This is the last of the community woodworking projects that I had to complete for our street party on 4th June to celebrate our queen’s diamond jubilee.

One day my wife came home from work with an old oak carver chair from a dining suite.

The conversation went something like this:

Wife: Can you turn this into a throne?

Me: You’re ‘aving a laugh aren’t you?

Wife: No. I thought you liked a challenge. If I didn’t keep making all these weird requests, you wouldn’t be half as good as you are. (wife obviously trying flattery now)

Me: I’m sure I can do something with it. Not sure what though.

Wife: Oh and by the way, it only has to look good from the front.

Me: That works for me.

Wife: You can probably do it out of the scrap from the other projects.

Me: Somehow I doubt that. (looking at the scrap pile)

I left this project until I’d finished all my other jubilee projects, hoping for some inspiration. Finally the day came when I had to tackle it. Needless to say, I was on a very tight budget and bear in mind it’s only a ‘prop’ for a game she’s got planned. Thereafter it will be a photo opportunity for the little kids.

Anyhow, I got the chair out and walked around it a few times, looking at it from every angle.

To me, it was all about the back of the chair. The existing back just didn’t say throne, so that’s where I was going to spend what little money I’d been given.

Off to the store to buy some softwood…

...then I just kind of made it up as I went along. I added some decals and roofs to the new chair back to throw some shadows, painted the bits that would show with a couple of coats of gold paint, upholstered the new back with some foam from an old sofa cushion, then covered it with red velvet. I also recovered the seat. Voila, I had a throne.

Just don’t look at the back!

Now I can relax and enjoy the day. I’ve done my bit.

Thanks for looking.

I have to be honest and say that I wasn’t going to bother posting this quick and dirty project, but then I thought people might like to know what I do when faced with those day to day woodworking projects that I REALLY don’t want to do. My wife needed a salad bar to hold 14 tupperware containers for our street party.

Let’s be clear though, this is not fine woodworking. This salad bar will be used once and then trashed. Now the quickest way to do it would have been to simply screw the rails onto the face of the legs, jigsaw out the holes in the MDF for the containers and screw the MDF onto the rails, but where’s the fun in that? So I decided to use mortise and tenon joinery. Now I’ve cut loads of mortise and tenon joints before by hand, so I really don’t have to think about the process. Usually though, I take my time and strive for perfection with each one. This time it would be all about speed. Ideally, I wanted them to fit properly right off the saw with no paring.

I used the following method to cut out each mortise.

1. Drill two 10mm holes to a depth of 15mm.
2. One paring cut either side inbetween the two holes
3. Two full depth chopping cuts either end and lever out the waste.

My method for each tenon was:

1. Two rip cuts for the cheeks.
2. Two rip cuts to establish a shoulder top and bottom
3. Four crosscuts around the shoulders to remove the waste.

The first one took me about 10 minutes, but by the end of it I was knocking out a completed mortise and tenon joint in just over 5 minutes. I was pleasantly surprised to see that 28 joints fitted acceptably straight off the saw and the other 4 needed only light paring. This little exercise turned this dull project into a bit of fun for me, so the next time SWMBO gets you to do something boring, why not look for a way to challenge yourself.

When my wife saw the four completed units, she said ”See you can work fast if you want to.”

Do you think I’ve made a rod for my own back now?

P.S. – The wife is going to paint them all white at the weekend.

Here’s another fun game I built for our Diamond Jubilee street party on the 4th June 2012.

My wife took one of my climbing ropes along to a local pipe fabrication company, laid it out in the shape she wanted them to make and then talked them into supplying, bending and welding around 45 feet of mild steel pipe at cost and delivering it free of charge. I then filed down the welds and cleaned it up.

The two ends of the pipe slide into holes bored into two 3”x3” posts and get secured by bolts that go straight through the posts and the pipe. The MDF boxes are built around a pine frame and the posts go down through the center and into a well in the base of the boxes. I also put a door in the box that houses the electrics. It runs off a 12v battery and can be turned on and off by a rocker switch mounted on top of the box.

The boxes and posts will be covered on the day and decorated with ribbons, balloons and flags. There will also be a poster on the front of each box saying:

The aim of the game is for the player to guide the ring along the pipe using only one hand without touching the pipe. If the ring does make contact with the pipe, the circuit completes and a buzzer sounds. Although the battery is only being used when the buzzer sounds, having the rocker switch allows you to return the ring to the other end of the pipe without the buzzer continuously sounding.

