An idea I toyed with for a while before I actually got around to doing it. Once I got around to it, the whole project, from beginning to end, took me less time than I actually spent thinking about it.

The wood is bog oak, the bezel cup is sterling silver, and the cuff link finding is a shiny nickel. Future cuff links will be made with sterling bezel cups and sterling cuff link findings.

I’d like to experiment with different woods, too, but with such a small canvas (16mm diameter), I’ll really have to find something with character. Maybe some burled wood?

This is a commissioned piece I’ve been working on. It is a sgian dubh presentation box for a woman in Scotland to give to her fiance on their wedding day. It is a traditional Scottish wedding, with kilts and the like, so inside will be a custom sgian dubh made just for him (but not by me; by the same guy who made my sgian dubh you see in the pictures).

Materials:
Reclaimed White Oak from my family farm
Bog Oak from Ireland
Extruded Brass Hinges from Woodcraft
Red Jasper Cabochon

The sgian dubh is going to have a red jasper cabochon set into the pommel, so I thought it would be a grand idea to inlay one into the lid of the box. The rectangle around the wood, the keyed miters, and the interior dividers are all bog oak.

Oh, and the cuff links in the right compartment are bog oak cuff links I made myself, in case anyone was wondering.

When I was making my sgian dubh presentation box for my best man, I wanted to use bog oak in it. The bog oak I bought from the U.K. came with a few larger pieces, so I thought I’d try my hand at pen turning.

I’m not terribly comfortable using the lathe yet, so I still have a lot of cleaning up to do on my basic techniques. To up the difficulty level even more, the piece I picked to turn was pretty pithy and had some voids in it. We soaked the blanks in hardener for a few days – I would have hated to see what it was like without that step! Break-out ended up being a huge problem, even with the most delicate touch.

I’ve turned pens before, mostly using rosewood and other oily exotics. They were always so easy – like turning a stick of butter! But I didn’t let this one get to me. I just kept at it.

The guy who was helping me (letting me use his lathe, showing me different turning techniques, that sort of thing) sold me one of his pen kits so I could just use his bushings and not have to buy the whole setup. I decided on the Churchill style – I thought it appropriate, considering the wood’s origin.

I ended up giving the pen to Dana’s uncle, George, for Christmas. He used to do a lot of woodworking when he was younger – he still does a bit here and there when he can – and I knew he would appreciate it.

I also did a nice write-up of where the bog oak came from and how it was found and printed that up on parchment paper and then rolled it up into a tube and sealed it with a wax seal (no pictures of that…). Presentation is everything!

As far as the finish goes, I used a lacquer finish, just spraying it on while the pen was still on the lathe. I could have filled gaps or sanded more smoothly, but I really wanted the grain and character of the wood to show as much as possible. Some testing had shown the bog oak would pretty much go black after any finish was applied, so I thought the texture of the grain was about as good as I was going to get.

In testing some documentation, I needed to go through the steps of posting pictures on the various pages of LumberJocks.com… so I thought I’d work in a little teaser project while I was at it.

The house Dana and I have under contract has an awesome family room. It’s going to look even better once we get the hardwood flooring laid down… but man, will that mantel look weak at that point! I can’t really knock it – the current owner made it himself (he’s British, so he has an affinity for pine furniture, and he’s REALLY good at making it).

But it won’t work with our plans, at all, at all.

So out it goes.

Once we close, I’ll start taking some more accurate dimensions of the fireplace and work on some mantel design ideas.

The flooring is going to be Santos Mahogany, so… looks like I get to make a mantel out of the same! Poor me. :)

This was my very first experience at turning something on the lathe. When I decided I wanted to get a little more into woodworking, I contacted Pops, who is a bit of a second father to my younger brother, Noah. Pops had helped Noah with tool-buying decisions and instructional lessons over the years, and he also made a carving mallet for him out of some Osage Orange. So I called Pops and asked him if he would make me a mallet.

He said no.

But then he said he would be more than happy to help me make my own if I could swing by some weekend night.

It was my first turning experience, so I was obviously just a bit nervous. But he helped me the entire way, through roughing it into a cylinder to marking the divisions for mallet head and mallet handle. He pretty much let me do the rest on my own, though he did offer some advice on such things as the thickness of the grip and the transition between handle and mallet. As you can see, there is a smooth transition, with a small cove just at the base of the head, which lends itself to a great thumb position for better striking control. To get the perfectly straight face on the head, we used a large, extra-thick card scraper (i.e. a piece of flat steel with a perfectly straight edge).

