Woodworking

Garage Cabinets

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.

benmartens September 9, 2016 Home Improvement, Woodworking

Garage Fridge Shelves

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.

benmartens August 22, 2016 Maker, Woodworking

Garage Sign

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.

benmartens July 25, 2016 Maker, Woodworking

Router Table Cart

I bought a router table a while back but I’ve never had a good place to use it. I kept it along the wall in the garage and when I wanted to use it, I had to drag it out and either use it on the floor or put it on a folding table. It was worth it for big projects but for small things I often skipped it. Now that I have more space in the shop area, I decided to build a cart to give the router a more permanent home and give me some additional storage space. It’s just a simple cabinet on wheels with two drawers but I’m excited to have it completed, and it was wonderful to just drive to Home Depot and throw a couple sheets of plywood in the truck!

benmartens July 20, 2016 Maker, Woodworking

Garage Changes

One side effect of buying the truck is that we now have more room in the garage. The truck doesn’t even come close to fitting in the garage (too wide, too long and maybe too tall.) I quickly took advantage of this to get more storage room and more shop room. Here’s what it used to look like when I had one bay combined for storage, toys and the shop.

The first step was moving the main storage shelves across to the other wall. It was pretty easy except I had to re-cut the bottoms of the posts because the floor slopes out to the garage doors and I was effectively reversing the shelves. Those shelves were one of the first projects that I did in the house. I built them using little more than a circular saw and a drill. You can get a long way with those two tools!

That gave me about 2 or 3 more feet along the wall in the third bay. I was able to convert that area into a pure shop area. All toys and storage happen on the other side of the garage. It will take a while to figure out how I want to arrange everything, but I think I’ll have the table saw near the garage door. That will allow me to easily open up the garage door and feed in extra long boards as needed. The bandsaw fits nicely to the right of the table saw. I can overlap/combine the “dead” areas of both tools.

The next thing I’m going to build is a small cabinet for my router table and then I’m going to build a combination assembly/outfeed table. I’m thinking it will be about 4 feet square. It will be a nice place to work on projects and will also give me a nice place to slide wood onto after finishing cuts on the table saw. After that I will probably fill up the blank wall with cabinets.

It’s so exciting to have an area I can really devote to a shop instead of stepping over and around boxes and toys! Below are photos of the current state. It will look a lot nicer in the near future.

benmartens July 12, 2016 Woodworking

Hand Hold

The door to our garage has a spring in the hinge so it closes automatically. That’s generally handy but I’m waiting for it to smash Elijah’s hand. He has to hold onto the door frame to step down. So to help keep all his fingers attached, I pulled out some scrap wood and built a little hand hold for him. It was a one night project using an old broom stick as the round piece to grip and so far it’s working out really well.

benmartens June 29, 2016 Maker, Woodworking

Mallets

After a couple failed projects, I was looking for a quick win and decided to make some wooden mallets. They’re handy for assembly wood parts. The big wood face is gentler on your project than a standard hammer. There are a lot of different ways to approach the project, but I chose to use Jay Bates’s laminated method.

First I had to choose some wood. When we got married, Tyla already had an old, beat up oak dining table. She always dreamed of refinishing it, but last summer we agreed it was better to just get rid of it instead of continuing to store it. I salvaged quite a bit of wood from it. It has just been sitting in the side of the garage and I decided to make use of it. I grabbed one leaf and rain it through the planer to get all the old finish off of it. It cleaned up nicely.

After that the rest was pretty simple. The head is built from three layers of wood with the middle layer being chopped in half to make a hole for the handle. The handle is tapered so it slides into the hole and sticks there. When finished, the handle can be detached from the mallet by just pounding it through. There’s not much too it but I think it will come in handy.

I made two thinking that I’d probably screw one up, but both came out reasonably nice so I gave one to Tim since we were heading to his house for dinner that night.

benmartens June 27, 2016 Maker, Woodworking

Cribbage Board

Dad and I enjoy playing cribbage when we’re together so I thought that a cribbage board would be a fun project and a good gift.

