Dusty Otter

Showing off my MAD WOODWORKING SKILLZ YO

[dustyotter]

I bought some silicone molds from Hirst Arts, and decided that I should have something reasonably attractive to store them in. So - voila! Maple plywood with solid maple edging & trim. Started it on Friday night, finished it on Tuesday night, but I did a lot of other stuff in between like go to work, attend multiple Easter dinners, hang out with visiting in-laws, work on other projects... etc. So it was pretty quick. Held together mostly with pocket screws, because it's cheap, fast, and effective, and this is a storage unit for some hobby supplies, not an heirloom that should last for generations. :-)

[dustyotter]

It's been a while since I updated here. I keep meaning to, I just keep being busy and then forgetting. At any rate, here's my latest creation - a simple presentation box for a simple gold chain I bought my wife for Christmas! It's nothing fancy but it did the trick.

Walnut with a curly maple insert, sanded to 400 and finished with 3 coats of Livos.

[dustyotter]

My current project is to build myself a proper workbench. I don't have a lot of space so the workbench is stuck at a maximum of 40 inches long, but it'll end up being about 27 inches wide. The front slab there is actually going to be at the back of the workbench, th one in behind is going to be the front. Before that, though, I'm going to be making a strip of square dog holes, and doing my own wagon vise. Not as good as a Benchcrafted one but $25 for the vise hardware vs $400... I'll survive the little hiccups and adjust where necessary. :-)

I have more ash for the legs, but not quite enough for the side rails and such. Luckily, I have a few nice pieces of 8/4 maple that I'll be able to use for that purpose.

[dustyotter]

It's been a while since I posted any projects. The reason is because most of the projects I've been working on for the past couple months have been birthday presents, like this maple box I made for my mother. She got it tonight so I can finally post a picture!

It's the same design as the one I made for my wife, but this time I sawed a few slices of veneer out of a burl offcut, and used bookmatched pieces of that for the top. That turned out extremely well for the most part.

The body, on the other hand... That's some gorgeous wood, but the figure caused it to tear out like crazy when I tried to plane it. (I've had other figured woods survive the planer just fine, this stuff was just that little bit too crazy and too brittle.) I lost a fair bit of wood that way, and even these pieces I salvaged have a few small spots of tearout. Pretty well hidden in the end, I guess. :-) Like the last box, the edges are strips of rosewood.

There are plenty of flaws with the box, but overall, I'm still extremely happy with how it turned out. And so's my mother, and that's what really counts!

[dustyotter]

My father-in-law was an avid woodworker before being killed by ALS. When I got tagged with the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, I decided to do something appropriate for his memory.

I have extra footage detailing the construction process... If anyone's interested in seeing a longer video explaining how I built my (somewhat leaky) bucket, let me know and I'll edit that together and upload it next.

[dustyotter]

Another project complete! This one's a lovely wooden mallet, once again out of purpleheart and maple. It's mostly material left over from making my handscrews, so it cost me practically nothing to make. Even the finish is the leftover bit of finish at the bottom of the jar from when I made my wife's box.

Of course, now that I have two different tools in the same combination of woods, I feel like this should be a theme for my shop and now I'll have to build a whole bunch more stuff using the same woods... :-) But before I can even think about that, I need to make a small run of boxes to give away as presents. Unless of course my wife gets hold of them first, in which case I guess it'll be a run of boxes for my wife's knitting & weaving stuff... ;-)

[dustyotter]

This is my current project, a very spiffy-looking wooden mallet. I didn't actually have one, and it was time. Once the head finishes gluing together, I get to saw it into final shape, ease the edges, sand it, and finish it... Altogether, probably 2 more hours of work at my usual pace. It's a good thing I'm not trying to make money from woodworking, cuz there's no way anyone would pay me for how long it takes me to make anything!

[dustyotter]

And voila - my wife's birthday present is done! Curly maple body, and the lid is made with bird's-eye maple (bookmatched! - not that it ended up making a big difference) laminated onto a curly maple base. The bottom is some bird's eye maple from the same board as the top. The trim is all east indian rosewood. Finished with two coats of Livos. I used two 1/4" rare-earth magnets at each corner to hold it closed, but to be honest, they're WAY too strong. (Oops.) One in the middle would have been plenty.

The overall dimensions are roughly 9.5 inches long, 4.5 inches deep, and about 2.75 inches tall.

[dustyotter]

I got the first round of trim attached to the box this afternoon. I'll do the bottom trim this evening and then tomorrow the vertical pieces.

[dustyotter]

Two project updates today!

First: The box. If you look at the high-res version, you'll probably think I screwed up all the edges, since nothing lines up quite right. That's deliberate though! I'm following Marc Spagnuolo's humidor design (roughly...) so I'll be cutting 1/4" notches in all the edges and putting in some accent wood for trim. Should be pretty cool when it's done. :-) I also tried to inlay my wife's initials on the box lid, but as it turns out, trying to inlay initials when you've never done any inlay at all before... not wise. Luckily I'd made the lid a lot longer than it needed to be, just in case that happened, so I trimmed that part out and went with something a little less fancy.

