Several years ago, while taking a class at the William Ng School, my buddy Treefrog and I decided to take a tour of the Greene & Greene-designed home known as the Gamble House in Pasadena. It was a transformative experience to say the least. Witnessing first-hand the level of care and detail given to such a massive project changed the way I look at the craft of woodworking forever. The experience of touring the Gamble House is a little bitter sweet though because you can’t take pictures and you can’t touch more than the stairway hand rail, for good reason.

So when I had a chance to tour another Greene & Greene home with very few limitations in terms of access, I jumped at the chance. I met up with Darrell Peart at the Thorsen House in Berkeley, CA for another life-changing Greene & Greene experience. While the Thorsen House isn’t given white glove treatment like the Gamble House, there is no shortage of design inspiration and beauty within. Darrell took us on a tour and I had the good fortune of filming the entire experience.

As craftspeople, we find our own personal inspiration in a variety of people, places, and things. Perhaps it’s a trip to a museum, or maybe a craft show. Maybe it’s an online video series or a class you took at a woodworking school. Or maybe it’s something as simple as being able to build a utility item for a family in need. Wherever it comes from, I hope you are able to recognize that inspiration when it crosses your path, capture it, and never forget it. After all, in today’s world, we need to hang on to inspiration for the all too frequent “rainy days.”

So I’m curious, where do you get your woodworking inspiration from?

And if you’re interested in signing up for our newsletter, you can do so here:

Since I posted my last shop tour I have moved shops twice. I left the garage shop almost a year ago for 1100 sq ft of commercial bliss, or so I thought. After getting moved in and working in there for 6 months I realized that there was just not enough room to complete some larger projects, or a few small ones for that matter. I started looking for a new space and stumbled quickly upon my current shop. It is 1800 sq ft with 16′ ceilings and a 12′ by 12′ overhead door. So let the moving process begin…again. Thanks to the help of family and friends, two of which are WTO members, CT Proctor and Duckkisser, the move went off without a hitch. The shop is primarily set up for furniture and cabinet making. There are 2 cabinet saws, the Saw Stop is for general use and the Unisaw is dedicated for dados. The rest is all pretty standard with an 8″ Delta jointer, 13″ planer, 2 router tables and a Jet shaper, Rikon bandsaw and a Porter Cable pocket hole machine. In the back of the shop is an Italian made coral spray booth accompanied by 2 air assisted airless sprayers, one for pigmented lacquer and one for clear finishes.

My focus when setting up this shop was to have as much open floor space as possible while maintaining an efficient work flow. I hope you all enjoy.

The only router I use for a dedicated task is my small trim router. I keep a little 1/8″ roundover bit in there since that’s something I need to use on just about every project as I ease the sharp edges and give it a finished look. It’s nice to know that the router is already set up and ready to roll at a moment’s notice.

So how about you. Do you have any dedicated router setups?

This poll was created by Tom Iovino of TomsWorkbench.com.

The house is currently owned by the Sigma Phi Society of California and is a California historic landmark. While the house looks great in video, it is actually in need of repair and restoration. Leading the restoration effort are the Friends of the Thorsen House. Curious what needs fixing? Check out the list! If you would like to donate to help support the restoration effort, you can do so here.

I’d like to thank Darrell Peart for giving us the tour and the Friends of the Thorsen House allowing me to film on location.

The video gives you an extensive tour of the interior and exterior of the home, but here are a few images for you to enjoy as well:

About 4 years ago, maybe longer, I saw a show on TV–one of those non-network stations–where a woodworker made a piece of furniture that looked nothing like the “Norm”. In fact, the show made the execution appear simple, elegant, and mindless. I immediately wanted to make the coffee table. Alas, I lived in a 1850s era home that was in constant need of TLC and all spare time was dedicated to repair and maintenance.

Just under 2 years ago my wife and I moved to the country, to a 150 year younger home. I suddenly realized that I had time to build something superfluous (well by my previous standards). I started looking around for projects and advice on the internet and stumbled upon “The Wood Whisperer”. As a side note, its a great site, maybe you’ve heard of it, if not, it’s worth checking out. This site had a ton of links to David Marks’ website which, at the time still had links to the DIY network clips.

I realized David Marks was the woodworker I had seen on TV. His approach seemed simple and straight forward: mill, bandsaw, rout, sand, glue, and finish. With all those jigs he used, how could one go wrong? David made it seem as if the project practically built itself.

Before I could blink, all the Woodworks’ videos were removed from the internet, but at least I could still look through DJM’s website at the finished project photos. I found the photos of his Contemporary Cocktail Table and loved it! I taught myself the steps by reading (TWW site and FWW), listening to podcasts and watching videos. Well, that and constant home repair helps to familiarize one with tools.

Armed with a bit of knowledge, DJM’s awesome project and Sketch-up, I jumped right in. This is my first piece of fine furniture. It took almost 3 weeks to build plus sketch-up planning. I did the rough milling at a friend’s house and the band-saw and router work in my basement. The legs and aprons are cherry. The edges of the rough board went to the legs (rift) and the rest went to the aprons. The joinery is hand cut mortise and tenons. The top is 3 pieces of lacewood veneer. The back side is cherry veneer. I edge banded the top with thin strips of Wenge cut on the table saw and mitered on my chop saw. I sanded to 320 and finished with a 1/1/1 oil, mineral spirits and varnish basement blend.

The Table was presented to my sister as a house warming gift and she loved it! Now that the whole family has seen it…well let’s just say the requests are still coming in.

I sure have learned a lot. A lot more than expected! As can be seen in some of the photos:
1) Always glue up the legs before chisel work for the top begins. I had blow out on one corner of a leg where the inset is because the grain was unsupported.
2) The inside shaping of the legs should have started 2/3 the way up instead of only 1/2 way up for more elegant curves.
3) Veneers are impossibly thin and leave nothing to sand. I just barely exposed the plywood substrate on one corner and was unable to completely flatten/clean up the veneered top.
4) Sap wood – Come on man! Always popping up where I didn’t expect it. There must be an art to board selection that only experience brings.
4) What the heck is up with snipe? Getting rid of it is the equivalent to snipe hunting in boy scouts. I wasted a ton of time futzing and in the end had nothing to show for it. I learned to make my pieces longer than needed and just cut the snipe off.