Since I have access to the laser cutter, I had dreams of creating a board with a very custom shape and design, but I never really liked the way they looked and decided to settle on the classic track design. That also made my life a lot easier because drawing out a crazy curved shape with three tracks of equally spaced dots is not a simple math challenge!

I experimented a lot with the laser cutter to determine the kerf of the laser (how much wood does the laser remove) so that I could get the inlay as close to perfect as possible. There’s still a little room for improvement but it came out very nicely. I only used the laser cutter to cut out the inlay track and the piece that it fits into. The track is a piece of bubinga that I found in a “sold by the weight” scrap bin the wood store and the body of the board is cherry.

On the back of the board, I routered out a holder for the pegs (which I purchased from Amazon) and then did a sliding dovetail door to cover up the pegs. The door has a little message engraved on the inside of it. There’s a small magnet to help keep it latched, and I drilled a finger hole through the door so you can grip it to move it in and out. That door design is largely based on the way Grandpa Martens made the board that he made for me.

The final step was cutting all the holes. I had spent a ton of time getting the laser cut pattern to excatly match the metal hole guide that I purchased. So after everything was glued up, I very carefully taped the metal guide into place and drilled all the holes on the drill press. I’m glad I went with that guide instead of trying to do something like using the laser to mark the spots. The holes came out perfectly straight and perfectly spaced. I don’t think I could have achieved that without a guide.

The finish was a three part mix of boiled linseed oil, wipe on polyurethane and mineral spirits. I applied it four times with a one day dry time and a light sanding with a synthetic abrasive pad in between each coat.

Happy Father’s Day, Dad!

benmartens June 20, 2016 Woodworking

Train Track Fail

I’ve had a lot of projects go really well lately, but there’s one that has continued to haunt me and I’m officially tossing the idea. I give up.

Tyla found some motorized Thomas the Tank Engine trains for Elijah. They aren’t the size of the standard wood tracks, but they do make plastic tracks. I thought it would be fun to make my own tracks because then we could have whatever pieces we wanted and it could exactly fit on his play table.

The first few attempts involved etching the wood repeatedly to burn in the tracks. I tried multiple times and finally got the interlocking knobs to fit properly, the curves to be big enough that the train could make the turn, and the rails to be the right width. The problem was that they were never deep enough to hold the train in place. When you’re etching wood, you can only take so much off at a time before it starts the wood on fire, so these attemps amounted to hours and hours in front of the laser cutter watching it slowly take away material. Here’s one of my best attempts with that method. It was rare for a train to make an entire circuit around the track without falling off and I eventually tossed these in the trash.

I gave up for a couple months and then had the idea that maybe I was approaching the problem backward. Instead of trying a reductive process of burning away material, why not do an additive process? I cut one piece that formed the bottom of the track segment and then the top segment was made of three pieces: the middle and then the two outer edges. The “rails” were left blank on that top piece. So the whole segment was two thicknesses high but the rails were only one thickness high. These were very quick to cut and it didn’t take too long to glue everything together. I thought for sure this would work but… the bottom of the train drags on the middle piece and the wheels can’t get to the bottom of the groove to push the train along. Fail. In the trash it goes.

If I spent enough time I could probably figure out the right way to do this, but this project has ceased to be fun and if I decide that I really want Elijah to have tracks, I’ll spend the $26 on Amazon so he can have tracks that actually work.

It wasn’t a complete bust because I learned a lot about the laser cutter and fine tuning designs, but it stinks that I don’t have anything physically complete to show for all that time.

benmartens June 14, 2016 Maker, Woodworking

Post It Holder

Our process for getting things done at work involves a lot of sticky notes. The person who has the office closest to the tracking board inevitably ends up with a huge pile of Post It Notes in their office. I decided it would be more handy to have them right on the wall next to the board so I grabbed a scrap piece of maple and set to work. I had a stack of post it notes on hand and kind of planned the design as I went. It’s held onto the wall with a French cleat and to hide that, I etched the Microsoft logo into some maple veneer.

benmartens June 13, 2016 Maker, Woodworking

Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Just trying to get through life without looking stupid, so far it's not going very well.