Studio711.com – Ben Martens

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.

Tyla showed me a Christmas decoration on Etsy. It was a sign that said NOEL and was made out of reclaimed wood with a wreath for the O. Price? $50. I started adding up the cost of building it myself and I figured it was only the cost of the wreath since I already have plenty of scrap wood.

Tyla picked out a wreath and in just over an hour, I knocked out all the letters. The N is made from the fence at the house where Tyla grew up, the E is made from an old dining table that Tyla kept for a long time in hopes of refinishing (I ended up using it as oak lumber), and the L is from the palette that my band saw came on.

While we don’t get any real credit for the design, I’m really happy with how this turned out!

During the month of October, the Makers Care group is encouraging makers to creating a plane of any kind to raise awareness (and money) for Make A Wish. Steve Ramsey posted some plans along with a video. For every plane we make, Steve Ramsey will donate $5 and it will be matched by MicroJig.

I used some scrap walnut and cherry to make two of the planes. It was my first attempt at making toys. They came out reasonably well but even this small project taught me a lot. My next project is probably going to be a much more complex toy for Elijah so I’m glad I had a smaller warm-up project to get some of the learnings out of the way.

You can find more information about this charity drive at makerscare.com. You still have time to build your own! It doesn’t have to be done with wood. ANY plane will qualify and you can look through the gallery to see some of the ideas people have come up with.

Before we re-landscaped the front yard, we had some hedges that came up to the front step. They weren’t beautiful, but they provided a convenient place for deliveries to be hidden. Now that we’ve removed the bushes, packages sit on our doorstep in plain view. We’ve never had a problem, but I’d prefer to have them at least partially obscured.

I decided to build a bench to fit on the step. Packages can be left under the bench, and, if necessary, I could even add a piece of wood to one end of the bench underneath the seat to really block the view from the street.

I used a SketchUp design file that is all over the web. (Unfortunately I don’t know who gets the original credit for this design. If you know, please contact me and I’ll give proper credit.) The design made heavy use of mortise and tenon joinery. While this type of joint is a staple in furniture woodworking, I’ve never done one myself. This seemed like a good learning project.

My first thought was to build this out of cedar since that handles outdoor weather well, but the cost quickly added up as I did the math. Instead, I ended up with hemlock fir (also purchased at Home Depot.) It’s pretty neat what you can do with standard dimensional lumber if you choose cleaner sections of the boards, trim off the rounded corners and run it through a jointer. This whole thing only cost about $30 in wood and I have some pretty big cutoffs left.

The four posts were wider than the 1 1/2″ I got from the boards so I used one full piece and then glued on half of another piece to get 2 1/4″. It actually looked reasonably good bare but after it was painted, the seam was completely invisible.

The mortise and tenon joints took me a very long time to complete as I fumbled my way through them. My joints got better and better as I went through the project though. I used a drill press to cut most of the mortises and then finished off the corners with a chisel. The next time I do it, I think I’ll try a router instead to get a cleaner mortise. I got the tenons with the bandsaw and that worked really well.

I hemmed and hawed a bit about how to finish the project. I like the look of natural wood, but it didn’t really fit the look of the front of the house. Plus I thought that the bench might weather unevenly since the outer half will be more exposed to sun and rain than the inner half. In the end, I put on a coat of Kilz primer and then used the same color as our exterior trim. I had an old can of that from the previous owners and the computers at Home Depot were able to match it perfectly! When I took the paint in to be matched, I explained that it was our house color. The lady replied “Do you live in an Army barracks?” I had never noticed it before, but instead of just being a dark gray color, it does actually have some green in it. Maybe I hadn’t noticed because it’s used for the house trim and it’s always against a light brown color.

I’m happy with the end result. It’s held together almost entirely without nails or screws. I did use a couple screws and nails just to ensure that the bottom seat supports don’t come lose over time. That part was at a weird angle and I didn’t want to screw up a mortise and tenon joint at that point in the project. The screw comes in from the back so nobody will see it.

(In the last photo, Elijah is trying to take a picture of me.)

My desk is closest to our team whiteboard at work so I end up with lots of dry erase markers, permanent markers, post-it notes, and erasers floating around. I headed out to the garage to play around with some scrap wood that I picked up from Crosscut in Seattle.

The box is REALLY simple. I screwed around trying to make some box joints but didn’t get them to look good enough for this so I dropped that and just did rabbet joints. I don’t know what kind of wood this is, but for the buck or two I paid for it, it turned into something useful. Simple, but useful. I finished it off with a few coats of spray lacquer.

Don took on a big project this summer and replaced his fence. I took some boards that were in reasonably good shape thinking I would make something out them. They sat in the garage for a while before I decided to glue them up into a panel. I trimmed off the rotten ends. Then I put them on my hold down jig and ran them through the table saw to trim off 1/4″ on one side. Once I had that nice straight edge, I could flip them over and run them against the fence to trim off 1/4″ on the other side. With those nice clean edges, I was able to put glue on them and clamp them together.

So then I had a big panel… and I still didn’t know what to do with it. I finally decided to cut out the shape of Washington state. I messed around with blowing up a picture and trying to print it out on a tiled series of paper sheets but gave up and just printed an 8.5×11. Then I drew a grid over the picture, drew a bigger grid in chalk on the panel and I drew the shape by hand.

I was going to use my shiny new bandsaw to cut out the shape, but once I realized how dirty all those boards were, I decided I didn’t really want to dull my brand new blade. So I did it with my little handheld jigsaw instead. I did use the bandsaw to trim a 1×4″ sheet of plywood to put on the back of the panel just to give it some extra strength in case those edge glue ups don’t hold over time.

It was a fun project because I didn’t know what I was going to end up with and I’m going to give it to Don and Nancy as a gift.