First step was gluing up the walls of the house. The boys each took responsibility for an end wall. While making lunch earlier we had been talking about my mother’s ability to stretch a jar of peanut butter. The bread would be coated but with no extra volume. When it came to applying glue my nephew, D, asked if he should apply it like Grammy (his name for my mom) used to spread peanut butter. This proved to be the perfect description for him. His pal, G, having not been part of the earlier conversation was a little more liberal with the glue. But since the point was for the boys to have fun putting the house together we didn’t stress out about this.

The boys were fascinated by the clamps (Irwin quick grips). After a quick explanation about how to operate them the boys secured the walls. After fitting the wall structure into the base we set it aside to set and we turned our attention to painting the decorations.

D is on the left.

During the course of the painting D commented on the roughness of some of the decoration parts (guess I hadn’t done a thorough enough job sanding Friday night) and asked for some sand paper to fix them. Soon both boys were hard at work sanding.

Here’s the output of the painting session.

After the painting it was time to glue up the roof. In order to get the angles glued up correctly it needed to glued together while in place over the walls, but we wanted it removable so a layer of plastic wrap was added to the walls before the roof pieces were added. To make it easier for the boys to add the glue to the correct edge without adult intervention I placed a small bit of blue tape on either side of the edge to be glued.

The boys adding the glue.

Here’s the roof all clamped up. I’d made a set of clamp blocks for this step. Held together by C clamps. D announced that this was awesome.

Energy was flagging at this point – we’d been working on this for most of 3 hours. D announced that he’d like to put on the decorations with his parents – as a “family project”. So the house was unveiled without the decorations applied (hence the almost final of the title).

Here’s the house and it’s decorations.

The proud assistant builder.

Me, D and the creation.

A couple of recommendations for working with kids. – It’s not about perfection. The point should be spending time together and sharing your love of woodworking. – Be flexible. If the child in question has had enough stop, or at the very least let them stop. – Enjoy it. The most fun part of this was watching D explain to G how the clamps worked. – Share your knowledge in language the child can understand. We had a great conversation about sand paper grits, but mostly we talked about how bumpy the sand paper was. In the course of the conversation I mentioned that woodworkers called how bumpy the sand paper was the grit. I still smile when I think about D telling me that the piece he was sanding was pretty uneven and “I think I need the 100” (he was sanding with 220).

I’ll post pictures of the finished project once I get them.

The houses I’ve been working on will be no different, although the decorations will be wood not actual gingerbread.

walnut gingerbread man

peppermints and candy cane sticks

tree – there is a second piece which allows the tree to stand up

candy cane

I leave first thing tomorrow for New Jersey and final construction of the houses will happen this weekend. The weekends tasks will be assembling the houses, painting the decorations and adding the decorations to the houses. Before I leave I need to cut a bunch more peppermints. I’ll probably do a fair amount of sanding in my hotel room tomorrow night (the maids are going to hate me). I’d have D help me but our schedule is packed – wrestling practice, movie, project, swimming…

I’m a little concerned about the trees. I made those and the full candy canes out of balsa wood. I think they’re too weak for the long term. I’m out of time so I can’t do anything about it before this weekend but I expect I’ll be coming up with some sturdier trees in the not too distant future.

One of the last things I needed to get done last night was assembling the chimneys for the house. These are 4 pieces of wood connected with butt joints. Two of the ends are cut to fit the pitch of the roof. I used my picture frame clamps to glue up one of them but had to improvise for the other (there are 2 houses). I ended up gluing one side and one end together, then the other side and end later.

This is what I ended up with:

It should look like this:

At 11:15 last night when I discovered this all I could do was laugh, well after I finished cursing. It’s not a big tragedy since one of the houses is going to come home with me. I’m thinking of gluing it together as is and keeping it in the shop as a reminder to always think things all the way through. Of course if I do keep it this was I’ll have to make another.

That’s it for now. I should have pictures of the construction and completed project to post Sunday night or Monday.

Here’s an early dry fit. The ridge beam fits into a slot in the gable ends, and is notched to lock the ends together. The walls are waiting to be cut down leaving a tab in the center to lock into the roof, and the windows and door have not yet been added.

This is one of the roof sections (it’s sitting on top of the other) with the notch that’ll mate with the walls cut.

