This is my 8 foot steam box that I built for my Wooden Boat Project which is getting me into some new things like steam bending. I’m finding a lot of people happy with boxes built with insulation board. Other people are successful using wallpaper steamers as a steam source with wood, metal and PVC boxes. I came up with my own version combining these two trends. This could be a first! At least the first documented online that I could find. So far so good.

The entire box was made from a single 8×4 sheet of 1 3/8” thick TUFF-R insulation board (About $22), cut up and joined together into a box with a good amount of aluminum duct tape. Based on good and bad experiences from others, it’s best to use the foil backed rigid foam board and avoid the polystyrene pink/blue insulation boards. 1/4” square cedar strips are placed every 2 feet on the inside so that the piece to be bent will be elevated a bit for the steam to surround it. One end is sealed with a removable block of foam and the business end gets a towel stuffed into it to keep in the steam when in use. The opening is 12” x 6”. I elevate the box a few inches in the back with a few blocks of foam so that the condensation will run out the front and into a bucket on the floor.

The steam source is a Wagner 705 power steamer (wallpaper remover). The unit comes with an 11 foot hose ready to go like it’s made for this thing. I cut a hole on the top of the box to push the hose into. In 15 minutes, the unit starts producing a good amount of steam. In another 10-15 minutes, the inside of the box is over 200 degrees F (according to my wife’s candy thermometer) and ready to load. The foam insulation is obviously a huge help in retaining heat. The outside of the box is warm after an hour. The inside is brutally hot scalding steam. The Wagner is a $50 unit, so it may not be the cheapest steam source, but I think it’s one of the safest and easiest to deal with compared to hotplate/kettle or fuel based boilers. The water level is visible through the side and it has a thermal safety fuse if it runs out of water. The steamer holds 1 gallon and my results show it will produce steam for at least 1.5 hours. For a very big project where I’d be steaming all day, this could be a limitation. I’d have stop and refill with boiling water to avoid any interuption in steam, but this is ok with me. To run it all day, I might work out how to slowly refeed the unit from a larger bucket, or from the recycled condensation from the box, which is often done with small kettles.

Definately fun and easy to build and it was exciting to see how easy it was to bend a 1/2” test piece of white oak by hand after a half hour in the box! I’m not sure if the box will last forever, but it should get through quite a few projects.

This 4×6 ash frame shows a record of events that occured in my family as I grew up. The wood is from a dead ash tree from my parent’s yard that we felled in early spring. Family events (birth years, marriages, etc) are marked near the growth ring for the year in which they occured. I made a few of these for family christmas gifts.

The wood was carefully rift cut to reveal the center of the tree (the pith) at the bottom and the annual growth rings. From counting the growth rings, the tree is about 42 years old. This tree was just a twig soon after my parent’s house was built.

I’ve been impressed with big cross sections of old trees in museums with dates stamped on the rings which is where I got the idea to try to use growth rings like this, but it took me months to think of doing it this way.

The construction was mostly done with a router. I made an MDF template to route out the space for the picture with a pattern bit and used a chamfer bit on the inside edges. The back is cut out with a rabbiting bit to hold the glass and the inside corners squared with a hand chisel. Outside frame edges are angled with a low profile hand plane to give it faceted edges. I used carbon transfer paper to trace out the numbers before I painted them (arcrylic) as I can’t paint anything for real. I bought 3 cheap frames from the dollar store for the glass and mounting parts. Finish is 2 coats of sanding sealer and paste wax, which seems to be popular for pictures frames. I can see why. It’s really a nice satin finish in person and easy to do.

I built this indoor light garden back in January so my wife and I could get an early start growing some vegetables and flowers for our garden. We also use it year round for a few orchids.

It’s western red cedar. Sanded smooth with no finish. The shelves are movable and are attached to the side rails with some brass bolts. The lights are $7 shop lights from Home Depot on adjustable chains.

Anyone have opinions on if it’s a good idea to leave this unfinished or how to protect it without making it look like there’s a finish?

This is my latest project that I completed last week for my 3yr old daughter. It took me about 6 months, probably 120 hours, and started out mostly as rough lumber except for the top boards which I bought S2S.

The external woods are black cherry and a few variations of maple. The drawer interior is poplar with cedar bottoms. It was finished with BLO, blonde shellac and wax.

I learned a lot about using hand tools on this. I did nearly all of the joinery and final shaping by hand with tools like spokeshaves, hand saws, mortise and bench chisels, planes and card scrapers.

For some reason, the idea of doing an inlay on the inside drawer stuck with me. I also figured that if it didn’t come out well, at least it wouldn’t be highly visiible, but I ended up happy with it. I had no idea how I was going to do this until I saw a David Marks episode where he did inlay into solid wood.

Any sort of comments or helpful criticism would be appreciated. One thing I’m not sure of is the hardware. I’m happy with it, but I’m keeping an eye out for alternatives.

I built this from cherry and maple scrap last year. This was when I discovered plug cutters and so I made my own round plugs since I couldn’t find any locally to match. I haven’t made a single plug since. The finish is natural with Waterlox/Wax.

This was my first attempt at a “real” piece of furniture. I built this for my 3yr old daughter in Dec 2005. It’s cherry with a Waterlox finish.

I made 2 jigs (shown in my shop photo) for this project. A basic adjustable taper jig for the legs and a fence guided tenon jig that I built from plans found on a wood working site by a woodworker named Jim Frye.

I designed it myself with the help of sketch-up, and tried to stick to a shaker sort of concept.

This was a great learning project for me and really got me hooked. Since this project, I’ve tried some new skills on several other projects that I’ll try to post here soon.