Thanks for all the information. I couldn’t have done this without the online community!

I have no intention of forcing my son to enjoy woodworking, but if he wants to go that route I’ll be happy to help him along. So far, the signs are positive. More than any room in the house, the boy absolutely LOVES being in the shop. Of course the shop isn’t exactly safe for a little guy so we spend most of our time chasing him down and making sure he doesn’t hurt himself. So far, the biggest hazard in the shop is the grit in the epoxy floor.

So here’s a fun little “slice of life” video of my boy enjoying a day of work in the shop.

A few months ago I decided to build our family of 5 a new dining table with reference to the Ana White’s Farmhouse Table plans. We knew we wanted to make the table out of some red oak that I had gotten for free, so I intended to deviate from the plans a bit. Long story short, I deviated from the plans quite a bit. The plan was to make the table essentially with free materials I was given when I began woodworking last year, but that changed when I spent several days squaring up the rough stock and realized with the tools I had, I would be squaring stock for weeks!

The first major mistake I made: jointing a crowned plank in the center of the table-top…whoops! After gluing, Kreg jig screwing, and sanding, I realized there would be no way to get the crown out of the top. So…the first table-top became the bench seat and the other half is going to be used for a computer desk in another room. After a trip to the local lumber yard, I had about $220 worth of red oak: Four 1x4x14ft planks for the legs and Seven 1x6x6ft planks for the table top.

I began by cutting the 14′ 1×4′s to length and then jointing them with lots of glue and clamps to form the legs. Next I set up the table saw to notch out the tops of the legs to receive the box. I prefer this method over using a circular saw or jig-saw as indicated in the plans. My wood-chisel cleaned things up and then I sanded, scraped using a card scraper after following Marc’s podcast on sharpening them, applied two coats of stain, and finished with two coats of wipe-on poly.

I followed Ana’s plans to construct the 2×4 base, modifying it to fit the size of my table and the specific overhang I sought. I also simply used 2×4 scraps to span the width of the box, and then Kreg jigged them to the box and table-top for support. I jointed the table-top planks using a Kreg Jig and glue. Lots of sanding and scraping again, and then I flipped the top, attached the box, and attached the legs. I used more of the 1×4′s for the skirts to hide the 2×4 box.

We decided we also wanted a built-in bench for storage instead of a free standing one to accompany the table. I followed the plan at the following site, modifying it as necessary to match the length of our table. I only built the bench and not the wall unit (http://www.thisoldhouse.com/toh/how-to/intro/0,,20301255,00.html). My mistake with the first table-top ended up being a blessing of sorts when we were looking for a sturdy bench-top.

All in all, we love it! It took a good deal of time to finish the table in part because I’m a horrible perfectionist and I’m fairly new to woodworking. The bench, on the other hand, was finished in a day.

The table is constructed entirely out of red oak and measures 6′x38.5″. The bench-top is also red oak. The bench is birch plywood and pine.

On future projects, I’d like to try mortise and tenon joinery to be truer to the Arts & Crafts movement and style. Total cost for table: $220 for wood; we already had all other supplies. Bench: $25; again, we already had most of the materials needed.

I thought the style of the custom leaded glass panel my wife designed and made would be complemented by a Greene & Greene style frame. I have framed many of her pieces and designed them to be hung in a window. This time I wanted to do something a little different and designed the piece to act as a divider between our entryway and dining room.

I made this hanging room divider from genuine mahogany. The finish is a mixture of sedona red and rich mahogany oil based stain topped with three coats of oil/varnish blend hand rubbed in. The hanging hardware is forged from 3/8″ bar stock, it is twisted in the center and a hook formed at each end. The eye hooks attached to the frame and ceiling support were formed around a 3/4″ pipe and welded closed. 16GA copper wire was wrapped around the bar and tarnished green with patina.

The triple relief in the ceiling piece was inspired by a detail from the Thorsen House dining room as shown in Darrel Peart’s book and the hidden mitered mortise & tenon corners came from Tage Frid. The pillowed buttons are made from Caco de Negro instead of Ebony.

While I don’t often use paint in my own work, I can certainly respect those who do. So how about you? Do you ever paint your furniture?

History

Over the years, I have tried a few of the common options out there for ductwork including home store HVAC, sewer & drain PVC, and economy snap-lock pipe. Below on the left you can see my old HVAC ductwork system in my first shop in Temecula, CA. I was running a Penn State Tempest cyclone at the time and didn’t have much ground to cover. The ductwork consisted of the 28 gauge snap-lock HVLP dutwork available at the home stores for a very reasonable price. While fairly thin-walled, I didn’t have any issues with the pipe collapsing and the system worked well enough.

After moving to the monster shop in Arizona, I had much more ground to cover and I quickly upgraded to a Clear Vue CV1800. Even back then I considered them to be the best bang for the buck in cyclone dust collection. Most folks who run a Clear Vue utilize 6″ sewer & drain PVC pipe. I found a local source and picked up a bunch of pipe and various fittings. Because the system is PVC, assembling the joints was a piece of cake. Hanging the relatively heavy pipe from a 16 foot high ceiling, however, was a pain in the pooper. In spite of the awkward suspended ductwork and harsh 90 degree angles, the system was serviceable and I had adequate collection at each tool. And no, I did not fear

Fast-forward through several painful shop moves and I finally ended up back in the monster shop, once again challenged with designing a ductwork run that didn’t suck, or actually, on that DOES suck. So I decided to drop a few beans on some better quality metal ductwork from Penn State Industries. I purchase a few boxes of their 26 gauge Economy Snap-Lock Ductwork. Metal ductwork is never quite “fun” and involves self-tapping sheet metal screws, tin snips, aluminum duct tape, and many band-aids. But because the pipe is lighter, it’s much easier to hang. Unfortunately, thanks to my poor design and excessive use of 90 degree angles, the system did not perform well at all. It’s such a bad memory that I don’t even have a picture to share with you. Fortunately, the Dream Shop was in my future and I would have one final chance to do it right.

