Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Many months ago, Tyla shared an idea to have some shelves in the family room to hold Elijah’s toys. It would not only be a place to store things, but also a place to rotate different toys on display to encourage Elijah to play on his own. I kept finding excuses to do other things but finally I decided to give it a go.

I started with a drawing in Sketchup to get an idea of the spacing and also make sure that Tyla was on board with the design. The whole structure ended up being 7 feet long. I’ve learned that big projects are a bit tough to deal with in the garage, but this was an easy one, right?

I ran into quite a few problems when building these. I did the initial glueup wrong and had to rip the nails out before the glue dried to start over. The edge banding didn’t stick nicely in all the areas. And I miscalculated and made the drawers 1/2″ too wide. But that’s part of the fun of woodworking. Nothing goes perfectly, at least in my workshop, and I’m presented with lots of opportunities to find interesting solutions. One of my favorite YouTube woodworkers is Steve Ramsey and when he has a major screwup, he makes the fix and says that it’s now “EXTRA FANCY!” These shelves are definitely extra fancy, but you know what? They work. Elijah is just going to beat them up anyway. I’m not building an heirloom. I’m building a toy shelf that we’ll throw in a bonfire after he’s older and we want something else there instead.

The bottom two drawers are only half as deep as the opening. Ever since we moved in, we’ve had a cardboard box covering up a bunch of ugly wires and a battery backup for the TV. I designed a void behind the drawers where I can hide all that stuff and there is also a space for a bunch of cables to run the length of the shelves back to the plugs. The top of the unit still fits snugly against the wall so all that is finally hidden.

Given the size of the project, I wanted to try spraying them. I even borrowed Don’s paint sprayer, but when I finally got around to spraying, the air was full of seeds and pollen. I ended up just taking the time to brush and roll it all, sanding between coats.

Now it’s on to the next project… it will definitely be something smaller!

Church asked if I’d be willing to make a “prayer box” for church. The idea is that people can write down prayer requests on pieces of paper, put them in the box, and then Pastor will remember them in his prayers. There were no design requirements so I chatted about some ideas, got a thumbs up and I was off and running to Crosscut Hardwoods to pick up a nice hunk of 5/4 cherry.

I wanted to play with my box joint jig again so I decided to do box joints. Unfortunately my first attempt failed because I didn’t clamp it well and the box wasn’t square when I was done. Instead of waste all that nice cherry wood, I sawed off the joints, cut some new box joints and then glued it together. So the box ended up smaller than I intended but I think it worked ok.

For the lid, I wanted to try a panel raising bit. I picked one up from Rockler and carefully cut the profile on the lid. It’s a huge router bit so it’s a little scary to use. I slowed the router way down and nibbled at the cut until it was the depth that I needed. I added a very thin layer of wood on the bottom of the lid that perfectly fits inside the box. So when you put the lid on, it is always centered and won’t slide off.

To make the box a little more special, I took it to the laser cutter and etched the church logo into the front of it. Dad was here when I did that so it was a good excuse to show him the laser cutter. Thankfully my testing was spot on and the logo ended up perfectly centered.

Instead of having people lift off the top to insert their cards, I wanted to put a slot in the top. But why just do a straight slot? I made it a cross. This was trickier than I had intended and I had trouble centering the cuts. Thankfully I had started with a very small slot so I switched to a wider slot and was able to cover up my mistake.

The final step was making a base for it. That was just a chunk of cherry and I used the router to remove the bottom half of the board except for the four feet on the corner.

For the finish I used an equal mixture of boiled linseed oil, mineral oil and wipe on poly. Four coats of that with a scrub from a synthetic pad in between coats completed the project.

Over the past couple weeks, I’ve noticed Elijah playing on his own a lot more than he did before. The coffee table is one of his favorite play spots right now. I want to support these activities, but it’s hard to watch him smashing his cars around on the table. I’ve put plenty of my own scratches into the table, but if he keeps at this for a couple months, we’re going to have sawdust on top. I’ve been trying to figure out a good way to build him some sort of bigger play table anyway, and one day it dawned on me that I could solve both problems with one project.

I had a scrap piece of plywood that was big enough to cover the coffee table so I cut it to about the same size and trimmed it with some simple 1×4 pine. Using pine takes a little extra time because it pays to fill all the knots with wood filler, but it’s so cheap that it’s worth it for a project like this.

It only took a night or two to complete the build and then the painting began. Thankfully we had a semi-sunny weekend so I set up the saw horses in the driveway and started painting. I covered everything with a coat of Kilz primer. The rim was painted white and then, after taping, the inside was painted with four or five coats of green. I did all of it with spray paint and kept it smooth with some fine sanding every once in a while. I finished it off with a few coats of spray lacquer.

I had thought about painting a road onto the board and even laser cut some paper to use as a stencil. I didn’t use them though because I wasn’t confident that I could get a clean enough line using the templates.

The end product works perfectly. We already had some soft foam around the edges of the table. This slides over the top of that foam so nothing is touching the actual wood of the table.

Elijah spent a lot of time playing at that table the first day. I spent less than $4 on the project (not including leftover spray paint and lacquer) and used up some scraps. He can beat this up all he wants, and it’s really nice to be able to spread out his Legos without watching them spill off the edge of the table.

When we moved in, we bought some cheapo plastic silverware drawer organizers. They work ok, but they never really fit the drawers. I was looking for an excuse to use my new box joint jig and I decided the silverware drawer would be a good project.

I had walnut laying around and I wanted to use a nice hardwood for the box joints so this whole project got made out of walnut. It’s kind of ridiculous but it’s so much fun to work with walnut. I resawed it on the bandsaw and planed everything down to thickness. The Wixley digital planer gauge that I got for Christmas really worked nicely for the planing. I glued two pieces together to make the bottom, cut the box joints and then cut the dados for all the inserts.

My original plan was to glue it up but everything fit so nicely that I’m not going to glue the pieces in. This way we can easily remove them to clean the drawer out if we need to. I put on a bunch of coats of lacquer and then let it cure for a few days before sticking it in the drawer.

Is it overklil to have a solid walnut silverware drawer? Yep. But I love that everything fits so much nicer now and it was a good learning experience.

Steve from Woodworking For Mere Mortals, recently posted a project showing how to make a simple toy truck out of a 2×4. The end result is a truck that can have a pickup bed, camper, or trailer attached to it. Elijah has been asking to play with the semi truck that Grandpa Martens made me. That is special to me and I’d rather leave it on the shelf so I thought this project might be a quick way to get him his own truck.

I had Elijah come out in the garage a couple times to “help” me with the project so he could feel like it was partly his work too. We also made two sets of trucks so that we could give one to his friend Ike as a belated birthday present.

My DIY spray booth came in very handy for putting all this spray paint on in cold, rainy weather. The trucks came out ok. I used scrap 2x4s which was fine but some of them were pretty beaten up. These will be great trucks for the kids to bang on and smash. And if they break and we have to toss them? Well hey, it was only about $2 worth of wood!