Studio711.com – Ben Martens

For about the last ten years, I’ve saved bottle caps from most of the beers that I’ve opened. I have… a lot of them. I always knew there would be a project with them at some point, but what? I like the idea of covering a coffee table, but I don’t really want a coffee table in the man cave. And I like the idea of doing a big mosaic but I don’t think I have enough of each color to do anything very impressive. Then I got the idea to do a map. There are lots of cool bottle cap maps around, so this isn’t anything original, but I made the state of Washington with bottle caps. The wood is just simple 1×4 pine and I covered it with some stain that I then sanded down to look a little distressed. This was a very Pinterest-y project.

Along the way, I thought about doing the United States and having bottle caps on the map from where the brewery was located, and I thought about doing something similar for Washington, but in the end, the placement was mostly random. There are a couple bottle caps specifically placed where the brewery is located but I’ll let you find those Easter Eggs on your own if you want to.

I got my first table saw about 3 years ago. I liked it because it was a good price and it was fun to use one of Tim’s dad’s tools. Over the years I got it dialed in and built a nicer stand for it, but at it’s core, it was still a contractor saw. You can read about the differences between contractor, hybrid and cabinet saws but the main points are accuracy and power. If you’re out on a job site ripping down plywood, it’s fine if all your cuts are within 1/8″ and you’re just cutting thin boards. And I made a LOT of projects that I’m very proud of using this simple saw. But now I’m itching for something safer and more accurate.

As part of our finances, Tyla and I give ourselves an allowance every month. I saved my pennies for a long time and my original plan was to buy a CNC machine. But around that time, I got cold feet on the CNC purchase and was really feeling like I wanted a better table saw. So I started researching table saws and landed on a Grizzly G1023RLW. Here are the things I like about the saw:

1. It’s a 3hp 240v motor. I can’t find reliable numbers for my old saw but I think it’s either 0.75hp or 1hp. I can’t count the times when I’ve been making a cut and the motor has either bogged down or the blade has stopped. That’s horribly unsafe and made me pee my pants every time. It happens more often now that I’ve started working with thicker hardwoods.
2. It has a riving knife and a blade guard. These features in addition to the increased power should make the new saw immensely safer. Have you ever seen kickback happen? Scary.
3. It’s a full-blown cabinet saw which means I can perfectly align the table top, the blade and the fence to all be exactly square with each other. This not only increases accuracy but it can improve safety too.
4. Theoretically it will offer me better dust collection but I don’t have a system powerful enough to move that much air yet.
5. It has a built-in router table. I love the space-saving aspects of it but I’m not sure how it will compare to my dedicated bench-top router table now. I expect actual aligning and cutting aspects to be similar to what I used before but the dust collection will be worse. I’m willing to make that tradeoff to save some space and if I decide not to use it in the future, there’s no big loss other than the small additional cost.

Because this sucker weighs in at 550 pounds, it’s expensive to ship. By the time I pay a freight company with liftgate service (to get it from the truck bed down to street level), it was going to be about $240. Thankfully one of Grizzly’s two showrooms is only 1.5 hours from here. So I’ll be driving up to Bellingham to get it and then I’ll be suckering a couple friends into helping me get it out of my truck and into the garage.

You may have heard about a company called SawStop. They have a patent on technology that instantly stops the blade if it contacts your skin. The demo videos are incredible, and given that table saws are the most common source of shop injuries, it’s a good place to make an investment. I strongly considered buying one, but in the end, I couldn’t justify more than double the price of the Grizzly for a tool that I only use lightly as a hobby. It’s a beautiful saw and if I cut my fingers off I’ll regret this choice, but I’m willing to accept the risk.

In the end, I’m buying an expensive tool that is way more than I need and it’s just for a hobby. This is clearly a luxury purchase. I’m thankful that I can have it and I’m excited to start shortening some boards with it! This could be the last table saw that I ever buy it might also be the most expensive tool that I ever buy.

(And by the way, I’ll be selling my old saw and router table if you’re interested…)

Elijah is getting interested in how things grow and we’ve talked about having a garden, so this year we decided to go for it. I thought it would be fun to start plants from seeds inside. We have a great bay window in the front room which would be a perfect spot, but we just had a cardboard box sitting there with one plant on it. It was time for an upgrade.

I bought some mahogany mostly because I had never worked with it before (aside from a cutting board project) and it seemed like a good excuse to try it out. I learned that mahogany creates incredibly fine dust! EVERYWHERE. But overall it wasn’t nice to work with.