Doing it Right!

In the new shop, I decided I was done screwing around with ductwork. Not only would I get the stuff that’s incredibly easy to install, I would also enlist the assistance of a professional ductwork designer. Now before you go thinking, “Hey, I can barely afford the ductwork let alone a design service!”, keep in mind that most vendors that sell ductwork will also provide a courtesy design service. I HIGHLY recommend you take advantage of that service and let someone who knows what they are doing help you make the right choices for your shop. Your lungs will thank you.

The ductwork I used is called Nordfab. It’s a smooth-walled pipe that snaps together end to end using their ingenious clamping system. This means the system can be modified, expanded, or reduced in a matter of seconds by simply unclamping various components. When clamped together, the pipes and fittings form an air-tight seal with no interior obstruction. The video shows you how the system works, in detail.

An essential part of this process was planning. In order for the design service to work their magic, they needed a tool layout and floor plan that shows the approximate tool locations as well as their port sizes. Without this information, it’s all just guesswork. So take measurements and sketch it out on paper. If you are so inclined, you should consider mocking up your shop in SketchUp like I did. The design service was actually able to overlay the proposed ductwork layout right into my SketchUp file. Feel free to download and check it out.

Pricing

The one single massive gargantuan drawback to Nordfab ductwork is the price. For all of the things it does well, is it any surprise that it also does an incredibly good job of sucking the money out of your wallet? Here’s a rough run-down of some common metal ductwork prices for the sake of comparison.

5′ section of 26 ga Snaplock Pipe (Oneida) – $19.83
5′ section of 26 ga Snaplock (Penn State Industries via 5-pack) – $16
5′ section of 24 ga Spiral Pipe (Oneida) – $21.32
5′ section of 22 ga Nordfab – $33.80

Of course, the straight pipe is probably the least expensive part of any ductwork setup. There are blast gates, wyes, elbows, and flex pipe to consider, and those tend to hurt the most. Even the cheapest ductwork system is going to be a hefty sum. So when you are ready to get serious about quality integral dust collection, make sure you budget appropriately.

Geeky Side Note

A lot of you were concerned after we moved into the new shop that my videos would be continually plagued by horrible audio due to echoes. As promised, the echo was addressed and this video shows an excellent before and after. Listen to the audio at the beginning and then compare that to the audio at the very end. That’s before and after sound treatment. Just thought some of you might be interested in that.

It’s been almost 30 years since my first wood shop and I’m finally able to have the nice shop that I’ve always dreamed of. The shop is approximately 900 sf and is connected to the back of a large two car garage. The entire building took 1 ½ years to build before I finally put down the hammer and called it complete. I posted some photos on “Wood Talk Forum” as I was building.

I framed it using 2X6 insulated walls with 5/8” drywall that reaches 11’ for plenty of height. I plumbed the garage and shop for compressed air with iron pipe and have a 60 gal compressor in its own room in the garage. The HVAC is a heat pump that is used only for the wood shop area so I can keep working through the winters here in Ohio. There is plenty of lighting throughout the shop which is controlled by 4 switches which allow me to use only what is needed at the time. In the back corner is a room for the future dust collector but for now it acts as a large closet. The 2X5’ windows are high enough to allow plenty of wall space around the perimeter. The floor is plywood screwed to 2X4 treated lumber with hard foam insulation sandwiched between the sleepers. This was well worth the effort and is great on my knees and back when I’m in the shop all day. If interested, I talk about how I installed the floor in another article “How to Install a Plywood Shop Floor.”

I’ve been grateful over the years to be able to save enough money to purchase all the Jet equipment at one time. Once I was ready, I waited for one of Jet’s yearly sales and since I was purchasing multiple items through my local dealer, they gave me additional savings on top. The combined savings allowed me to purchase two additional pieces of equipment for the same amount.

As you can see the walls are bare so I plan on building each cabinet for tools and storage differently, i.e. raised panel or flat panel doors, different hinges etc. This will help me regain my woodworking skills that have gone dormant plus build in ways that are new to me. I built the cabinet for the router table to house all the bits and accessories and this was the first time I sprayed on paint and water based poly so that was a good experience. The drill cabinet was also going to be painted black since I had leftover paint but I like how the door turned out so I wanted to keep it natural looking.

My finishing skills need updating since the only thing I ever sprayed in the past was lacquer and sanding sealers. I had expected almost no overspray when using my HVLP gun but there was enough to land on the surface of my projects so I took the next step and made a portable spray booth. I used (7) 4X8’ foam boards, 5 for the walls and 2 for the ceiling and some 2X4s to help keep it solid in case I accidentally bump the walls. The filters are 16X25” taped together and inset into the foam board. Scrap lumber was used to build a fan box to mount the fan off the floor. The foam pads seal the fan box to the booth once the fan is operating. The entire booth is about 11” thick when all the walls are folded together and is covered in a blanket against the wall in one of the pictures. I may end up only using 3 walls instead of 5, it will all depend on how much space is available once I build an actual bench or two.

The next project will be to build a bench for the miter saw which will store much of my smaller lumber and some lumber racks on the wall above the door and jointer so I can have a place to acclimatize lumber to the shop conditions before I start cutting into them. Then I will build an out-feed table/bench to replace my saw horses.

Each winner will receive a copy of the Greene & Greene Adirondack Chair DVD (a $49.99 value).

One winner will also receive Season 2 of Woodworks starring David J. Marks – This DVD set contains all 13 episodes of the highly acclaimed woodworking television show WoodWorks (Season 2) (a $69.99 value).

One winner will also receive Season 3 of Woodworks starring David J Marks – This DVD set contains all 13 episodes of the highly acclaimed woodworking television show WoodWorks Season 3 (a $69.99 value).

One winner will also receive the Complete Wood Magazine Collection Issues 1-216 in searchable digital format (a $149.95 value)

This dining table is Arts and Crafts Prairie style to mate with a set of 6 dining chairs completed prior and also posted on Marc’s viewer projects. The table is 84″ by 43″ at standard height and seats 6 spaciously with room for at least two more diners. It replaces a smaller round table that matched the Copenhagen style teak buffet in the photo background.

