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.


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.




This is my version of the Hal Taylor Rocking Chair. I have wood for two more of these that I will hopefully get to soon. Here are some pics of a wheelchair accessable baby bed I made for a wheelchair bound couple at my Church.





Another shop thing, a cart/cabinet for storing all that stuff used with the table saw as well as work support. Can be used where it is for supporting longer pieces being crosscut, or moved around into the driveway and used for outfeed support ripping long stock.




Here are some brace bits I recently got from ebay. Sort of look like gimlets, but are not threaded at the tips.







I made a few of these trapped wedge marking gauges from an article some time ago in Popular Woodworking Magazine. Liking things with mulitple purposes, I added dedicated mortice gauge arms set to fit my morticing chisels.


On the end of a shorter arm I cut a saw kerf and drilled a small hole at the end to prevent splitting. I can now use the gauge as a scratch stock in addition to its other uses. A 5/8" #8 Square drive wood screw tightens the kerf to hold the cutter firmly in place.