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INEXPENSIVE, key word, cost me $10 ($5 for a sacrificial skateboard from a flea-market & a 1/4” x 3’ glv rod).

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Built this from western red rough cut cedar using my Kreg jig for the fastners. Asked my Son Nov of 2012 what he wanted for his college graduation gift the following month in Dec. He half-heartedly told me “Dad I want a handbuilt beastly rocking chair made by my Dad”...challenge accepted.

Designed this on Sketchup, built it in a week and while I wanted to use mortise & tenon joinery, I just wasn’t ready equipment wise, so used the Kreg system and the sea-trials involved my best friend 6-4” 320 lbs (former football player) sitting in it and rocking without a creak. I hand-sanded it down to 320 and rubbed it with cherry danish oil, slick as bambi on ice.

The funnest part of the build was making the 1/4” cedar rocker runner strips, the template for that and laminating them together with Tightbond II woodglue.

The best part of the project was my Son’s delight in a built-by-Dad beastly Warrior Rocker, he absolutely loves it. I really am proud of his earning a bachelors of science in Environmental Science, he had a job waiting the following Mon after graduation :).

Designed this storage bench for my wife on Sketchup, built it from rough-cut western red cedar from Lowe’s. This is my fourth storage bench so far. Started with one for my Sis for Christmas, then my Mom wanted one, then made one for our neighbors who just had twins this week and finally my wife’s and best yet.

My initial design was much simpler but the downside of it was I didn’t think through the 1/4 paneling and allowing for the vertical area to be fastened to the vertical legs on the inside, in fact you could almost see daylight (about a 64th” gap). I recessed the bottom horizontal framework for the fastening and I did have lateral struts for the 1/2” birch bottom, but the verticals just needed more to fasten to. So this version involved using a dado cut on the inside corners of the 1-5/8” x 3” vertical legs. Now it had fully vertical fastening, no daylight whatsover.

The first one I built I used all pine and the lid was tounge & grooved on the tablesaw, this fourth one I used my custom diy dowel jig to fasten the cedar stripping for the lid, came out good. My wife loves it, even added a brass Handmade by tag on the inside lid, happy wife = tool upgrades for her next project :).

Built this 3/8” 4-pin Dowel Jig out of 1” oak scraps, 1/2” steel tubing for the guides and 1/4” alum rods for the dowel spacer guides. I wanted to try something different than tongue & groove for my fourth storage bench lids.

Designed the jig on Sketchup and threw it together in an evening. I have since replaced the tap-in pronged T-Nuts with screw in type t-nuts which hold up much better. It works fantastic, my first trials required some tweaking, I didn’t
have the 3/8” (1/2 tubing) exactly dimensioned from the edge on each side. Reworked it to 5/16” on each side and it works wonders now. Aligning the guides was really tough on a Craftsman benchtop drill press, they are nearly perfectly vertically aligned with one being off less than 1/64” of an inch which hasn’t made a difference with the dowels thus far.

It was a fun project to build, not really a dowel fan so far, but I just wanted to see if it could be done. Oh yeah the cool thing is I made this for my most popular project mediums, starting with dead-stopping the fence (fully closed I guess) it’s setup for 3/4” material which I use a lot and scribed for centerline and then it’s adjustable to whatever sized medium from there. I have a woodworking auto-adjusting clamp ordered which is a little easier than the F-Style clamps. I slotted then grooved the base underside @3/8” deep and 3/4” wide for the fence slide.

Funny part – I had just finished watching “Conan the Barbarian” for the 20th time and decided to go back to the shop and finish this jig, well having seen the steel working going on in the foretold barbaric movie, decided I’d DIY harden the carbon steel 1/2”/3/8” tubing. So I set all four guides (prior jig insertion) on a stainless platform and heated them with my MAP-GAS to a bright red, then placed them in 30 wt motor oil to temper. Haha, honestly I don’t know if I made them harder or tempered them, but they were pitch black now and the look on my wife’s face coming into the garage seeing smoke and fire from nearly molten metal in oil was priceless :)...

This jigs sea-trials were successful on my wife’s custom storage bench I designed for her.