When we heard my wife’s first cousin was expecting a baby in January I thought it would be fun to try and build her and her husband a cradle. Since my wife and I were thinking (and are now expecting) a child of our own, I decided to build two cradles at once.

I decided to build a heirloom cradle I saw in Wood Magazine and more or less followed the plans with a few minor deviations: I attached the cleats that hold the rockers from the bottom instead of the top using glue and screws. I added contrasting walnut plugs to “hide” the screws entirely. I also applied a veneer to the bottom to give it more character and help contrast it with the sides. Finally I glued up the ends and sides from a series of smaller strips as I explored incorporating sap wood into the project to create some interesting patterns.

This was my first project working with curves and decided to go about it by making a series of templates and using the router. My first attempt was a complete disaster. I failed to first remove enough of the waste at the band saw and foolishly used a very small flush trim router bit. Fortunately, in case something would go wrong, I started by trying to make one of the rockers. Disaster struck as I went around the tip (and inevitably across the end grain) of one of the rockers. The bit dug in and threw a small chunk of wood across the shop. Fortunately I had not destroyed one of my glued up panels. It was clear I needed to revisit my technique and find a better way. I ultimately decided to:

-switch from my almost useless excuse for a band saw to my neighbors simple (but effective) bench-top model. This allowed me to remove much more of the waste, to within about 1/8” of my template line.

-I was given a spindle sander for Christmas which I then used to remove the remainder of the waste to within 1/16” of an inch.

-I then routed out the pattern top-side using a 1 1/8” flush trim router bit from Rocker. This time routing out the pattern was a breeze and I produced tissue-paper thin shavings.

Once pattern routing was behind me it was time to make the base. I ended up using an ancient piece of Douglas Fir I fished out of my parents basement and tried to take a stab at gluing down a veneer. This was when the second disaster struck. Not being used to working with veneers I applied too much glue which soaked through and then caused the veneer to buckle and ripple despite a caul being clamped across the entire surface. I ended up scraping the veneer off and trying again. This time, with less glue, things worked out better. For some reason I ran into buckling again when gluing down the last section of veneer on the second cradle, but at that point I already had a good piece glued down along side it. In a last ditch effect I used an iron and by lightly misting the surface and then warming it up with the iron was I able to slowly flatten the veneer back down.

You’d think after two brushes with disaster nothing else could go wrong, but when the cousins baby came early and me already being behind schedule, I guess I got anxious and tried to rush through the sanding process. I pushed down too hard on my ROS, resulting in beautiful swirl marks all over the wood. After the Marc Spagnolo corrected my technique I was able to go back and do the sanding all over again and get rid of all the swirl marks.

Many thanks to Dustin Ward , who gave me the veneer I used at a LumberJocks BBQ last summer. After applying the finish I think both cradles turned out fairly well, especially considering the road blocks I encountered along the process. I have a new found respect for building projects that can be taken apart while making the joinery as tight as possible. Hopefully both cradles get a fair bit of use and won’t have to be taken apart any time soon.

Finish:
4 coats of Tried & True varnish oil, warmed to 120 F and rubbed on, excess wiped off after 45 minutes.

3 coats of semi-gloss poly thinned 50/50 with mineral spirits and wiped on, burnished with #0000 steel wool between coats.

For years I’ve disliked my ineffective method for storing my random orbital sander, sand paper, and other sanding and scraping supplies. What was my method? Throw it all in a giant heap! Of course the sandpaper would get dinged up, it was hard to keep track of how much and where various grits where, and I never knew when I was about to run out of something until I was in the middle of sanding a project. Fun! So I finally broke down between projects and designed and built this sanding supplies organizer. It’s made up of lots of scrap wood. Heck, the top and bottom, which are 5/8” ply that was so warped I had to clamp out about 1 1/4” of deflection, if not more. It is a giant mix of materials (hardy board for the back and removable inserts for ROS disks, birch ply for 4 of the 5 vertical members, 5/8” ply for the top and botom, cherry for edge banding for the front, and beech or something for the dowels that help keep the ROS disks in there proper locations). That doesn’t matter. This was designed to be functional and keep things organized. It isn’t the prettiest project I’ve built but I think it accomplishes my goal coming into this.