A fair amount of work later here are two views of the dry fit.

Since I’ll be doing the final construction with a six year old I decided there needed to be a way to anchor the houses to a base. The final two pictures above show the houses set into a hole in 1/4” plywood. The hole matches the footprint of the house. The 1/4” sheet will be glued to a 1/2” sheet. I’d have gotten it done today, except I need to make some cauls for the glue up, and most of today was spent making bread rolls for Turkey Day.

Cutting the tab in the top of the walls presented an opportunity for a new woodworking challenge. I have never before cut anything with the table of my scrollsaw tilted. The saw I have uses a thumb screw mechanism to secure the blade. I usually have the blade installed so that the thumb screw is on the right side (when you stand in front of the saw). When I tilted the table to 45 degrees to the right the thumb screw bumped into the table. I was able to solve this by installing the blade so that the thumb screw was on the left. The other challenge with cutting the angles in the walls was in figuring out the correct angle of approach so that I could follow my line. The cuts aren’t perfect but they’re pretty close.

I have made one flub on the construction. I was really careful with cutting the bevel (plane and chisel) on the ridge beam for the first house. I got cocky cutting the second and it ended up seriously lopsided. So another was cut and beveled with more care.

When I dry fit the houses I discovered a serious gap at the ridge of one. For this I turned to my supply of thin wood. In the supply I found the perfect piece to fill the gap. After a little work with the plane it was good to go.

Because these won’t be assembled for another couple of weeks I’ve got all the parts labeled so they will fit together correctly.

I will say that this have given me even more respect for the awesome birdhouses John creates.

Next step for these is to create pieces for decoration – trees, wooden candy, wreaths for the doors, candy canes…

Last year he suggested that we make houses this year. This still sounded like a good idea to him when we spoke last month. I spent some time looking for patterns, but didn’t find anything that looked like it would work. Criteria for this project are that it had to be easily transportable, couldn’t take too much time to create, and had to be something that a six year old could do most of the work putting together.

Finally it hit me. We could make a wooden gingerbread house. First I needed a pattern. I headed to the kitchen and pulled out the gingerbread house cookie cutters. With those as inspiration I turned to the computer and SketchUp. Several hours later I had a pattern I thought would work. I adjusted the pattern so that all of the angles are 45 degrees to make it easier to set tools for cuts.

One gable end and the door side of the house.

The same gable end and the other side of the house.

The other gable end only has the round window.

Next step milling the parts.

The next step was to cut out a prototype and see how it worked. So it was off to the scroll saw. Just for kicks here’s a picture of my scroll saw.

Once I found a piece of stock 1/8” thick walnut, I needed to attach the pattern to the wood. I use a spray adhesive for this. One of these days I need to come up with a better arrangement for containing the over spray. For the time being my “spray booth” is the top of a box (paper carton) lined with freezer wrap. The brighter white rectangle is the pattern.

With the pattern affixed to the stock the next step was to drill starter holes. These should go in a place that won’t stand out when the design is cut. It’s also helpful to think about the direction you’ll be cutting and place the starter hole so it works with that. Here’s the piece with the starter holes drilled. Two are in the wrong spots. I’ll move them in future cuttings. (The two in the wrong place are the left wing and the head. They should be a the other ends of the lines.)

When cutting out the design it is best to start in the middle and work out. This means the cuts are supported by as much stock as possible. My design included a stylized eye. I forgot to cut this before I cut the head. I don’t know what came over me, probably over confidence, but I went back to cut that. I did not get very far before the head cracked off. This led my to decide that the eye does not need to be stylized.

With the cutting done I hung the ornament up to make sure that it was correctly balanced. It’s missing the head because of the earlier incident while cutting the eye.

And finally, here’s the prototype with the head in position.

Other than simplifying the eye, and moving the two start holes I think this will be the final design.

Despite hearing the sound of the deadline whizzing past I decided to finish up the design and post it when I’d had a chance to not only finish it, but also get some pictures of my own. Here’s the result.

My inspiration is the Old North Bridge in Concord, Massachusetts. Americans will know this as the location of one of the opening battles of the Revolutionary War. The bridge was made famous by Ralph Waldo Emerson in the Concord Hymn which starts with the line “By the rude bridge that arched the flood”. The current bridge is part of the Minute Man National Historical Park.

