Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Elijah is getting interested in how things grow and we’ve talked about having a garden, so this year we decided to go for it. I thought it would be fun to start plants from seeds inside. We have a great bay window in the front room which would be a perfect spot, but we just had a cardboard box sitting there with one plant on it. It was time for an upgrade.

I bought some mahogany mostly because I had never worked with it before (aside from a cutting board project) and it seemed like a good excuse to try it out. I learned that mahogany creates incredibly fine dust! EVERYWHERE. But overall it wasn’t nice to work with.

My original plan involved using floating tenons for the first time. You cut a mortise into each board and then make a tenon by itself and glue it into each side. It’s kind of like an elongated dowel. But alas, I could never get my test pieces to go very well and I eventually tabled the idea for later use. Since I had already cut the pieces to length for that joinery method, the only real solution was pocket holes. I felt totally ridiculous using pocket holes on a nice hardwood, but oh well, it worked and it was easy.

Once I made that change, everything went together quickly. I used a teak oil finish which was new for me. It wiped on easily and I put a few coats on in hopes of protecting it just a little from spilled water and the sun. I still think that in a few years we’re going have obvious fade marks where the plants sit.

The end result looks nice and aside from my joinery skills fail, I’m happy with how it turned out. It’s plenty big enough to hold lots of plants and it’s short enough that ELijah can easily see it and help out with the watering.

Tyla found some big wooden blocks and thought it might be fun for Elijah’s Christmas list. I balked at the $130 price tag and said “That’s ridiculous. I could build that for $30.” I now suspect that I fell right into her trap. Well played.

I found a “unit block” standard size of wood blocks that dates back to the early 1900s. That seemed good enough for me. As that Wikipedia link will tell you, “A unit block is 5.5 inches long, 2.75 inches wide, and 1.375 inches thick.” I used that as my base and made a couple variations on that block size. Figuring out how much wood to buy turned into a bit of a mind bender, but I ended up with the following block dimensions: 4x2x1, 2x2x2, 2x2x1 and 8x2x1 (where 1 = 1.375″).

I wanted to use cheap wood but I decided to get poplar from the wood dealer instead of using pine from Home Depot. The prices are about the same, but the poplar is a lot more stable than the wet/warped pine boards at Home Depot. I bought a lot of 6/4 (1.5″ thick) wood for most of the blocks and then a couple feet of 12/4 (3″ thick) for the cubes.

After doing this project, I actually recommend it if you are just getting started with milling your own lumber. Getting all of the blocks to be exactly the same size is a great challenge.

That part went pretty quickly and then it was a LOT of time at the sander. I already have 80 grit paper for my stationary belt sander, but I also picked up 150 grit. That sped up the process quite a bit.

If I ever do this again, I’ll do a couple things differently:

• If I was really shooting for those exact final dimensions as specified in the standard, I should have made the blocks SLIGHTLY thicker when I was cutting them to account for the losses during sanding. Poplar is pretty soft wood so it sands easily.
• I ran everything through a round over bit between cutting the blocks and sanding them. That was a waste of time as the sanding removed most of the roundover. I should have either just done it by hand with the sander or maybe used the roundover bit at the very end (with more touchup sanding on the edges after the router bit was done.)

Because I cut things a little too closely when trying to figure out which boards would give me the least amount of waste, I didn’t end up with as many blocks as I planned, but Elijah couldn’t care less. He loves these and they’ve been getting regular use.

After the success with my first attempts at cutting boards from David Picciuto’s book, I decided to try again. This time I went with the plans for a butcher block design. You can make some really interesting designs and the result has the end grain facing up so it’s kind to your knives. I used walnut, maple and mahogany for this one. The plans were easy to follow and now that I have the hang of it, I think I have a better idea of how to manipulate the design from the start.

My first project from David Picciuto’s new cutting board book (look for my name in the Acknowledgements section!) was a pair of cutting boards that are designed for sushi. I chose them because they look nice and I could build them with wood that I already had on hand.

As with all things I made, the two boards are not identical. Everything is unique because I like to screw up in unique ways every time. They look great though and I think they would work well as a simple serving platter. These two ended up as Christmas gifts.

The piece of walnut is thicker than the pieces of maple and the walnut forms the feet. I flipped one of the boards over in the photo to show that.

Tyla brought a wooden star home from a store but she didn’t really like that it had lights in the middle. It cost $35 and I still had some leftover wood from Don’s old fence sitting in my wood pile so I decided to take a crack at it.

It took a LOT of trial and error and math to get the jigs all set at the right angles, but it came out well. The joints aren’t super strong but they are held together with glue and a LOT of pin nails. I had enough wood to make two. Tyla got one and I sent the other one to Mom.

If you’re looking to build something similar, Rogue Engineer has a good post that helped me out even though I took a different approach.

I made Mom a bandsaw box for her birthday earlier this year, and I thought it would be fun to try another one for her Christmas gift.

This box, like the last one, came from David Picciuto‘s bandsaw box book. I found this one quite a bit easier than the last one and I think it looks a lot better. I attribute that to having slightly more experience and a couple tips that I got from David over email about how to make smooth curves on the bandsaw.

I don’t have a good picture of it, but when this was all done, I took it to the laser cutter at work and engraved the date on the bottom of one of the feet.

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!