I built this out of 2×4 and PVC pipe to close in my kids playroom to keep the babies out. Later it kept the dogs out. It was one of the first things I ever built. It is now sitting out to go to the dump. It had standard door hinges and an outdoor gate latch. This room is now an office and I’m going to build a wall with French doors where the gate has lived for the last five years.

This is stool I made for our bathroom so my kids can reach the pot and sink. It’s made of test boards and cutoffs of another finished piece. Splined mitered corners and the top drops into a rabbet in the sides. The birch plywood was already stained and polyed and I liked the unfinished edges of the cut plywood so I just filled the voids with wood putty and put on a few more layers of wipe on poly.

Jason

This was my very first woodworking project. When I bought my first house I thought the only really good place for the TV in the living room was right where the fireplace was. I asked a friend to help me build an entertainment center to fit over the raised hearth. It was built with big box birch plywood, pocket screws and iron-on edge banding. The finish is stain followed by satin poly. The doors weren’t finished until the cabinet had been in use for almost two years. This was built mostly at my friends house and then brought over to mine place when he moved. Along with it came his table saw and router and table. That was the beginning of my love affair with woodworking. This piece has been modified and moved to another room in the house since I remodeled my living room three years ago. I sliced the back of it off to make it shallower as it doesn’t have all that deep A/V equipment in it anymore. My Flooring Concept Equipment Tower has taken it’s place now and the cutoffs from the modification and the test piece from the initial finish have since become The Bathroom Stool.

Jason

This project started out as a big beautiful slab of curly cherry that my wife gave me. It was thirteen inches wide and six foot long and just hair over 4/4 thick. Clear as a bell and the darkest, richest cherry I’ve ever seen. My wife had requested a table to go by her papasan chair so I decided to use the board for the top. I wanted to go with a two tone table with the legs a different species than the top and aprons. I started researching table design as I had never made a table before. The board sat in my lumber rack for probably a year before I decided on a design for the table. I wanted an end table with a drawer and a shelf and was limited to 13 inches width by the width of the board for the top. I didn’t want to glue up a top as I had such a wide board. I saw a picture of a table that had a drawer on the end that looked just like the apron on the other end. You would never know it was there unless someone showed you or you got underneath the table. I liked that because the table could act as a hall table up against the wall if it ever needed to. I then found a collection of tables by Todd Woodesign that I fell in love with for the simple curved aprons and tapered legs and overall proportions. I drew up something similar in sketchup and played with dimensions and ratios until it drove my wife nuts. I even made a prototype out of dimensional pine. After living with the prototype for a while I could see all the things I didn’t like. I’m glad I did too because I changed both the leg thickness and taper locations, apron hight and shelf hight.

I pulled down some nice dark 6/4 walnut from my rack and started laying out legs to get nice straight grain on all four sides. I wasted half the board to get my four legs but it was worth it for the leg stock I ended up with. The prototype’s legs were 6/4 thick but the finished thickness on the final piece was 1 1/8. I laid out the aprons, shelf and top on the cherry and started cutting it up. The aprons went through the jointer and planer but the top and shelf had to have one side flattened by hand before thicknessing. The top ended up 7/8 thick and the shelf 1/2. I beveled the underside of the top with a hand plane and chamfered the top edge. I made the legs, roughing out the taper on the bandsaw and cleaning it up with a No. 4. I cut mortises and notches for the shelf. The mortises are done with a router and squared up with a chisel. The mortises meet in the middle of the rear legs and the tenons are mitered to get the most glue surface and longest tenons possible. I cut the tenons at the table saw with a dado blade and fitted them with my shoulder plane. I made plywood templates for the curve on the aprons and roughed out the curves on the bandsaw and then used a flush cutting bit at the router table to finish it up. Then I cut some 1/8 inch strips of walnut, ran a bead on one edge and glued them to the bottom of the curves on the aprons and drawer front. I just used glue and a bunch of clamps to bend them to conform to the curves. I used some maple for the runners for the drawer to ride on and glued them to the aprons. I glued in top runners to serve double duty as runners and to screw through to hold the top on. Spacers between the upper and lower runners make sure of a consistent gap for the drawer.