I wanted to keep the buffet so I selected Canarywood for the table top since it has a bold grain and coloring that is complimentary to teak that has aged a bit. I stayed with Cherry for the table frame since it matches the Rodel design chair set and other nearby pieces. I expect the cherry frame to darken with time and improve in contrast to the top relative to the new table photos.

I used 4/4 Canarywood available locally and built up to 8/4 for the breadboard ends and for the tabletop edges to provide the massive look of Prairie style without the weight and expense of thicker material. The breadboard ends were installed with both a long base tenon and six extended tenons using a combination of techniques from Rodel and Garrett Hack. The Wenge plugs cover the screws used to anchor the breadboard to the top tenons. The legs and apron pieces are solid cherry with mortise and tenons that can be disassembled on the long aprons.

The finish is Watco Natural followed by 4 good coats of Minwax Poly wipe-on. I did just a little testing with water and wine drops and this seemed to be the best choice for me for a bit of protection.

I only have a few months under my belt in woodworking. It is something I always wanted to do but the presumed barrier to entry in tool cost kept me out of it. Of course in my head, I needed a “dream shop” full of every large power tool known to man to even consider the prospect of being a woodworker. Once I got that misconception out of my head, I was able to get started with a borrowed table saw and a few hand tools.

I’m sure like other new woodworkers, my first project was a very simple recipe box with mitered joints and I was positive that it was the most perfect recipe box ever made! OK, so it was far from perfect, but making it was enough fun that a new woodworker was born. I just kept expanding on that simple box idea and before I knew it, I was convinced I could build anything I saw. However, despite countless “oh, I could build that” conversations with my fiancé, what I continued to build were little “box-like” projects. The inspiration for this particular project came from a game I bought awhile back for my office called, “Shut the Box”. It was made of cheap materials and not particularly well done, but it looked like it would be fun to make so I gave it a shot.

To start with, the wood used in this project is Bolivian Rosewood and Wenge. I’ve found a big part of the enjoyment in my projects is the wood selection. I like finding interesting wood combinations and with exotic woods a simple clear finish lets the natural color and beauty of the wood speak for itself. Speaking of finishing, I’m even more of a novice at that than I am in basic woodworking (the more I learn the less I know kind of situation), so to keep it simple, I used Lasco semi-gloss aerosol lacquer.

Part of the challenge in a project like this is the assembly order and keeping things straight, more so than the actual cutting and joinery. For example, I used simple miter joinery but if you aren’t paying attention when you make the flippers, the wood grain will not flow together across the individual pieces. Another example would be if you glue in the sides that hold the flipper rod without actually putting in the flipper rod and flippers first, you just did a dumb thing. I may or may not know that from experience! What I am willing to admit from experience is Titebond III glue takes longer than a minute or so to dry. *wink, wink*

In addition to the visible Bolivian Rosewood and Wenge, the bottom that can’t be seen is made from a scrap piece of maple-covered MDF. The bottom side is covered with black felt. The flippers are on a brass rod and are separated by brass washers. The self-adhesive numbers are from a small clock kit. The dice rolling area is covered with kid’s crafting foam (2mm thick). It can be found at any craft store in the kid section. I first used that stuff on a dice tower and it does a great job of softening the sound of dice hitting wood. The dice tower is a pretty cool project too but if you don’t know what that is (most don’t), here is a very short video of a dice tower I made in action:

I suppose this project write up would be lacking without an explanation of how to play “Shut the Box”. The premise of the game is simple, you roll the dice and “shut” out the number you roll or any two numbers that add up to the number you rolled. An example would be if you roll a 5, you can shut out 5, 4+1, or 3+2. The goal is to “shut the box” by closing out all numbers. If you can’t close out all numbers (you roll a number that no combination of remaining numbers adds up to), you add up the numbers left showing for a final score. The lower the score the better.

Because Clear Vue cyclones require some assembly, I thought it would be interesting to show you exactly what’s involved when after the unit arrives at your doorstep.

The cyclone can be installed by one person if required. I know, because I have done it three times. But if you can get help, I highly recommend it. While the cyclone body and blower housing are very light, the motor is incredibly heavy. Lifting the motor overhead onto the wall-mount brackets will test your strength. So I recommend getting some help. Everything else is a simple matter of tightening some bolts, drilling a few screws, and caulking the seams.

For full disclosure, Clear Vue is a sponsor of the show. But if you’ve been following The Wood Whisperer for a while, you know that I’ve been running a Clear Vue cyclone since before The Wood Whisperer ever existed and it’s a product I truly believe in.

And just so you know, Clear Vue is one of the companies that offers a discount to subscribing Guild members. Right now, you can get 5% off along with any website specials they happen to be running. On a big ticket item like this, that can make a big difference. So if you’re interested, Join the Guild today!

We met Brian back in 2010 & with a quick email search found this picture to share. Brian also has a YouTube channel where he shares his passion for segmented wood turning.

Thanks everyone for participating & be sure to check out & enter for the GRR-riper!

Congrats again Brian!

In the video, you’ll see I use a nifty Wall-Mounted First Aid Box that is durable and compact. Perfect for hanging on the shop wall!

Cuts & Lacerations

Various Band-Aids – I like strong heavy duty bandages in a variety of sizes and shapes. Knuckle and finger-tip bandages are a favorite in the shop.
Butterfly Strips and Steri-Strips – Great for holding wounds closed.
Gauze Pads – For larger wounds where a bandaid just won’t do.
Gauze Roll
Tape – Holds gauze pads in place.
CA Glue – Can be used to “stitch” a wound closed.
Quick Clot – Stops bleeding fast!
Antibiotic Ointment – Applied to wounds when they can’t be cleaned thoroughly.

Splinters

Tweezerman Tweezers – Heavy-duty and very sharp tweezers for digging out nasty splinters.
Magnifying Headset – Some splinters are so small that you need magnification to see the details.

Amputation

Tourniquet – For applying pressure at amputation site.
Instant Cold Pack – To keep the amputated part cool.
Zip-Lock Bag – To transport the amputated part.

