Studio711.com – Ben Martens

I’ve always been intrigued by wood inlays on the CNC. I’ve tried a few times in the past but I could neve get the precision I needed to make it happen. For Christmas, I received a BitSetter for my CNC which lets me change bits in the middle of the job and zero the height of the new bit to exactly the same as the previous one. When doing inlays, you need to first use a regular bit with a flat end to carve out the big areas and then you use a “v bit” to make the angled sides. If those two bits aren’t zeroed exactly the same, you won’t end up with a precise piece. After that you have to cut the plug to fit into it going through the same bit change process.

I chose to use the Martin Luther College logo since Tyla and I have been doing some much work with them and because it seemed like a good medium-detail goal to shoot for. And I’ve been shooting for that goal for months and months. Granted this is very much a start/stop project as I try to find 30 minutes here and there throughout the week or on the weekend to make progress.

I learned so many things along the way. This post would be absurdly long if I wrote it all out in detail but here is a quick summary of the learnings and improvements I made in the process:

• Holding the work pieces down is difficult when making coasters. Pretty early on, I made a jig out of MDF that would perfectly hold the coaster but still have finger holes on the outside so I could extract the coaster.
• The jig worked well but the coasters would spin so then I started cutting my coaster blanks with a little nub that fit into one of the finger holes so that it wouldn’t spin. I could easily cut that off at the end.
• I messed around with different angles of bits: 60, 30, and 11. The sharpest bit didn’t work because the remaining slivers of wood were too fragile. The 60 degree bit was ok, but ultimately I liked the 30 degree best because it let me cut deeper even in areas of fine detail.
• To remove any inconsistencies, I would spend time running a program to face each piece before cutting it to make sure it was perfectly level.
• You have to glue EVERYTHING when you’re putting the plug into the base. I would use a tiny brush to carefully get glue everywhere on both faces but going fast so the glue didn’t start to set up.
• I thought of various ways to remove the extra part of the plug, but eventually I just put it back on the CNC in my jig and let the CNC cut it off.
• Glue would inevitably seep into the fibers in the top of the wood so I expanded my cut path just a tiny bit. Since I was make an angled cut, this meant I could remove the top couple hundredths of the coaster to perfectly remove any extra glue marks.

I had about 12 steps to the process of making a single coaster and it took me hours to complete one. And in the end… I could never get it good enough to satisfy me. There were always some little gaps between various parts of the logo. I tried using brown glue to make the gaps less obvious and I tried filling them with superglue and then jamming sawdust into the cracks. The superglue trick got me the closest but it’s still not something I’m proud of. So I did something I rarely do: I gave up on it. For now. Below you can see all of my numerous attempts as well as a solo shot of the closest I could get.

But I didn’t totally give up. I decided to scale back my dreams and instead of inlaying one type of wood into another, I would pour tinted epoxy resin into the logo that I had carved out. Despite being the first time I had ever worked with epoxy, this was almost an instant success! Not only did it look amazing but it also took me only about a third of the time (except for the 24 hours of cure time.)

There were still learnings to go through with the epoxy like dealing with bubbles that come to the surface as it cures, figuring out how the walnut soaks up extra epoxy around the logo pocket, keeping sawdust out as it cures, etc, but those were much simpler and I’m very happy with the result. I was even able to switch the logo and get a decent coaster on my first attempt.

After working on this so long, I’m kind of stuck in this mindset so I think I’m going to make a bigger jig and try to batch some of these out. They will make nice gifts and I’m sure I’ll experiment with other woods and other logos. I’m also interested to try doing a multi color pour. That would involve cutting part of the logo, pouring a color, cutting another part of the logo, pouring another color, etc. It feels a little silly to spend so much of my year on this one project, but I’ll keep going as long as I’m enjoying it.

Our bedroom furniture is a mishmash of stuff we had before we were married and while it still works fine, there’s not a lot of rhyme or reason to the setup. For example, somehow during those endless nights with Elijah as a baby, we ended up with a foldable TV tray table serving as Tyla’s nightstand. After ~11 years of this, I figured it was time to do something about it.