At this point I was ready to prefinish the top and shelf and then do some gluing up. I gave all the aprons a smoothing with the No. 4 and glued up. The glue up went smooth and everything was nice and tight and square. At that point I turned my attention to the drawer. I had never cut half blind dovetails and couldn’t afford to mess these up since my drawer front was all ready done so I decided to cut four corners on some scrap and if they were ok by the last two I should be good to go. All four were near perfect so I went ahead with the drawer and they turned out just great! The hardest structural part of this design was how to get the drawer to sit at the same offset from the legs as the aprons and still have structural support in two places across the front to keep the piece square. To do that I cut a rabbet on the bottom of the drawer front to let the drawer clear the bottom stretcher mortised into the legs under the drawer. I was smarter on the top and mortised the stretcher into the top runners so I was able to keep full thickness there. The drawer sides and bottom are made of curly maple for a nice contrast. The back of the drawer is cherry with through dovetails and the bottom is slid in from the back into grooves in the sides and the front. I ran a screw though the bottom into the back and then put the drawer in and backed the screw out a bit to act as a stop for the drawer. The finish for the table is clear sprayed lacquer over BLO wet sanded to 600 grit except the top and shelf which are sanded through 2000 grit and then buffed out with automotive polishing compound and machine polish to a mirror shine. I used a power buffer! The drawer is finished inside and out with a thin cut of dewaxed shellac. Everything got a couple of coats of wax as a final finish. I also used a candle to wax the drawer runners and the top and bottom of the drawer sides so the drawer slides real smooth.

The table now resides next to the papasan chair in my living room. It usually has woodworking books or magazines on the shelf and a drink and my wife’s knitting on top. This is the first piece of furniture I’ve ever required a coaster under all glasses. She loves it although the drawer may have been a waste of time as nothing has ever been in it. I’ve taken a ton of pictures of this piece since I finished it three months ago but was never happy enough with any of them to post them. I wrote up the build this morning and decided to get some good ones so I took it outside and laid out a white blanket as a backdrop. These turned out very well and I was able to really capture the curl on the top in one picture while the sun was out. Overall a very satisfying build.

Jason

A couple of wooden swords for my boys. The entire thing is southern yellow pine off a 2×12 with cherry laminated to make the handles. The cross guards are also cherry. Finish is wipe on poly.

Now, this box here was an adventure in finishing. I started it for my sister’s Birthday back in March and finished it with a varnish blend. When I finished the poly, it had some runs and sags in it and when I started to sand it back I couldn’t get the chamfers sanded without sanding through the finish so I ended up sanding the whole thing back down to bare wood and rounded over everything and lost all my careful chamfers. Then I decided to try something new. I had just got some Garnet Shellac and mixed up a batch and put it on. It was too thick and ended up very unappealing. Also, I hated what it did to the color of the maple and the way it obscured the grain of the cherry. I was so put off that I shelved it and didn’t touch it again for nine months. I saw my sister a few days before Christmas and she ribbed me about it a little so I got out my card scraper and some sandpaper and stripped it down to bare wood for the second time. By then it had the biggest roundovers I’ve ever put on a project. (I included a shot of the box before any finishing just for comparison.) I finished it with the Jeff Jewitt quick finish. BLO, thinned shellac and wax. The finish took all of about two hours from start to finish, not including the hours and hours and hours of finishing that came before. My wife, Danica, carved the skull and the bottom is lined with red velvet inside and out. FINALLY DONE!

