Studio711.com – Ben Martens

One challenge with woodworking projects is figuring how to make the best use of the wood you have available. If you’re working with expensive wood, your decisions can have a dramatic impact on the total cost of your project. I did some quick searching around and found a few solutions, but my favorite (free) one so far is the Free Online Panel Cut Optimizer.

For the Adirondack chair project, I thought it took two 2″x6″x8′ boards and four 2″x8″x8′ boards. Using this tool, I got it down to three 2″x6″x8′ and two 2″x8″x8′. That drops the price by about 20-25%!

The downside is that the cuts aren’t as simple to make. The way I had it originally drawn, I cross cut the wood and then ripped it to the right width. This more efficient use of the wood requires more strategic cuts, but if it saves enough money, it’s worth the effort.

Back in November of 2006, I got my first miter saw. DougS found it at a garage sale for me. It was a 10″ Delta and it served me very well, especially considering that I only paid a few bucks for it. Aside from the fact that I needed to sharpen the blade, the only thing that really bugged me about it was the small size. I couldn’t cut through a 4×4 or a 2×8. I use 2×8’s a lot in my projects so that means making a cut, flipping it over, cutting again, and then going over to the table saw with the cross cut sled to get a clean cut. That’s three cuts where I should have one. After months of hemming and hawing, I finally pulled the trigger on a new saw: the Ridgid 10″ sliding double bevel miter saw.

My search originally started with 12″ sliding saws and for a long time, I was saving up for the DeWalt. More recently, I gave the 12″ Ridgid a serious look and was very impressed, especially considering that it was $200 less. The drawback was the size. 12″ sliding miter saws are huge and the Ridgid was significantly bigger than the DeWalt.

Looking around at various reviews, lots of wood magazines targeted at the amateur and semi-pro woodworker did 10″ sliding miter saw reviews. Why were 12″ reviews so hard to find? I ran across one article which talked about the advantages of the 10″: lighter, smaller size, and the blades are a little cheaper. And it turns out that unless you’re doing big crown molding, you probably won’t care too much about the difference in capacity. For example, when cutting at a 90 degree angle, both the 10″ and 12″ can cut 4x4s and 2x12s. At a 45 degree miter cut, the 12″ can cut a little more (2×10 vs 2×8), but that’s about the only major difference in the cutting specs. The smaller size seemed like a positive tradeoff.

I would have jumped on the 10″ at that point, especially since it won a lot of those woodworking magazine shootouts, but it was exactly the same price as the 12″. Huh!? It took me a while to weed through the specs but I finally figured out that the 10″ has a few extra features compared to the 12″. There is a laser system that people say is actually somewhat useful, an LED light that illuminates your cutting area, and most importantly for me, a soft start system. On my old saw, I’d hit the button to turn on the blade and the instant 100% power surge would often jerk the saw around a bit and the wood would move. The soft start system spins up the blade a bit more slowly so it’s a very smooth operation.

I haven’t done a lot of serious work with this yet, but so far I’m in heaven. I was tempted to wait for this saw to go on sale (it was a Black Friday deal in the past), but eventually I decided that I wanted to be done researching and I wanted to start using it. Now that I have it, I wish I had bought it a long time ago!

I’ve been talking about building an Adirondack chair for so long that it’s embarrassing. It’s been at least four years if not more. There always seemed to be other projects that were more pressing, and my excuse was that I still didn’t know exactly how I wanted to build it. Over the years, I sat in a lot of chairs trying to figure out what makes a comfortable Adirondack chair and I finally decided that a contoured seat makes a huge difference. Unfortunately that also ups the difficulty of the build and gave me another reason to put it off.

Finally I stumbled across some plans from Woodworkers Journal that looked like just what I wanted. Even better, they had done a refresher of the plans complete with a 15 minute video series showing all the steps. Bingo.

A couple weekends ago, I headed to Home Depot and picked up a bunch of cedar boards. The plans say pine but I decided to go with cedar as it seemed like something that would stand up to the weather better (not sure if that’s true.) Instead of trying to find the minimum sized boards that I needed, I bought a few bigger 8″ wide boards with the intention of trimming them down to size. The cost was about the same and it was a lot easier to find bigger boards without warping or cupping.

While I’ve done a lot of wood projects over the years, this is the most complicated plan I’ve ever followed and easily the nicest looking piece of furniture I’ve ever attempted. There were a couple new skills involved in the project. One was template routing. I spent a lot of time drawing out all the different pieces onto 1/4″ plywood and then I cut them out with a jigsaw and sanded them to perfect shape. To make the actual cedar pieces, I used double sided tape to stick the template onto the cedar and then used a flush trim bit in the router table. The top of the bit is a bearing that rides along the template and then underneath it’s cutting away the cedar allowing me to perfectly replicate the shape of the template on the cedar. Pretty cool!

