Well, here is a fishing rod rack that I just finished for a friend. It is two pieces that mount to the wall. The bottom one holds the butts of the rods and has a sloped bottom piece that pushes the tip toward the wall. Then the top part just holds the tips to keep them from falling over.

I made it out of walnut and finished it with Watco Danish Oil in the medium brown color. This made it a little too cool for my taste, so I added a coat of garnet shellac which seemed to warm it up a pretty good bit. A little paste wax and that was it.

While it didn’t turn out perfect, it was ok. Plus I made some jigs and templates that will let me make more pretty easily if I ever decide to. So, all in all, another learning experience, and that can’t be bad.

Well, my wife wanted a coffe table and after completing several smaller projects but never an actual piece of furniture I thought why not. She wanted a very plain table, which was good for me. I actually considered trying some breadboard ends, but she didn’t want them. So, what we have is a very simple table made of walnut with regular tapered legs. The aprons are attached with haunched mortise and tenons. The top is simply butt jointed together and attached to the base with wooden buttons set into small mortises in the aprons. The finish is umpteen thousand coats of garnet shellac topped with a coat of wax.

I learned a lot by working on this project. I learned to always get the flattest stock you can find and then buy extra. I had to make two extra trips to the hardwood dealer to finally have enough wood. Although I do have a nice pile of exta walnut in the basement now. I also learned to match the color of the wood as closely as possible while at the lumber dealer. I had to stain the apron material to make it match the legs as close as possible. I built a jig for my plunge router to cut the mortises in the legs. I learned that my plunge router stinks and doesn’t plunge straight up and down but has a slight rock in the plunge actions which can hurt your mortises. I learned that you can’t see a pencil mark on walnut, completely cutting the end off of one of my mortises requiring me to glue a piece back into the leg when the haunch should go.

The one smart thing that I did was to build the taper jig off of antiquesbuiltdaily.com, which worked wonderfully for tapering the legs.

All in all it was a very educational experience and it turned out okay.

Well, I finsihed my tablesaw outfeed table. It’s certainly nothing special, but any opportunity to practice skills and learn from mistakes is worthwile I guess.

I went for simple and cheap. The legs and aprons are 2×4’s, joined with mortise and tenons. The top is just a piece of 3/4” birch-faced plywood attached with screws through the face. Add a little stain, wipe on poly, wax, and lag bolt levelers, and that’s it.

Of course following my measure once, cut twice mode of operations, I made the dado’s the same orentation as the saw, so once spun around and aligned with the mitre slots on the saw the table edge doesn’t line up with the edge of the saw. It’s all backwards, and upside down, and inside out, or something.

Well…my first project post. Here we go.

I decided to make a cutting board as a Christmas present for my step-mom. It is one of the ones in the picture with three of them. I have a version just like it, only bigger, that I made my wife a couple years ago. it has been nice to use, but really too big. I personally always wanted to have a small one just to dice onions or what have you. So, I made her’s in the same design (end grain of hard maple and two cherry strips) only smaller. It turned out pretty well and I had some left over materials, so I thought why not make one for my mother-in-law and sister too. So, now I have three that are virtually identical except for slight differences in dimensions (I didn’t really try to hit a certain dimension, just use what material I had).

Then, as the bug was biting and I started seeing other folks cutting boards on this site, I decided to try my hand at an end grain board with an alternating pattern. So, after much scratching my head over design for a while I started cutting parts for board you see by itself in the picture. This turned out okay in the end, but was fiasco after fiasco in construction. I made curved cuts on my cheap’o tablesaw, couldn’t glue the edges due to the curves and had to rip the edges off 1/2 inch. I busted out about half of the end strip and had to cut it off. One thing after another. Like I say, it turned out fine, but I learned lots of lessons on this one. It may be my last. This one is hard maple and some manner of oak (I think). I actually have a pile of redwood and picked a piece out of it. Turns out it was in the wrong pile. I should pay closer attention.

Thanks everyone. I have really enjoyed this site and learned a lot already.
-PeteMoss