My original plan involved using floating tenons for the first time. You cut a mortise into each board and then make a tenon by itself and glue it into each side. It’s kind of like an elongated dowel. But alas, I could never get my test pieces to go very well and I eventually tabled the idea for later use. Since I had already cut the pieces to length for that joinery method, the only real solution was pocket holes. I felt totally ridiculous using pocket holes on a nice hardwood, but oh well, it worked and it was easy.

Once I made that change, everything went together quickly. I used a teak oil finish which was new for me. It wiped on easily and I put a few coats on in hopes of protecting it just a little from spilled water and the sun. I still think that in a few years we’re going have obvious fade marks where the plants sit.

The end result looks nice and aside from my joinery skills fail, I’m happy with how it turned out. It’s plenty big enough to hold lots of plants and it’s short enough that ELijah can easily see it and help out with the watering.

Tyla found some big wooden blocks and thought it might be fun for Elijah’s Christmas list. I balked at the $130 price tag and said “That’s ridiculous. I could build that for $30.” I now suspect that I fell right into her trap. Well played.

I found a “unit block” standard size of wood blocks that dates back to the early 1900s. That seemed good enough for me. As that Wikipedia link will tell you, “A unit block is 5.5 inches long, 2.75 inches wide, and 1.375 inches thick.” I used that as my base and made a couple variations on that block size. Figuring out how much wood to buy turned into a bit of a mind bender, but I ended up with the following block dimensions: 4x2x1, 2x2x2, 2x2x1 and 8x2x1 (where 1 = 1.375″).

I wanted to use cheap wood but I decided to get poplar from the wood dealer instead of using pine from Home Depot. The prices are about the same, but the poplar is a lot more stable than the wet/warped pine boards at Home Depot. I bought a lot of 6/4 (1.5″ thick) wood for most of the blocks and then a couple feet of 12/4 (3″ thick) for the cubes.

After doing this project, I actually recommend it if you are just getting started with milling your own lumber. Getting all of the blocks to be exactly the same size is a great challenge.

That part went pretty quickly and then it was a LOT of time at the sander. I already have 80 grit paper for my stationary belt sander, but I also picked up 150 grit. That sped up the process quite a bit.

If I ever do this again, I’ll do a couple things differently:

• If I was really shooting for those exact final dimensions as specified in the standard, I should have made the blocks SLIGHTLY thicker when I was cutting them to account for the losses during sanding. Poplar is pretty soft wood so it sands easily.
• I ran everything through a round over bit between cutting the blocks and sanding them. That was a waste of time as the sanding removed most of the roundover. I should have either just done it by hand with the sander or maybe used the roundover bit at the very end (with more touchup sanding on the edges after the router bit was done.)

Because I cut things a little too closely when trying to figure out which boards would give me the least amount of waste, I didn’t end up with as many blocks as I planned, but Elijah couldn’t care less. He loves these and they’ve been getting regular use.

After the success with my first attempts at cutting boards from David Picciuto’s book, I decided to try again. This time I went with the plans for a butcher block design. You can make some really interesting designs and the result has the end grain facing up so it’s kind to your knives. I used walnut, maple and mahogany for this one. The plans were easy to follow and now that I have the hang of it, I think I have a better idea of how to manipulate the design from the start.

My first project from David Picciuto’s new cutting board book (look for my name in the Acknowledgements section!) was a pair of cutting boards that are designed for sushi. I chose them because they look nice and I could build them with wood that I already had on hand.

As with all things I made, the two boards are not identical. Everything is unique because I like to screw up in unique ways every time. They look great though and I think they would work well as a simple serving platter. These two ended up as Christmas gifts.

The piece of walnut is thicker than the pieces of maple and the walnut forms the feet. I flipped one of the boards over in the photo to show that.

Tyla brought a wooden star home from a store but she didn’t really like that it had lights in the middle. It cost $35 and I still had some leftover wood from Don’s old fence sitting in my wood pile so I decided to take a crack at it.

It took a LOT of trial and error and math to get the jigs all set at the right angles, but it came out well. The joints aren’t super strong but they are held together with glue and a LOT of pin nails. I had enough wood to make two. Tyla got one and I sent the other one to Mom.

If you’re looking to build something similar, Rogue Engineer has a good post that helped me out even though I took a different approach.

I made Mom a bandsaw box for her birthday earlier this year, and I thought it would be fun to try another one for her Christmas gift.

This box, like the last one, came from David Picciuto‘s bandsaw box book. I found this one quite a bit easier than the last one and I think it looks a lot better. I attribute that to having slightly more experience and a couple tips that I got from David over email about how to make smooth curves on the bandsaw.

I don’t have a good picture of it, but when this was all done, I took it to the laser cutter at work and engraved the date on the bottom of one of the feet.