The rings (a big one for children and a smaller one for adults) were made by one of my neighbours. The player can start from either end and stand on whichever side of the game they prefer. Due to the length of the pipe and the fact that your arm starts to ache halfway through, I’m going to give them three lives. If the buzzer sounds for a fourth time, they’ll have to start again.

I know you guys won’t let me get away without posting a video of the game, so here it is. I’ll try my luck with the smaller of the two rings. Don’t forget I’ve got three lives.

Now you know why I didn’t become a surgeon. The sun was in my eyes though. :-)

Thanks for looking!

Just a fun project. This was a collaborative effort between my wife and I for the street party she’s organizing on 4th June to celebrate the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. She Photoshopped the image merging the legs from one photo onto another photo of the rest of the body. Then she had the whole image enlarged to be bigger than lifesize. We then stuck it onto 3mm MDF and I carefully jigsawed it out removing any blurred edges from the enlarging process, but leaving the highlights where the sun bounces off. It will be fixed to a stand on the day.

I just couldn’t resist adding the captions below to the photos.

Thanks for looking!

This is the first of a number of woodworking projects my wife asked me to make for the street party she is organizing for 235 residents on 6th June to celebrate Queen Elizabeth ll’s diamond jubilee. Apart from using a router to hollow out the lid of the ball delivery system and a cordless drill to drill around 200 holes to screw the walls of the labyrinth to the board, it was all made with hand tools.

This labyrinth game is for two players and you need a good dose of coordination and concentration to successfully navigate the maze. You also need to communicate with your partner as neither player can see all the holes from where they stand. The only rule is that you cannot tilt the game in any direction more than 45 degrees.

I designed the labyrinth route in Sketchup and used it as a guide to measure and cut all the pieces which are made from pine. They are joined at the corners with hand-cut box joints and a few halving joints for good measure.

I added a turnstile to the game for a bit of variation which is made of hard maple and beech dowels.

The frame (4ft x 2ft) is made from pine joined at the corners with through dovetails. The grooves in the frame were ploughed with a Record 044. There are three levels; the top is 4mm clear perspex, the labyrinth and bottom layers are 4mm MDF.

I designed the ball delivery mechanism to convert 8mm of sping-loaded linear travel between two stops to 90 degrees rotational movement. This lifts the ball from the bottom layer after it has fallen through one of the holes and puts it back into play on the labyrinth layer. It took quite a lot of experimenting with MacDonalds coffee stirrers and sewing pins before I got the linkage lengths and pivot positions worked out correctly.

Here’s a quick and dirty video of the finished mechanism with the covers removed. It is made from hard maple with a sapele knob operated by the player’s thumb. There are two fixed pivot points and three moving pivot points, one of which has a slightly elongated hole as it connects a link moving in an arc with a link moving in a straight line.

This project was never meant to be ‘fine woodworking’, but it was great fun to make and quite challenging to design.

Thanks for looking!

A sturdy saw vise design to fit in a Workmate or any twin screw/Moxon vise. The vise uses the clamping pressure of the twin screw vise and variable localized clamping to suit different types and lengths of saws. The two sides of the saw vise are hinged together with piano hinge. Full details of the build can be found on Episode 9 of my Saw Talk blog.

Materials: 25mm MDF and Sapele off-cuts.

Thanks for looking!

Sapele body 190mm long by 44mm by 44mm. Hard maple clamp. Finish is Liberon Finishing Oil followed by Lord Sheraton’s Wood Balsam.

Step by step instructions for making this file holder can be found on my Saw Talk blog.

Thanks for looking!

I have been meaning to make a plane adjusting mallet for some time now, but never seem to get around to it. The other day I was at the supermarket and saw a meat tenderizer made of beech. It only cost £2.50 so I bought it. I cut the end off, plugged the hole and filed it to mirror the other face of the mallet. Gave it a coat of BLO and called it done. Total time: 15 minutes.

You can read a more humorous account of this project on my blog.

Thanks for looking.

I know it isn’t Christmas, but I found these photos when I was clearing out my garage and thought I’d post them. This is a project I built about 10 years ago. My wife told me one Friday evening that she was organising a Santa’s grotto for the Christmas fair at my daughter’s infants school and that she needed my help with a few bits (understatement of the year).

She wanted me to build a life-size sleigh that the children could sit on to have their photo taken. She’d arranged for the local lumberyard to sponsor it and supply four 1” thick MDF sheets and some 2×2” softwood which would be arriving in the morning. She wanted it to be ‘flat pack’ so it could be stored afterwards. So I sketched out a design on the MDF sheets and cut it out with my jigsaw. The two sides are connected with the 2×2” pine and some 3/4” dowels hold it all together. We painted it, added some glitter and twinkly stars, then covered the parcel shelf and seat in fabric. My wife got another company to donate the inflatable Reindeer.