The second new skill was cutting a taper into the back slats. I haven’t yet built a really nice tapering jig, but I was able to throw one together with some hold down clamps. It wasn’t pretty but it did the job well and gave me repeatable cuts at the right angle.

I was surprised at how well the whole thing went together. The only real hiccup was the upper back frame (part H) came out about an inch too narrow. It didn’t cover the entire top of the back legs. I checked my measurements over and over against the plans, couldn’t find the problem, and finally just cut a new piece that was a little wider. I don’t understand how there could be a bug in the plans after they made the video and didn’t catch it, but whatever. This works and it looks good.

There are a few things that look a little off if you are paying attention, but hey, most of the time you’re sitting in this chair you’ll be drinking a beer in the sun. It’s plenty good for that and very comfortable. Mission accomplished!

I still need to figure out how I’m going to finish this (or if I’ll just leave it bare). After that, the next step is to redo it all over again so that we have two. It should go MUCH faster this time since I already have all the templates. Plus, I feel confident that I can cut all the pieces first and then assemble them. The plan is very forgiving about pieces being off by an 1/8″ here or there and not having a huge effect on the outcome (for the most part.)

We have a bunch of boxes for the various sizes of plastic bags, ceran wrap, aluminum foil etc. They used to reside in a drawer but that drawer got taken over with safe toys for Elijah so he has something to pull out and mess around with. That moved all of our boxes to the top shelf in the pantry and it was difficult to find the one you wanted. We also ended up buying more when we already had some that were just too hard to find.

Tyla flipped around on Pinterest a bit and quickly found some ideas to solve this problem. I looked at the ideas and said “I could build that.” So then I kind of had to back it up. Luckily it’s a super simple project. Basically I just built what look like magazine boxes (open, sloped top) and screwed them to the wall.

While it’s a simple project, it’s incredibly convenient. I made six of them to hold the various types of bags and wraps. They work great! Some day I might paint them white but more likely they’ll probably just remain as-is.

For Elijah’s Christmas gift, I decided to build him a table and a couple chairs. The actual construction was pretty straightforward. I headed to one of my favorite woodworking sites: Ana White’s site. From there I pulled up the “Clara Table” and the “Four Dollar Stackable Chairs“. The total cost of the pine for two chairs and the table was less than $30. Hard to beat! I had them built pretty quickly.

The problem came when I tried to finish them. We decided to paint them with leftover white and blue paint that we had tine the garage. The painting was fine but I wanted to put a hard finish on them since he’ll be abusing them and eating off the table. I have always turned to polyurethane tin the past, but it failed me miserably on the table top. There were huge blemishes in the finish.Thankfully the table top is built out of solid pine boards so I was able to sand it down without worrying about damaging something like plywood. And sand it I did. I sanded it down FIVE TIMES. It took a couple weeks as I experimented with different finishes. (Special thanks to John F for giving me some tips.) I tried a bunch of different things but everything dried tacky or had terrible brush marks. I ended up with a coat of shellac to cover the latex paint and then four coats of spray lacquer. That has been holding up pretty well but for some reason, some of his wooden toys do feel like they stick a bit to the surface if they are left there for a couple days. I don’t understand what causes it.
This project took way more time than I thought it would, but I learned a lot (spray lacquer rocks!) and I smile every time I see Elijah use his table. Totally worth it.

I have a small work area, but I’ve often wished that I had a table I could walk around for easier assembly of projects. I’ve also felt like I should have an outfeed table for the table saw to aid in cutting large pieces of wood. I was able to accomplish both with a single project. The plans come from the November issue of Family Handyman (an excellent magazine!) It’s built out of a single 3/4” piece of plywood so it’s pretty economical. And the plans are cleverly made so that you can cut the plywood into three 32” strips. I had that done right at Home Depot so it was easy to get home and maneuver around on the table saw. Obviously a bigger table would be nice but this has already come in very handy!

I also attempted to make this into a downdraft table (think of an air hockey table in reverse.) it would help catch dust particles from sanding, etc. There are a little over one hunded 5/16” holes in the top (that adds up to the 2.5” hose size). I drilled a hole in the side for the shop vac, but it probably should have gone in the bottom. It turns out not to matter because the shop vac doesn’t move enough air to make this very useful. If I can find an old furnace motor I might try to hook that up. It wasn’t a big loss though. The modifications to the plans were minor to try this. The top was already a box to make it easier to clamp things to the surface.

I’ve been on a mission to get more dust into my shop vac and out of my garage. Previous projects have left a lot of dust on everything. The table saw is a pretty big culprit. I came up with a very simple solution. I cut a few pieces of 1/4” MDF and made a wedge-shaped box under the table saw. It’s all held together with tape until I’m convinced it works and then I’ll glue/screw it together. So far so good. I can use this without a shop vac attached and most of it stays in the box or I can use the shop vac while I’m cutting. A lot of dust still escapes upward from the blade but catching that requires a much more involved system. This is a good solution using parts that were already in my garage.