This box started life as practice for half blind dovetails for a drawer in a different project. It was my first time doing half blinds but all four sets turned out great so I went on to the actual drawer. The practice box sat around my shop until the day before our family Christmas get together rolled around and my wife asked me to make a box for my sister-in-law, Christen. I chopped a piece of maple with some character off the end of a board and rabbeted the edges with a shoulder plane and chamfered the edges to make a lid. I went ahead and chamfered the box and fitted it with green velvet for the bottom and finished it with the Jeff Jewitt quick box finish featured in Pop Wood a while back. It’s a quick wipe down and then right back off with BLO then three coats of thinned Seal Coat Shellac then buff out with steel wool and then two coats of paste wax. This will probably become my go to finish for boxes in the future. It’s quick, beautiful and almost impossible to mess up.

Jason

This was for my sister Katy for her birthday and is my first box with my new Veritas 14 tpi dovetail saw. I was able to cut much smaller and tighter dovetails than on my other boxes. I was also using my newly made 1:7 dovetail marker. So far, I’ve done all my dovetails by eye but I needed more uniformity for half blinds on a drawer front that I wanted to look perfect so I made a marker. For these I marked just one line and cut on that and then put my saw directly in the kerf for the second cut. I also had to create a new chisel to clean out the waste. Before now all my pins were 1/4 inch or more at the wide end but these are only 1/8. I ground down the edges of my 1/8 inch chisel to a sharp bevel. It’s now shaped like a triangle and all edges are sharp, including the top. Well, back to the box. It’s walnut and red oak and the bottom is lined with royal blue velvet inside and out. The top is a single piece of walnut with a hole made with a forstner bit. I then chiseled out a 1/4 inch wide groove to fit the handle in. The handle is about 1/4 by 1/4 square walnut and is glued down in the groove. The box is 5×7 5/8×3 1/4. Unlike most of my boxes, the top is flush with the sides. The lid is rabbeted to sit down just a bit into the box to keep the lid in place. The finish is BLO and wax.

This is Dede’s box but it should be called the Murphy’s Box. I swear, everything that could possibly go wrong did. I ended up throwing away one of the pin boards due to horrible blow out and completely redoing it. After the box was done except for cutting the groove for the bottom, I cut the grooves on the outside of the tail boards. Amazingly enough the dovetails were so symmetrical and the same size that I was able to just reverse them and they fit! This box has better figure inside than out! The handle was shaped with rasps and knives and sandpaper and then just glued to the front of the lid. The finish is Witches Brew and wax and the bottom is dark purple crushed velvet.

Happy Birthday Dede!

This started out to be a nice box but when I resawed the 3/4 board there was a big nasty pitch pocket right in the middle. There was no sign of it on the outside but there was no way I was leaving that showing even on the inside of a nice box. Too bad too since it was such a pretty book match otherwise. I’ve been wanting to build a box to go around that ever present tissue box on the bar for quite a while and this board fit the bill.

I took this box as a chance to practice my dovetails so I laid out as many as I thought would look ok. They’s all hand cut, of course. It probably would have looked even better with mitered corners since three of the four corners are either book matched ends or continuing grain. The third picture is the least matched corner because it’s the outside of the book match. The dovetails were not bad. I blew out a couple of them chopping the waste out of the tail boards but it hid well. I also blew out two of the pins cutting out the grooves for the top but was able to find the pieces amount all the shavings and chips on the floor of my shop and glue them back in place.

The top is a little under 5/8 and is grooved on the router table with a 1/4 inch groove and a 1/4 inch tongue, leaving less than an eighth of lip at the top to cover the tops of the side boards. I bored a hole with my largest forstner bit and rounded it over on both sides with my router. I fitted the top into the grooves in the sides and glued it to only one side to allow it to move with the seasons. There is no bottom, it just sits over the tissue box. Pretty snug fit too.

The finish was a first for me. I used a custom oil varnish blend. Equal parts Minwax Gloss Poly, BLO and Naphtha. Before using that I flooded on and wiped off a few coats of straight BLO. The blend was then put on and wet sanded and then pushed into the various cracks and pours to fill them all up. I sanded that in with 220, 320 and 600 grits. It left a very nice, low luster, in-the-wood look.