Eye Injuries

Eyewash Station – A sterile saline solution to help flush debris out of the eye.

Congrats to our winners: Brian, Eric, and Russ!. Emails have been sent to the winners.

If you’ve been watching The Wood Whisperer or reading articles here for a while, you know I’m a fan of the MicroJig GRR-Ripper 3D Push Block. I demonstrated the tool in an older episode called Get a Grip if you want to learn more.

I use the GRR-Ripper at the table saw primarily as it is indispensable for thin rips and other dicey cuts. But the GRR-Ripper also works great at the router table, the jointer, and the bandsaw. So why am I telling you all this? Because MicroJig, a big supporter of Woodworking Safety Day (formerly known as Safety Week), has offered up THREE FREE GRR-Ripper 3D Push Blocks to readers of TheWoodWhisperer.com!

All you need to do is leave a comment on this post telling us your favorite safety tip. Doesn’t have to be something perfectly unique and original. Just tell us something you’ve learned through your experience or research. Something that you think other woodworkers should know. And that’s it! You’ll be entered into the drawing. Winners will be selected Friday morning. Good luck!

First, let me say that I am the LAST person to dictate what someone else does with their blog. It’s really not my business. But when I am sending my readers your way, I do have to review the content to make sure it fits the theme. Oddly enough, this is the first time in five years that I feel a list of requirements is actually necessary. I apologize for not posting this sooner.

In order to be included in the Safety Day links, your post must conform to the following basic guidelines:

• Mention Safety Day. You don’t even have to link back to this site or use our images. Simply inform your readers that it’s Safety Day.
• Publish on or near Safety Day. A post from several weeks or months ago doesn’t qualify.
• Keep it on-topic. Posts that are only tangentially-related to safety don’t qualify.
• Don’t be lazy. You don’t need to write a novel or provide an Oscar-winning performance, but at least put a little effort into it. If you don’t have something interesting or compelling to share, please don’t feel obligated to contribute.

That’s really it. I hope I haven’t offended anyone but this is the first time I have found myself somewhat disappointed in what I’m seeing. I don’t like being in a position where I have to judge the work of others so I am considering NOT doing Safety Day links next year. That way everyone can post simply because they want to post, and not because they want extra traffic.

One surefire way to increase our safety around power tools is to simply increase the distance between our body parts and the sharp blades. Whether it’s a push block, a push paddle, a push stick, or something as fancy as a GRR-Ripper 3D Push Block, something is almost always better than nothing. So we’re curious, what do you use when feeding boards through power tools?

This poll was created by Tom Iovino of TomsWorkbench.com.

Hello and welcome to my workshop. I am 17 and I live in Durban, South Africa. I starting building up my workshop when I was seven in a small corner of our garage. In 2009 my late grandfather gave me my standalone workshop as a present, and the rest is history.

My shop measures 272 square feet, and for the moment suits me just right. My large machinery includes a Dewalt radial arm saw, Rockwell 8″ table saw, Ryobi lathe and a Ryobi drill press. I also have a wide variety of hand tools i.e. electric planer, circular saw, sanders, grinders, drills, routers, etc.

Along with woodworking as my hobby, I also collect old woodworking tools, my most prized possession being a original Stewart Spiers Coffin Plane.

In 2010 I started up a small business call Wood-Works and since then it has really grown. I make cheese boards, cutting boards, knife blocks, boxes, and many other novelties. I have recently started building larger furniture and I am loving the experience.

I trust you enjoyed my shop review and I hope that I will inspire many other young people to take up this amazing hobby. Thanks for reading, now go out into your shop and make some sawdust!

This project started as a rectangular Ash coffee table to be given as a wedding present (only a year late–I had to build my workshop first! This is the first project from my new garage workshop). The original plan called for Ash with a walnut spline, but after I cut the dado for the spline and fitted the walnut in, I saw a different design. I decided to angle the walnut to give a spread wing look. The Ash is 1 3/4″ thick and the walnut is 5/8″ thick, so the two woods contrast beautifully in color and size. I routed a V groove in the ash wing to give a feeling of separation and lightness. The dado is 1″ deep, so I used oak dowels to strengthen the glue and to to give a little design to the wings.

I used reclaimed redwood for the legs, which I won’t do again. The wood is much softer than I expected and worried me, in terms of strength. Because of the disparity in size between the walnut and ash I didn’t want to use a full apron with 4 legs, so I made each leg assembly with a separate apron and 2 legs. Each of these are joined to the wings and are joined using pocket holes. I also wanted to make sure that the center was strong enough for someone to sit on, so I added support beams across the bottom that are dadoed into the leg apron. The top is finished with some boiled linseed oil and then several coats of Arm-R-Seal. The legs have many coats of poly.

This poll was created by Tom Iovino of TomsWorkbench.com.

If you aren’t sure but you want to learn more about becoming a subscribing Guild member, check this out.

Sometimes inspiration comes from broken things. My sister gave me the glass from a broken clock and said that she would like to have a lamp like the one she saw in a magazine a while ago. The only condition was that it had to be made out of birch.

After searching for the electrical parts at Home Depot, I found one of these new LED-light bulbs which matched the glass.

Up to the workbench:
First I made the base at the router table. Two stripes of wenge for a decorative touch crossing the center. For the post I made four grooves at the table saw at an 60° angle a little deeper than half the with of the blank. These grooves where filled with strips of wenge. At the lathe I turned it to the round post. The strips of wenge turned out just as amazing as I thought. For the cord I drilled a small hole into the back of the base, reaching the center of the base. After drilling the hole for the bulb fitting, I glued the post into the hole which I had previously made inside the top of the base. The finish was a few coats of linseed oil an a final touch with beeswax. It was hard for me to hand it to my sister, but it turned out to be the best birthday present she got.

As I used a LED-bulb for the lamp there is no concern about heat, it stays pretty cool although the light efficiency is a little too high for a bedside lamp. Next time I´ll use a dimmable LED.