Little did I know that the sleigh was just the first of many projects she had in store for me. The log cabin you see in the pictures was one of the other projects. That was made from thick cardboard tubes that you get in the middle of rolls of carpet which we collected from all the local carpet shops. I made a wooden frame to support the structure which the cardboard tubes slotted over. I think I also made a workshop for santa’s elves and some workbenches that went in it and also a train track for the Christmas Express train as it travelled through the grotto playing Christmas carols.

It was a lot of work on some very cold days, but well worth it to see the excitement on the children’s faces as they journeyed through the grotto to receive their present from Santa. You can’t put a price on that!

A few years ago we splashed out on a nice fitted kitchen in hard maple with galaxy black granite worktops (black with bronze twinkly bits in it). The only thing we didn’t have was a breakfast bar. Now we do.

I drew a design in Sketchup and showed it to my wife. Initially it had tapered legs which she approved, but later she changed her mind (she’s good at that) to straight chunky legs.

The legs are 891mm tall, 84mm square with a 1/2” roundover on each corner. The rails are 100mm in height x 30mm thick. I had to get the height bang on so that once the granite top went on, the top of the granite would slide in nicely under the dado rail on the kitchen wall. The size of the granite slab will be 1285mm long x 750mm wide.

The two legs are joined to the rails using hand cut haunched mortise and tenon joinery, which I also drawbored for added security since it will be taking quite a weight. The other end rail which is bolted to the wall is joined to the two long rails using hand cut half-blind box joints reinforced by two 45 degree glue blocks.

I finished it with Ronseal Diamond Hard Matt Varnish to match the rest of the kitchen cabinets. This is a water-based varnish that looks white in the tin and doesn’t change the colour of the maple. I applied two thin coats using a synthetic brush. Being water-based it raised the grain, so I hand sanded with P320 grit then applied two more thin coats. Once the final coat was dry I rubbed out the finish with P600, then P1200 grit to remove all brush marks and leave the surface silky smooth with the same sheen as the kitchen cabinets. I call this part of a project lushing it up.

Just waiting for the granite slab to arrive now which should be here just in time for Christmas. Thanks for looking.

Update 15/01/2011 – Granite arrived yesterday so I’ve added a couple of pictures of the finished project.

We needed a gate for the side of our house. So I designed this one in Sketchup and made it out of Sapele. There were lots of firsts for me on this project. First time working with hardwood. First time building something from my own design in Sketchup. First time edge jointing and glueing boards together. First time chiseling mortise and tenon joints. First time drawboring. First time making my own beading. First time doing a proper assembly.

Each rail is joined to the stiles by a double mortise and tennon joint, drawbored to the stiles using beech dowels. The panels consist of 7 boards edge glued together and then routed with a V-cutter so they resemble tongue and groove. The bottom beading on each panel is deeper than the side and top beading and is rebated into the panel to just passed the bottom of the V-grooves. That way the rain can run down the panel and over the beading rather than behind the beading. I filled the grain on the panels, but didn’t bother on the rails and stiles (well as my wife kept reminding me, “It’s just a gate!”). The panels are glued to the beading in the middle only at the top and bottom, so the panel can expand and contract across its width. I allowed 10mm either side for expansion so I hope that’s enough.

Initially I tried steam bending the top beading, but it wasn’t that successful. It became difficult to fit due to spring back. After two failed attempts, I bought two more boards, edge glued them together and cut the shape out to match the arch, then routed the profile on it.

The posts are pressure treated pine stained to match the gate. Unfortunately, the budget wouldn’t stretch to 5” square Sapele posts. I’m just wating for the last coat of finish to dry on a Sapele fence panel that goes to the left of the gate.

All in all, I’m quite pleased with the result considering all the ‘firsts’ and the fact that it was built on a Black & Decker workmate in the back garden.

My daughter had two single wardrobes and a pile of books in her bedroom and no space to put anything down. So I came up with these MDF built-in shelves, that I basically made up as I went along. The six short shelves and the two longer ones are ‘floating’ shelves where batterns are screwed to the wall, the shelves slide over the batterns and are screwed to the battern through the top of the shelves. they are also screwed to the two wardrobes from the inside. The resulting structure is solid as a rock. Cheap and cheerful storage. My wife said she was going to paint it 18 months ago, so I don’t hold out much hope now!