Perhaps the most enjoyable part of working on the project was some of the finder details.. I attached the cherry edge banding using the wood whisperers method (oversized, then remove off excess vertically at the table saw. I also built and used the simple jig the Wood Whisperer recently covered for making dados in order to dado in the vertical members. This worked very well and produced very tight dado’s.

I made a small template and used it with a flush trim bit to put the small indent on the front of the sheet shelves to make it easer to pull out full 9×11” sheets of sand paper. These shelves and those for the ROS disks can slide in and out (the rest are glued in place). I cut small handles that are glued onto the front of the ROS disk shelves using a small dado. The handle is raised up about 3/16”, the thickness of the hardy board, which simply lays behind front handle and is prevented from falling off the back by a small strip glued back there. In other words you can pull out the shelves by reaching under and pulling from below, and you can remove the hardy board insert that has the dowels that hold the disks to make it easier to load up with new supplies or some day made again if the hole pattern needed to be changed.

This is my first “commission” piece: a wrap-around coffee table for my brother. He basically dictated the design almost entirely since he liked a lot of aspects of a table that belonged to one of this friends. I tried to make his a little unique by using sap wood to emphasize the wrap-around design, using half-blind dovetails when building the drawers, and integrating four secret compartments. The table is rather large (3’ x 3’), which made some of the steps during construction a little challenging, especially the long miter joints. As usual this project required tackling a lot of new things for me:

-giant miter joints
-half-blind dovetails (I used Rockler’s router jig)
-secret compartments
-haunched tenons

Anyhow, I’m somewhat relieved to finally have completed this project I began back in September.

Now that Christmas has passed I can safely start posting holiday presents. Here is the first of several, a pair of walnut and cherry end grain cutting boards for my mother in law. They’re fairly big, 1” thick, and loosely follow TWW’s approach (I like to add a thin strip along the sides). Instead of using mineral oil and bees wax I tried a 50/50 mix of Generals Salad Bowl Finish and mineral spirits (3 coats), then a non-dilluted final layer that sat more on the top. I think I’ll skip that last coat in the future. I added rubber feet to one side so it sits above the counter top and thus avoids standing water. I banged these out a week before Christmas over my final weekend at home (you can still smell the finish a little) so I’m pretty happy to have gotten them done in time.

Was out shopping with the LOML the other day when she spotted a rather disappointing shoe rack. I suggested I could easily make one much better. With a week till her birthday I pounded this project out, a few hours each night. My Dad helped me complete it including sanding, attaching the slats, and putting in the plugs. The legs and aprons are cherry while the slats are black walnut. I have no clue what the plugs are, some piece of exotic scrap I cut plugs from. I got the scrap from another LJ at a picnic earlier this summer. Three coats of T&T varnish oil followed up by three coats of wipe-on poly and she’s finally all done. Not as many new things for me on this project aside from using metal (to attach the slats) and finally took a stab at real thru tenons and real pins using my new mortiser. Still need some practice but getting there.

At last I’ve completed a cherry entertainment center for our living room. This piece was designed to match the prairie style coffee table I made earlier. I actually designed the entertainment center in SketchUp first, then decided to make a coffee table as a practice piece before returning to the entertainment center. I’m glad I did since I learned a few things and improved the design of this piece before cutting any wood.

Like the coffee table, this piece has strong prairie style/Frank Lloyd Wright influences.

First, I strived to produce a piece that wasn’t to tall and felt wide with a thin overhanging top. The top, like that on the coffee table, is actually 3/4” thick, but with a bevel it doesn’t feel nearly as heavy/thick and tapers down to 3/8” at the very edge.

Next I wanted to incorporate a pattern like those you often see in stained glass in many Frank Lloyd Wright homes. Wright used horizontal, vertical, and diagonal lines to create basic geometric shapes and using these would draw an abstract form of the type of plant life you might see growing out on the prairie. I’ve gone for the same effect. Hopefully you can make out the form of a flower or the tassel from an ear of corn (we sure have a lot of the latter growing around us this year!). So I guess you could say I’m taking an abstract approach to the “grasses blowing in the wind” summer 2010 contest using rigid straight lines to hint at curves and movement you’d actually find in nature.