This level of accuracy can be enlightening and stifling at the same time. As we know, wood moves. So there’s a point where dialing things in to the Nth degree provides quickly diminishing returns. But where should we draw the line? Sadly, there’s no easy answer and even if there is an answer, it is likely different for everyone. Depending on the tool, the material, the project and the person, the numbers can and will be different.

This article was inspired by a long-time friend of the show, Adam, who expressed his discontent with the level of accuracy he was able to measure with his cross-cut sled. His ability to measure error seems to have exceeded his ability to adjust for it. A problem I have had myself recently. Frankly, this is probably more commmon than any of us are willing to admit.

While making his sled, Adam used the well-know 5-cut method which I demonstrated in my Cross-Cut Sled Video. By making multiple subsequent cuts on the same piece of wood, the method magnifies the error by a multiple of four. This is powerful stuff when you’re looking to dial in your fence setting and if you have the ability to make teeny tiny adjustments, it can be quite effective. But what happens when you can’t seem to get the fence any more accurate. Perhaps every adjustment you make seems to just make the error worse. At what point is it good enough?

For me, the acceptable amount of error is right at the cusp of where I notice it. While assembling a project, if I have an 18″ wide panel that is off square by about 1/64″, would I notice? Would I even be able to see it with the squares I have access to? I doubt it. And I’m guessing most of you wouldn’t be able to spot the error either. Of course not every project involves wide panels, so for everything else we process with a cross-cut sled, such as joinery, the error would be even less impactful.

All that said, if I can further reduce the level of error without driving myself crazy, I’ll give it a shot. But if I think trying to improve on it will simply make the situation worse, I simply stop while I’m ahead and proceed with the acid test: a project. If you don’t notice the error during actual project construction, then for all practical purposes the error does not exist.

A Good Lesson

Here’s a story that might help put things in perspective. When I received my current table saw (the PM2000 with the flames), I started to stress about the flatness of the top. I can’t remember how much of a dip it had but it was more than most of us would consider acceptable. I’m picky, but not THAT picky. So I asked for a new top and the manufacturer agreed that it was a little too much error. Unfortunately, the second top had the same problem. I lost a few weeks of table saw time as a result of this fussing around and decided I had enough. I needed to get back to work. I bolted the top down, calibrated the saw as well as I could and started on the next project. It was bugging the heck out of me that I was going to “live with” this error but I pushed forward. Over 6 years later (or something like that), I have yet to notice ANY negative impact in my work. The final fit and finish of my projects is as good as I expect it to be.

So the moral to the story is, a problem isn’t a problem unless it’s a problem! Whenever I calibrate my tools now, I try to get as close to the ideal scenario as possible. Once again, I do this without driving myself nuts. I can’t afford to spend an entire day tuning up a jointer. Once I feel I have it as dialed in as I can reasonably get, I begin working. If at some point in the future I find that the quality of my work is diminishing thanks to a particular level of calibration error, then I know that for me, in that particular situation, the error was too great and it needs to be adjusted. If I never notice anything and my work meets my personal standards, then there really is no problem at all and the tool is accurate enough.

So I made a tough decision that I think will be music to the ears of bloggers, podcasters, and readers alike. Instead of a full week of safety focus, I’d like to reduce it down to a single day. Of course, like any holiday or occasion, content producers should feel welcome to focus on safety as much as they want in and around the actual day, especially if that day happens to fall on a weekend at some point in the future. But with only one day to worry about, it’s much more likely that the safety content we do get will be focused, inspiring, informative, and compelling.

So from here on out, I’ll be honoring May 1st as Woodworking Safety Day. And once again, I ask the rest of the woodworking community to join me in this effort. Feel free to create new content or simply link to old safety content you posted in the past. That will at least give your new readers a chance to catch up on topics you may have already covered. And as is the case every year, send me the links to your posts and I’ll post them here in one massive collection.

Hopefully everyone will appreciate this change as it makes a whole heck of a lot of sense to me. But then again, wearing a blonde wig also made sense to me at the time.

If you’d like to spread the word about Woodworking Safety Day, feel free to use the following images on your blogs and resize as needed. Simply link it back to the Woodworking Safety Day page: http://www.thewoodwhisperer.com/woodworking-safety-day/

As a student at NBSS I needed a project for my first summer off. I work part time for one of the New Hampshire furniture masters, but I still needed something interesting to keep my skills up, other then what I am doing at work.

I chose this clock as my first project. It is 100 percent my own design. The inspiration is drawn from my love for period furniture and also from details I saw in Richard Oedel (My boss) and Garret Hacks work. The hole case is hand dovetailed construction with a shiplap back. The door is wrapped in Holly and the banding is Ebony and Holly. I finished it with around 80 coats of padded super blonde Shellac to help seal and shine the piece. I then added 3 coats of Waterlox original to help protect it. It was rubbed out with deluxing compound.

I started woodworking at our old house in the basement. It was a decent set-up, but it was cramped, loud, and dusty for the house. When my wife and I decided that our house was too small for our growing family, it was understood that we also needed a garage and space for my shop. After a year in our current house my wife gave me a home depot gift card for my birthday and told me to “Go for it!”

Our garage is about 22′ wide and 24′ long. I built an L shaped divider wall inside the garage to allow space on one side for garage tools and kid toys. Luckily, the previous home owners had built large 2×4 plywood shelves in the back of the garage so I had some storage space already built in. Even better was that the high school where I work was getting rid of some plywood and library bookshelves, so I got those for free. We live in Rochester, NY so I needed to do some work to make it winter working worthy. I insulated all the walls and covered the ones in the shop portion with OSB plywood and put in a door and new windows (I love Craigslist for things like this!). I framed out my divider between the storage space and the workshop and covered that with the plywood from the high school and used a bi-fold door I bought CHEAP from a local outlet store. I raised several rafters in the garage, added support for my overhead air filter, and wired in old fluorescent lights from my school. I put in a wood floor over the concrete, partly to keep my knees comfortable and partly to protect dropped tools and projects. This was the hardest thing to figure out the best way to do. Marc posted his work on his shop floor after I did mine, or I would have copied his ideas. Instead, I used pressure treated decking, Ram Jetted those to the concrete, and covered them with 4′x 8′ OSB sheets and polyurethaned the whole thing.

