Funny How Time Slips Away

Well, hello there. My, it's been a long long time...

Yes. I know. I feel it deeply, the SHAME of an untended blog. It may be the internet's last actual sin. It’s been well over a year since I last posted any content, and I am sorry to write that truth, but I am back now, ready for more. I’ve got a small collection of pieces that were accomplished in the gap from then to now and plans for more. So stay tuned, I hope that it will be less than a year before there’s an update…

Framed and Hung

So I received this lovely print of Nick Offerman drinking Lagavulin as a gift back in late 2016. The print came with the artist’s card, who I would very much like to credit, but I’ve lost the card and can’t find the print online… but whoever you are, well done. The frame is upcycled cedar with a stain and shellac finish.

One more work bench.

Since I work in a limited space, most things have wheels. It’s not uncommon for my main work bench to be pushed to every corner of the shop while spinning 360 degrees for the hell of it. Now it has this dance partner, built from sturdy materials to spin this wonderful saw around for me. Since this image was taken, this bench also carries the bulk of my longer scraps on the bottom. So it’s heavy. Hard to dance with, but certainly more stable.

A Natural 20

When I’m not working the day job or in the woodshop I am gaming. I love video games and tabletop games alike and all things involved are AOK with me. For my latest birthday I received the tabletop D&D game Castle Ravenloft. I had only seen pictures of the game online so when I unboxed it I immediately blown away by the detail of the game pieces. I knew I had to paint them. It took some time and as I did so I realized that I didn’t want to put the painted figures back in a jumble in the box. So, I made this instead. Built from cedar, pine, and plywood, it’s finished with polyurethane and a hand-burned 20—sided die on the front.

How I Roll

You’v played board games, right? Most of them involve rolling at least one die, sometimes more. Here’s a dice tray (or Dice Arena if you ask the mrs), made of UFW — unidentified found wood. Two logs were brought to me that at first was ID’d by the giver as possibly hickory. It’s not pine, oak or, cherry — other than that, your guess works, too. Under the black felt is a piece of mdf which does a great job muffling the dice. Making dice quieter wasn’t really the goal, it was keeping the dice from flying all over the table, but once you’ve rolled onto this, hearing the dice on the hardwood of my actual table is surprisingly loud and jarring. So yay for unintended consequences (for a change).

How I Roll, part 2

I saw these at my parent's house, oversized dice, presumably for playing Farkle in the front yard. I thought the same thought that usually gets me into trouble: “I could do that.” Using a scrap 4x4, which may explain why these have cracks and such, I made six of these. They currently serve as large knickknacks but stand ready when an outside game needs a bit of chance thrown in. BTW, if anybody knows how to build a d20, let me know.

Knowing when to Surrender

This piece started out as custom board for the game Stratego, one of my favorites. Made of alternating walnut and red cedar it has sat in the shop for well over three years in different states of completion transitioning into dereliction. It had appendages at one time, strips of walnut on the sides to give the play surface a raised quality. It suffered from chips and scratches and dents and finally I found it underneath some other forgotten items and said—it’s time to surrender. So I stripped all unnecessary bits away,replaned and sanded and finished by wet-sanding with 600 grit paper and Dutch oil. What it is? Not sure. A real fancy looking trivit, I guess.

The Library Stand

Every household needs a dictionary. If not for learning, for proving to your Scrabble or Quiddler opponent that they’re wrong. And while there are plenty of online sources for this information, I still prefer the feel, and outright limitation, of the printed page. Made of oak, stained and finished in a way that — to me — evokes a dark and hushed hall of books, this library stand has a ball-bearing base that allows it to turn and face the reader, supporting any tome, and any argument that Kwigybo is, in fact, not a word.

The Next Post

Hey everybody, here’s the summer/fall update.

Table top

This table's been in the family for quite a while. It started as a rescued counter-height art table with wheels and a weird linoleum top. Then I gave it a paint job, replaced the top with a pine board, and chopped off the legs to make a table for my then toddler.

Here's the newest version: coffee table with solid oak top with reconditioned and repainted body and added shelf. Cat sold separately. Sorry I didn't take more pictures but I was on a quick schedule and didn't take time out to shoot process pics.

Desk hutch/bureau thing

You will see in the fist image below that the cat and I use an old kitchen table as a desk. This table was one of my first refinish job that really propelled me toward woodworking (thanks table!)(actually thanks goes to my mom who first bought the table and later gifted it to me when she moved). It could probably be refinished. I have not been kind. But that's for another time.

