This tray is made from maple and paduck. I will never use that combination again. When sanding, the paduck will blead into the maple and it is almost impossible to remove it. This tray required a lot of jigs to make the pieces as well as to dish out the sections. Next time I will use walnut and maple.

I finally completed my Hall Table. It is primarily made from Mahogany. The top and the shelf utilize a veneered panel of MDF with a mahogany frame. The veneer is curly bubinga. The accent wood is curly maple. The finish is 3 coats of wipe-on poly on top of 3 coats of clear shellac.

I downloaded a Sketchup copy of an office table from the net and modified it quite a bit for the hall table.

My nephew got married on Saturday. We gave him and his wife this box for a wedding present. The top is made with Jatoba and Maple with a Mahogany ‘rings’ inlay. The top was also laser engraved by Tim Bateson of Liberty-Laser, near Cincinnati. (I don’t do engraving!)

The sides of the box are Lacewood. The trays are made from Curly Maple and American Cherry.

The Jatoba will turn to a brilliant reddish-brown color after it seasons for a few years.

A1Jim wanted to know how to cut the pieces to make a “tumbling block” pattern. This is how I did it.

The first photo shows a small “tumbling block” pattern. Each piece in the pattern is the same size. The width and the length of each piece are the same. The sharp angle of each piece is 60 degrees.

Let’s assume that the desired width is 1-1/4”.

I would first make a sled as shown in pix 2 and 3. A fence would be attached to the sled at an angle of exactly 60 degrees from the saw blade. Then make a stop from a piece of scrap that has one end cut at a 60 degree angle. (This will allow the stop and the fence to nest with two sides of the piece to be cut.) Attach the stop so that it is exactly 1-1/4” inches from the saw blade and parallel to the blade. This will ensure that the width and length of each piece of the tumbling block are equal.

The tumbling block pattern usually uses three different types of wood. Rip a piece of each wood to 1-1/4”. The pattern shown in pix 1 requires four pieces of each of the three types of wood. Therefore, each of the three strips should be approximately 1 foot long.

Place a strip of wood against the fence and slice off a piece to make the end cut at 60 degrees. Now move the strip firmly against the stop and make a cut. You now have the first part of the pattern. Cut up all three strips and assemble the pattern.

Check the 60 degree angle if the six pieces in the middle of the pattern do not fit correctly. Check the blade to stop distance for any other problems.

This can also be done using a miter guage with a stop.

I hope that this is helpful.

I have one of the 8” Incra Router Jigs and I decided to finally do something with it. I designed a box that uses a “Quadruple, Triple, Double box joint”. (I couldn’t think of anything else to call it.)

The box has four sides (duh), with a triple box joint on each of the two ends. Thus the name.

I used Sketchup to design the corners and it worked great. Since I wanted to cut the top off the box using the table saw, I purposely added 1/8” at the correct position to ensure that the box joints were all the same width after the box was reassembled.

I built a prototype box out of walnut, maple and spalted maple. Somethings that I found during the prototypes construction:
1. Use a sharp spiral bit in the router. I started with a straight bit and I could not get consistent results. A 3/8” endmill worked great
2. Make sure that none of the parts can move while routing the joints. This requires a stout fixture to hold the boards correctly.
3. There are lots of glue-ups and it is difficult to keep everything lined up during these glue-ups. I was shooting for a final thickness of 1/2” for all of the box sides. I started with everything planed to 9/16”. I then completed all of the triple box joints and then planed the sides to 1/2” before finally gluing up the corner posts to the sides.

I then built the three boxes that I am giving to my wife and my two daughters. The boxes are all slightly bigger than the prototype. The top of the boxes is made from bubinga veneered to 1/4” ply. The corner posts are made from sapelle. I also used cherry, walnut, birch, white oak, and paduck.

My daughter and grandchildren visited us over the Labor Day weekend. As soon as Gabrielle, the 11 year old entered the house, she asked if we could make something in my workshop. She specifically wanted a box with a lock (to keep her two brothers out of her stuff). Of course we did just that.

I found some jatoba, maple, and wenge and we went to work. She would hardly let me take a break. I did all the work that required a power tool except for the sanding. Gab did the sanding and gluing as well as some of the design.

You can see from the pics that we both had a lot of fun.

I made this a couple years ago. It hangs on our front door all summer. It was make from 1/2” poplar, glued to 1/4” ply.

It was fun to make.

I made this for a wedding present for my nephew and his wife. It is made from straight grain Douglas Fir. The plans came from Norm.

I designed these lamps after looking at lots of different designs. I built one for myself and one for my brother. He did the cut glass work and I did the wood work.

The hardest part was making the oak frames for the lamp shades. I hate compound miter joints.

Here is another project that I made a few years ago. My wife loves to make quilts and made the one that is on our king-size bed. I decided that we needed a Blanket Chest (Quilt Chest) for the foot of the bed. I designed this one. Primary wood is red oak, both plywood and hardwood. The inlay is 1/4” thick cherry, walnut, purpleheart, ash, and poplar. If you look close you can see that the design of the quilt blocks and the inlayed blocks are the same.