In my very first post in this series, I said that I wanted to make something before building my workbench, and I said (here comes a direct quote), “What better project for my beginner skills than a simple dovetail box?” Yes. I said the words “simple”, “box” and “beginner” in the same sentence. How little I knew. So here are some reflections on my 6-month journey into box making, and some lessons learned: Find something you do well, and buil...
I’ll call this a radial dovetail (for lack of better name). This is a practice handcut joint for a future keepsake box. It’s curly maple and Caribbean rosewood. My initial thought was to have all the sides of the dovetails in the maple point to one common perspective. However, during layout I quickly found out some of the angles would be far too severe, putting the integrity of the joinery at risk. Thus I used two perspective points for this joint. Note there are four tails in the...
After admiring the double and double-double dovetail joints that are capable with the Incra and other jigs, I started thinking, “Why not try this by hand?” So this box is my first experiment with handcut double dovetails. It took me some time to figure out the joinery process, but once I realized a few things about this type of joint, it seemed do-able. It was quite challenging but also a ton of fun. It also does take some degree of patience and precision…which I’m still working on. In...
This is my second piece of furniture (and I use the word pretty loosely). I was walking around in my local Borg and noticed this piece of funky looking pine. I don’t know what this effect is due to. The wood in the dark spots seems really brittle and chips very easily. I suspect it is something related to fungus but I am not really sure. It was only ten dollars and I took it home with me after getting it cut into 2 four-foot long pieces. I wanted to try my hand at build...
Just in time for Memorial day… I made a display case for my father-in-law that holds an American flag and certificate. The flag and certificate were presented to him by an active Navy Seal serving in Operation Iraqi Freedom. The certificate shows the date the flag was flown over Camp Patton in Fallujah. This was quite an honor for my father-in-law, and the flag and certificate deserved a special case to preserve and protect them. Here’s a link to the video on how the ca...
Back at the end of January (yes, 2008), I said that I wanted to make, and I quote myself, “a simple dovetail box.” I planned to make it for my wife. I don’t think I really expected to finish it by Valentine’s Day, but I did expect that it would be done for her birthday (mid-March). That came and went, leaving me with Mothers Day as my next target date. As I finally figured out how to do the lid, it all started coming together very quickly, and I found myself on Mothers...
Many excellent woodworking videos. I stumbled on this link for this site on Reddit.com, from a posted link on creating a solar furnace from coke cans (that garage gets cold in the winter). Once I found the tool stuff, this is the first video that caught my eye: Cutting Inlayed Dovetails using the Leigh D4, by Al Navas I have a D4, but haven’t tried doing anything fancy yet, but maybe at lunchtime…. The tutorial is three videos. I also noticed David Marks and Wood Wh...
When I read about challenge 04 in Popular Woodworking Newsletter my first thought was to give it a try. The next thought was to design something that didn’t look like a box. Then I remembered that I had turned a square book case 45 degrees and put it into a corner. From there I took inspiration from other project I have built. A Corner Pantry Cabinet I built for my daughter and a reproduction of a 200 year old spice box that I built for my wife. When you add to that my enjoyment of carving...
Here is my entry for the bookcase challenge. Actually, maybe I should call it “how I forced myself to learn Sketchup the right way.” I had dabbled in Sketchup before but I never made drawings of different components that I then assembled. I spend a lot of time for this challenge watching the tutorials on YouTube and reading about proper Sketchup techniques online. I have worked with many 3D modeling programs before and some of the concepts are the same but there is certainly a le...
The Porter-Cable Omnijig dovetail jigs are finally available! Woodcraft in West Springfield, VA had the Porter-Cable rep in Saturday for demonstrations all day long. He said he got the jigs on Monday and only started playing with them then. So there’s a really fast learning curve. My first question to the rep was do you have them in stock? Yes. Not wanting to look too eager I asked him to demonstrate a few things and asked him some questions. I didn’t get the sense that he really knew why ...
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