My 5 year old son outgrew his toddler bed and needed a twin. I wanted to match his existing dresser – which unfortunately was a factory finished pine/MDF piece. Well made, but difficult to replicate. Given how hard he was on his furniture, I couldn’t see making this new one out of cherry or another fine hard wood. I opted for Poplar and Birch, and paid for it in finishing time.

The plan is from “Children’s Furniture Projects” by Jeff Miller. I beefed up the legs and added a secondary coved upper rail reminiscent of the details on his existing dresser. I also replaced two dowels and a hex-bolt with two furniture bolts with barrel nuts and a 3/8” steel alignment pin for each side rail to post connection. Lastly, I added an 1/8” round-over to all the pieces as I didn’t believe the sharp corners wouldn’t hold up.

I had my wood supplier plane all the poplar to 1 1/8” for a small fee to save time and planar blade life. After milling up the pieces I decided to apply the finish prior to assembly. I needed to finish the panels anyway to avoid gaps in the future due to expansion and contraction. I used a gel stain for the base color, which I find difficult to work out of corners and joints, so doing it prior to assembly appealed to me. The base color is a 3:1 mix of Georgian Cherry to Java. I applied one coat of sanding sealer. Both the birch and the poplar still had dense parts of the grain that didn’t take any stain, so I opted for a stain and poly combination (Minwax Polyshades Bombay Mahogany) for the next two coats. Polyshades is horrible to work with, it is very thick, likes to separate, and doesn’t lay down smooth. It was very difficult to get a thin coat with, but I eventually found that disposable foam brushes did a much better job than my expensive oil brushes. Unhappy with the result of the second coat of Polyshades, I gave everything a sanding with 220 on my random orbital to knock down the ridges. Finally, I wiped on a final coat of satin poly, which yielded an acceptable finish. The final color is darker and more brown than the photographs suggest, and matches the existing furniture quite well. I’m happy with the end result, but if I were to do it again, I’d look for an alternative to the Polyshades.

My son is thrilled with his new bed, but his little sister probably likes it more than he does. We find her up there looking through a picture book when he leaves his door open.

I’d exhausted my tool budget for a project on an expensive router bit, square, and dado-set, so when it came to making the tenons, I decided to try my hand at a precision custom tenoning jig. I decided to keep it simple and only concern myself with square tenons (no angles). I reviewed some example jigs from a couple books (Tablesaw: Methods of Work, by Jim Richey, and Jigs & Fixtures, by Sandor Nagyszalanczy) for ideas and modified them to come up with a plan for this jig.

I wanted to be able to make 0-2” thick tenons in 0-2” stock. This defined the setback from the saw blade and the required table travel. The height of the fence was somewhat arbitrary, but was influenced by a 6” vertical fence and a max cutting depth of 3”. I made the jig deep enough to be stable, but small enough to allow the runner to engage the slot before the tenon hit the blade. I decided to make it a little wider than I had originally intended so I could use my left hand to keep the base flat against the table. I may add a wooden handle to the left side of the base after getting a feel for using it.

I made most of the jig from 3/4” baltic birch plywood. The runners are mahogany. I made the runners slightly large and sanded them to just barely fit in the slots. The bare wood fit very tight and took some effort to slide the upper table on the base. I then applied an oil finish (marketed for toys and food containers) to protect the wood but not build up a finish which would bind up the slots. Finally, I added a liberal coat of paste wax to both faces of the base and the bottom of the upper table, as well as all the mahogany runners. After buffer that out, the base slides effortlessly on the tablesaw and the upper table slides easily along the base. The final jig has next to zero slop in the runners and fences are nearly perfectly square to the table. This is the most precise jig I’ve ever made, and I’m very happy with the end result.

Update: Basic plans are available here: http://dvhart.com/darren/woodworking/dvhart-tenoning-jig.pdf

Our church needed some youth recognition plaques. I glued them up from some left over cherry, spent a few weeks trying to get the trophy shop to get the engravings right, and finally made a jig to drill all the holes. I applied a wash-coat to the one on the left prior to stain, and not to the one on the right. It’s a simple little project, and most of the work had nothing to do with woodworking, but I’ve been lax in my woodworking and just had to get something up on Lumberjocks ;-)

I spent the past several Saturdays building this simple cherry bed with a friend of mine, Vernon, for his 4 year-old son. It’s a solid cherry frame with veneer panels. It was my first attempt using tenons, and my first bed. He took it home to finish it in his dust free garage :-) with 3 coats of poly. His son loves his new bed.

Vernon has a blog post with some more detail: http://vernon.mauery.com/content/woodworking/nathans_big_boy_bed

After a few years of drooling over teak (or similar) deck furniture (and knowing I’d never be able to afford it or care to work with the stuff) I finally built a simple picnic table for my back deck. I started with the plans from This Old House ( http://www.thisoldhouse.com/toh/how-to/intro/0,,20291200,00.html ), which are slightly different (read: not as good) from the one Tom Silva built on an episode of Ask This Old House. These plans have several problems, I don’t recommend using them.