The upside to using a table as a desk is that I really don't need the whole surface and can comfortably use the back half for my stereo. The downside is that it looks, well, blah. So I made a simple, yet functional, hutch/bureau thing. It's pretty rare that I use paint on projects (vs natural oils and shellac), but I used some rescued and recycled cedar that was in less than perfect condition so the paint helped hide some of that. 

Thirteen going on Undead Hunter

A young lady that I am close with turned 13 this fall. I wanted to give her something that she would cherish and keep forever, and while you might expect I'd make a jewelry box or a hope chest, that would only prove that you've never met this young woman. She shares my dark sense of humor and love for all things macabre (as do her parents, whom I adore), so instead of something traditional in the expected sense, I went traditional in a whole other sense, a very (very very) old world sense: a vampire hunting kit. 

The original idea was to simply offer one or two wooden stakes. Maybe whittled, maybe turned. I wasn't sure. As I really started to sketch this out, it quickly grew into more. The eventual plan was to create two stakes, a mallet, and a coffin shaped box to house the set. Up first are the mallet and stakes. The mallet is made of very old (and weathered) oak. The stakes are made of maple, one birdseye maple, the other curly maple. The monogram on each was transferred using laser paper and heat, and then completed using a wood burning tool. All three were finished with Dutch Oil and many coats of shellac. I finished the stakes before sharpening them so they would have that raw wood contrast in the points. 

 

As I said before, the plan was to build a coffin shaped box for these items to live in, but the more I sketched and planned, the was a seed of doubt that I would be happy with the construction based on the materials I wanted to use. I visited Hobby Lobby to pick up some details for the box, some metal corner protecters, hinges, and a latch and by the time the math was done, it was more economical—in terms of both time and money—to go with a pre-made box, of which Hobby Lobby has many. So, no, not only did I not make a coffin box, I also did not make a box whatsoever. I've made boxes and will do so again, but for this project... I didn't. Simply put the box I found was outstripped my expectations for a box I could make for the same cost—I mean this box has leather straps, protected metal corners and such—and it was 50% off. So there. 

On the outside the box looks cool; no doubt. The inside however proved a different story altogether, because now I had a space—a completely empty box—in which the stakes and mallet could fit, but HOW would they fit? I won't lie, I had fun doing this, but it was a challenge. The box isn't square— and by that I mean most of the angles aren't really 90°, and most of the sides aren't really straight—so I ditched my rulers and dug out my calipers and got to work creating spaces for each item, adding glassware to the project to help round out the kit. There's a pull-out tray where the stakes rest (and a 'hidden' drawer in the side of the tray). Under the tray theres spaces for the mallet and the glassware. 

Every measurement, cut and corner is unique in this thing, which is why I take deep pride in it's execution. 

The finish is unique as well as it had to match (for the most part) the outside. Black spray paint, layered with stain (which contains turpentine so it activates the spray paint, allowing it to be thinned, moved and effectively aged), and shellac to dry the whole thing out. The resting surfaces (where the stakes, mallet, and glassware touch the box) are all covered in black felt to reduce wear and rub-off. 

Finally a monogramed bit of wood affixed under the lid to finish the whole thing off. 

 

 

Last Day of Spring part two: one year later.

So it's been almost a year since last posted. WOW. Well, it's been a busy year that included a lot of work outside the woodshop, a 2 month closing of the woodshop, and a whole lot of not wood working. Which is a shame. But there was time for SOME wood working and so here's your catch-up.

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I had mentioned that we closed the woodshop for couple of months. We were thinking about (and got real close to) moving which meant having a clean, presentable space. Which is the opposite of how our shop works. So it closed and we cleaned and cleaned and cleaned. And then we showed and showed and showed. In the end we stayed in our home, which is great, and the shop—and life—goes on.

The reason I bring all this up is in the cleaning period a discovery was made. A few years ago I had come into possession of some fresh cut wood—which was believed to be ash. After breaking the fairly large logs down into some workable pieces I bagged everything up in plastic to help manage the moisture loss. For those of you who don't think in terms of wood—most of you—fresh wood is wet, and as it dries it shrinks. cracks, and warps. If you can control the rate of moisture loss you can mitigate things like cracking and warping. Or you can be like me, and forget about the whole affair.