Well, the next projects aren’t finishing themselves out there in the shop so I better get to it.

This one was built for my brother Greg for his birthday. I lined it with black velvet. I like the light pins on dark tails but I wish the sides were walnut too. I think I see some mitered corners with dovetail keys in my future. The top is a book matched glue up but you can’t really tell once I put a handle over the joint. This was my first time book matching. The lid is rabbeted to fit in the box and has a chamfer on the bottom. The finish is BLO, Lacquer and Wax. 9 1/2×7 1/2×4. Same as the oak one. This is my favorite size now. The last shot is just because I’d never had that many of my boxes together at one time. Seeing them together, I like the two tails of the oak box best. These boxes started as just a way to practice hand cut dovetails but they’re starting to take over my woodworking. Finish is straight off the shooting plane with a very light sanding with 320 to break the edges and any plane tracks.

The one is walnut with a carved purple heart pull. It was a gift for my wife for Valentines Day. She puts her daily jewelry in it, watch, rings, etc… Finish is BLO, Sprayed Lacquer and Wax. The bottom is purple velvet. The pull was the first time I’ve tried carving and it actually turned out ok. Dovetails are hand cut. The top is rabbeted to fit into the box. 6×3 5/8×2 7/8

This was the third thing I ever built. My brother couldn’t find a shelf to fit this corner in his apartment so he came to me to build it. I bought the pine and crown molding at HD and the inside back is oak for durability. I used a keyhole bit in my router for mounting. The finish is Minwax dark walnut stain (actually a dye regardless of what the can says) and poly thinned and wiped on.

I built this box just to kill time in the shop. There was no one in mind and no real plan going in. It’s red oak with a walnut handle. The dovetails are hand cut and so are the grooves for the bottom and the groove on the lid that the walnut handle fits into. All the stock was dimensioned by hand except cutting to rough lengths. (I don’t have a crosscut hand saw yet) The bottom is real velvet inside and out. The finish is multiple coats of BLO and a reddish brown paste wax. The inside has no finish at all.

This is my second attempt at a dovetailed box. Cherry and maple again. I really like this combo. This one has a hinged lid. I think I liked the sliding lid better. I have to do something to jazz up the next one. Maybe a cherry handle… The last two pics are unfinished. The first is while the BLO was drying and the second is sitting out in the sun trying to darken up the cherry a bit. The finish on this one is several coats of BLO and some wet sanding at 320 grit between coats. Then 4 coats of spray lacquer and wax.

This was a project for my wife’s college humanities class. She had to create an interpretive artistic “thing” inspired by an existing work of art. The piece of art she chose was an unfinished painting by Leonardo da Vinci titled St. Jerome In The Wilderness. She wrote a poem and wanted to burn it onto a cross. I did some research into Da Vinci and found that in the Vitruvian Man he used a ratio (1.656:1) very slightly different from the golden ratio so I created this cross around that ratio. Every dimension was decided by that ratio. Every joint is a 45 degree miter. A total of sixteen pieces in all with 36 miter joints. The cross is hollow and made of old cedar fence slats. There is no finish just as the painting was unfinished. The first box I glued up was done with clamps and took forever to get everything lined up just right. After that I just laid down packing tape and wrapped them closed. That worked a treat! The cross part was one piece and the top and bottom were built as their own boxes and set into the cross piece. All the miters were cut on my router table and then the end pieces were fitted with a block plane. My wife did a few of the cuts under close supervision. My wife burned the poem she had written into the cross with a soldering iron. She got a perfect 100 on the project.