Like on the coffee table the pattern on the doors was built using 1/2” wide pieces of wood. This time I half-lapped all horizontal/vertical piece overlaps. I removed the waste using my sled on the table saw using a pair of stop blocks. This allowed me to quickly make perfectly symmetrical half-laps since after one I just rotated the piece 180 and made the second. I tried to dial up the pattern a notch as compared to the coffee table by having the long diagonal pieces push through the vertical pieces on the sides, as well as adding a third narrow row of diagonal pieces at the bottom. The goal was to make a piece that resembled the coffee table but has it’s own unique qualities and I think that worked well. Also, the design is in part of obscure all the annoying blinking lights that will eventually be inside the case once a DVD player, Wii, and various other electronics are installed.

With every project I embark on I try to experiment with new techniques…

This was my first attempt at corner bridal joints. There’s 20 of them, each door has 4 and the dividers between the three cabinets have four as well). I really enjoined making these using an attachment clamped to my table saw sled. I feel like I got pretty proficient at making tight symmetrical joints. Once I had things all dialed in I could crank out as many as I would need.

This was my first attempt at using glass. I’m fairly happy with the shelves. By using glass the shelves are less noticeable so your focus remains on the pattern on the doors. I used a jig from Rockler and then installed metal sleeves to dress up the holes a bit more. I’m not entirely thrilled with how the glass in the doors is secured. I cut and had ready strips of wood to hold the glass in but found they were too small to install with brads. I then tried to hot glue them in and found the hot glue kicked them out something terrible. I ultimately decided to run a bead around each of the corners with hot glue and call it a day. The glass is secure. I think if I were to do it again I give myself more space so I could use brads with slightly larger strips of wood to provide a cleaner appearance on the inside edge.

This was my first attempt as floating panels. I made solid panels for the left and right side and used cherry ply for the back and cabinet dividers.

This was also my first attempt as using hinges. In terms of the contest, if you’re looking for literal movement I guess the doors do open and close, although I’m really banking on the pattern on the doors to make this project applicable. :-) I used some low profile butt hinges I found on Woodcraft, carefully mortised by hand into the doors and case using a sharp chisel and lots of patience. The doors swing beautifully so I’m very happy with how this aspect of the project turned out. Small low profile magnets at the top left corner secure each door in the closed position. Two of the doors were a bit louder when they closed and required more force then I’d like to open so I simply placed a piece of black eletrical tape over the black piece of metal screwed to the top left corner of the door. You’ll never notice it and it makes the doors a bit easier to open and much quieter when closing.

I originally intended to use some mission style knobs I also purchased from Woodcraft. In the final hour I decided they were too big and the dark color would distract from the doors and piece in general, so I made some knobs from scraps of cherry again using my table saw sled. Have I mentioned how much I love my table saw sled? :-)

Like before the top is secured with 14 “buttons” that allow for wood movement. I got so excited gluing up the case that I forgot to first dado a grove for the buttons to go into. Biscuit cutter to the rescue! I plunged in the proper place with my biscuit cutter, then raised the fence 1/16” before plunging at each spot a second time. This worked really well (although clamping a support piece of wood for each one was a bit of a pain). Ultimately my aprons are probably stronger than if I had dadoed a grove along the entire edge.

The aprons and side rails are mortise and tenoned into the corner posts, although once again I chickened out and faked the thru tenon appearance. This time I made caps and attached these using dowels. As a result the pins on the doors actually do pin the bridal joint, just with a dowel. Those already super strong joints (lots of face grain glue surface on those bridal joints) will now never come apart, even if the glue does fail some day.

I’ve included a photo of how not to glue up the case. I should have taken this slower and done fewer things at once since the right cavity ended up off by 1/16” at the top, but you can’t really tell. I’ve also included of photo of some of the techniques of how I glue up the pattern on the doors. Paper clips work well for holding the small pieces together. Spacers make measuring and marking additional glue ups unnecessary. You can also make out the half lap joints toward the bottom.