I used the library bookshelves and wood and turned these into a pegboard storage shelf and a support area and shelf for tools. A fortuitous cabinet find on the side of the road turned into a perfect miter saw stand and another one turned into an outfeed table for my table saw. For my table I was lucky enough to have a friend who happens to own an optics shop and he had just purchased a new 60 inch butcher block table top by accident and he gave that to me. I used it to build a functional workbench with sliders on the bottom so I can move it around. Because I have 2 young kids I also used the top to one of the library bookshelves to make my kids a matching workbench and I hung up the tools their grandparents gave them.

My last big purchase (not from the gift card – that was all gone!) was a new Rigid table saw. I did a lot of searching for the perfect saw to replace my 10 year old $110 Skil saw. This saw is amazing and it is a joy to use. Using different sets of resources I placed most of the stationary items against the outside walls and my movable things against the inside walls. There is a space off the side of the workshop that serves as wood storage and extra tool storage.

Overall I’m really happy with my shop and I’ve already built 2 beautiful projects in it, as well as a few smaller items. My biggest problem this past winter was that I didn’t insulate the ceiling and my little space heater just doesn’t cut it when its 10 degrees outside. I had to add some insulation in the middle of winter just so i could work out there. Next up is a much better heater purchase and finishing the ceiling insulation.

While searching for a curtain or door for our bedroom walk-in closet we concluded that a Japanese sliding door, called a Shoji would be the best solution. I began drawing the first plans with Sketchup in October 2011. Since I travel a lot and could only work on the project on the weekends, it took about a year to complete.

So what is a Shoji and how is it constructed? A Shoji is the Japanese word for a paper wall or door. In many cases it consists of 4 doors that slide in a bottom rail at the floor, and a top rail. Above the top rail a non-movable blending completes the project.

Each of the doors is constructed of an inner grid of pine strings (10 x 20 mm or about 1/2″ x 1″) which are connected to each other by a half lap. 3 strings vertically and 6 strings horizontally. The grid is surrounded by a frame of bigger strings (20 x 26 mm or about 1 x 1 1/2″). The joints for the frame are mortise and tenon joints and so are the connections between the inner grid and the outer frame. Each string had to be planed by hand on all four sides and therefore needed no finish. The upper blind was constructed the same way only the grid is smaller.

The challenge with the doors and the blind is that your work has to be extremely precise because it’s a geometrical form. So exact 90° angles, exact height and width of the grids and the frames.

The bottom rail is constructed of two 20 x 60 mm (about 1″ x 3″) beams, connected horizontally by a half lap as one wasn’t long enough. The bottom rail was constructed the same way with two 60 x 60 mm (about 3″ x 3″) beams. The sliding rails were the only parts I didn’t do by hand but with a router. Planing the beams was hand work again.

Another challenge I was confronted with was how to manage the doors to slide effortlessly and smoothly in the bottom rail. The traditional way is to notch a part of the frame so that it fits into the rail. For me that seemed to have too much friction, so I tried some polished wooden balls of beech. To my surprise the friction was similar as with the notch. So I constructed metal rollers made of aluminum brackets and ball bearings usually used with roller skates. This worked extremely well. As the guidance at the upper rail doesn’t carry any weight, friction here is no matter and the notch does well.

Last challenge was that the doors had to slide parallel behind each other when opening and closing, so the rails had to be routed with high precision as well.

What worked with nearly no effort was gluing the Shoji paper to the back of the doors. The process consists of three steps. First fixing the paper at one end of the door with some tape, than applying the rice glue (it’s actually made from rice) to the grid strings and the frame. Next was covering the glued door with the paper and waiting until the glue was nearly dry. And last was to cut the overlaying paper away with a sharp knife and sprinkle the paper with water. When everything dries the paper has the right tension.

The tools I used where of very different quality. Best of all was my Kataba, a Japanese pull saw with a very thin blade. In conjunction with the suitable saw guide, I was able to produce very precise cuts which was especially helpful for the half laps of the grids and for the tenons of the frames. The chisels worked fine as well including sharpening.

The plane, one of the new Stanley’s, was really crappy. Although it has some adjusting wheels (!) to adjust the blade, I’ve never been able to get it to work with these. Eventually I adjusted the metal plane like a wooden plane with a metal hammer (ouch!). But never try this at home, it might damage the sole of the plane. From time to time I have to smooth the sole with a file. My next plane will be a wooden Japanese one (which has to be pulled and not pushed like normal).

Despite the different challenges I had to master, this project was fun and I’m really proud that I can present the results to you.

The Grizzly T10687 Track Saw retails for $179.95 and the track retails for $49.95, as of April 2013. This price point is the reason why I’m doing this review. At this stage of the game, a new track saw hitting the market at the going rate of $400+ would just be white noise and probably wouldn’t catch my attention. But the fact that folks can potentially know the joys of the track saw world for only $230 is something worth talking about. And here’s a little disclaimer: This is not a complete feature by feature review. Most of you know that’s not how I do things here. I am sure there will be plenty of hardcore reviews for you to enjoy from other publishers in the near future. My goal is to simply give you my thoughts upon initial inspection and use. Nothing more.

The Inevitable Comparison

As much as I tried to evaulate this tool solely on its own merits, it’s impossible not to draw comparisons between it and other track saws on the market. As a long-time Festool user, most of my comparisons will involve the Festool TS55 and TS75. I did spent a small amount of time with DeWalt’s track saw and even did a review of it back in 2009. So while I admit to being somewhat biased toward the big green machine, I like to think most of you know that I am fair and honest when it comes to tool discussions.

I made several cuts with the saw and evaluated the attributes that are most important to me: build quality, cut quality, and dust collection.

Build Quality:
Overall, the saw feels a little “cheap” in my hands. The plastic parts and knobs are rough, square, and not ergonomically designed. This is a minor detail that does not affect performance, but it’s something to consider. While most of the parts on a Festool saw are also plastic, they are molded in such a way they they feel smooth and comfortable.