This is my first dovetailed box. I built it for a Christmas present but really that’s just a good excuse to do something I’ve been wanting to do anyway. This is my first set of handcut dovetails for any complete project. It’s also my first time working with cherry or maple. The finish is BLO and wax. The inside is completely unfinished. The bottom is crushed velvet inside and out. No sandpaper touched this project at any point. Everything is straight off the smoother. That last shot is in natural sunlight. Funny how much different it looks, eh?

In the Spring and Summer of 2011 I built a concept piece out of (almost) all flooring material. The piece is a tower to house all my a/v equipment. Requirements were that the piece be made primarily of left over oak flooring, It must be wide and deep enough for my Pioneer Elite receiver with room for connections in the back, it must be tall enough for all my equipment including the sub, it must have adequate ventilation and sound must pass though the bottom half for the sub and light must pass through the top half for ir signals. Oh, and it had to be visually appealing. The design phase was done entirely in SketchUp and the build was done in my garage shop with a table saw, miter saw, drill press, router and table, a set of chisels and a backsaw. It was a long four months worth of nights and evenings but the hardest and most time-consuming part was probably deciding on a finish. The piece is finally done and I wired all my a/v equipment up and finally have my home theater back.

Well, I suppose this all started after I had a new oak floor put in my living room. When they were done laying the floor and were leaving for the day they started hauling all the left over flooring and cut offs out to their truck and I asked what they were going to do with it. They said the cut offs were trash and the good stuff would go back to the contractor. I pointed out the total square footage I had paid for and asked if that’s how much they had brought and they said it was. I said, “Ok good. That means it’s mine, right? Put it in my garage.” They said ok and did. Right then I started thinking about what to build with it. It’s all 2 ¼ inch wide and various lengths with a groove on one edge and a tongue on the other. Most of it has some bow or twist, which is not a big deal in flooring because it’s all forced into shape when it’s pounded and nailed in place on the sub floor. In furniture building however… well, you know. At this point I had just had the floor laid and it would still be 10 days before the floor would be done and we could move back in the room. When the floor was done and we were waiting for the poly to fully cure before putting furniture on it my wife decided that the brick fireplace and hearth and high mantle had to go so we could hang the TV there. We started working and pulled out all the brick and laid marble tile in its place and put the TV above it. Now my entertainment center that I built when we bought this house was useless and all my a/v equipment had no place to reside. Right then I knew what to do with that leftover flooring. I would build a tower to house all my equipment.

After deciding to build an equipment tower from oak flooring I went into design mode. I measured all my equipment and set interior dimensions from which I figured up exterior size. Now, all my material was 2 ¼ wide and had a ¼ inch deep groove in one side so once I trimmed off that groove I would be stuck with 2 inch wide, ¾ inch thick boards to build everything from. I drew the whole thing up in SketchUp and started figuring out how to build it. I’ve had great luck with splined miters in plywood and figured my eight longest, straightest boards would become my posts and be put together with long grain splined miters to make the equivalent of 2×2 posts. I had never done any real joinery (I’ve always used screws, nails and butt joints) and wanted to do mortise and tenons on this piece. It was going to be frame and panel construction and I wanted to make the rails wider than the stiles so I needed to glue up some four inch wide stock. I made my first mistake here. I had already cut the mortises in the posts with my plunge router and an edge guide and had already cut to length and milled the rough tenons on the rails before gluing them together. Which means that when I glued them up they had to be lined up perfectly. It actually turned out ok and I got them glued and cleaned up and fit the tenons to the mortises. I had used my miter gauge and a dado stack to rough out the tenons and I decided that it would be easier to round over the tenons than to square the mortises so I used a backsaw, chisels and sandpaper to fit each one to it’s mortise. I used the existing grooves on the rails.

