Studio711.com – Ben Martens

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!

A few years ago, Steve Ramsey posted a fun video about how to make wooden snowflakes. I decided to give it a shot and it was harder than it looked! I had a strong suspicion that my first attempt would fail so I did it out of cheap pine. I made a bunch of mistakes and thought I had it figured out so I moved on to maple for my second attempt. Nope. He clearly says in the video to glue the face grains together. I don’t know if he misspoke or if I just understand what he means but when I do that, I don’t get six evenly distributed points. I won’t explain the whole thing here, but if you build this, make sure you hold it all together with rubber bands and make sure it looks right before you apply glue.

The third time was the charm and they came out pretty nice. My only failure was that even after the third attempt, the pieces still didn’t form a perfect 360 degrees so there are gaps between some of the pieces. Oh well, I was tired of the project by the time I got to this point so I called it good enough!

We only put a few on our tree. Some of these will go out as gifts to Elijah’s teachers, but if you want one too, let me know and I’ll see what I can do.

For the past years, every few issues of Wood Magazine have had plans for a construction toy. I recently purchased the plans for the End Loader and completed it. It was another big learning experience for me. Aside from the quick planes I did recently, this is the first toy that I’ve built. The biggest thing I learned is that precision matters. You can’t be too precise. I made a large number of these pieces twice just to get them perfect. I also spent a lot of time sanding to try and get it as clean and smooth as possible. Because it’s so small, people look at it very closely and even small flaws will stand out.

Along with the plans, I also purchased the kit that contains wheels, smokestack and the hardware needed to complete the project. I don’t have great equipment for making those circular pieces so buying the kit let me focus on the rest of the loader.

It took me about two weeks to complete and I’m thrilled with how it came out! One of the hardest parts was getting it all sprayed with lacquer. Lacquer is supposed to be sprayed above 65 degrees or in low humidity. I couldn’t spray it in my garage since the fumes are so intense and they can actually ignite from the pilot light in the furnace. I set up a pop up tent on the back patio, hung tarps from three sides and hung a space heater from the top, pointed down at the table. I also brought all the pieces and spray inside to let it warm up to room temperature. That setup might have been overkill, but I didn’t want to screw this up after all the time I put into it.

I’m very happy with how this turned out. It will end up being Elijah’s Christmas gift. Last year I built him the table and this year he gets a toy. I think it would be fun to build something for him each year but we’ll see how that holds up.

The next project or two will be quicker and easier but I think I might do one or two more of these toys. I have plenty of walnut and maple leftover from this project.