The big boards all clamped together are going to be my wife's new inkle loom. It's been sitting idle for a few months, but tonight I took a bit of tme to dry-fit the uprights and mark where the cross member is going to go. I also spent a little time fixing a twisted board, and I'll probably have to take a run at some others before moving on to the next step.

[dustyotter]

And voila! A finished box. No lid on this one, mostly because I decided that I want to experiment with making a box similar to the Wood Whisperer's humidor project (although without the amazing veneer, because I want to take things one step at a time) and frankly this box is good enough as-is. So... yeah. Box done!

The pictures were taken shortly after a second coat of wipe-on poly was applied. The wood is a nice 5/4 maple I found in the discount pile at KJP Select Hardwoods (if you're in the Ottawa area, go visit those people - they're wonderful!) resawn to just under 1/2" thick. The whole thing is matched - the grain wraps around on two corners and is bookmatched on the other two. Of course, I don't have a bandsaw, so I had to do the resawing (very carefully) on a table saw, and I ended up taking out a little more than I wanted so the bookmatching isn't as obvious as it should be. Still works though.

Next up... Not sure. My wife keeps reminding me that I'm not done her loom, but I'm also not positive on the design still, so... Hmm. Might be another box instead. Or I might do a dice tower. I'll figure it out soon. :-)

[dustyotter]

First box! Not complete, obviously. And I managed to cut a couple of the openings for the box joint a little shallow. Etc, etc. Easy to fix. Next up: Figure out the compound angles on the lid I want to make. (It's a prototype for the real project, which is going to be a simple jewelry box for a friend's wife.)

I should also figure out what the heck I'm going to do with this one once it's complete...

[dustyotter]

I finally finished making myself a table sled + box joint jig and tested it out tonight... Looks like it worked just fine! Woo! Now I need to make a test box to see if my plan for a friend's wife's birthday present will work out. I've got a month and a half for that, so I better get my butt in gear.

[dustyotter]

Next projects

With the handscrews finished, it's time to start a new project. Or complete an old one... or two... Oops. Kinda got distracted for a bit there, I guess.

I'd started making a loom for my wife a while ago (documented using the inkle loom tag) and that's made very little progress since posting it. I need to get moving on that project before she completely loses patience...

Also, long before starting this blog, I'd started making picture frames. I've had the wood milled for ages - at least 6 months - but had no good way to get the corners as tight as they kinda need to be. I finally made myself this miter sled from Woodworking for Mere Mortals and it works! Hooray! Unfortunately, the wood has warped slightly (probably because of the untidy mound of wood I'd made of them, rather than taking the time to stack it all neatly...) so I'll need to do some finessing at the corners.

And after that, I need to make a few practice boxes. A friend asked me to make a super-simple box for his wife to put her jewellery into. Not sure of the details yet but I have a 1/8" veneer piece of olivewood that'll likely form the visible parts of the top, possibly in the form of a panel in the lid. Once I have the details sorted out I'll post my drawings and see what you folks think.

[dustyotter]

And here they are, the finished handscrews! Not exactly the most exciting project in history, but it's nice to have another item checked off the list. And for me, it's a big deal to have finished another project, however simple it is - each time I finish something, I learn more.

[dustyotter]

My phone's stopped letting me post photos to Tumblr for some reason - it claim's it's trying, it just never succeeds - and I'm so busy with other stuff that I never have time to hop on the computer, bring pictures over, crop, resize, and upload them here. But this morning I woke up at about 4:15 and couldn't sleep so I eventually got up and decided to put the pictures up. So here we are. :-)

These pictures are from my current project, a quartet of handscrews. (Old fashioned wooden clamps.) The hardware is a kit from Dubuque Clamp Works (via Lee Valley), but it's not in any of these pictures yet, so... yeah. The wooden bodies are purpleheart on the outside and maple on the inside, based on a pattern from a Wood magazine publication my Dad had in his collection.

The first picture is just something that amuses me, seeing all the clamps needed for such a small piece of wood... Also the irony of not having enough clamps to put together all my clamps. :-) The second picture is a reminder for me to pay attention when doing these things... I'd made a test version of these clamps with other wood and decided I would like them slightly wider, so I made both the purpleheart and maple about 1/2 wider than the template. But on the purpleheart, I added the extra wood to the outside of the body of the jaws, and on the maple, I added the extra wood to the inside of the jaws. So then I wasted more time fixing that and ended up with the original, which I've decided I like better anyway because the extra width would mean extra weight. So that's OK. The third picture is what the bodies looked like once trimmed to rough shape.

That fourth picture is the one I really like, because it shows off what happens to this wood once I put the Livos (a wonderful oil finish) on there. The picture looks like the camera's exaggerating the effect, but in reality, it might be underselling it a little. The wood looks just ridiculously beautiful. It's less shiny in person than the camera makes it seem, but it's got so much depth and warmth to it...

Next step for these things: I have some lovely figured-maple turning blanks that I'm going to turn into handles, then it's assembly time!

[dustyotter]

The boards have been ripped and resawn to the same size as the hardwood will end up being. I need to put a thin kerf blade in my table saw… I tripped the breaker three times trying to resaw the 2x4s.

Next time… cutting the lap joints, assuming I can find the dado blades I bought years ago.