To further the abilities of my weather junkie Dad, this year the weather station went digital… Made of spalted maple, the box containing the weather station is supported on a walnut stand by brass rods, which you can change the position of to change the tilt of the entire box.

This is one of those cases where what I had planned didn’t work (I forgot that I had to be able to get the weather station to change the batteries… opps) but the redesign proved to be much better that what I had originally planned and I am very pleased with how it turned out.

My interpretation of a post by DAN (here, thanks DAN!) I decided to make an “easel” for my Mom for Christmas. She does a lot of collage work (including teaching collage classes) and I thought it was about time that she had a way of displaying her collages (they are awesome).

Made of mahogany and lacewood, with a single adjustable shelf this easel breaks down so that it can travel completely flat when she teaches classes. Finished with boiled linseed oil and a coat of poly.

My brother, sister-in-law and nieces have been living in Japan and just moved to Germany by way of the States and where here for Christmas so I decided to make the 2 older girls music boxes for Christmas and here is the result. One is bloodwood and curly maple and the other is lacewood and curly maple, both finished with boiled linseed oil.

The basic design came from a Fine Wood Working article and was adapted to include the music mechanism. If you are thinking of making one of these make sure that you figure out how you are going to incorporate the mechanism well in advance or it will give you a headache… not that I have personal experience with that…

I made this for my Mom last Christmas. She collects nativity scenes and her collection had finally grown beyond the limits of her old one (not to worry though, she has enough for both this one and another one). This is made of walnut with brass pins, is 48” tall with 6” wide shelves from 36” to 8” long, attaches to the wall with a modified French cleat and is finished with boiled linseed oil. Thanks for looking!

Here is a key cabinet that I made for my entry way. I had started thinking about it when Marc (The Wood Whisperer) started doing the gadget station series, and I thought that it would be nice to have something that I could stick mail and keys in when I walked through the door rather than having it end up all over the place. As fate would have it the Craft Center on the UC Davis campus was having a show to help celebrate our centennial and the manager asked me if I would contribute a piece for the show and I thought, “Hey, now I have an excuse to make something.” And this is the result…

It is an odd mix of gothic and arts and crafts styles, is 35”t 22’w 7”d and made of African mahogany and with floating curly maple panels. There were two parts to the finishing process, first I “popped” the grain with tinted shellac (a la the Wood Whisperer’s technique) thenfollowed with coat of seal-a-cell and a wipe on poly. The glass has a sandblasted image from a 1500 woodcut of horses leaving a stable (We are the “Aggies” and have a horse as the mascot) and was surprisingly hard to photograph.

Thanks for looking.

With three adult children and grandchildren coming to visit, my Dad decided that since he felt like he was running a hotel it should be provisioned like a hotel and asked me to make some luggage holders for the guest bedrooms to make life a little easier for all concerned… and here is the result.

They are walnut and maple with bridle joints pinned with brass rods. The finish is 4 coats of BLO and the stretchers are blue canvas, staples and finished with antique headed nails. Thanks for looking.

I built this fireplace mantle and surround for my parents house last Christmas to replace the squat white brick fireplace that they have hated since they moved into their house. It was an interesting project because I built it at home then traveled ~350 miles to install it, fortunately everything fit. It was built out of plywood, painted, then tiled. I had never tiled anything before and it left me a little frustrated, chiefly because I had to tile completely around the opening, which resulted in needing to tile on my back. If I were to do it again I would have used thicker plywood, just to limit the fuss from trying to glue the miters together while the ply flexed, but because it is likely to have a range of temperatures and humidities I think plywood was the right approach. All comments are appreciated.

If I can find other photos, without holiday decorations, I will post them.

Finally posting my first project! I made this for my Dad, who is a bit of a weather junkie, for Christmas. The idea was to make two boxes, one of which would rotate inside of the other to allow the instruments to be both protected and hidden (although really I just thought that it would be a fun idea to try, and it was).

All of the sides of the boxes are mahogany and birdseye maple, while the top and bottom (in the closed position) were made out of curly maple. The inside face (supporting the instruments) is also birdseye maple. All of the miters are keyed with cocobolo (and thank you to all of the fellow LJs out there that helped me understand the difference between keys and splines) and a brass rod acts as the pivot for the inner box. The final size (for the outer box) was 12” x 3 1/2” x 5 1/2”. It was finished with several coats of clear Danish Oil and was a lot of fun to design and build.