Studio711.com – Ben Martens

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!

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?”

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.