Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Woodworking

Laser Cutter Marquetry Butterfly

Search for “marquetry” images and you’ll be blown away at the art form of combining small pieces of wood to make amazing pictures. I’ve been intrigued by this, but I’m a nerd so I did it on a laser cutter. I thought it would be way easier and it probably was…. but it was still a challenge.

A while back, David Picciuto from Make Something sent me a box of small wood scraps. There were a lot of very interesting species in there, but they were so tiny it was hard to think of something to do with them. (Kinda makes sense why he would give it away, huh?) Then I hit upon the marquetry idea.

A butterfly seemed like a good first attempt so I found an image online that was close to what I had in my head and then tweaked it and made it into a laser cutter file. I spent many hours tweaking my design with test cuts at the laser cutter to get it as intricate as possible without making pieces so small that the kerf of the laser would totally obliterate the tiny piece.

In the end, I combined coconut palm, walnut, maple, purple heart and a couple other woods that I don’t know the names of to make the butterfly you see below. It’s pretty fragile, especially the antennae, but it at least held together long enough to take a photo. The dark outer wood is the coconut palm. In addition to the top border that you see, I also cut a solid bottom piece that everything glues on to.

This one is a Christmas gift for Mom. Merry Christmas!

benmartens December 26, 2017 Maker, Woodworking

Wooden Semi Lowboy and Dump Trailers

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!

benmartens December 4, 2017 Woodworking

New Jointer Blades

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.

benmartens October 27, 2017 Woodworking

Closet Storage

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.

benmartens October 12, 2017 Woodworking

Fort Wilderness

My parents jokingly refer to their house as “Fort Wilderness”. I didn’t appreciate it growing up as much as I do now. When I made those two signs for Don and Dean, I also made one for my parents and delivered it on our recent trip. These are fun to make but I’m more excited to do them after I get a CNC. That will remove a lot of the stress of making them.

benmartens September 7, 2017 Woodworking

Storage Closet Cleanup

We have a fairly big closet at the top of our stairs that holds a bunch of stuff that doesn’t otherwise have a home: sleeping bags, board games, wrapping paper, vacuum cleaner, folding chairs, etc. It’s a mess. That’s not terrible except that we have to leave the door open because it is also the closet where I had the electrician run all my network jacks. That closet has a whole bunch of networking gear and two computers that are on 24/7. It gets way too hot if the door is closed. Some day I might build a ventilation system in there, but regardless of whether I do that, I knew I needed to build some storage that was better than our old wire frame shelves.To kick things off, I cleaned out the closet, took down the wire shelves and then patched all the old screw holes from those shelves. I even sprayed on some new wall texture to hide the patches. I had a leftover half gallon of the same brown color that is used in many other places in our house and it was the perfect amount to paint the closet.

The real improvement will come from some new storage cabinets, but first I needed a solution for the mess of computer wires. It had to just sit on the floor while I was painting and I needed it out of the way for the cabinet project. So the first build in this project was a very simple set of shelves to hold the computers, routers, battery backups and other miscellaneous gear. The shelves were a quick one day build (with Elijah helping) out of a sheet of 3/4″ plywood, some poplar to hide the exposed plywood edges on the front, and a bunch of pocket screws.
It’s not fancy, but the bulk of this will be hidden by the new closets along the same side wall anyway. And for me, this is glorious. It’s going to be so much easier to diagnose problems and I finally have all of the network jacks in our entire house connected at the same time. Nerdvana.

Now it’s time to build some big cabinets…

benmartens September 5, 2017 Geek, Home Improvement, Woodworking

Wood Sign

Router-carved signs are a common sight at fairs or even in pop up shops at the mall. I’ve been watching a bunch of Dave Rhoten’s videos on YouTube and finally I decided it was time to try it for myself. I purchased a Dewalt DWP611 along with two special router bits and a nice base plate from Dave’s store.

I bought 1×8 select pine from Home Depot (mostly knot free) and put on a couple coats of shellac. Then I used the laser cutter at work to draw the letters that I wanted to cut. That made the layout portion of the project very easy!

The next step was the most time consuming. I used a very narrow V-bit to carefully cut around the outside of every letter. Then I put in a bigger 90 degree V-bit to draw the big cloud around the outside and cut out everything between the cloud edge and the edge of the letters.

After a little cleanup with some chisels to remove any remaining high spots, I covered the whole piece in black spray paint. When it was dry, I sanded the top which removed the paint from the letters and the part outside the cloud leaving the indented part black. The shellac coating helped to keep the paint from bleeding too deep into the wood on the parts where I didn’t want it to stick.

Finally I used my keyhole bit to cut a slot in the back for a screw or nail so it could be easily hung on the wall.

This was a gift for Don’s brother and his wife in Montana as a thank you for letting us stay with them. And since I was making one, I decided to make two and give one to Don as well. It’s a fun and relatively quick project, but it takes patience!

benmartens August 18, 2017 Maker, Woodworking

Happy Birthday Tyla!

Happy birthday Tyla! On Saturday she chose to spend some time down by the river in Monroe, Sunday afternoon was spent eating fried chicken with her family and playing board games, and then tonight we are going out for Thai food. That should do a pretty good job at filling up her love cup.

I was happy to finally share a project I made a few weeks back. I laser cut a tree out of a piece of cherry plywood and then dug a mortise out of a block of walnut to hold the tree. The idea is that this can sit on her dresser and hold small jewelry. I used a random scrap of walnut and it had some beautiful grain in it that was perfect for this project.

I didn’t invent this so if you’re interested you can see lots of variations of this idea on Etsy and various craft sites.

benmartens August 8, 2017 Family, Maker, Woodworking

Cutting Board

Cutting boards are a staple of many woodworkers, but I’ve only made a few and they were all gifts. I decided it was time to have one in our house, and instead of waiting to make “the perfect cutting board”, I just grabbed some scraps and threw one together. I’m really happy with the end result! It’s made of walnut, cherry and maple and then a bunch of mineral oil. I had originally intended it to be longer but there was a void in the walnut when I cut it to size. So instead of filling with epoxy or something like that, I just kept cutting shorter until I got past the void.

benmartens July 17, 2017 Woodworking

Laser Cut Decorations

If you talk to Elijah, the first thing you’ll probably hear is that he is four now. For his birthday, Tyla came up with the idea of a Winnie the Pooh theme because that’s pretty much the only thing that Elijah watches or listens to these days. He had a Tigger shirt, a cake with all the characters on it and decorations around the house. Thanks to Tyla for putting that all together!

She also had the idea of having him hold a large 4 and posing for some pictures. Instead of buying one, I decided to cut it out on the laser. I did two of them with the top one also having his name cut out. I painted the top piece yellow, painted the bottom piece black, and then glued them together. The hardest part of the idea was getting a four year old to smile and look at the camera!

benmartens June 29, 2017 Family, Maker, Woodworking