I haven’t been working out in the shop for a while. I had been working inside where it’s cool.

I spent about the last 6 months building an 1/8” scale Sopwith Camel plane. A very large kit with about 1200 pieces.

The last time I made a case it was for my model wooden ship which I used glass for the case. But with this one being about 44” x 30” x 14” tall, I decided to use plastic instead.

This is hanging in my living room above a large window. I plan on making a Fokker DR1 plane later to balance out the display on either side of my daughters picture.

The case is made from mahogany finished using my standard reddish-brown dye and poly.

The plane is actually hanging by the tail in the case and the case is mounted to the wall using a french cleat.

I took a lot of pictures of the plane while I was building it, so if anyone is interested I could probably do a decent blog on it’s construction. It is mostly wood after all.

I started out with this:

When I bought it about 15+ years ago, I had it installed outside in a small metal building next to my garage when I lived in California. It’s a Taiwanese made Reliant brand.

I built a small room inside my new 1000 sq ft shop I built in Texas for it.

Then I decided to upgrade it about 4 years ago to a canister filter instead of the bag. It made a big difference.

You can see it here:

I friend my mine still living in California (But is moving to Texas next month) built a cyclone dust collector from a plan in Wood Magazine. He mentioned that it never loses suction due to clogged bags or filters.

So I thought that I would upgrade again to what you see above in the project. I do get a lot more suction from the longest run of 50+ feet away. I was surprised by just how much extra there was.

Since my shop was air conditioned for those hot summer months, I exhausted the air that was sucked in the that small room through a cleanable filter you can see in the last picture. I just take it outside and smack it on the sidewalk to knock all the fine dust off.

When I installed the cyclone I incorporated the output of the blower to use it also as you can see in the 4th picture.

If you are interested in making one yourself the plans are in the November 1997 Wood Magazine or you can by the updated version with some improvements from their website here.

You might remember this as one of the first projects I posted.

You might also remember that I never finished it. I needed some feet and to finish the inside of the swinging drawers for the pieces.

Well, you can see from the picture above that I finally finished it after around 10-15 years later. I think that this is my last incomplete project that I started a long time ago.

I kept going back to it over the years going over and over on how to arrange and “pocket” the pieces. I came up with a the viable solution you see above. I’m glad that it’s finally done. It’s really been bugging me for years.

For more details see the original post.

After 2 months of work it’s finally complete! It was a long hard road, a lot harder than I had initially thought it would be, to tell you the truth.

If you haven’t seen the blog of its construction you can see it here.

It’s in 41 parts covering about 2 months work.

Everything is explained in the blog but for those not wanting to go through the whole thing here are the highlights.

The chairs are solid African mahogany as well as the legs for the table. The table top is veneered with Mottled Makore and curly maple on a substrate of two 1/2” (12mm) pieces of Russian birch plywood glued together.

The top is trimmed with Wenge and Santos Mahogany. The apron for the table is also Santos Mahogany.

All in all I had a great time building it, but at the same time I wouldn’t do it again. I don’t have to :-).

The only thing left to do on it is to fill in the oval spaces on the upper backs of the chairs. My next project will take care of that. You’ll see it later.

In the last two picture you can see the two happy customers.

Well, this took about 3 weeks of on and off work. Gluing mostly.

I had seen some cutting boards that kind of looked like a maze so I figured why not make a maze. It turns out to be a real pain. It’s almost impossible to get all the pieces the exact size and then glued up the exactly the same way every time.

I ended up finishing it but it turned out bad in my eyes. The only way I can see to do this and get everything to line up perfectly, is to glue one piece at a time making sure it’s right. I glued up an entire row at a time and the accumulation of small differences really added up. It’s just too big also.

It is an actual maze. You start at one DOT in one corner and go to the other DOT on the opposite corner.
Material it hard maple and peruvian walnut.

Anyway I hope that you enjoy it.

After seeing all the cool cutting boards posted I thought that I would try one that I know I haven’t seen anyone do.

I call it “Intersection”.

It took me a lot longer that I thought it would with all kinds of jigs/fixtures and a lot of wood left over.

See if anyone can tell me what parts are left over.

It’s Maple and Peruvian Walnut. I’m really using up all the warped, crooked, twisted… walnut I have in my pile.

If there’s enough interest in how I made it, maybe I’ll do a blog on it. See if you can figure out how I did it first.

Here’s the blog on how I made it: http://lumberjocks.com/GaryK/blog/21408

Here’s my version of an end grain cutting board.

I was going to make one like this since I haven’t seen one like it before but Steve beat me to it. :-)

So I had to come up with another design as you can see above.

The woods are:

Hard Maple
Peruvian Walnut
Cherry
and Canary wood for the little triangles.

The board is 1” thick.

Took about 3 days to glue up!

