Studio711.com – Ben Martens

I got a set of cheap chisels and a block plane from Home Depot a few years ago. There are times when they come in super handy, but how do I sharpen them? If you search online, there are a bazillion different options and each one is a bit of an investment. I wanted something that I couldn’t screw up and was quick to use without much cleanup. I ended up buying the Work Sharp WS3000.

The basic kit comes with two glass plates and four different abrasive levels. The abrasive sheets adhere to the glass so you can pick the right one and flip it to the correct side. My chisels were in rough shape but in less than half an hour, I had flatted the backs, and established both a bevel and a micro bevel. Brilliant! I’m so excited to finally start using my hand tools more.

Fear of sharpening was a major reason why I haven’t invested in a bigger plane yet. Maybe a jack plane will find it’s way into my shop.

Up in the man cave, there is a couch with a recliner beside it and the recliner is at an angle to the couch. We have a set of cheapo folding food table things that sits in the gap between the chairs but it doesn’t look very nice. Almost exactly one year ago, David Picciuto made a table to fit a similar spot in his house and I finally got around to making my own version.

Most of this project will be hidden between the sofa and the recliner so I spent all of the funds for this project on the top. I bought a big chunk of 6/4 walnut and glued three pieces of it together to get a slab that was wide enough for the table. I carefully cut the appropriate wedge shape out of the slab and then built a simple plywood box for the base. The top is just held in place by gravity and a few cleats on the bottom so that it doesn’t slide around. You can lift off the top and get to some storage and the other feature of the base is that it has a built-in outlet and dual 2 amp USB chargers built into the back.

The base got painted black and the top was finished with teax oil and then covered in Briwax. Needless to say, this looks MUCH nicer than what we had there before! The downside is that now I feel the need to use a coaster. Hmm… Anyway, this went well so I’m going to make a similar table for spot between the couch and the wall. This one will just be a simple rectangle top though so that should make things a little simpler.

I remember Dad telling stories about how he wasn’t allowed to get a drum set when he was growing up. And then when I was growing up, I remember Mom and Rachel telling him to stop drumming his fingers on his desk downstairs because it made too much noise. This poor man deserves a drum!

Steve Ramsey posted a couple videos about making cajons. (Is the plural of that “cajones”?) I chose to make his bongo cajon version. It seemed like a simple project, but as usual, I was amazed at how many ways I found to screw it up. Woodworking really is about starting your project and then figuring out how to fix all the mistakes you make along the way.

It was fun to be able to pick pretty much any wood that I wanted for the main body of the drum. I walked around Crosscut Hardwoods for a while and ended up buying some sapele. That seemed like more fun to work with than the 1/2″ plywood that Steve used in his version. The top required 1/8th plywood and since I didn’t want to pay bunch of money for a full size fancy sheet from Crosscut, I got a really cheap piece from Home Depot instead. It doesn’t have quite the tone to it that I was hoping for, but I think it will still be a fun gift.

Merry Christmas Dad!

The last two Christmases, I’ve built Elijah toys from the Wood Magazine construction series. 2015 was the front end loader and 2016 was the dump truck. He plays with them a lot so I decided to go for it again. A few months ago, I showed him all the toys and asked which ones he liked. Of course his favorite was probably the biggest build: a tractor with a dump trailer and a lowboy trailer. I supposed I could have just done a single trailer, but eh, why not go for it all?

If you’ve been following my woodworking Instagram account (@martenswoodworks), then you know this project has taken me quite a while. It kicked off on November 1 and I finished it almost exactly one month later. The instructions were pretty good although there are two fairly big flaws with the plans:

1. There are multiple locations where they tell you to cut pieces to size and then glue them up. It’s impossible to glue two pieces that are perfectly aligned. Instead, leave them cut a little bigger and then cut the whole block to size after you get it glued up.
2. There are little fender pieces that get glued on the front and back of the truck. They are supposed to have head and tail lights drilled into them but they tell you to do it after you get it on the truck. That’s a recipe for frustration. Instead, do the drilling before you glue them on.