I had bagged up these chunks of tree with the plan of re-bagging them every 2 months so that the moisture could be slowly lost in a controlled environment. What happened instead was that 8-9 months after the initial bagging I finally removed the bags from the woodshop during the cleaning process. I opened one up to find that a new ecosystem had evolved inside of the thick plastic bags. Hot, wet, and fungal, the tree bits were black and disgusting. Fearing the worst—black mold—I threw all but one bag away (big mistake). The bag I saved was the one I opened, because—in all honesty—I didn't want to have to re-bag it. So I placed the swampy wood in the farthest reaches of my back yard and got on with life. A month later, we didn't move, the shop is reopened and I come back to this wood in my back yard. Still black, but now rain and wind had cleared away some of the gross. Curiosity, a filtered face mask, and thick gloves brought one of the logs inside and after clearing off the outer layer of... stuff... what was left was gorgeous. The wood was permeated by the mold which left wonderful dark streaks though the grain. I used what I could, as the wood wasn't all the choicest cuts—and only got a couple of pieces out of it—but it was worth the effort.

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Next up: fun with scrap. If there's one think I have a lot of, it's scrap wood. Tried my hand at fashioning letter-openers from thin strips of scrap. First one is oak, and it's enormous (for when you're opening your birthday cards), and the second is a much more manageable Walnut opener.

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During the summer months we elected to spruce up our kitchen; new coat of paint, some woodwork—ya’know—the usual. First effort was to beautify the family chalkboard. I reframed it in pine and cedar:

Next to-do was to dress up our cabinet tops with some antiques and fresh turned produce. The produce was made from pine scraps and twigs for stems—except for the pumpkin, which was made from a chunk of oak (that has a huge crack in it). Here's a couple shots of those:

Last. though not least, is the oak book holder. I cook a lot and on Father’s Day was given a copy of America’s Test Kitchen's Complete Cookbook. It's great, and great-big, so a holder seemed like a good idea. The book came form my parents, which is fitting as the oak came our of their kitchen—rescued when they remodeled some time ago. For the other wood workers who might be reading: this project was fun because I had just a 8x1x36ish piece of oak that I re-sawed and hand-planed to make this work. The curves were all hand sawn and sanded. Here's a pre-finish and post finish comparison (finished with Dutch Oil and nothing else), and some detail pics:

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As winter approached there wasn't much time spent in the shop, though one gift request was fulfilled. A simple cross made of red cedar with proud mahogany inlay:

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As winter gave way to spring I got my but back into the shop and have been doing prep-work for more than a handful of projects, but have managed to complete a few more, like this pine log bowl, which I lovingly call the Bowl of Sauron for it’s great burning All-Seeing Eye. Finished with dark oils, sanded down and top-coated with amber shellac.

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Deja vu: after seeing my book holder my step-dad made no bones about wanting one for himself, as he has the same book. Not really wanting to tread the same path so soon I made a different kind of book holder—and his kitchen's quite different so it made sense. Much like the other book holder, this piece was made from one of my last walnut boards. It was at first intended to be ALL walnut, so I could bookend the walnut grain (which I didn't do with the oak book holder), but I quickly realized that I didn't have enough material. Red cedar has been my go-tp for accenting this beautiful walnut grain and it works really well here. I used boiled linseed oil and a wipe-on polyurethane to bring out the grain and color depth of both woods, which I was very pleased with.

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Well, that's all for now. We have plenty in the works so I'll pul all that together for you to see—maybe by next year. See you then.

Last Day of Spring

It feels strange writing about this next project. Mostly because I've spent the last 7-8 months thinking about and planning it, and now that I'm done, I'm struggling to spend any more time on it. Oh, well, here we go...

The Portico
For the 11 years that I have lived in my current house, the back porch (which is also the basement walkout), has been just a slab of grey—or more recently white—concrete. We've been spending more and more time back there over the last few years and frankly, I've grown to dislike the austere slab of 'crete. So, with an idea and financial sign-off from the boss (that's the Mrs to those who don't know), I began to plan. And plan. And then plan some more. Then I bought the materials, ready to work. That was late fall of last year. In fact, we brought the materials into the basement, just outside the woodshop, on the last nice day of 2014. The next day, winter began.

So I spent the winter looking at the pile of lumber every time I walked by it on the way into the woodshop. "Hello, looming project," I would say, and then go work on something else. Eventually spring rolled around and I ran out of excuses and I got to work.

Built to last, this 3 piece portico features mortise and tenon joinery, plugged pocket screws and some tricky miter cuts. Made of cedar-tone treated pine and finished with an opaque deck stain—this thing just might outlast me.

Here's some build shots showing the mortises and the diamonds I cut into the shelf column sides.

 

And heres some shots of the assembled shelf columns.

Here's a few showing various stages, from cutting the roofing plywood down, to the hand-cut support stretchers (hand-cut because I chose to make them parallel to the roof—an angle not achievable on the miter saw. Silly me, right?)

And finally, here's the porch before and after. We've some lovely plants on the shelves now, but I don't have pics of that, so you'll just have to use your imagination.