This is my 5th project in less than a month. I’m on a roll!

Here is a little box that I built just a proof of concept. You can see the look I was going for.

The woods are hard maple and Peruvian walnut with my standard crushed velvet interior.

The rest is sort of self explanatory.

This is an experiment to see how things would look just cutting out veneer and gluing it directly to another piece of wood without doing an inlay or a full veneer.

The border pieces are Holly stacked and cut on a scroll saw and then glued to a Wenge backing board. I found that the problem is the glue squeeze out. If I were to do this again I would probably apply glue to the back and let it dry. Then use an iron to apply it.

The veneer is Holly with a Wenge background and a Maple frame and Wenge in the corners for strength.

It was made for an 8×10 picture.

All in all it turned out pretty good.

Being a stay at home dad takes a lot of time away from my shop, as many of you have noticed by my absence of late. I made time for this contest though. I really liked the theme.

Some of you old timers might remember the Summer 2007 contest where I entered this project:

Well, some of those joints inspired this picture frame but with a twist, or should I say a circle?

After just having finished my curio cabinet for my wife, I had just a little over two weeks to come up with something if I wanted to have an entry for this contest. I haven’t build anything for or entered one of the contests for 2 years, so I figured I would “chip” in again.

Starting at the top are couple Japanese flavored joints. Top center is what I would call a rabbeted scarf joint. On either side of that I would call it a mortise and tenon with square pegs to hold it together. Below on both sides of that are one of my favorite joints, a pin and crescent joint.

Then for good measure I made up the bottom one. It is two overlapping circles joined with finger joints.
It didn’t turn out like I wanted it to. You really can’t see the circle on the right side.

The two major woods are Holly and Madrone. I used walnut for the square pegs to contrast both woods.
The reason for those woods is the contrast and the nature of the wood. They both hold a nice clean edge when using a chisel, and a fine grain.

It’s about 10” in diameter and 6.5” inside. One hard part was cutting a round piece of glass!

The biggest problem I encountered was after getting one joint perfect, was screwing up the other joint, scrapping
the whole part. I won’t tell you how many times I did that!

My only regret is that I didn’t take any progress pictures. (Let my brother borrow the camera, bummer!)

It’s been a while since I’ve posted a project, huh?

This is a Curio cabinet that I made my wife for Christmas. It’s what she said what she wanted and gave my until the end of January to finish it. I was told this a week before Christmas when I asked her what she wanted. I beat the deadline by two weeks.

It’s made completely from Peruvian walnut. I’m getting to the bottom of the barrel with this walnut. There’s not a straight flat piece of what’s left.

Anyway there’s not much to say about it. Spline joints on the case and M&T for the doors.

Just so you guy don’t think I don’t get in any shop time, I thought I’d post this.

It’s actually the first project I did for money. I took an existing head-board and foot-board and put them together to make a nice foot-board with a TV lift built in.

It fits a 50” plasma TV. I thought that it’s a little too big to be at your feet, but that what he ordered.

I basically add 6 ” in between and mounted everything to work correctly. Matching the wood and color was a chore. The thing was made in Vietnam, so I had no idea what kind of wood it is.

Anyway that it.

1409 individually cut pieces of veneer and this is what you get. Never again! By the time I got 1/4 the way through I wanted to quit, but by that point I had too much invested in it. Numb and sore fingers.

This is 18” in diameter with these veneers:

Curly maple
Walnut
Madrone
Holly
Makore
with a Mahogany rim around it.
I used MDF for a substrate and base.

It took over a month of cutting. Most of the work was done at the kitchen table where I could keep an eye on my daughter, so that month consisted of some 4-5 hours days. I saw the pattern on the cover of a book and went from there.
It’s not exactly the same but the main pattern is.

I’m glad the I finally finished it but I’ll never make something this involved again. (I hope)

Well, if you remember back about 2 months ago I asked what wood stayed red over time, ( see here ) this the project I was talking about. The Ruger logo is red so that is what I wanted to use.

I have been wanting to make a project out of holly for over a year now and I have been thinking about this one for a couple of months now. It’s made entirely out of holly and ebony with bloodwood for the logos.

It surprised me just how long it took to make. I figured “I’ll just knock if out in a couple of days”. Well that couple of days took me about 2 weeks. Mainly because I could only work on it when my daughter took her nap and a few hours in the evening. About half the time was spent meticulously working on the ebony trim around the openings.

It’s finally done, so I can move on to my next project.

This is more of a tip than a real project, but here it goes anyway.

I was waiting for a glueup to dry so I decided to solve a problem I was having. I was using my Dremel tool’s flex shaft and I needed it to hang from something. Something that I could move around to keep it out of my way when I wasn’t using it. Then I remembered Blake’s light that he stuck into one of his round dog holes on his work bench.

