii circles with centers that are spaced 3/8″ apart. Their opposing curves meet two horizontal lines that are 1/4″ apart (vertically), and the circles’ circumferences just touch. The larger cloud lifts start as 5/16″-radius circles with centers that are 3/4″ apart. Their edges intersect two parallel lines that are 1/2″ apart, vertically. A short diagonal connects the curves. Draw each of these cloud lifts onto squares of 1/4″-thick scrap. Cut them out and sand the shapes carefully on a spindle or drum sander. These “mini” templates will serve as tracing and routing guides for making the bed’s larger templates.

And that is your next task. I made four primary templates for the project: two half templates for the top and bottom rails, plus full templates for the two leg sizes. They’re necessary for tracing the actual project parts to shape, then template-routing them to final size. I also plotted the various mortise locations on my templates so they would perform double-duty as “story sticks” for the joinery. Draw your full-size templates, making the top and bottom rail templates at least half the total length of the rails. Then cut them out at the band saw and use your mini cloud lift templates, stuck in place with carpet tape, to template-rout the “S” shapes onto the larger templates. That way, all the cloud lifts will be precise and consistent from here forward. One other note: as you shape the bottom edge of the top rail template and the top edge of the bottom rail template, do your best to make their edges mirror opposites so the templates can literally fit together. What’s most important is that their flat surfaces are straight and parallel with one another.

Shaping and Mortising the Rails and Legs

Head to the jointer and planer to surface enough 6/4 mahogany down to 1-3⁄8″ thick for the top rails and legs. From there, adjust the planer to 1-1⁄8″ and mill stock for the bottom rails and the headboard’s frame rail. When you crosscut the parts to rough length, allow an extra couple inches on each end of the top rails; you’ll cut that off after mortising them. Rip these blanks to final width, and use your templates to trace the parts to shape.

There’s an urge I sometimes get once parts are drawn, to cut them all out. If you share that impulse, stuff it down deep for this project. Making these rails and legs should happen in stages that involve cutting, template-routing and mortising — and not always in that order — with the goal of keeping flat reference edges as long as possible. They’re needed for stable mortising.

Start by band-sawing just the inside edge of the headboard and footboard top rails and the top edges of the bottom rails to about 1/16″ from your layout lines. Now stick your templates along the traced lines with double-sided tape, and use a piloted flush-trim bit to mill the excess off at the router table. Be careful of reversing grain direction here at the halfway point of these project parts; I flipped and retaped the templates to the opposite part faces in order to always keep the bit cutting “with” the grain: avoid tearout at all costs.

With these selected edges now shaped, lay out all the slat and stile mortises, centering them on the rail thicknesses. See the Drawings for mortise lengths.

I deliberated at length about my mortising tool options: Festool Domino, mortising machine, router with edge guide or drill press and Forstner bit. Because of the close proximity of the slat mortises to some of the cloud lifts, that eliminated the Domino. A handheld router on these part edges might have been teetery, and the wide bottom rails exceeded my mortiser’s “bite.” So, the drill press, outfitted with a 4-ft. straightedge fence and support table I made, was the best choice for machining these long, heavy workpieces. Bore the mortises 1″ deep for the stiles and 3/4″ deep for the slats, using a series of side-by-side plunges with your Forstner bits. Make the leg mortises at the ends of the top rails 7/8″ deep — the extra stock you’ve left here prevents the mortise end walls from breaking. If you repeat the drilling sequence several times over, you should be able to remove nearly all the waste so you’re left with assembly-ready mortises.

Now clamp the rails upright and chisel their mortise ends square. Once that work is done, the flat reference edges of the top rails are no longer needed. Rough-cut, then template-rout, these remaining edges into their cloud-lifted shapes.