Luckily for me, those flaws (at least in my book) are part of the entire series so I knew to keep my eye open for them going into the project. The whole thing went pretty smoothly without any major disasters. I felt like it went a little faster than previous projects because this time I got a whole bunch of boards milled to all the various thicknesses that I needed before I started building.

The dump trailer added a new twist since it incorporated PVC. It was a little tricky getting the wood glued to the PVC without too much glue squeeze out, but hopefully it worked well and will stay together.

These toys feel more fragile than the previous ones I’ve built, but I guess it anything breaks, it’s not like I can’t repair it. I figure I’ll do a pass on all of the toys after he gets older and is ready to put them on a shelf or in a box (in which case I’d probably put them on MY shelf.)

Obviously, please don’t say anything about this to Elijah. He’ll be unwrapping these for Christmas, but I’m so excited to have them done that I had to show you!

The jointer in my shop is a 6″ benchtop model that was made 10 years ago. I’m guessing that I’m the fourth person to own it and I have a suspicion that the blades have never been changed. It has been working fine for me and I didn’t know any better.

However, during the storage closet cabinet project, I ran the painted doors over the jointer to try and trim them down just a bit so they would close better. That put a HUGE dull spot/divot in my blades.

A quick visit to Amazon revealed that I could get new blades for $15. Sold!

I watched a few videos about jointer blade installation using various gizmos (or eyeballing it, etc) so I was a little nervous that I was about to embark on a soul-sucking endeavor. Thankfully it only took me an hour and I could probably do it in half that next time. I just followed the instructions in the manual and purposely didn’t use a dial indicator or any other precise measurement tool. Instead I went with the “If it looks straight, it is straight” approach. Why? Well before I took out the old blades, I checked to see how well they were adjusted. They were terrible and I had never noticed. The new blades were calibrated way better than that so I was already at a net gain for something I didn’t know I needed.

Comparing the old blades to the new blades is like comparing a butter knife to a steak knife. I should have done this long ago. The jointer feels like it has so much more power now and boards glide over the blades much easier.

Over a month ago, I started tackling the storage closet upstairs. I removed the wire shelves, patched the walls, painted, and made a simple tower to hold all the computer and network gear. The next step was building cabinets.

Cabinets aren’t usually a great choice for a closet since you lose the space where the doors have to swing open, but I wanted to go for it here because we always leave the door to that closet open. The computers generate a lot of heat and there isn’t any cooling system in place other than the open door.

I really don’t like projects that require me to go in and out of the house 100 times so I decided to build the cabinets in the garage. I designed them so I could assemble and paint everything in the garage, and then disassemble it to the point where it would fit through the doorways.

This is the first time I’ve really tried to make cabinets. There were a ton of mistakes but in the end, it looks pretty good and it will meet our needs. It’s difficult to take a picture of a closet, but here is one attempt:

As I mentioned, there were a lot of snags in the project. These were the biggest ones:

1. The cabinets are built out of 3/4″ plywood with poplar along the edges. I completely miscalculated how much poplar I needed which meant a second trip down to Crosscut. It’s about 30-40 minutes each way and Saturday is the only day they are open when I’m not at work.
2. Despite measuring a dozen times and carefully planning it all out, the cabinets were too deep and covered up the light switch. I was able to cut out a bit of the face frame so you can reach in to hit the switch. It’s ridiculous but it’s really isn’t that big of a deal. It will just make me feel dumb forever.
3. I didn’t think to use special cabinet door hinges until the complete end of the project. I spent hours upon hours getting the doors to align and making sure they all closed smoothly with a fairly consistent gap between them. At the end, it dawned on me that cabinet hinges have an adjustment built in so that you can fine tune after everything is assembled. Why didn’t I think of that before?

These are all good lessons learned because I think there are a couple more projects like this coming along.