So all in all I’m very happy with how this piece turned out. Aside from cherry ply used on the back and for the cabinet dividers the rest of the piece is solid cherry. The finish is three coats of Tried and True varnish oil, warmed to 120 F in a slow cooker, then rubbed on using cotton rags, followed up by a coat of paste wax.

Update: Due to popular demand I’ve uploaded my SketchUp design to Google’s 3D Warehouse. Enjoy!

For our 4th anniversary I made my wife another cutting board. She loves it! A bit wider and bigger overall compared to the last one. This one is walnut and cherry and is end grain as opposed to the zig-zag side grain one she got for Christmas. If I recall correctly it’s about 18”x14”x1”. I didn’t put a hole in it since it won’t be hung up, this way she gets even more surface area to cut on. Finished with a liberal amount of mineral oil followed by a mineral oil and bees wax finish. The walnut was all from scrap produced when helping one of my wife’s co-workers make trim for around his house.

At last, I’ve finally built a Super Sled. I used 3/4” ply for the base, UHMV plastic for the runners, and cherry with black walnut plugs for the fence, handle, rear support, miter attachments and miter attachment stop blocks. I opted to recess T-track into the rear fence for mounting a flip stop I picked up from Rockler. I still need to build an extension flip stop for the miter attachments but I’ll leave that for when it’s actually needed. For now I’ll primarily be using the sled for cross cutting. In fact I already have when making the last set of cutting boards and it was a blast. I suspect between my new drill press table with fence and the cross cut sled I’ll see my accuracy, repeatable, and overally safety go way up. Regarding safety, you’ll notice I decided to push the sled all the way forward once so the saw went through the handle in the full raised position. While using the sled this should never occur, but in case I ever get distracted I’m hoping that slit in the back will keep my aware of the danger zone. So long as I use the actual handle I should be in excellent shape.

I’m not sure why it took me so long to build one of these, it’s great. I basically made it very smilar to Dodeka's drill press table . The base is two sheets of 3/4” ply, trimmed out on 3 sides with cherry and black walnut plugs. I used some red T-track I found at Hartville tool that was quite affordable. The bottom is clamped to the factory table using four knobs that screw into wing nuts embedded into two rails screwed into the bottom of the table. This allows me to losen up the table and pull it out in order to raise and lower the factory table. Long run I’m going to look in a way to modify the factory handle to avoid having to pull the table forward and back like this all the time since the fence can get in the way of the chuck and requires removal from behind the spindle in some circumstances. I used cherry for the entire fence, squaring it up after it was glued up by running it past my table saw blade with the front face down against the table which worked beautifully. Anyways, I hope this helps anyone that needs yet another drill press table example before they build their own. It’s totally worth it!

Just completed this cherry coffee table for our living room. My wife and I enjoy Mission, Prairie and Frank Lloyd Wright style furniture and design, hence the pattern on either end, the wide overhanging top, etc. Lots of mortise and tennon joints, even on the pattern on the ends. A few half lap joints there as well. I didn’t have the guts to make real thru tennons, so those are faked, as are the pins. I finished it off with 4 coats of Tried and True Varnish Oil, first warmed to 120 F using a slow cooker water bath, then burnished after 1 hr, followed by two coats of paste wax. I’m quite happy with how this turned out. This was supposed to be the “easy” project. The next one, an entertainment center, is quite a bit more involved. Stay tuned…. :-)

Update: here’s a link to the Sketchup model

Here are a few end grain cutting boards I just made. Walnut, cherry, and maple, flooded with mineral oil, then finished off with a coat of beeswax. In one of you photos you can see me cross cutting after the first glue up using the new sled I’m building. I’ll post that in a separate project once it’s 100% complete.

This is my recently completed dust collection setup. I used to lug around an old shop-vac my neighbor gave me, but it really wasn’t cutting it and banging out the filter constantly was a real pain. I decided to go with the Delta 50-760 and ordered it from tools-plus.com since they offer $6.50 flat shipping on all orders where as shipping was like $50 plus anywhere else.