Well I decided to use the rectangular dog holes on mine, and came up with what you see in the pictures. I can adjust the height depending the height of the piece I’m working on and more it around my workbench to where I need it.

I’m already thinking of other things to use it for. Add a couple of holes for pencils and hanging some things that I use for every project that I really don’t want laying on my bench. (mainly because they get buried under junk). Things like that.

It’s nice because I can either use it or not, but I usually have one corner of my bench I’m not using.

This is so simple I know that it has to have been done before.

It’s kind of a pain lining up the holes on a Random Orbital Sander. I just took a 6” square piece of wood, drilled 4, 3/8” holes lined up using a disk and glued in some dowels. The dowels have been rounded at the top. They stick up about 3/4”.

Just put on a disk loop side up, lower the sander, rotate it a little until the holes line up (helped by the rounded pegs) lower it all the way and you have perfectly lined up disk.

Another cool thing it that you can stack up more than one disk in order of grit size. I show 8 disks but I only add 4 at a time since the top disk will stick before the holes are lined up. Great for working your way through the grits.

You could make one for 5 hole disks and for Festool disks also whatever they have.

I built this out of necessity. My 2 year old daughter was getting into everything. I had an open glass thing that had all my electronics on and I had put a little fence up to keep her out. Well, that stopped working a while ago so here is my child proof media cabilet. It’s not a piece of fine furniture but it only took 2 days to build (the first was glue ups) and it works. I left the back open to have access to all the wires.

There are a lot of firsts here.

The first time I used Cherry.
The first I used pocket screws for a project.
The time I have used stain (I know I did once years ago but I forget when).
The first time I used no mortise hinges.
The first time I used window screen gasket material to hold in glass.

Looking on craigslist I found a guy selling a pile of cherry and maple lumber, so I bought it for $50. The wide cherry boards were glue ups from thinner lumber so I just glued the up some more to make these 20” wide boards.

I know that this will offend a lot of people but for me cherry sucks. My two biggest complaints are it’s brittle and it won’t take dye. I was using a router on the edge and it shattered. I tried to tweak a door frame that wasn’t laying flat and it snapped. I broke of at least 3 steel screws in pre-drilled holes. It does have a good point in that it has closed pores that sands to a silky smooth surface. I will never use it for anything again. I’m probably just used to mahogany which in my opinion is the best wood for furniture, with walnut second.

All the firsts worked great except for the stain. You can read about that HERE if you are interested.

To hold in the glass in I used that rubber stuff that holds window screen in the frame. I figured that with all the problems I was having with the cherry I wasn’t going to use that. I pre-drilled holes in the rubber and into the frame so that I just had to press the brads in place. Worked great , it’s cheap and it’s easy to replace.

Almost the entire project it held together with 3” deck screws which were covered with plugs and sanded flush. There are wheel to make it easy to move, although I should have had them sticking out more than the 1/2” I used. Still kind of hard to roll on carpet.

I included the fourth picture so that you can see whose legs those are in the other pictures. That’s just my butler.

It’s been a while, huh?

Well, it’s been a long time since I finished the actual woodwork on this. The middle of May to be exact. 6 months ago!
For those of you who don’t know me too well, I hate sanding and finishing.

There is a LOT of details that needed some very intricate sanding and I got bored with it real quick. It took until last week that I finally got back to it. I have some other projects backing up and need to make the room, so I finally broke down and completed it.

If you are interested in seeing the 11 part blog on it’s construction you can find it here.

The finish is my standard finish for mahogany. Reddish brown water based dye and poly. I usually use a satin finish for everything, but for some reason I went with a high gloss for this one. If it turns out that I don’t like it, I will just add a satin topcoat to dull it down

Was playing around on the computer and thought I would put together a little video of my biggest project to date; my Shop.

These pictures were taken from 4-16-2006 through 7-30 2006 when I moved into it. They were taken in sequence through all phases of construction.

Enjoy.
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A little project to warm me up for the oncoming winter.

I got an e-mail from the place that I bought the pucks and wax for my shuffleboard table.
They were selling a set of bowling pins for about $40. I figured that I could make them a lot cheaper. Like for nothing.

I wanted them to all be exactly alike, so with my lack of skills on the lathe, I decided to use my Legacy mill with a following template. You can see it in the fourth picture. In the fifth picture you can see them roughed out. From there I put them on my Jet mini lathe for final smoothing and sanding.

The wood is something called White Limba. I thought I would buy a piece on eBay just to see what it was like. Well, it’s mostly white but has black streaks in it. Basically it sucks. I had a piece of 8/4 so I used it for these.

The third picture shows a little pin setting device I came up with. Makes it a snap.

The design is a scaled down version from a drawing of a 10 pin I found online.

Two coats of water based Poly and they are ready to go. It adds another game to my shuffleboard table.