The three boxes are about the same size: 8.5” wide, 4.5”, and 6” deep. The outer two are made of cherry, and the central one is of mahogany. The marquetry tops are of various types of veneer hide-glued onto mdf. The leaf motif on the central box is like the painted leaves on my cuban mahogany coffee table that I posted a while ago. The box bottoms are lined with suede leather. I made these boxes after attending a weekend course on marquetry taught by the artist/woodworker Paul Schurch, so they are my first effort with veneer and marquetry.

Music Instrument: hammer dulcimer
Case: walnut
Soundboard: quarter sawn spruce
Dimensions: width 38” (front), 24” (back) height 18.5” depth 3/25”
Soundboard painted by a neighbor, J. Stinger.

Incorporating baseball bats gives an opportunity for personalizing projects for children by having the bat monographed with the child’s name. I’ve done this in a couple of projects: full-sized bats in making a headboard for a grandsons bed, and short bats in a toy chest for a younger grandson. The toy chest is rather large because of the length of the bats (24 in.), so I included a bench inside the chest so grandson Elias can sit inside to do whatever grandsons do in spooky places. The bed is made with maple, baseball bats, and baseballs. The toy chest is made of cherry wood, baseball bats, and walnut & yellowheart splines (to strengthen the mitered corners.) For safety, I used slow close hinges to prevent the lid from slamming closed on little fingers; these type of hinges are made for toy chests and can be purchased from Woodcraft and other suppliers.

I really messed up some boxes I was making by not being careful enough when cutting miters for the sides. Soon after dumping the trashed sides into the dumpster, an article by Doug Stowe appeared in the Nov/Dec 2008 issue of Fine Woodworking Magazine. In it, Stowe describes how he gets his perfect miters by using a shop made crosscut sled of his table saw. “That’s what I need,” I said to myself, so I put one together by following Stowes description and adding a couple of features. I added a T-slot for use with a hold-down clamp and a face board to allow adjustment of the rear rail to be perpendicular to the saw kerf. The accompanying pictures show the result.

Headboard made of spalted, figured maple, with circular burl inlay. Finished with blond shellac, urathane top coat, and wax. Height 76, Width 54 inches. Tapered octogon posts with lambs-tongue transition and brass finials.

Dan Walters posted pictures of some of his projects having inset Grueby tiles. Those tiles are beautiful and rare, and they are displayed nicely in Dan’s projects. This motivated me to post pictures of some of my projects with inset tiles. The tile frames in the 5 small, splayed-leg tables are made of cherry, with the legs ebonized cherry. The large tile is 8”x8”. It was made by artist Jenny Mendes, who lives in Ohio. The tiles in the other 4 tables are 6”x6”. Excuse my picture with the sofa table. The tile in that table was also made by Jenny Mendes. The table top is cherry with wenge inlay, and the splayed legs are ebonized cherry. It measures 31.5” H, 57” L, 17” W. All the tables are finished with shellac sealer coat and oil urathane top coat. The tile in the wall hanging was made by Motawi. I made the wall hanging for my son, who lives in Philadelphia and heads a tree-care company. The pictorial inset represents a cycle in the life of a tree. The wood is cherry, the inlay is wenge, and the frame on the pictorial inset is bocate. You might wonder why I use so much cherry. The reason is that my Philadelphia son’s company cut down a large cherry tree some time ago, yielding about 500 bf of very nice Pennsylvania cherry—I still have about 300 bf of it. The cherry wood in all of these projects came from that tree, giving my son’s wall hanging a little extra story.

On a recent driving trip to South Florida, I managed to purchase a 6/4 thick, 7’ long slab of Cuban mahogany with two live edges, with spalting along each edge. I turned it into the coffee table pictured. I made one leg of the table by cutting off a portion of the board and jointing it back on at 90 degrees. The joinery is through dovetails that are mitered along the outer edges so the spalting flows around the corner continuously. A friend who volunteers at the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis provided the picture of leaves and flowers of a Cuban mahogany tree, and these were used to paint a representation of them flowing around the folded edge. The finish I used is 3 coats of shellac, 3 coats of urathane oil top coat, and one coat of polycrystalline wax. Dimensions: height 17”, length 54”, width varies between 18” and 15”.

The joinery in my Peace Bench is inspired by the japanese furniture maker Kintaro Yazawa, whose remarkable joinery is highlighted in the June 2007 issue of Fine Woodworking magazine. The bench is made from a single board of 5/4 mahogany. It’s dimensions are 26” high, 8” wide, and 30” long. The ‘olive branches’ inlay is made with sand-shaded holly veneer. I made the ‘dove and heart’ joinery by first making (unusually shaped) dovetail pins in the usual hand-sawn way but with the doves and heart cut into the ends of the pins using a straight bit in a Dremmel tool mounted on a Stewart-MacDonald router base, following Yazawa’s method. The tails are cut somewhat like those of half-blind dovetails but with an added step of opening areas for the doves and heart to penetrate, again following Yazawa’s method. It turns out that making these kinds of joints is slow going but not overly difficult. Some of Yazawa’s other style joints look really impossible, so I’ve put them off for the future after more late-night thinking.