At this point it was time to glue the long vertical planks together to form the aforementioned posts. I used 1/8-inch hardboard in a single kerf width groove cut at 45 degrees to the mitered inside edge of the post halves. This was a fun experience and one that shows just how nice it is to work with flat, square, straight stock. I was not. I had to use every featherboard I had to push the stock up to the fence and down to the table so that the miters would be milled right and when I clamped everything up it would force it all together and make them straight. I did this by setting my saw at 45 and making a new zero clearance insert at 45. I set all my featherboards and ran each piece through to form the miter and then lowered the blade and moved the fence and ran them through again with the top edge of the miter against the fence to form the groove for the spline. I used 1/8-inch hardboard for the splines and glued them up by putting them all together dry and then placing them all together to form a tall box. I used a ratcheting band clamp in the middle and every other clamp I had to push all the warped boards together. I then loosened enough clamps to pull out one pair at a time and applied glue, fitted them back together and put them back in the clamps. I spent a lot of time getting the miters lined up just right, applying clamps just so, and then left the whole thing over night. The next day I removed all the clamps, cleaned up the glue-lines and rounded them over just a bit with sandpaper. At this point I dry assembled the frames and did a TON of sanding to make everything flush.

Once the frame was done I stated building the panels. This was a fairly straightforward process. I used the tongue and groove nature of the flooring material to fit the slats together and cut some strips to fit in the final groove on the back slats and the grooves on the stiles. I cut them all to length using a crosscut sled and stop block on my tablesaw and formed the tongues on the ends with my miter gauge. I then ran a 1/8th inch 45 degree bevel on all outside edges of each slat and gave them each a sanding with an ROS starting at 100 and ending at 180 then a hand sanding with the grain at 180. I then took this sanding regiment to the rails and stiles. Finally I was ready for glue-up. But wait! I haven’t decided on a finish yet!

Picking a finish was, and always is, the hardest part for me. When I first conceptualized this piece it was to be stained the same DARK brown as my new floor. I was also planning to scrape the cabinet the same way the floor was done. When I started building that was the plan but before long I had dropped the idea of the scraping and soon after decided that I didn’t want it to blend right into the floor. I wanted it to stand out! I have become enamored of Gustav Stickley’s furniture and his finishes for oak in particular. The process of ammonia fuming was not something I was interested in. I understand that fuming leaves a lot of different colors on the different boards and I wanted it to be more uniform than that. Plus it sounds like a pain. I read that they now used a dye and a glaze to achieve that “Stickley Look” and started exploring this area. I’d never used dyes so I searched it at The Wood Whisperer and found Marc’s video, You and Dye. In that video he had a picture of the end table he had done at the William Ng School. The formula was General Finishes Dye stains, orange and medium brown at a 7 to 4 ratio. I fell in love with the color and went to my local Rockler and picked some up. I knew it would be different on red oak than whatever wood Marc used so I made sample boards and ended up liking a 7 to 3 ratio better. 7 to 4 was a little too red for my taste. I then noticed that, unlike stain, which darkens the pores significantly, the dye did not. Conversely, it left white capsules down in the grain. I didn’t like that one bit. I thought back to the Stickley finish and the glaze. I got some SealCoat shellac and sealed in the dye then went on a search for a stain to glaze with. My biggest concern was that the color was already perfect and I just wanted to darken the pores. I ended up using General Finishes Candlelight Gel Stain. I used a rag to rub it in real good and then a clean rag to wipe it back off. It was 105 degrees in TX the day I did this and the glaze dried too quickly so I ended up going back over it with mineral spirits to take it off the surface and leave it just down in the grain. After glazing I built up four or five coats of SealCoat. I had planned to rub it out and wax it but my wife got a look at the high gloss sheen and said, “It’s perfect! Don’t touch it!” Well, I know who my client base is so that was that. No rub out. No wax. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

After deciding on a finishing schedule I dyed the slats for the sides and the inside edges of the frame members. I glued up the sides and then glued them to the front and back rails with ¼ inch oak plywood for the back panels. I then glued and brad nailed some pine blocks in for the bottom shelf (3/4 inch oak ply) to sit on. I put in the shelf flush with the front bottom rails and glued and nailed it in place. I gave everything a final sanding to 180 and dyed everything remaining.