After picking up a copy of “Dust Collection Basics” from Woodcraft, I designed and redesigned and redesigned how I would setup my shop and run the trunk and drops so as to minimize the total static pressure drop for any run to any machine. For example, you’ll notice in the run to the planer I avoid an extra bend by dropping down from the ceiling at an angle. Since I don’t have any ay to place the dust collector proper in a different room, I opted to place it along the center of one wall, thus reducing the distance to the two biggest dust contributors in my shop, the planer and table saw.

I opted to use 4” schedule 30 PVC which worked out OK. If I were to do it again I might use schedule 40 since the fittings are a lot tighter and thus easier to glue and get air tight, but with a little work I made the schedule 30 work and I did get to save a little on the fittings and pipe. I decided to only ground the exterior of the system, but I was pretty strenuous about that and all the machines and dust collector are all grounded to each other.

Since the 50-760 is a single stage collector, I opted to build a Thien pre-stage using an old metal garbage can and some melamine from an old junky dresser I took apart instead of throwing in the dumpster, so the pre-stage was basically free and it works great once the baffle was added on.

You’ll notice I have a few unused branches around the setup. I eventually intend to add above the table dust collection to my table saw. I’d like to also add below the table dust collection to my router table. I have a port ready to add a floor sweep and dust collection for a future lathe. Finally, the dust collection from the miter saw is woefully inadequate. I intend to eventually build a cage behind to grab all the dust is throws back and to the sides.

All in all, I’m very happy I finally did this. It wasn’t cheap, but the shop is definitely much cleaner, and emptying the pre-stage is a LOT easier than dealing with the old shop vac. I literally have no chips coming out the planer any more, a huge step up.

Another three Christmas presents just completed. Glued up with Titebond II, flooded for 24 hours in mineral oil, then finished off with a bees wax mineral oil finish. A couple summers ago I picked up a nice cutting board with this type of design at a craft fair. It looked like it would be fun to make and now that I finally have a table saw I set out to make a few as Christmas gifts using scrap leftover from making my bed years ago and cutoffs and boards I didn’t think were good enough for the coffee table I’m currently working on.

I definitely learned a lot while working on this project! I need to work some more on my planer setup to avoid snipe. I also learned that the slower I go when making cuts with my table so I can virtually avoid tear-out all together and thus just kiss the surface with the planer after doing a glue up (and thus reduce the risk of chipping!). I also found I was able to get smoother and smoother bevels on the edges by going slower with the router, just not so slow to cause burning of course. The simple thin ripping jig I built recently was wonderful to use and allowed me to make consistent thin rips very quickly. I’m looking forward to building a “super sled” to make cutting miters a bit easier and safer in the future. Anyways, thanks for looking.

Just finished 26 stocking stuffers. I used the alternative design shown in Wood Magazine’s November, 2007 (No. 180) issue. For wood I used thin rips of hard maple, cherry, mahogany and a short cutoff of cedar I had laying around. Working on tiny projects like these really makes you work hard to get every joint as tight as you can. By slicing each key chain off in the end with the bandsaw I didn’t lose much to saw kerf and ended up with far more then I originally planned.

I built this bed as my first project over five years ago. I still love the design, but in hindsight I could have done a better job on the finish.

This is one of three chess boards I made a couple years ago.

I find my compound miter tends to jump off the table when I let it fly up so I really wanted to get it bolted down. I figured I might as well do it right with an extension fence, storage below (to get all my tools off the floor and in one place). I find it’s handy to store the ever increasing number of fasteners I seem to obtain behind, while some of my smaller tools fit nicely below the cutting surface.

I got tired of working on the floor or uneven/awkward surfaces so I built this basic work bench. With my neighbors help I was able to run 12 gauge wire down the center powering 4 grounded outlets (2 on each end). Lockable rolling casters on the feet have proven to be a God-send as I push this thing around my shop all the time, either to make space for glue-ups or simply to give me the ideal light depending on where I’m working on what. If I were to build it again I would include an end-vice but that’s about it.