I originally intended to build this out of pressure treated framing lumber until I stumbled across a great deal on some really rough 2×10 cedar from a local lumber yard ($1.60 ln-ft) so I picked up all the materials including hardware for $91 (I know right? NICE!). I said it is rough though – it took a friend of mine and I 5 hours of planer, jointer, and table-saw time to yield material that passed for usable. Buried in the garbage though were 4 or 5 absolutely beautiful tight grain colorful cedar boards which I used on the top and benches. The lesser sap wood I relegated to the A-Frame as it’s less visible.

Once all the parts were cut to length, I used a 1/4” radius round over bit on all the edges. A couple more tweaks to the plan, and I started assembly. The whole things goes together with 3” deck screws (after planing the boards are still 1-5/8” thick) and 4 3-1/2” carriage bolts. It’s 7 feet long with a 29” top.

We broke it in tonight when my son (4-1/2) promptly said, “Daddy, you put the benches too far away from the table.” His mother and I agree :-) 29” is also too narrow for a table in our opinion. Fortunately, I have one beautiful board remaining and with some new table supports I should be able to add 8-9” of width to the top and solve both of these problems. Now… I need to plan the menu for the Linux kernel developer social at my place tomorrow night…

Update: I finally got around to milling up new table supports and an additional table board. The table is now a nice 38 inches across and is at a more comfortable distance from the benches – see the last photo in the series.

I built this simple toy train expecting to build one more car a year for my son as he grew. He’s four now and still has just the one piece train. Oh well.

Simple cherry picture frame with a subtle shadow line on the inside edge. Oh… I biscuited the corners…. because when you have a biscuit joiner… everything looks like a perfect application. The painting is a water-color by a local Portland, OR artist we commissioned from a photo I took at the local Japanese Gardens.

This is my first set of actual cabinets. I used pre-finished birch for the boxes and alder for the face frames. The drawers are constructed of 1/2” baltic birch with half-blind dovetails. In future projects I’ll use prefinished 1/2” birch (as opposed to baltic birch) as it’s less expensive and easier on the router bits with less resins – and I don’t have to finish it of course! The gel-stain is called Java and was very difficult for this novice to apply. The knobs are solid brass from restoration hardware, all the drawer slides are full extension ball bearing Accuride. They were expensive to build, but I got a much better set of cabinets than I could have afforded to buy from a custom shop.

Update: Finishing
I used General Finishes “Java Gel Stain”, applying one coat and then rubbing it off. This was the hardest part of the finishing as the time it set was difficult to gauge for me, as was selecting appropriate sized areas. The goal was to have some grain show through so it didn’t look like paint, and I think I accomplished that, but it isn’t as even as I’d like. After than I applied two coats of Zinsser Bulls Eye SealCoat Universal Sanding Sealer (wax-free shellac), sanding with 220 after each coat. Finally, I applied 3 coats of General Finishes Arm-R-Seal Oil & Urethane Topcoat (Satin) with a clean rag, scuffing with a fine pad between coats. The topcoat was the easiest to apply with the exception of the inside corners on the rail and style door and drawer fronts – I still find those areas very difficult to get right.

Update: Lessons Learned
The biggest challenge for me was definitely applying the finish – it literally took me a month to apply the 5 coats of the various finish products. So what did I learn? Wood is naturally beautiful and should not be stained… ever. :-) I followed Norm’s (NYW) example and didn’t glue the face frame joints since the pocket screws supposedly are sufficient. Over the years the joint has popped a little – not enough to show a gap and not so much as to show a gap in the stain, but enough that I can feel it when I rub my fingers across it. I have glued future pocket screw joints. Face it – you’re NEVER going to replace a rail or style. Lastly, when building a large cabinet like this, I would install 3/4” partitions on either side of the drawers to mount the drawer-slides on. On this cabinet I used the face-frame mounting kits which just don’t feel as stable to me and leave the slides visible from the area under the sink – not a big deal, but in future cabinets I installed mounting cleats on the sides of the boxes to screw the slides to and was happier with the result.

When our second child came along, I had to give up my office for her bedroom. We had a nice unused nook in the master bedroom which I built these cabinets and the mahogany counter top for. The cabinets are pre-finished birch with painted poplar face frames. I particularly proud of how the decorative end-panels came out on the base cabinets, although in retrospect I wouldn’t miter them with the face frame in the future on paint-grade cabinets. A simple but joint is easier to make, just as strong, and nearly invisible when painted. I didn’t do my planer any favors running 12” of counter top through it either.

A friend at work was unhappy with the tack trunks she could buy online. They were expensive and those she had seen weren’t holding up to the abuse horse, rider, and the elements doled out. I ordered a plan online (and used the basic dimensions – nothing more) and built this. I replaced commonly used hardware like the piano hinge with much more durable versions. Instead of simple plywood butt joints which have been a common point of failure, I made biscuited corner blocks. If I were to do it again, I might try a dado and rabbet instead of the biscuits. She really likes the size, but the marine grade mahogany plywood turned out to be far heavier than we expected. In retrospect, perhaps birch plywood would have been sufficient.