I landed on a set of plans from Wood Magazine since I find it significantly easier to work off existing plans than to build from scratch. I knew I wanted to build this out of walnut, but my first hurdle was the cost of the materials. The plans called for less than half a sheet of 3/4″ plywood and it needed to be good quality on both sides. A sheet of walnut plywood is not cheap and while I could theoretically buy half a sheet, the markup for having them only sell me a half almost makes it not worth it. I ended up buying a full sheet and made plans for what to do with the leftovers. (Stay tuned… hopefully that next project won’t take 11 years.)

The build itself was straightforward. The plans were ok but they’re very basic. There’s not much joinery. Everything is just a set of panels and pieces that get combined with biscuits. I was ok with the simpler build, but I wasn’t crazy about the biscuits. They’re great and I use them on various projects, but it felt like the glue up would be very complicated since the pieces could still slide laterally. I ended up doing everything with dowels instead and that worked out very well. I was able to dry assemble everything and then the glue-up was straightforward. But before the glue-up, I prefinished everything with General Finishes Arm-R-Seal Oil Based Topcoat in semi-gloss.

In keeping with the nature of the simple design, the drawer just sits in the opening, and it is a bit of a loose fit. It’s fine for a nightstand but that could be an area for improvement if you’re using the same plans.

I dream of replacing all the furniture in our house with stuff I’ve made, but at this rate I think I’d have to outlive Methusaleh.

I don’t remember how long ago it was, but many years back I built a custom silverware organizer to fit inside of our drawer. I did it in solid walnut and box-jointed the edges. It has worked well and it makes me happy every time I grab a utensil.

Fast forward to more recent times and we bought new silverware. We went through a lot of options before finally landing on this set and everything was great about it except that the knives were just a tad bit too long for the organizer.

After just ignoring it for too long, I finally took action. The organizer originally had dadoes to hold all the slots in place but thankfully I hadn’t glued those in place. I took out the dividers, sort of filled in some of the dadoes as best I could, made new dividers that were the right size, and then glued and nailed them into place. It was a bit tricky to align everything without the dadoes and there were some mistakes that make me question how long this will stay together, but so far so good! I just repeated the original finish of rattle can lacquer.

I was approached a few weeks back by a girl at church asking if I could make a sign for a kids craft fair/bake sale that she was entering. She quickly drew a picture of the logo she and her friend had designed. I’m frustrated that I can’t find the original drawing, but I took what she had and made a vector version of it on the computer. I actually started with Copilot to generate some similar ideas and then I combined all the ideas in Inkscape.

I ended up making two identical signs using round, pine blanks from Home Depot. I sprayed them with shellac and then covered them with Oramask the girls wanted to paint them after I was done.

The girls did a nice job painting the signs and it sounds like their bake sale was a hit! After learning a bit more, it sounds like lots of market setups have one day a year where the booths are run by kids. If you have a crafty kid, check for options in your area!

This is the third sign I’ve done on these round Home Depot blanks. They are a great size and relatively inexpensive so they’re a good option, but if you have a good source for other 3/4-1″ thick blanks in different shapes, please let me know. It would be fun to give people options of other shapes too.

We generally use the entry door from the garage but there’s no easy place to hang up coats near that door. After more than 10 years of living in the house, I finally bought a cheap coat rack and screwed it to the wall. It worked but I wanted something a bit nicer.

While the design is almost exactly what you’ll see from many internet shops, the advantage of building it myself is that I can make it fit our space perfectly. For example, when the door opens, it hits the door stop just before it hits the wood. I was also able to put the mounts on the back directly in line with the studs but still have the shelf be centered in the wall.

The project went together very quickly. The white part is poplar with some rattle can white paint and then the top is walnut with David Picciuto’s experimental finish. On the back, I routed an insert for some metal keyhole hangers. The project was quick but it made use of a bunch of previous Christmas and birthday gifts such as dividers, self-centering drill bits, and plug cutters.

We’ve always had a photo hanging on that wall (a sunset from Camp Ticawa) and I can’t decide if it fits with the new coat rack. Perhaps a different frame would look better or maybe I need to move it completely.

I was happy that the rack installed level without any drama. I used a laser to make sure everything was aligned. Now we’ll see how it holds up to a school year full of heavy book bags!