I was playing around with drawings to put some nice curves in the shelf supports to hold up our stereo, and Charlene said “Why don’t you go with a note theme”. So I grabbed some reclaimed mahogany scraps and did just that.

Same content over at my personal site.

We have a local homeless services organization, Committee on the Shelterless, or COTS, that’s awesome. They’re a group dedicated to real change, local landlords are clamoring for the graduates of their program, which starts by providing emergency shelter, and works with people until they can stand on their own. The vibe I get from many shelters and homeless services organizations is one of enabling, but I believe that COTS provides a basis for real change.

One of their programs, called Family Connection, takes families in transition from shelters to permanent housing and pairs them up with middle class folks to provide the extended family and support structure that many of these homeless moms and dads never had. One of the conditions is that those of us who volunteer to be the extended family are strictly forbidden from giving money to these families, in order to keep this from becoming an enabling situation. We’re there to provide emotional support, occasional child care, and offer up our attitudes towards money, family and life expectations in the hopes that some of that can rub off and turn a life around.

Just because we can’t give money doesn’t mean we don’t find ways to help in material ways, we keep our eyes out for stuff they need, and every once in a while will hit a garage sale, talk up the program, and say “so, it’s two o’clock, you’ve been out here since 8, it’s 95°, we have a family which needs a set of bunk beds. Any chance you’d want to make a deal?” And, yes, if that deal isn’t quite “free”, sometimes we’ll forget that a few bucks changed hands.

In contrast to the folks I’ve met at COTS, I had an absolutely blessed childhood. We had ride-on toys from Community Playthings, solid maple that we beat the living daylights out of and they still survived, we rowed a boat that my grandfather had made for us around the pond in our back yard, and I have all sorts of fond memories of time various shops with my extended family making toys.

One of the things I’ve been keeping my eyes out for is a toddler ride-on toy that allows for steering. I’m also a fan of the Smile Bike like toys, I think young kids getting the balance thing down (and getting on two wheels from an early age!) is awesome. So in the back of my mind, and thinking “well, building toys in the shop is what extended family does, right?”, I’ve been kind of thinking it’d be cool to put together such a thing.

Work has been a little slow, so yesterday I did the next glue-up on the kitchen cabinets, and was out cleaning out the shop when came across a few pieces of plywood I thought were too useful to throw out, but they were in the way. And then I remembered that I’d saved these wheels from somewhere… and a little estimating how big a 18 month old is, a couple of glue-ups and some 3/8” bolts later, this is what emerged from the shop.

Now I just need to find a toddler helmet for free…

And I might need to put one of those “walk along and hold the bike up” handles on this thing somehow.

Same content over at my personal site.

Just playing in the shop, learning how to do various cuts. The inside is routed out with a straight bit, the curved bits on the inside put in with a bullnose. Everything else is cut with a hand saw and a chisel, technique I clearly need to work on.

I built one out of mahogany, which doesn’t have enough cross-grain strength for this, and I’ve got another one in the shop in progress out of purpleheart, but I think this one will work for a while.

Hopefully fixed the pictures

A while back we were browsing garage sales and stumbled across this neat piece of limestone. Careful inspection shows a couple of fossils buried in that pattern, and we’ve always thought that this would make a really cool outdoor table. We’d set it on a wrought iron stand to make sort of a makeshift table, but we were always concerned about unbalancing it.

Recently we ended up with a bunch of scrap fir ends from another project and I decided to take an hour or two to slap something together. The only challenge here was cutting the taper on those 4×6s, ‘cause I didn’t have the patience to wait for the jigsaw to cut that far, and my circular saw only goes 2” deep, so I had to cut in from each side and match up the results, which worked a lot better than I’d planned.

Presented here not as a work of art, but as a serving suggestion for people who might end up with some extra counter tops and some construction scraps. Finish is Penofin hardwood formulation, ‘cause I’ve got a gallon of it bought for our front door project.

I had this as a blog series, but when I got back to the front page I saw myself featured there (I was the random lumberjock pick), so figured I should add this chair to my projects as well.