Turning to the Legs and Tenons

You can employ the same drill press setup now to drill 5″-long mortises into the legs’ inner edges for the rails — two in each headboard leg and one in the footboard legs. Make these slots 1/2″ wide and 1-1⁄4″ deep, centered on the leg thicknesses. But, before you head to the band saw to cut cloud lifts into the outside edges of the legs, stop! Mill their top tenons first. These 5/8″-thick, 1″-wide tenons are offset on the ends of the legs (see the Drawings). The shoulders that face the cloud-lifted edges are 1/2″ wide, while the opposite shoulders are just 1/4″ wide. I cut them at the table saw with a dado blade, backing up the long leg workpieces with an auxiliary fence attached to my saw’s miter gauge. Because of the various shoulder sizes, definitely make these cuts on scrap first, so you can adjust your saw settings carefully. Once you’ve cut them, check for a friction fit of the leg tenons in their top-rail mortises. When you’re satisfied, band-saw and template-rout cloud lifts into the outer leg edges, then file or sand their bottom corners to 1/4″ radii.

Take some time now to touch up all the cloud lifts on the rails and legs before proceeding. I used a 1/2″-diameter, 120-grit sanding sleeve in my spindle sander to remove any burn marks and rough-grain areas that resulted during routing, then switched to finer-grit papers wrapped around a dowel to go over them all by hand. It’s tedious work, but necessary nevertheless.

With the leg mortises made, there’s still the matter of cutting matching tenons into the ends of the bottom and frame rails to fit. Since these rails are now shaped, and no longer suitable for tenoning on the table saw, I milled the tenons with a handheld router and a slip-on, “wraparound” style jig. A 1″ O.D. guide bushing followed the edges of the jig, and a 3/4″-diameter straight bit made the cuts. I milled the tenons in stages, routing the 3/8″ shoulders into each face, then shifting the jig back to expose more area for routing. Cut the end shoulders with a hand saw.

Forming the Stiles and Slats

Dry-assemble the rails and legs so you can verify the exact length of the 16 slats and four stiles you need to make, next. Once you’ve milled stock for these parts — the slats and stiles are 7/8″ and 1-1⁄8″ thick, respectively — rip them to width and cut them to length. Switch to a stacked dado blade in your table saw and raise all their tenons. Once those are made, try them in their mortises, and pare them down, if needed, with a shoulder or rabbeting plane to achieve a nice, friction fit. Then dry-assemble the slats, stiles, rails and legs to check your progress.

Next, it’s time to mill the 5/8″-wide, 3/8″-deep grooves that will house the headboard and footboard center panels. You can cut these along the full inside edges of the stiles, and between the stile mortises on the bottom rails, with a slot cutter or straight bit at the router table. Feed the workpieces along the fence in the usual way, centering the grooves on the part thicknesses. But, these grooves also must be cut along the inside edges of the top rails between the stile mortises…and a standard router table setup won’t do. That’s because the innermost cloud lifts will interfere with a long fence.

So, I took a different tack. I made a “short” fence jig from doubled-up plywood. It gave me bearing surfaces on either side of my slot cutter that were short enough to allow the cutter to reach the mortise termination points. It also enabled me to adjust the bit’s projection out from the fence so I could cut these grooves in several deepening passes. The jig worked just as I hoped it would for this job.

Panel-making and Pre-finishing

Glue up a couple of attractive center panels for your headboard and footboard. You can make them 5/8″ thick for a flat-panel style, but I thought some dramatic shadow lines would look great here. So, I opted for 7/8″-thick panels and scooped out a 1-1⁄8″-wide, 1/4″-deep cove all around with a panel-raising bit in the router table.

Before you can do some permanent assembly, make a slotted routing jig so you can cut the shallow mortises in the bed legs for metal connecting hardware. My jig consists of a top plate with a 3/4″-wide, 4-1⁄4″-long slot in the center and a fence screwed underneath for clamping. I was able to cut both the large mortises for the metal plates of this receiving hardware, plus deeper grooves for the hooked “prongs” of the mating hardware, using the same routing jig. For the shallow 1/8″ mortises, I outfitted my router with a 3/8″ O.D. guide collar and a 5/16″ straight bit; I cut the deeper prong slots into these mortises without repositioning the jig by switching to a 3/4″-diameter O.D. collar and a 1/4″ straight bit.

With this done, ease the edges of all the bed parts with a 1/8″-roundover bit in a trim router, but stop just short of where the stiles fit into the bottom rails and where the tops of the legs will fit into the top rails. Sand everything up through the grits to 220, and go ahead and glue the stiles into the bottom rails.

