Boxing Day

With all apologies to the Commonwealth countries, that is still the most apt title for this post.

As so often happens, we had wood and an idea and sought to find out how they went together. Having learned hard lessons, we started with scrap pine to test our approach.

After using the table saw to make .75-inch rods, we set up a rig to make sure all our pieces were of uniform length. We needed twelve pieces in all.

At each end we made two 45-degree cuts.

Here's what it looks like from the business end.

Let's pause for a quick diversion. As you know we've been into squares and cubes and played around with another, open concept.

That worked ok but would have been impossible to stain or finish. So right now it's on our work table holding a couple pens. More importantly, we created a simple rig to hold the pieces in place while they dried.

We now return you to today's project where we laid out our twelve pieces in the mold, glued all the corners, and set it aside to dry.

The result was another type of open cube, but this time much easier to finish. This pine example came out ok, so we filled in the gaps, sanded, and painted everything.

Before we reveal how that turned out, we went back to the shop to create what we'd originally intended. Again we needed twelve pieces but this time made four each of different woods--cherry, Kentucky coffee tree, and something else (the darkest one).

That yielded this little guy...

And his green-on-yellow buddy.

Our next challenge, after we make or find a stand, is to figure out how to start making curved surfaces with this beauty that someone very kindly gifted to us.

Happy woodworking.

Picture if you will...

How would you choose to display a bunch of unique items if they were coins or coin-like?

We decided to make a frame for them from our stash of wood. The nice morado, used in the last projects, seemed ideal--it's dark, has a nice grain, and looks great with clear stain. The pieces cut easily and we used the table saw to cut away the "non-frame" bits. We needed a deep inch+ frame so opted to make it only 1/8" wide.

So far so good. Until we tried putting the whole thing together. Our Elmer's wood glue is strong but there wasn't much surface area at the corners. Would it be strong enough? And were the sides thick enough to make notches for the little clips that would hold the back in place but allow us to take it on and off as we collected more coins?

The short answer to both questions was "probably not." To reinforce the corner we had the inspiration to cut pieces of sheet metal to add strength.

Unfortunately they were too flimsy to add any real reinforcement. The narrowest version we could find at Home Depot was much wider than 1/8".

We had played this option out, so we went back to the drawing board and started again with a nice piece of cherry from HD. 

We would have a display area of about a foot square, so we needed four side pieces a little longer than that.

Again we used the table saw to carve out the part where the glass, etc. would nestle. This time we left 1/4", which would give more surface area for glue and let us use the corner braces above.

The added thickness also gave us enough depth to carve out notches for the clips on the back. It needed about 3/8" cut into an arc for the clip to swivel in/out.

We had just the tool for the job--the little dremel marked with tape to tell us how deep to cut.

We marked the midpoint of each side and then the roughly 3/16" height of the cut, which we set another 3/16" from the edge.

Everything worked like a charm--depth, height, and arc.

Because the power miter saw, as good as it is, doesn't make perfect 45-degree cuts it can be tricky to find the right configuration to hold the pieces square and make the corners flush. Fortunately, we have lots of options.

With everything set we installed all the parts (glass, foam, back) to see how the clips worked. You be the judge.

So we had a functioning frame! 

Three coats of our favorite clear stain and we have a finished, functioning frame!

And a new home for this guy and his friends. The gentleman here has a particular resonance for us. We'll let you guess at his identity.

Happy woodworking.

Lincoln Logs

In days of yore quilters invented a style called "log cabin" that is really visually striking and looks good as both a whole quilt and as an individual block.

Ok, so if you're asking yourself, "Self, what does all this have to do with woodworking?" Well we wondered if there was a way to make this in wood and if so what it would look like. After all, one of us might have an affinity for quilting.

Our first step was to find a simple template. We decided to make a 7" x 7" square, making the width of each part 1".

Given our abundance of shades in the old wood pile we had a lot of choices. We set the table saw blade high enough to make each of these pieces 1/4" thick to keep the whole thing from being too bulky and heavy because we planned to glue it to a piece of 1/4" plywood.

With the pieces set we started cutting them into the right lengths and arranging them on the base. We discovered the hard way that there are tricks to cutting a small 1" x 1" piece like the ones at the center of the design. A power miter saw will send such a light piece flying, so we put the wood we wanted to cut on top of a big piece of scrap wood (pine, poplar). That way the saw had something more substantial to sink its quickly rotating teeth into.

With all the pieces glued in place and stained, we checked to see how it compared to our template.

We glued on a 1/2" frame of morado wood to set the whole thing off.

And here it is with the rest of its newly created family. Not half bad.

Leftovers

We found ourselves trying to answer the age-old question: What do you do with unused wood? In our case, we had a number of pieces cut into .5" x .5" rails from the scarf box project. What could we possibly do with those? Well, we had one idea.

First we needed to cut them all to 2.5" in length (this will be clear in a second). We rigged up a temporary shim on the saw to ensure everything was a uniform length.

That yielded a range of pieces in the same light-medium-dark tones as the box. In all we cut a bunch of pieces and started gluing them together in layers of 5. If you're counting at home, that would make 5 layers of .5" wood or...2.5". See? Clever, right?

After some trial and error with glue and clamps, we settled on creating a temporary rig to create a tight 2.5" x 2.5" housing for our pieces as they dried.

The result is...a paperweight or maybe the world's least movable Rubik's Cube. We don't know, we just make the things.

Here's one version without our favorite clear sealer (on left) and one with. Also these are the  two variations we made--one rotating the layers and one keeping everything in the same direction.

Finally, here are the full results in all their glory. Not a hard project but an amusing one.

Feeling boxed in

If necessity is the mother of invention, it's also the mother of woodworking projects. In this case, we needed a new, bigger, and nicer looking place to store the "currently in use" scarves. Fortunately, there's an app for that. Wait, that's not right.

Fortunately, there's a wood store nearby that can supply a raft of options, from morado to oak to snake wood to some thing we don't even remember. We added some nice cherry and walnut from HD. Our goal was to have options at the light, medium, and dark ends of the color palette. That sounds really familiar.

Anyway, the first step was to cut a bunch of .5" x .5" rails because we had a design that would  layer them in alternating hues with a finished height of 4.5" and 9 x 14" on the inside.

Then we paired them up. Each follows a dark-light-medium progression, but off-set. This will make sense in a second, trust us.

We liked the trick from the jewelry box project that hid the plywood base and added surface area for gluing, so we notched the four rails that would be the base of the box. First we made demos.

With all that set we started figuring out the order of the rails. We alternated not just the colors but the lengths to allow for a staggered, pseudo-dovetail look at the corners. This has the added benefit of being better for gluing.

Next we had to glue and clamp everything in place. Our trusty Bessey's worked for the first two rounds, but this has nine layers in total. So we needed a new plan.

We tried the new corner clamp, but things shifted around too much. So we went with an old standby that allowed us to do two layers (1 inch) per round. Even with these, we found the need to supplement with some basic straight clamps to nudge corners into place and (importantly) to hold the layers together. As we always say, you can never have too many clamps. 

It all seemed to work out because there's a satisfied customer. Here are a couple angles and a closeup on a corner. That tiger-y wood from the second picture above added some nice vibrancy and fire to the finished piece.