In our longer term plans, we want to build chairs for our dining table. My sweety and I like to work in the shop together, but I generally have a separate project going on because she doesn’t spend as much time in the shop as I do. So combining a need for a chair for my home office and me developing the skills to do some really nice chairs for the living room seemed like a good side project.

This one’s ¾” birch, I had my doubts when I started but the chair seems plenty sturdy. To get that “Maloof” look I’ll definitely have to go for thicker wood so that I can put in more curves, but as a “what I had lying around” experiment with no planning, I think this worked fairly well.

The curves are all cut with a jig saw, clamped together and cleaned up with a router. The splay from the front legs to the back is about 7°, that miter was cut with a Festool saw on a rail. The joints are all loose tenons made with the Domino,

The slats are laminated recurves with 3 layers, they flex a little bit in their sockets, which is fine, but they make noise, so my next version will probably glue them in. That top rail with the knot in it is mitered together for the angle, worked fairly well given that I was working from scrap and thought I should highlight the knot, but the seams are pretty obvious.

All in all it worked fairly well, and I’ll be doing more of them, though I do want to do carved seats for my next one.

When we bought our house recently, we used the real estate agent services from Redfin.com, and Ernesto and Angelo, the two folks we dealt with from there, were awesome. We wanted to show our appreciation for their efforts in some personal way, and one of the things that the house has given us is a shop, so we thought we’d make some trays. We went and got some beautiful maple burl veneers, and a bunch of lyptus, and some baltic birch, and we asked at the store how they recommended attaching the veneers, and they sold us contact cement, and a $7 brush to apply it with.

I didn’t notice the price on the brush ‘til we got home, but I think that it was given to us as a “one time use” thing should have given me more pause.

So we dutifully applied the contact cement, pressed on our veneers, left ‘em in the shop. Of course they bubbled, so we took our iron (yes, we have an iron in the shop), pressed ‘em back down, and then went on to cutting the side pieces on our new Leigh 24 Super dovetail jig.

Came back to the bottoms and, as anyone who’s used contact cement to attach veneers could probably tell me, they’d completely torn themselves apart. In talking with some experienced woodworkers we’ve since learned that you want a really hard glue for this, apply smoothly, let dry and iron together, as DaveT talks about in his skill share post.

Time constraints meant that we dropped back to some basic 1/4” birch veneer ply we had lying around.

And it also took us several passes through the Lyptus to get dovetails we were happy with. The Leigh jig was awesomely easy to adjust compared to the horrific ShopFox jig it replaced, but Lyptus has this huge long grain that tears out like crazy, so I learned to tape my ends (so that at the very least I had a prayer of finding the big splinters and gluing ‘em back in), and to try to cut in the middle of the template, and then clean out the space with climb cutting.

This was also my first real use of my homebuilt router table, showing both that a router table is a wonderful tool (Charlene, my partner, dislikes using a router hand held, but the router table won her over), but also that we need to budget for a beefier and better adjustable router for it.

Finishing was sanding to 220, then two layers of wet-sanded shellac followed by two layers of hand rubbed oil based polyurethane. Still searching for that perfect finish, but I think we’re getting better and closer.

Similar notes on our web site.

Given the spate of really nice projects I’ve seen come up here, this is kinda casting swine before pearls, but I wanted an illustration for a comment I’m making, and given that I’m working 6 days a week and long hours right now, I figure that anything that I turn out that’s remotely related to wood should be uploaded to LumberJocks.

Gotta feed the beast.

It being spring, my sweety has been swapping seedlings with coworkers, and one of the plants she’s ended up with is a morning glory. I love morning glories, but we were both concerned about it getting out of control, as such vines tend to. So we decided that even though we want it growing up on our deck fence (to cover up the nasty mesh that’s there now), and give us a little privacy from the road, we wanted it in a planter box.

Saturday evening I slapped together such a box. Do I know how to party, or what?

And, because I visited Jerry Work’s shop recently and saw one of his gorgeous cabinets that was assembled using only tight fitting joints and wax, I got excited about the idea of using no glue.