After we were done, he gave me a small coffee can ½ filled with boiled linseed oil. I let it sit in the BLO in the coffee can for a full week. I then followed his treatment of sticking it back in that can once a day for a week, once a week for a month, once a month for a year, and then once a year from then on.

Learning to turn on osage orange was a great experience. Most things I turn now are nothing compared to that – rosewood, for example, is like having a stick of warm butter chucked into the lathe.

Sorry I only have one picture of it, but… it’s just a mallet. There really aren’t any more interesting angles…

I picked this idea up from the last pages of an old Fine Woodworking Magazine (some issue from 1992 or 1993, I believe). I’ve probably made 20 or so keys in the past few years, and I’ve refined the process several times since the first one.

I used to use copper tubing for the key ring hole. That wore way too quickly, so I started using bronze spacers I found at a local hardware store. They were increasingly more difficult to find, so I started looking for something else to use and eventually came across brass tubing of the right diameter at a local True Value Hardware. That is what I now use and will probably stick with.

The wood varies according to the person whose key I’m working on. For example, my mother-in-law’s favorite color is red and her car is red, so I used Bloodwood. It has a great sheen to it when you polish it up to the wet/dry grits, but you have to be really careful to get all of the scratches out before you move up to the next grit.

The shape is sometimes totally random and sometimes very specific, again depending upon the person and what they want. I also have learned I have to restrict the key size to the construction of the ignition switch, as well. Some ignition switches have those metal tabs on them; I have to make sure the key fits between the tabs. (I’ve had to redo two keys because of that.)

I tend to use Gorilla glue with my key grips – partly because of the metal-to-wood contact. I know some people don’t like Gorilla glue, but these are small pieces and I’ve certainly never had a problem with them before.

I don’t really think this is a great money-making project, as I spend several hours on a key, if you total the time from beginning to end, and I don’t think most people would charge $100 for a wooden grip. I’m also unable to make keys for a vehicle if they have a chip in it, which is quite common these days. I have a few ideas I might start checking into, but please forgive me if I don’t really elaborate on them here…

Oh, my favorite key grip is one I made for myself out of Blackwood. When it is sitting on a table, it looks like a regular black plastic key grip. Someone has to pick it up to see that it is really a piece of wood.

Descriptions of the keys displayed for this project:
White Background – This is one of the last keys I’ve made. I wanted to move away from the traditional key shape. The wood is Vasticola, an Australian timber. I love how it looks like flames… I’ve gotten really good at “letting” the key into the blank of wood – the opening where the key comes out of the wood is really tight on this one.
Black Background – This was also a recent key I made from an Australian wood. This is York Gum – can you see the ghostly faces in it? Scarey wood…
Green Background – This is my wife’s key. I made it with Maple burl from Canada. She likes that she can grab her keys and find her car key just by feeling for the wooden grip.

Dana and I had an Irish/Scottish themed wedding, complete with a piper playing at the ceremony and an Irish band playing at the reception. Probably more importantly, however, my best man and I both wore kilts – he was in his family’s tartan, Montgomery, and I was in Dana’s family’s tartan, Campbell.

My best man was my best friend, Matt. I’ve known him for most of my life – my dad delivered him, even! We’d gone through everything from pee wee soccer to little league to being roommates in college. I was the best man in his wedding five years ago. So I really wanted to do something to honor him.

So for my best man’s present, I had a pair of sgian dubh custom made for us. A sgian dubh is the small knife traditionally worn in the kilt hose. It means “black knife”; the meaning of the name is attributed to the fact that often the handles were made out of bog oak, which is extremely dark in color due to the reactions of the tannic acid with the chemicals in the bog. After a bit of internet searching (didn’t I say you could find pretty much anything on the internet?), I found a guy in Scotland, Rab Gordon at Rainnea Graphics (www.rainnea.com), who makes sgian dubh using bog oak for the handles and Damascus steel for the blades. After some negotiating, we came to a price agreement and I purchased two sgian dubh.