To approximate the color of many original Greene and Greene pieces, I followed a finishing recipe recommended by Darrell Peart, a published expert who specializes in this style. He mixes seven parts orange water-based dye with four parts medium brown dye to produce a beautiful, warm brown tone. Raise the grain of the bed parts before staining by wiping them down with water. Knock off any roughness and raised fibers after the wood dries with 320-grit sandpaper. Then flood dye onto the rail/stile assemblies, slats and panels, and wipe off all the excess immediately. Go ahead and topcoat these parts, too. I applied three coats of General Finishes Enduro water-based satin varnish.

When the finish dries, glue up the complete footboard and headboard with the slats and panels installed. The reason not to pre-finish the legs and top rails is so you can scrape and sand their corner joints flat now, when these assemblies come out of the clamps. Once that’s done, dye and varnish this bare wood.

Making the Side Rails

The side rails begin as two long planks of 1-1⁄8″-thick lumber with bed rail mortises cut into their ends. My handy slotted routing jig worked here, too. I just tacked a 1/4″-thick spacer to the fence to offset it for centering the jig correctly. A 3/8″ guide collar and 5/16″ straight bit took care of the mortising work again. Cut these mortises 3/16″ deep instead of 1/8″, so the pronged hooks will pull the side rails tightly against the headboard and footboard once assembled. Stain and topcoat the rails, then fasten the hooked connectors with #10 x 3″ flathead wood screws. Attach the headboard and footboard hardware with #10 x 1-1⁄4″ screws.

The bed’s box spring rests on two lengths of 1-1⁄2″ x 1-1⁄2″ angle iron, positioned flush with the bottom edges of the side rails. Prepare the irons by drilling eight to 10 counterbored holes for #10 x 1″ flathead wood screws, then cleaning the metal and spray painting them a dark color. Fasten the irons to the rails.

Adding the Signature Square Wood Plugs

Pillow-topped wood plugs, made from a darker hardwood, are classic Greene & Greene details wherever two parts intersect at a joint. I made 5/16″-square plugs for the “major” joints (leg/rail, stile/rail) and used 1/4″-square plugs for the slats and on either side of the larger plugs on the bottom rails.

The pillowing effect was easy to do by spinning the ends of my plug “sticks” in a drill/driver against sandpaper of various grits.

The hardwood I chose for the plugs — an ebony alternative called katalpa — wasn’t dark enough, so I dyed the plugs black and sprayed them with satin lacquer.

After several hours of pounding and drilling each of the bed’s 56 plug mortises 3/8″ deep, I glued in the plugs. All that was left was to fabricate a half dozen pine slats to span between the irons.

Jo Ellen and her husband Rick are pleased with the style and sturdiness of their new bed. I’m sure the recipient of your Greene and Greene masterpiece will love it, too.

Click Here to download a PDF of the related drawings and Materials List.

Hard to Find Hardware

4″ Bed Rail Fasteners #28589

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Since my goal was merely to give the sense of a tree, I used only part of the tree form: the canopy is blatantly manipulated and cut off in a straight line. This design choice not only gave the spice rack a clean line across the top, it also gave a metaphorical nod to the harvesting and manicuring of trees. For the wood, I used mahogany salvaged from a door maker.

To get started building your spice rack, establish your template and create a cut list for your own design, or use the ones I came up with if you want to follow my lead. Next, mill your wood. (Remember to check that all your tools are set up square. “Squares” might be boring, but squares are a woodworker’s close friend.)

My side pieces are book-matched even though the grain is straight and only has slight variations. Per the usual milling rule for a smaller project like this, I left all of my pieces one to two inches longer than the final dimensions to make sure I had plenty of material. After milling all the wood, I lined up the two side pieces and traced my pattern directly onto the top piece in line with one of the long edges. Next, I crosscut both side pieces to final length at the same time.

