So I have a few hand tools, and I needed to get away from keeping them all over the shop on shelves and any other cluttered surface. I decided I needed to build a cabinet to hang on the wall near my bench. Since I have a ton of walnut I decided to build the case out of that. For the panels in the doors and the back I used VG fir and mahogany veneer glued to baltic birch ply. The inside is all vertical fir which I like for the light color. The tool “hooks” are all made from some curly maple scraps I had laying around.

A common problem I have is getting stuff I build for myself about 80% done before moving on. This project is no exception. I still need to add the finish, add a few more storage options, and add the remaining hardware. Fact is once I got it to this point I wanted to see how it looked with a bunch of tools in it and I haven’t looked back.

I built this walnut bed as a wedding gift for a couple of friends. Since they live out in Oregon and I’m here in Kansas City I had to ship it freight. Boxing it up took some planning and the cost for the shipping ended up running about $250, but it was worth it.

The project itself took about a month’s worth of weekends, and a few evenings applying the 6 coats of oil/varnish. The wood is all local air dried black walnut. For the posts I had some 16 qtr that I milled down to 3 1/2 substantial inches. The head and foot boards have nice wide book matched crotch pieces that I resawed from some 5/4 stock. Mortise and tenons with bead bolts hold the rails in place.

In the end I was pleased with the way this project turned out, and before I shipped it out all I could think about was how much I liked the design over my own bed. I have some ideas to expand on this basic design and may have to make another ;-).

This summer I completed this full length walnut tilting mirror for my wife Tamara. This was supposed to be a birthday gift, but you know how that goes (her birthday is in March). For the frame and base I used some figured walnut and use some scraps of wenge with threaded brass for the “hardware”. I did my best to avoid sandpaper on this project and completed most of the smoothing with my new (at the time) bevel up smoother and card scrapers. There are a lot of curves on this piece and I made MDF templates and pattern routed the pieces to shape. I then rounded the pieces with the router, rasps, spokeshave and block plane. The mirror was a great find the Habitat Restore and I cut it myself to match the cloud lifts. If I could add a nice wide beveled glass mirror it would have been awesome, but that would have ran me $500, this piece of glass only cost me $20 and I did the cutting myself. Despite the fact that I was about 4 months late getting this completed I still rushed myself and left out some details I had intended to add including some ebony pegs. I finished the piece with 6 coats of General Finishes seal a cell and arm r seal. Can’t miss with the stuff.