My Pics

What woodworker's website would be complete without a few project pics? Yep, we occassionally actually make something other than just sawdust and shavings while trying out our new tools. Even stuff that is not shop jigs, cabinets, or other shop related equipment. Sometimes we make stuff that other people can use.

This is one of my most recent projects. I find myself lately coming up with project ideas based on a procedure I want to try. This one came about because I wanted to try some laminated wood bending. Starting off on a fairly small scale, I actually heated the strips for bending in the microwave wrapped in a dampened shop towel.



Many of my projects start out from pictures in catalogues and the like. Such was this Booksellers table. The LOML spotted this in a catalogue from one of those high priced mail order places. The overall dimensions were listed, and from those I sorta guesstimated the rest. Like I said, though, the reason for doing it was the bent laminations. Notas difficult as I imagined, but I did learn a couple things about this type of project from the experience. Probably the most important was that for bent pieces of this size, I would have been better off making the slices a bitmore than twice the width of the final pieces, and making a single one, then cutting that in half. Matching the two pieces was probably one of the more difficult parts. Most of the joinery for this was done with hand tools.


The piece shown above was another bent lamination and it was great fun to do. This one came out of my own head, though the overall design is of classic lines. The front skirt piece is secured to the legs via drawbored mortices and tenons. The tenons, out of neccesity, had to be hand cut due to the bend of the piece. The drawbores allowed me to glue the legs and skirt without the use of clamps. I made the pegs using a home made dowel plate, simply a piece of steel (in this case, an old plane iron) with the appropriately sized hole drilled through it. The stock was cut square a bit larger than the hole, the point whittled down a little, then it was driven through the hole in the dowel plate, which was laid over a dog hole on the bench, with a mallet.


The front legs were compound cut on my bandsaw, then rounded and smoother with a drawknife and spokeshaves. The back legs were simply tapered. The drawer face was a bit of a challenge, as was the structural integrity of the front skirt once the drawer face was cut from it. The bottom cut of the drawer face was a plunge cut on the table saw, finished up with a handsaw. The sides were cut with a handsaw also. In order to stiffen the front, I glued the top right onto the skirt along the full length. Then, to allow for expansion of the top across the grain, I two sliding dovetail sockets on the underside from the back edge inward a few inches. I then made a pair of dovetailed brackets that would slide in these sockets which I glued to the rear skirt.

Below is a box I made for one of my grandsons. This was to have been used to store "letters" written by his grandparents, aunts and uncles and the like at his birth to be kept there until he reeached 18 years of age. At that time he was to be shown how the box was opened and allowed to read the letters of everyone's hopes. I made the box, don't know if anyone else wrote letters.



Thie second picture shows how one of the side "handles" is pulled out, disengaging a lock and allowing the lid to slide open. I thought it was a pretty cool hidden lock, but others weren't quite so impressed.


I do a bit of turning as well as playing with the scrollsaw. These inlays are not that difficult to do, though some folks are pretty impressed with them. The minister at our church saw one of the pens that I turn and approached me about making some to give to the kids from our church who will be graduating high school this year as gifts from the church. I decided to make boxes for them as well and initially thought of harvesting some of the lumber that was felled for our new building for both the pens and boxes. Then I stumbled upon a site that sells olive wood from Bethleham and decided that would be more appropriate. I ordered some pen blanks as well as some spindle turning blanks to use for the boxes. The pen blanks came in, but they had to wait for a new shipment before the larger blanks could be shipped so I made the box from some pecan. The inlay of the Cross is Wenge and the flames are Padauk. The pen is olive wood (below pic) and this is the prototype which I'll surprise the minister with as a Christmas present.

A while back I responded to a request for help on one of the woodworking forums I frequent. Some soldiers in Iraq were wanting some plaques made as momentos of service in Iraq. They had the stuff to put on the plaques and wanted someone to do the wood part for them. A few emails later I had convinced them that shadow boxes would be better than a simple plaque and agreed to do them for the cost of my materials. Anyway, here's a close-up of one,



And here's the bunch ready to be shipped.



I had started on this project prior to the shadow boxes, set it aside, then started back up again after completing them. In the meantime, I had come across some air dried walnut, and though I'd used some store bought for the tops and legs, decided to use the air dried for the skirts. What a difference in color. Used some amber shellac on the legs and top to darken them some, and it helped, but you can still see a lot of difference. The storebought had some sapwood inclusion that had not darkened as much as the heartwood from the steaming.

Here's a pic with the leaf folded down and the leg folded in.



And here's one with the leaf up and the leg folded out to support it.


This started off as an attempt at making Secret Mitered Dovetail Joints. I decided to make a box to safegaurd some of my marking and latout tools.


The tray holds some of my more used layout toolss.


When the tray is removed, it reveals some of my lesser used layout and machine tools. The holders for the tools are kept in place by the tray, securing everything in their own little cutouts.



Here are a couple of boxes I made several years ago during my "machine head" days.




Here are some pics of a wheelchair accessable baby bed I made for a wheelchair bound couple at my Church.