Windows

It's time to put all else aside and start a new woodworking project. The shed in the garden needs some new windows. The current ones are mostly a shell of paint with a little bit of crumbly wood inside. These are the ones to be replaced.

They don't look too bad in a picture, but trust me, they are crap.

Now, I almost know nothing about outdoor woodworking and how to protect it from the environment. So I asked around on woodworking.nl and I browsed around in the library. This little book from a consumers organisation, published in 1994, is actually quite good and detailed. Especially important, it has local information, about how things like this are made in our country with currently available materials.

So I got myself some prefabricated window stock. This is almost all made from Meranti, a kind of wood I haven't worked with before. It should be more wheater resitant then pine, which was used mostly in the past, but it gets painted anyway.

Meranti is sold in standard sizes for windows with all the rebates allready cut. These sizes are a bit too bulky for the walls of a shed like this. My walls are only 10 cm thick, while the walls from a normal house are more like 30 cm. I also want to change the looks of the window a bit, letting them deeper into the wall, so it doesn't have the same "flat" look as the old ones. This means that I have to change the standard sizes.

A bit of work for the tablesaw.

Here I have been cutting the sloping deck of the lower window sill. My saw doesn't reach far enough, so I had to remove the rest with a chisel and clean up with a plane.

Meranti is weird stuff. Very soft and light weight. Splintery and loves to tear out. With the famous chipbreaker technique it is no problem to plane though. You must handle the wood carefully, because it dents easilly.