Using a dado stack, I set up to cut a 5/8″-wide dado to house my shelves. I laid the two side pieces against my miter gauge fence and together with the inside faces down, then set up a stop to ensure my pieces would stay aligned for cutting each of the grooves. You can see my setup in the photo above. Then I used double-stick tape to adhere the inside faces of the side pieces together for cutting and shaping. (You could also use masking tape or blue tape and tape them together.)

Since I had already drawn my shape on the outside of the side pieces, I went straight to the band saw to cut the organic shapes of the outline. While the pieces are still aligned and taped, drill the holes for your steel rods. I drilled through one side and only halfway into the other so that I could easily slide the bars in through one side after glue-up.

For creating the interior shapes of the branches, I drilled holes in the side pieces so I could use the scroll saw to cut those shapes according to my template. (If hadn’t had a scroll saw, careful cutting with the jigsaw or a coping saw would’ve worked, too.) I took the side pieces apart before using the scroll saw. The thickness of the two stacked together would be too much for that tool.

Next you will rip your shelves to width. The dimension provided for the shelf depth is a little bit deeper than it needs to be, so you can get the right angle on the shelf fronts to match the sides. At this point, assemble the shelves and side pieces. Then, using a pencil, mark the angle you need to cut in order to match it up. On the top shelf of my tree, I cut out two relief spots to ensure that the negative space of the branches wouldn’t get lost with the intersection of the shelf. The angle of the branches made this tricky. Make sure to mark the top and bottom intersection of the shelf and branches because it will be angled. Cut out the smaller shape on the band saw and use your hand tools to shape them flush.

Go ahead and rip and crosscut the wall mounting cleat, and drill two countersunk holes 1-1/2″ in from the ends for mounting the rack. I countersunk these holes 1/4″ deep so I could plug the screw heads.

Now the fun really begins! Using a variety of hand tools (rasps, files, chisels, spokeshave, sandpaper with thin sanding blocks, etc.), I shaped the tree branches, got rid of the saw marks, and chamfered all the edges to varying degrees to accentuate the tree shape on the outside of the side faces. You can form the tree as much or as little as you like. Maybe you want to take the edges to a full roundover or carve it to be closer to a true tree. It’s up to you. Although, with hand-shaping, it is very important to be mindful of short grain, weak spots and grain direction in general. Use smart clamping to support your piece, too. Now sand the front and back faces of the sides, top and bottom of your shelves, and the mounting cleat, up to 220-grit either using a sanding block or by cupping your sandpaper. Don’t sand the front edges of the rack until you have glued it up.

My shelves fit into the dadoes almost perfectly, with a nice friction fit. Therefore, when I sanded the shelf faces before glue-up, I was careful not to hit the part that would go into the dado. I did not sand the front edges of the shelves before gluing: I left them a little big to make sure the edges of the shelves matched the organic shape of the sides.

At this point, it is time to glue things together! Use just enough glue in the dadoes so as to not have squeeze-out on the shelves. I used three bar clamps (one for each shelf). They clamp up nice and square, and they aren’t hefty to haul around the shop.

After ample drying time (overnight), shape and sand the front of the shelves to match your side pieces. Everything should be sanded to 220-grit now, and you are ready to finish!

For the clear coat (I rarely stain wood), I used Minwax® Aerosol Lacquer in semigloss. I needed something quick drying, so this was the right choice. I do hate using aerosol cans, but sometimes convenience wins over ecological sense. I did three spray-on coats. Start in the hard-to-reach spots in between the branches. Make sure you flip the rack over to get all the different angles, too. I recoated after about 20 to 30 minutes, and following the final coat I let it sit a couple of hours before I put the steel rods in. I didn’t glue the rods into their holes in order to make them easier to remove for occasional cleaning. If you choose to, use epoxy.

I’m pretty satisfied with the results of the spice rack. The mahogany is beautiful. There is enough room for about 30 average-diameter spice bottles. There are lots of beautiful specialty bottles available online that you could fill your rack with if you want to further customize the look. Happy cooking! And enjoy the ease of your spice organization.

Click Here to download a PDF of the related drawings and Materials List.

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Small wooden toys make great gifts and they are fun to build. David makes several different articulating toys, but he especially likes making birds. Subscribers to Woodworker’s Journal can click here to get plans to make his penguin pull-toy.

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