Tyla got an espresso machine for her birthday and there are quite a few little pieces that go along with the process. I’ve had some random pieces of purpleheart wood laying around so I decided to make her a small box to hold all the little parts. The sides are walnut and I used a box joint jig for the corners. The bottom and inlay are purpleheart. A few quick sprays of lacquer finished the project off.
I’ve been working on Christmas gifts for various people for the last couple months. I’ve enjoyed the projects, but it has been killing me to not share these with you! I’ll start with the biggest project first: Elijah’s dump truck.
Last year I built Elijah a front end loader for Christmas. I decided to follow it up this year with a dump truck from the same series of plans. I ordered the kit which contained the wheels, axles and the hardware but everything else came out of a couple maple and walnut boards. The plans for this project could have been better, but I was eventually able to get it all put together and I’m really happy with the end result!
I’m loving the outfeed/assembly table that i built a while back. I don’t take great care to keep it nice. It’s a work surface. When it gets too bad to use, I can just screw off the top piece, flip it over and screw it back down. That being said, there are some really messy activities where I do still put down paper.
We have a 4 foot long roll of brown paper that gets used both in the shop and for Elijah’s craft projects. It doesn’t have a good home so it usually ends up in a corner of the house or in a closet. I’ve seen various YouTube woodworkers mount it to their assembly table. Tim was over at the house for an afternoon so we decided to give this project a shot.
We made a quick run to Home Depot for some 1/2″ threaded rod. That’s what supports the heavy roll. The interior hole is only about 3/4″ so I needed something thin and strong. We cut out a couple holders for the rod just using some scrap 3/4″ plywood. Those got screwed onto the sides of the table and the project was done! It’s one of those projects where I think “Why didn’t I do that months ago?”
Elijah still loves to ride around on his little John Deere tractor. A few weeks ago, he asked me to help him hook up one of his other toys to the back so he could pull it around. I quickly fashioned something out of wire and he got a kick out of that but I knew we could do better.
When I had the week off for Thanksgiving, we headed to Home Depot to pick up some lawnmower wheels and a couple pieces of hardware and then went into the shop together to build a better trailer for his tractor. We got started and then while he was sleeping that night, I got most of the rest of it figured out. I left one or two cuts on every tool that we were going to use so he’d get to experience them all. It took us about an hour to finish it all up but he stayed engaged the entire time. The only hiccup came when he put one of the nuts on his finger and couldn’t get it off. I had to butter up his finger to pull it off.
The final result looks pretty good and gets lots of using hauling toys around the house. I doubt this will be the last project we do together!
In case you’re wondering, the nuts on the end of the axle are held on with thread locker (blue) to keep them from spinning off when the wheels turn.
I made Dad a new sign for his garage this summer and decided that he needed one more for his birthday.
Dad has a 1954 Allis Chalmers WD 45 tractor. It came with the house and he has done a lot of work on it to keep it running faithfully for the last 32 years. It gets a lot of use in the winter because that’s how he keeps our 1/4 mile driveway plowed in the winter. Elijah LOVES that tractor and named it Otis after one of the book series that he likes.
I found a good picture online of that same tractor and spent a bunch of time drawing it. There are some tools in Inkscape that help to trace the lines of the image based on color and edge detection, but it still results in a lot of manual work to clean it up and reshape the mistakes. Once I had the image file, it was just a matter of cutting it/engraving it out on the laser cutter.
I tried to make a totally different design than the first sign. This one is pretty simple looking but I think it came out nice. Now that I have the vector file of this drawing saved on my computer, I might revisit this one again in the future. I’m thinking about making something for Elijah’s room so that he and Papa can have similar signs hanging up.
We removed a couple small cherry trees along our driveway that were dying off. I saved some of the chunks of the bigger trunk in hopes that I could get a couple usable boards out of it. It will be way more work than just buying cherry boards, but it would be kind of neat to have something from a tree that grew in our yard. I watch lots of home milling on YouTube (especially Matt Cremona) but those are almost always bigger trees. I don’t really know how it translates to these smaller logs and I didn’t take the time to do a ton of research.
The logs were just a tad bit too tall for my bandsaw to handle so we sliced them up a bit with the chainsaw. Then I ran them through the bandsaw making ~2″ slabs. Those boards are now sitting in my shed with spacers between each one to allow for airflow. The goal is to get them to dry out as evenly as possible to avoid massive warping or cracking. I could have left them as a full log, but that generally leads to some pretty big cracks as the stresses in the wood are relieved. I don’t really know which way would work better, but a large part of this project is just about learning for myself.
