I made this router tray after seeing the one that Julie made. http://lumberjocks.com/projects/74671 I made this from Bradford Pear that I milled last summer. I finished this thing 3 times. I first finished it with wipe on poly, but I didn’t like it because it seemed too plasticy, so I sanded that off and tried just finishing it with a wax buffing, but I didn’t like the lack of color development, so I sanded that off and finished it a third time with Watco Danish Oil, then buffed with the Beall Buff system.

These were my first experience turning lidded boxes on the lathe. I made the one on the right first and the second photo shows what happens when you let the inside get to be bigger than the outside. It got scrapped, but I later ended up cleaning up the edges and gluing it back together and saving it. The one of the left was finished on the lathe by sanding with mineral oil/paste wax and the one on the right was finished off the lathe with Watco Danish Oil and buffed with the Beall Buff. These were made from branch wood from a Bradford Pear that broke apart in the neighborhood and that I dried in the attic after bandsaw cutting in half through the pith, and then three more times to make a bark free blank.

A friend of mine asked for two crosses made of maple from a tree that he had given me last summer after he had cut it down for a neighbor lady. One for his family and one for the lady who’s tree it actually was. This was a good excuse for me to make a kerfmaker to get some tight half lap joints. He was really pleased with how they turned out. For a pattern I used the image of a gold pendant that I saw and scaled it up. They were finished with Watco Natural Danish Oil and then buffed with the Beall Buff.

I loved my Dust Deputy cyclone, but hated having the bucket tip over 5 or 6 times every time I used it to clean up the shop. I used the plans presented by the Woodsmith shop. The link to the plans is here. http://www.woodsmithshop.com/download/609/shop-vacuum.pdf It’s made entirely of 3/4” plywood and I think the only modifications to the plans I made were to make the shop vac section 2” wider and longer and to make some of the hose pass-through holes larger to pass 2.5” hose.

I needed to make some tight half lap joints for a couple of crosses that I was making for a friend so it was a great excuse to finally make one of these kerf makers. I used Bradford pear for this because it’s tight grained and hard so it machines well. I milled this pear wood last summer from storm damaged trees that broke apart and dried it through the summer. I pretty much used the design that Mafe showed in his excellent series and blog posts on kerfmakers. See his posts for a description of how to make one and how one is used. http://lumberjocks.com/projects/37513

I made this maple step stool for my 16 month old daughter. It is based on the design presented by Marc Spagnuolo. I used red maple that I had milled in June using an Alaskan mill from a tree that was listed for free on Craigslist. The lumber air dried in the Austin summer heat for about 4 months, and then spent a couple more months in my 40% RH attic once it cooled off a bit. This was a nice learning project for me as it presented the chance to make angled tenons and has lots of curved surfaces. I applied a transtint dye in alcohol, and then sanded that mostly off to pop the figure a bit, and then finished with wipe on poly made by diluting brush on poly 50/50 with mineral spirits. I used poly on it because I think it may see moisture being used at the sink.

This red maple bowl is 11” diameter and 4 1/2” high. I got the trunk of this red maple when someone offered it on Craigslist. They had felled the tree by just cutting straight across and the trunk had split right up the middle. I slabbed one half of it into 2” thick lumber using my Alaskan mill and cut the remaining half into chunks for turning. Chunks this large usually split on me if I keep them around very long, even with anchorseal on the endgrain, but these red maple chunks stayed check free even though I kept them around for about 6 months before getting to them. I cut the blank out using a circle cutting jig I made for my bandsaw as a 12” blank, and it ended up being 11” by the time I was done.

It’s finished with Watco Danish oil followed by buffing with tripoli and carnuba wax using the Beall buffing setup.

Pear is very hard and fine grained and turns very nicely green. This bowl is 7” diameter and 2.25” tall and is a nice candy dish size. Finished with Watco Danish oil and buffed with tripoli and carnuba wax.

A few weeks ago someone had posted on Craigslist that they had cut down their Arizona ash tree and that it was cut up and on the curb. I picked up several portions of the trunk that were a couple of feet long and this bowl is the first thing I’ve made with it. The funny thing was that this wood was white when freshly cut, but within a few minutes it would turn bright red. The shavings around my lathe looked like they had been soaked in cherry kool-aid. I don’t know if it was exposure to oxygen or light that set off the development of the red color. I thought the bowl would turn out red too, because its surface kept turning red on the lathe within a few minutes when I stopped, and then would be white underneath again where I turned away the surface to expose new wood. In the end I guess the act of sanding burnished the wood and sealed it enough that the color reaction didn’t develop in the finished bowl.

Even a few days later when I (still) hadn’t cleaned up all the shavings they were still very red.

The finished bowl is 9” diameter and 2 3/4” tall. Finished with Watco Danish oil and buffed with carnuba wax.

These are pretty modest bowls but they are the first things I’ve turned in years, and the first green wood turning I’ve done. The one in front is a small pear bowl and was the first one I made. The wood was from a neighbor’s Bradford pear that split in a wind storm. The one with a foot is of red maple and the smaller one without a foot was from a piece of standing dead silver maple. Just getting the hang of it again.

No one would mistake this for fine woodworking or anything, but I thought that it might be helpful to show how this came together in my case. This lumber rack is made from 2×4 pine that I jointed a face and an edge and planed the other face and edge to get straight and square 5/4×13/4 stock out of. 2×4s cost $2.12 each for the 8 footers, which makes this whole project cost about $15. Props go to twobyfour16 for showing us his lumber rack here http://lumberjocks.com/projects/40346, which got me thinking in this direction. I’m limited in the space the rack can extend out into the space and still get cars in there, so the arms only extend out about a foot, and there is about a foot between the arms vertically, all of which limits the overall weight that may get stacked onto this rack. This is a consideration since I’m only hanging this from a french cleat. The advantage of it being on a french cleat is that I can relocate the rack to somewhere else in the garage if I get a new tool or something and need this space back. Also, it makes it easy to take this with me the next time I move. Even with it loaded up with wood I can still hang on it and bounce and it seems solid enough.

This lumber rack is really 5 independent pieces, each of which hang on a strip of my french cleat system that runs along the walls of my 2 car garage shop. Each unit is a pair of vertical 5/4 boards that sandwich the 3 elements that make up each arm. There is the arm itself, a lower support block that is cut at a 45 degree angle, and an upper support block that is just cut off square. The entire thing is held together with glue and no fasteners. My thinking in the design is that for one of the arms to shift it would have to break the 2 face to face glue bonds on either side of the arm, as well as the 2 face to face glue bonds on either side of either the upper or lower blocks. As a result, I’m really not worried about the strength of the joint of the arms in the vertical supports.

If you look at my workshop photos from before I had lumber on the floor leaning up against the wall all around the garage and it’s really nice to have all that stacked up on the wall and out of the way now. I even have room to slide a couple of cutoff scrap bins under it, which I’ve never had room for before. This was a simple 1 day kind of project that did a lot to organize my space. Thanks for looking at it!

I made this marking gauge yesterday out of materials I had around. It’s not super fancy or anything but think it turned out ok. I meant to be working on something else, but got this notion in my head that I needed a marking gauge at some point and got diverted into this side project. I’ve never had a marking gauge before and I think it will come in pretty handy. I filed edges onto two sides of a triangular window glazing point for the marking pin. I made a triangle shaped recess in the end of the beam that it fits into and it is held tightly in place by the end plate. I used a stainless threaded insert and stainless screw for the set screw and inlayed a stainless shim stock into the beam for the screw to bear against. The two wooden parts are made from 7/8” mahogany, which makes the proportions look a little chunky.