The top of the piece was built the same as the sides but I had run out of flooring so I ended up using some red oak I had laying around for the frame of the top. The slats are flooring. The door is of the flooring planks and was built the same way the sides were but without the grooves for the panels. Instead, I routed a ¼ inch by ¼ inch rabbet on the insides of the door, stretched grill cloth across the openings and used a pin nailer (bought just for the occasion) to attach ¼ inch sticks in the rabbits to hold it in place. The grill cloth is black and, if all the equipment is off, you can’t see though it but sound and IR from the remote pass unfettered. This also means that the whole front is almost open-air so no further ventilation is needed. I eased all the edges of the door with a chamfer bit in my router and used a sharp chisel to get in the corners. The shelves are ¾ inch ply with thick solid edge banding edge glued to the front. I used a jigsaw to cut out the back of the shelves to run wires up. I used a hole saw to cut a hole for wires to run into the back. The door is a full overlay with European hinges (I would do a flush door if I could go back). The top is attached with small blocks glued and screwed to the top corners of the cabinet. Screws are then run up into the top to hold it on. The back blocks are made with a groove for the screws to slide in to allow for movement. Before putting on the door or top and before putting the cloth in the door I glazed the whole thing and wiped it back off. I applied several coats (two quarts worth) of SealCoat to everything and put on the door and the top.

Now to enjoy the fruits of my labor! I dug my speakers, sub, receiver, amps and wires out of my closet where they had been neglected for five months and spent three hours hooking everything up. I have big sound again! Yay! Next? My mother-in-law wants one. I think I’ve talked her into doing walnut with maple panels. Last week I picked up a jointer and a planer so this time I get to work with straight, flat, square stock. And during the last few months I’ve also added a small bandsaw to my growing tool list so I’ll be incorporating some fair curves to the bottom. All in all, it was a fun project to build and I learned a lot. It held a lot of firsts for me, such as: frame and panel construction, dye, glaze, shellac, mortise and tenons, edge gluing to make a wider board and solid wood edge banding. At this point in my woodworking, a major factor when considering what to build next is, “What will I get to do that I’ve never done before?” I am looking forward to my next project and will be incorporating curves and moulding into this current design.

This was my first creation that was not to serve a purely utilitarian use. This was a Fathers Day gift for my Dad who is a minister. My little brother was staying with me for a week while his place was being remodeled and had an idea for a gift for Dad. He had an old beat up Bible and wanted it displayed with a plaque that said, “A Bible falling apart can be found in the hands of a man who isn’t.” As soon as he told me about it I went into design mode. I’ve been wanting to do something with the Greene and Greene style joints ever since I sat down in rapt awe and watched Marc build the Gadget Station. I’m afraid I may have ripped him off a bit but that piece has really stuck with me.

I started by looking at what I had in the garage. Pine 2×4s and some birch and oak plywood and some small scraps laying around. I’m a bit strapped for cash right now so I used what I had. My woodworking tools consist of a Ridged contractor table saw, some Blue Chip chisels, some tapes and squares and a hand me down Porter Cable plunge router (no table yet). I found an old picture frame we weren’t using and stole the glass out of it and that minus 1/4 inch all around became my size to work with. I did some basic drawings and jumped into cutting down some 2×4s to square 1×3 stock. (I use my table saw with an Amana Prestige for all my cutting because it’s all I have and have had great luck creating square boards no taller than 3 inches.) After that I cut to length and started working on the proud standing finger joints. I did not batch them out all at a time but cut one with the center finger and two shoulders and then matched it up to the mating piece and cut it. When both were done, I went on and did the next pair starting from scratch. To make the first cut was simple: two kirf cuts on the sides of the finger and then two more to remove the waste and then chisels to clean it up (my greatest woodworking revelation to date is the use of a nice sharp set of chisels and if I could, I think I might do everything with them). Then I laid that piece down on top of the next and traced it out and cut just inside of my lines with the table saw and then removed the excess with repeated passes. Then, a little nibble at a time, I got it to fit the first piece with a nice snug fit. I went on in this manner until all joints were done and then cleaned everything up with the chisels and sanded it all down. Now my frame had a basic shape.