I won’t know for quite a while (a year or two?) how well this worked. I have a moisture meter and it says the wood is at 36% right now. Professionally dried wood that has acclimated to my shop is closer to 10%. Once it’s dry enough, I’ll use my tools to mill them into nice square/flat boards and take out any of the warping that occurred while drying.
When I push wood off the end of my table saw, it just falls over the end, or if I’m not too lazy, I get out my new roller stands to catch the wood. It’s not the safest setup. I also lack a nice big area to build stuff so I end up building on the floor a lot. It was time for a change.
Enter the dual purpose outfeed/assembly table. I built it all out of a couple sheets of 3/4″ plywood. It’s about 1/8″ lower than my table saw to easily catch wood without getting caught up. I routed some channels into it that align with the miter slots on the table saw so that jigs and such have a place to go as I push them through the saw.
It’s also a great place to assemble projects. It’s on nice caster wheels so I can pull it out if needed or even roll it outside to use as a painting surface. The top is two layers of plywood. The top is meant to be unscrewed and flipped over or replaced every once in a while as it gets cut up or if it gets wet and the plywood delaminates.
The only additional thing I have in mind for it right now is a dispenser for a big roll of brown paper. It would go right along one of the side rails and easily pull across the table. I don’t need to keep the table pristine, but sometimes it’s nice to have easy cleanup.
It’s pretty big (4×4) partially because that was a convenient size to use up the plywood, but also because I’m hoping to buy a CNC machine next year. The one I have my eye on is about 1 meter by 1 meter. I think I’ll be able to fit it on the bottom shelf of this table and pull it out when I use it (or just use it down there if I don’t have a bunch of monkeying around to do.)
I’ve really been pounding out these bigger projects. They were queued up waiting for me to get a truck so that it was easier to buy plywood. I’ve just about burned through that list and now it’s time to get to some smaller projects again.
The shelves next to our garage fridge have been working well so it was time to work on using the space above the fridge for more storage. I looked at a bunch of different designs but eventually decided to see if I could build “real” cabinets.
To kick it off, I built some simple boxes using pocket holes. Since this was just being used in the garage, I wasn’t too concerned about having those pocket holes showing. Obviously for something nicer you’d want a different type of joinery. The dimensions are 24″ wide, 30″ high and 24″ deep. That’s a lot deeper than a standard cabinet but it works fine in this location.
To mount it to the wall, I went with a french cleat system. This let me easily hang them on the wall and get them positioned the way I wanted them. After they were in place, I did add some screws into the studs but those really aren’t necessary. I was able to hang from the edge of the cabinets with them just sitting in the french cleat.
This was the first time I had ever built a face frame and doors. I’m really happy I went for it because it turned these quick and dirty cabinets into something that looks respectable. I just used a bunch of scrap 2x4s to do it but it turned out great. I picked up some cheap self-closing hinges and handles from Amazon to complete the doors.
I’m extremely happy with how these turned out. They are a great place to store our extra stash of paper towels, toilets paper and other random bulky supplies. And since they have doors, I don’t have to worry about them getting all dusty. I want to start doing more stuff with doors in the garage to make it at least appear to be a little more tidy.
Chris and Nikki replaced the fridge in their house when they moved in so they were looking to get rid of the one that was in the house. (They already had another fridge in their garage.) This was right after I had gotten the truck so picking up their fridge seemed like a good excuse to take a drive.
It has been sitting in our garage unplugged since then, but now that I’ve got the garage more arranged, it was time to find a home for the fridge. I tore down the shelves and coat rack that I had built near the door. That was one of the first projects I built after moving into this house. It was done with a miter saw, circular saw and a drill. You don’t need much to get started building stuff!
The fridge went up against that wall and I decided to build two vertical shelves to go on each side. They’re pretty simple construction. I used 3/4″ plywood and used my router with a straight edge and a 3/4″ bit to cut dadoes to hold the shelves. I cut the dadoes before cutting the board into two pieces for each side of hte shelves. That guaranteed that the shelves would be perfectly flat. After that I glued everything together and nailed it in place. They aren’t fancy but they should work well. The next step will be building cabinets to go along the wall above the fridge.
My parents have been building a fantastic new garage at their house. I thought it would look good with a new sign in it. I found some inspiration online, drew it in Inkscape and then took it to the laser cutter at work. The sign is made out of two sheets of 1/4″ MDF. The bottom is just a circle and the top has all the shapes cut out of it. I also cut the white portions out of 1/8″ plywood and put that under each of the white pieces. That gave it a raised look which I really like. After I got it all done, I realized I probably should have put “Martens Garage” instead of just my Dad’s name because Mom uses it for her project too but, oh well. Maybe I’ll have to come up with something else that has Mom’s name on it.