Here’s a quick and easy redwood planter box using only friction fit joints. And, because I’m also wanting to use this as an illustration of why Bill should consider alternatives to a table saw, it was made over a wool rug, in our living room, and clean-up was minimal and mostly ‘cause the combination of the guide bushing and my dovetail jig don’t do good dust collection.

As I explained in my blog entry, I’ve been absent because work has kicked in hard, and because my hobby time right now is spent working on an R/C glider that had been gathering dust for years. Maybe once I get that done I can get back to making sawdust in something other than balsawood, but then I thought “maybe my entries here don’t have to be all about furniture and boxes”, and I realized that I had a few other projects lying around that were made out of wood that I’m kinda proud of.

So maybe I don’t have to be totally absent while the work overwhelms me. And maybe I can dig up enough pictures that I can write some stuff while I wait for the computer to finish its assorted things. Here’s a testament to… well… maybe not great woodworking, but a little coolness that some scraps of bike parts, coat hanger wire and some waxed birch (that sounds vaguely obscene, for some reason) can create…

Almost two years ago my sweety and I took a trip to Alaska. I was just about to dive into a project that’s chewed through a lot of our resources, and her comment was “either this won’t matter in the grand scheme of things, or this’ll be the last trip we can afford to take for a loooong time, so we may as well do it right”. We went, had a fantastic trip, stayed mostly clear of the touristy cruise ship areas, but towards the end of the trip we did end up in Juneau, and we took the obligatory helicopter flight up on to the glacier.

When we got back, and Charlene (my sweety) said “that was so cool, I’d love to learn how to fly a helicopter!”. Now I’m as much a pushover for an excited woman as the next guy (probably more, actually), but having just got back from that trip and dedicated a bunch of our savings to the project I’m currently embarked upon, I was reluctant to call up flight schools and figure out just how much it cost (not as much as you’d think, but she’s also not the most coordinated person in the world, so there’d be a lot more hover practice at however many hundreds of dollars an hour than there would be for, say, me).

I looked around a bit, and an amazing number of people reported that learning the basics of helicopter flight on a simulator actually helped them when they went to fly the real thing. The one caveat was that a usual sprung joystick didn’t work for such things, to make the simulator training useful, you had to have real pedals and a non-centering cyclic stick (the one that controls which direction the helicopter goes in, the other one, down at the left side, is called the collective, and controls how much lift the main rotor is generating… roughly, these things actually get really complex really fast).

Now at the time we were living really lean. But I thought about the problem a bit, found out that FlightGear was free, had a semi-decent helicopter simulation, and ran on Linux (my favorite OS), so I splurged on a few bucks at the hardware store and the $20 or so it cost to buy a cheap joystick that had roughly the number of axes of control I needed, took that sucker apart and made some sawdust.

These pictures don’t have the cyclic stick completed (I took the original joystick handle and mounted it on the stick so that the auxiliary controls were available), and it’s gotten less use than I’d hoped (which is good, because it shows that flight training might not have been followed through on as fervently as it’d have to be to make it worthwhile), but it was a good kick in the pants on a number of fronts to realize that some things were easier than I’d imagined them to be.

A little bit more rambling on the project.

A rocking horse I’ve built for my nephew. Learned a lot, and, in hindsight, the mane pattern… well… uh… resembles mine.

This weekend we drive up to Portland, Oregon to deliver it. Going to have to disassemble it a bit, when I packed it in the car to take it to this meadow for pictures I had the head hanging out the window like a dog.

More in my Lumberjocks: My First Rocking Horse series and over in my own journal pages.

A little cord organizer/end table that I built mostly out of stock pulled from the discard bin. Oak legs, poplar sides, birch ply top and shelf with birch edging. The back half of the top lifts off to conceal a power strip with wall warts and various stuff plugged into it, and the notches and holes are there to run the plugs for cell phones &c. up through the top.

The bottom shelf holds the big digital SLR and rechargeable drill chargers.

The legs are tapered and rounded. I… uh… I guess the euphemism is “learned a lot”, but it’s a lot better than what we had, and a good start towards figuring out what we’d really like to have there.

A few more notes over on my wiki