This was also about the same time I’d aquired the bog oak from England, so I thought I’d try to make a presentation box for Matt, using some of the reclaimed white oak from the farm and some of the bog oak.

This is the end result. It is a sliding lid box, about 6” x 11” or so. The insert is made with four layers of hardboard. To get a good fit, I traced an outline of the sgian dubh onto the first layer and cut it out with an inward bevel. Then I used that to trace the pattern onto the next layer. I cut it out with a slight bevel, as well. I repeated these steps for the final two layers, so that when you stack them up together, you get an opening that gets smaller and smaller until it just fits the exact shape of the sgian dubh. I added a final solid layer for a bottom (the insert is an extremely tight fit, but it does slide out) and applied a layer of cork shelf liner to the flat surfaces of the insert (so that the surface had a little “give”) and then covered the entire insert in suede cloth. The silver insert is engraved with the serial number of the sgian dubh. Matt has SG105A and I have SG105B.

I had originally planned on making a bog oak carving (a medallion, maybe?) and inserting it into the lid, but I really liked the look of the knot and thought they might compete for focal point attention, so I left it out. Instead, I inlaid a strip of bog oak into the end of the lid.

I was very happy with how it turned out – I love the look of the reclaimed wood with the nail holes and stains. And I love the way the bog oak polishes up – almost like ebony.

Again, you can see my focus is on clean, simple lines, which lets the nature of the wood become the main design element.

This project was my entry for Woodcraft Magazine’s, “Think Small, Win Big” clock contest from March of 2006. It also happens to be the engagement ring box I made for my wife. I’d gone the safe route and included her when picking out her engagement ring. I knew she had very specific tastes when it came to jewelry, so I wanted to make sure she ended up with a wedding band and engagement ring she would want to wear forever.

Since I couldn’t surprise her with the ring, I decided to surprise her with the presentation of the ring. When I showed her my “clock” to get her final review before I sent the entry in to Woodcraft, it took her a minute to realize the clock opened. Once she got it opened, it took her another 15 seconds to realize the ring inside was her ring, and exactly what that meant. But I think she was pleased with both the box and the way I proposed.

As far as proposing goes, I wanted to make sure I didn’t come up with any excuses to not give it to her, so the night before I gave it to her, I woodburned the title of the piece, “It’s About Time”, and the date into the bottom of the box, pretty much insuring I gave it to her the next morning.

As far as the contest goes, I did make it as a Top 20 Finalist, but did not otherwise place. The box was photographed and included in the June 06 issue of Woodcraft Magazine.

I am absolutely my own worst critic, but the one thing I most enjoyed about the contest was to get a copy of all of the judges’ comments along with my returned entry. I like receiving proper feedback on my works, as it is a great way to learn and improve on my up-coming projects.

The box is Honduran Mahogany. It opens on simple barrel hinges and uses rare earth magnets for a closure method. I made the insert using foam and suede cloth.

Things I would change:
- I’m not a big fan of how orange the box looks. I did this box before I got into fuming; the next ring box I make with Mahogany will be fumed, as I prefer the nuttier color resulting from ammonia fuming. Anything I do now with white oak or mahogany usually gets fumed.
- The scribe lines were evidence of time running out. My original plan was to inlay a very thin line of binding along the edges; I came to a point where I could start doing that, but if I messed it up I might not have time to remake the box from scratch. So the scribe lines remained. One technique I want to start working on this next year is that type of inlay work, so that is something else I’ll incorporate into future boxes.

Stylistically, it is a fairly simple box. The novelty comes from it being a clock and an engagement ring box at the same time. I understand this, and I’m ok with it. I prefer Arts and Crafts, Eastlake, and Mission styles of furniture. I like simple foods and an uncluttered house. So naturally, my works tend to be simple and uncluttered in appearance. I’m generally more concerned with execution, technique, and wood selection. Are my joints tight? Did I sand properly and enough? Is the finish adequate for the intended use? Does the piece function as designed? Does the fabric compliment the wood selection?

My wife keeps her ring box on her desk at work so she can be reminded of that day whenever she checks to see what time it is.

(Incidently, the band in the picture was the jeweler’s first attempt at making a wedding band to go with the ring. It was whole heartedly rejected. Fortunately, Dana found a band she liked at an antique store. It was a thin band with small roses relief carved into it, and it looks great with the filigreed antique engagement ring.)