I worked with a rasp I had bought for rough metal work and had never used and some sand paper to create the rounded ends on the fingers. Next I had to figure out how to create the super thin dados for the back piece and the glass in front. The top and bottom pieces I could make with kirf cuts on the TS but on the sides, the groove had to go past where you would see them on the outside fingers to give full depth for the panel and the glass to fit. I sat for 45 minutes trying to figure that one out and ended up doing the scariest thing I’ve ever done on a TS. I marked where the blade started and stopped on the fence at a certain depth and transferred those lines to my work piece and turned on the saw and dropped my workpiece slowly down onto the moving blade and ran it until I reached my line and stopped the saw and pulled it off. Now I was left with the cut too shallow for the panel and glass at the very edges and the panel side was OK because it was 1/4 inch and I have a chisel that would fit in that, but the groove for the glass, I ended up cleaning up with a jewelers screwdriver and a hammer.

I cut to length and glued up a panel of 1/4×5 oak plywood for the back (My very first time gluing wood) and fit in the slot and fit the glass in the front slot and looking at it and said to myself, “something’s missing… PLUGS!” I watched Marc’s videos again and set out to find a 3/8 hollow chisel mortising bit and some wood for plugs. WOODCRAFT! YES! I was thinking walnut but at Woodcraft I fell in love with a wood called Bocote. I went home and googled, “square plugs” and who pops up but Marc Spagnuolo on FineWoodworking.com with pillowing square plugs. I watched and learned again and went back to the shop. I didn’t do pillow tops but beveled the four corners on the top with a chisel and then chopped them off using the miter gauge and a short auxiliary fence on the TS and tapered the backs. I made a handle for my hollow chisel mortising chisel and used it with a 3/8 forsner bit and a hammer to create the square holes for the screws and plugs and slapped it together for a dry fit. It looked good so I batched out a bunch of those plugs and then went to work on getting the inscription in the box.

I found a piece of pine from old landscaping timber my neighbor gave me that I thought would be perfect. This timber had been buried underground for about ten years, I think. He pulled it out to reinforce a retaining wall with concrete and gave a bunch of them to me. It has some beautiful grain but you won’t be able to see in the pictures. I cut this with an angled front and wrote out the words for the inscription and then went over them with a woodburning tip on my soldering iron and glued it in place to the back and the bottom pieces and then glued the Bible in place above it and let it cure over night. I also used a key hole bit in the router to make places for mounting to the wall. In the morning, I screwed it all together and pounded the plugs in place with a claw hammer and a block of wood and that was it…no glue (I’m afraid the glass may break sometime in the future and have to be replaced) and no finish (no time, it was Sunday morning by then).

When my brother Greg and I gave it to Dad after church this morning, he broke down in tears and said he would cherish it for the rest of his life. It was the best Fathers Day ever.

This is my first project with any kind of Hardwood. It’s a jewelry box built for my Mom for Christmas. It’s also the first time I’ve used any kind of joinery and the first time flattening a board with hand planes. There was no real plan going in. I had just sharpened my plane iron for the first time and had a very cupped board that I spent hours flattening just to get the hang of using a hand plane. It started at a full inch and ended up at 3/4. I cut the board down and re-sawed half of it and planed to 1/4 for the panels. The legs have a groove cut in two sides to accept the panels and also the tenons on the bottom rails. The inside is finished by gluing crushed velvet around 1/8” hardboard and friction fitted inside the space between the legs. The dividers are made the same way and the removable top tray is also hardboard. The finish is Minwax Dark Walnut stain and Wiping Varnish.

Jason