These pictures were taken from my kayak. You’ll find more pictures from that paddle here. The river that runs under the bridge is the Concord River.

I happened to pass under the bridge as a tour was crossing the bridge. According to the tour guide the original bridge was narrower and had a shallower arch, but the construction is basically the same.

Here’s the table inspired by the bridge. Basic dimensions are 68” x 42” x 29”. Woods would be oak and walnut. Mostly mortise and tenon joinery. Breadboard ends on the top. I have no current plans to build this, although two of the people who read my personal blogs have volunteered to take it off my hands if I do.

The biggest challenge I had in creating this in SketchUp came from the curves. Never did figure out how to create a mortise in a cylindrical leg. The SketchUp model isn’t perfect but it definitely shows what I want it to show.

Earlier this year I posted pictures of a couple of the ornaments I’ve been making almost annually as a project. You can see them here. It’s time to start focusing on this year’s ornament.

I started making an ornament/window hanging each year in 1996. I’ve missed two years – both because of work related time pressures. But every other year I’ve produced an edition of about 25 which are given to my family and friends as Christmas/Hannukah/New Year’s presents. It’s a lot of fun and there are several family members (all over the age of 10) for whom the ornament is a highlight of the holiday season. (At some point I’ll unearth the one’s I haven’t posted and post pictures of them.)

Like many woodworking projects, and most other types of projects as well, the first step is planning. The first ornament was a snowflake. At the time I thought I’d make a different snowflake each year. The next year I saw a craft design for a creche and inspired by a friend who collects them I adapted that for the ornament. It’s a beautiful ornament but is quite fragile because it’s very open. The ornaments in all but one of the suqsequent years have been inspired by nature – moose, heron, cabin in the woods, owl, dragonfly, goldfish. Which brings us to this year.

We have spent two weeks every summer since 2000 at Wakanda a compound (way too fancy a word but I can’t think of a better one) of 5 cabins in the Adirondack Mountains of New York. Each cabin has a name, including the owner’s house which is Moose. The other cabins are Heron, Owl, Loon, and Birch. Each cabin is decorated with numerous items depicting the namesake of the cabin (I think we counted over 30 owls in Owl cabin this summer). The owners have become good friends so they are on the list of ornament recipients each year. The heron ornament was inspired by several early morning heron sightings there one summer. For the first year it hung in the owner’s kitchen window. The next summer it moved into the permanent decorations in Heron cabin. Likewise the owl I made is now hanging in Owl cabin. I’ve never made a loon, and one of the kids there last summer (2006) pointed this out. At the time I wasn’t keen on making a loon ornament but kept the idea in the back of my head. Last year ended up being one of the years without an ornament since I spent most of November and early December traveling (work training and an insane drive to Arkansas for Thanksgiving – from Boston! A story for another time.).

Which brings us to this year. At one point I thought I might find the time this summer to get last year’s ornament made. This did not happen – I must have breathed in some pretty strong toxins to think it might have. The idea of creating a loon ornament has been percolating in the back of my mind for more than a year now. Over that time it’s grown on me.

My first step in creating a design is to look for an inspiration picture. I’ve gotten inspiration from rubber stamps, books, catalogs (the heron is based on a weather vane I saw in a catalog) and even bed sheets. In recent years one of the first places I turn to for inspiration has been the Google image search. Type in a couple of key words and you get thousands of pictures. I take a bunch of inspiration pictures and try to synthesize them into a design. Some years I end up at a point far away from the inspiration. Other years I don’t stray so far.

This is the stage I’m in right now on the loon. I’ve got a picture I like. It shows a loon in an agitated pose, as opposed to the sterotypical loon floating serenely that you see everywhere in cabin furnishings. One of the most important steps is to simplify the design. I stack cut the ornaments on a scroll saw in batches of three or four. To end up with 25 or so ornaments that means cutting the pattern as many as seven times. A complex pattern may look lovely but takes too long to cut, and by the seventh time through I get pretty sick of it. So simple is better. It also fits with my favorite aesthetic – I don’t like fussy. I can appreciate fussy, but it isn’t me.

