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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
WiFi Password
Now that we have a house with a dedicated guest room, I thought it would be nice to put a little sign in there that has the guest WiFi network and password. When I took my last trip to the laser cutter at work, I brought along a scrap piece of cherry and etched it right in. It’s a good reminder that projects don’t have to be complicated to be fun.
Zero Clearance Insert
A year ago, I made a new table saw insert so I could use a dado stack safely. As soon as I finished that and realized how easy it was, I thought that I should make another one for use with a regular blade. I thought that pretty much every time I used my table saw for the next year. I finally spent an hour and built another one. It’s ridiculous how long that took because I’ve already benefited greatly from it. If you have a table saw, this is a great project and a very easy upgrade. They give you cleaner cuts since your wood is supported all the way up to the blade, and it’s also safer to cut thin strips because you don’t have to worry about them falling down next to the blade.
Shed
Our house came with a small Rubbermaid shed in the backyard. It’s a handy place to keep stuff like the lawn mower, but it rapdily gathered so much stuff that it was hard to even pull the lawnmower out.
Last week I decided it was time to build some organization. Thankfully, that turned out to be a very quick and relatively cheap project. The whole thing was built with about 25 2x4s and a bunch of scrap plywood that I already had.
I started out with Sketchup to figure out how I would get all the big items to fit in there. I measured the interior dimensions of the shed and also the dimensions of the mower, the wheelbarrow, etc. It was very helpful to figure this all out on the computer instead of doing it on the fly.
The plan was to build an “attic” and two shelves as well as some places to hang tools along the wall. Floor space is really valuable and I can pretty much fill it up with the mower, generator, wheelbarrow, ladder and cornhole boards. Everything else needs to be off the ground.
I moved all of the contents out onto the patio and covered them with a tarp (which Elijah thought was very interesting.) Then it only took about 4 hours of work to build everything inside. After doing a bunch of nicer woodworking projects, it was kind of relaxing to frame the project out with 2x4s. I covered the shelves with scrap pieces of plywood and before I knew it, the project was done.
Everything fits in there very nicely now and I no longer dread opening the doors to get something out. I still have plenty of empty space that I can use now too.
Toy Shelf
Many months ago, Tyla shared an idea to have some shelves in the family room to hold Elijah’s toys. It would not only be a place to store things, but also a place to rotate different toys on display to encourage Elijah to play on his own. I kept finding excuses to do other things but finally I decided to give it a go.
I started with a drawing in Sketchup to get an idea of the spacing and also make sure that Tyla was on board with the design. The whole structure ended up being 7 feet long. I’ve learned that big projects are a bit tough to deal with in the garage, but this was an easy one, right?
I ran into quite a few problems when building these. I did the initial glueup wrong and had to rip the nails out before the glue dried to start over. The edge banding didn’t stick nicely in all the areas. And I miscalculated and made the drawers 1/2″ too wide. But that’s part of the fun of woodworking. Nothing goes perfectly, at least in my workshop, and I’m presented with lots of opportunities to find interesting solutions. One of my favorite YouTube woodworkers is Steve Ramsey and when he has a major screwup, he makes the fix and says that it’s now “EXTRA FANCY!” These shelves are definitely extra fancy, but you know what? They work. Elijah is just going to beat them up anyway. I’m not building an heirloom. I’m building a toy shelf that we’ll throw in a bonfire after he’s older and we want something else there instead.
The bottom two drawers are only half as deep as the opening. Ever since we moved in, we’ve had a cardboard box covering up a bunch of ugly wires and a battery backup for the TV. I designed a void behind the drawers where I can hide all that stuff and there is also a space for a bunch of cables to run the length of the shelves back to the plugs. The top of the unit still fits snugly against the wall so all that is finally hidden.
Given the size of the project, I wanted to try spraying them. I even borrowed Don’s paint sprayer, but when I finally got around to spraying, the air was full of seeds and pollen. I ended up just taking the time to brush and roll it all, sanding between coats.
Now it’s on to the next project… it will definitely be something smaller!
Drawer Slides
In some past woodworking projects, I avoided using real drawer slides because they add so much cost to the project. Amazon to the rescue! There’s a line of slides from Gliderite Hardware that is very affordable. Depending on the size of your drawer and the quantity that you order, you can get a pair of drawer slides for $3-7. They are full extension slides which mean that you can pull the drawer all the way out of the cabinet and you can also upgrade to soft close drawers to make sure tiny fingers don’t get pinched.