Typically I’ll get a design I think works, cut it, and evaluate it. The evaluation process includes figuring out if there are points where the cutting is too difficult to make successfully – if the ornament is likely to break while I’m making it the design needs tweaking; I also determine if the finished ornament has any seriously weak points – even if I can cut it successfully the design get’s adjusted if it’s likely to be broken later; and I also evaluate how long it took to do the cutting – November and December are busy times and as much as I love spending lots of that in the shop I usually have a bunch of other projects to work on.

I’ll scan in my preliminary design soon and get it posted. And as soon as I clear a path to my scroll saw I’ll post about how much the design has morphed. And I promise to include some pictures along the way.

If you’ve made it this far – thanks for sticking with me.

First step was to burnish the bats using a dog’s chew bone (without the meaty center :-) ). This was done with the bats loaded into the lathe, but with the lathe off.

With that completed it was time to coat the bats with oil (natural Danish oil). This was done with the lathe spinning at the slowest speed.

And finally the bats were shined using handfuls of shavings (courtesy of the dust collection system). With the lathe running on slow both hands were loaded up with shavings and pressed up to the bat.

I’ll post this as a project once I get some more pictures taken but for now this will have to do.

I spent most of the summer session working on other projects, primarily an advent calendar for my nephew. With one more class left I realized that I had completed all the work I wanted to do in class on the advent calendar. So, I decided to join the club and make my own bat. Since I play softball, it would be a softball bat, not a baseball bat. (Primary difference between the two is the barrel diameter – softball bat barrels are narrower.

First step was to cut a couple of blanks from a slab of ash. I ended up with two blanks about 3 1/2 inches square and 36” long. The corners of the long edges were cut off at a 45 degree angle on the table saw leaving a hexagonal blank.

The center at one end was punched with an awl, and at the other end a saw was used to mark the X seen in the picture. After mounting the blank in the lathe The corners were knocked off using a gouge (I’m not so good with the precise names of the tools.) until the entire blank was a cylinder. Using an aluminum bat as a reference I measured out the transition points – the edges of the knob, the point where the handle angles into the barrel and the end of the barrel. Those were marked with a pencil then cut using a parting tool.

Then using a skew chisel, gouges and parting tool I brought the barrel down to final dimension (about 2 1/4”) and the taper into the handle was rouged out. This was the end of session #1 on bat number 1. The blank looked like this at that point.

Fast forward to last week, the first class of the fall session. I was able to finish the first bat through sanding. I was fairly please with the results although the knob is a little small. My instructor has recommended using a dog biscuit to burnish the bats, and he’s offered to provide it, but didn’t have it with him so I put the bat aside.

With the first bat finished I started in on the second bat. Class number one ended with the second blank ready for marking. On Thursday I was able to get the second bat to the same point as the first. I should be able to get them finished up next week.

Here are a couple more pictures of the almost completed bats:

The first bat is in the middle, the second on the right, the bat on the left is the aluminum bat from which the dimensions were taken.

The knob of bat number 2.

I don’t know how much more turning I’ll do anytime soon. I do know that if I decide to do much more I’m also going to acquire my own tools. The tools available in class are just not sharp enough, and have been abused – broken handles, bent shafts, and the like.

It has been fun learning this new skill.

I’d acquired the plywood several months ago and a couple of weekends ago I’d cut it to size. Last night I decided that this was the weekend to make the change. First step was clearing off the bench which was, per usual, covered in clutter.
Here’s the starting point.

And here’s how it looked 1 1/2 hours later after much clean up. What you can’t see is all the stuff stacked on the router table and floor.

A close-up of the old top.

I’ve had two different kinds of interlocking padding on the floor for several months and because they don’t lock into each other they are posing a serious trip hazard. So as long as I had the bench cleared, and therefore more easily moved, I took the time to replace the padding so that it’s all the same type. And I did a fair amount of cleaning as well.

Here’s the frame, without the top.

With a little help from my spouse the first layer of plywood was put into place. The plan was to screw this down to the frame then screw the two layers together from the bottom.

First layer ready for attachment to the base.

Top layer in place, glued and screwed with the back brace of the frame reattached.

The top is now nice and flat and I’m thrilled. I’ll be adding hardwood edging. and will post additional pictures then. I also need to reattach the vise, and will be adding bench dog holes to make the vise even more useful.