I had no trouble getting the saw to align on the track with little to no slop. The operation of the cam adjustment knobs is a little clunky, but it didn’t seem to impact setup or prevent me from attaining a slop-free ride.

Speaking of the track, everything looked good to my eye with one exception: a little wobble. I don’t mean the kind of wobble that results from a sloppy fit between the track and the slot in the saw base. This was a wobble that results from rocking the saw back and forth using the handle. When applying downward pressure on the left side of the saw, the right side lifts up off the track, as you can see in the image. Depending on where you place your pressure while sawing, the effective cutting angle will change. This is a problem and I have to imagine this is going to impact cut quality in the long run. And just so you know, I checked both the saw base and the track and neither one is cupped.

I also noticed that the spring is difficult to compress when plunging. Part of the problem lies in the orientation of the handle (perfectly vertical) and the thumb safety release (angled back toward the user). This is going to make it fatiguing to use use this tool for repeated cuts and almost necessitates having two hands on the saw while plunging. Now I realize in the ideal world, we would have two hands on the saw at all times. But anyone who uses a circular saw to cut plywood knows that many cuts will require you to use the saw with one hand. Part of the joy of owning a track saw is the fact that a guided cut makes one-handed operation much safer and predictable. So if you happen to have weak wrists, plunging the saw with one hand is going to range from painful to impossible. To test my assertions, I had Nicole try plunging the saw with one hand a few times. After three plunges, she said “ouch” and added a few expletives to express her displeasure with my experiment and the subsequent pain in her thumb and wrist. Oops.

Cut Quality:
The cut quality was acceptable. The included blade is better than what comes with any other circular saw on the market (at least from initial inspection) and competes well with my upgraded Frued blades. After the cut, the keeper piece had a mostly acceptable amount of tearout that could be sanded away. The off-cut didn’t fare quite as well but was still in decent shape. Results are way better than I usually get with my regular circular saw, but not quite the same table saw quality cuts I get from my Festool saws.

Dust Collection:
Quite a bit of dust escapes the saw. Fortunately, it doesn’t spew the dust all over the shop like a traditional circular saw. The dust that does escape seems to do so in a very localized way. So there was a nice pile of sawdust sitting on top of the off-cut piece after the cut was complete. Festool saws have nearly perfect dust collection in most situations.

Compatibility

Because I knew many of you would want to know, I decided to test compatibility between Festool and Grizzly components I had on-hand. While the Grizzly track takes Festool clamps and accessories just fine, it does not accept the Festool saw. Not only is the groove on the saw too small for the guide rail, the blade would wind up cutting into the aluminum track. So that’s a no-go. The Grizzly saw does, however, fit on the Festool track, but the saw blade extends out well beyond the rubber splinter guard. The Grizzly saw freely accepts the standard Festool extractor hose.

Final Thoughts

If you were hoping to get a $500 saw for $230, you will be disappointed. But if you’re looking to get a capable plunging circular saw with the advantages of a track system and somewhat decent dust collection, I think the Grizzly is an excellent buy. It isn’t going to give you perfect table saw quality cuts, at least as presented, and the low price comes at the expense of some comfort and general build quality. But it will cut plywood with greater accuracy and control than the typical circular saw setup.

The final verdit here is something that could be up for interpretation as there are two ways to look at it. If we compare this saw to the other saws on the market like the Festool, the Grizzly falls short in just about every area. Duh! An important piece of information came from Grizzly themselves when I inquired about this tool back in January. They said (paraphrasing) that comparing their saw to Festool is a little like comparing a Toyota to a Lexus. They both will get you to the store and back but there are key differences between the two brands.

In my opinion, the real comparison we need to make here is not with Festool, or even DeWalt or Makita. Instead, we need to focus on the standard circular saw market. And in that regard, this saw really kicks some butt! I can only compare the experience to my Porter Cable saw that I’ve been using for years now, and this saw and track system outperforms it in just about every way.

Want to Win This Saw?

If you’d like an opportunity to win the saw I purchased for testing purposes, simply fill out the form below. One entry per person please.

Sorry the deadline for this giveaway has past & the winner selected. Be sure to keep an eye out on the site for other giveaways!

And that brings us to the poll question: What is your preferred way of sharpening?

This poll was created by Tom Iovino of TomsWorkbench.com.

I have been creating art most of my life. I have studied with, and been influenced by artists from many different fields. Tapping into this knowledge and experience, has enabled me to create wonderful and unique works of art.

This Mirror is all hand carved from solid walnut and measures 52″w x 44″h. The ravens are all fully detailed, as are the clouds, and the foliage on the bottom. I gave the birds movement by carving “wind” around them, and bringing them more fully out of the wood itself.

I wanted to create a project that could be enjoyed in any home or office, and that enabled the viewer to feel the magic in the wood.

This is a build I did for my wife’s friend who was having twins. She had asked me to build a changing table on commission, but after many years of attempting to have a baby with IVF medical help, I told her that if she got pregnant, my wife and I would GIVE her a crib as a present. So that is what I did. On the last two months of the pregnancy, when I knew for sure that she would have her long awaited newborns, I completed her crib. The changing table commission paid for the build, which I finished a month before hand.

I didn’t have anything to really go off of except for mental images of cribs I have seen on Lumberjocks.com. I found regulations for crib slat spacing and made sure that I was well under that regulation. I used my daughter, who is now 2 but 1 at the time, as a guide for the mattress height when fully dropped to the bottom. In order to avoid making so many slats, like my very first crib, I increased the width of the main slats and added a decorative center slat that is a raised panel. This also made the slats way stronger than I had hoped. I’ve included a photo of the first crib (my daughters) that I built.

The crib is a sleigh style, my first one, that is of my own look and design. I wanted the crib to break down for easy moving and storage, and convert to a full size bed when the time comes, so I used threaded inserts with hex head bolts to hold it all together. There are four bolts per side and when the time comes for the bed to convert, they will easily remove so the footboard will extend out for a mattress.

The slats are inset in the rails, not with mortises, but with a long dado. This made construction easier and insured proper spacing with my filling pieces for the dado. It also prevented me from having to put a tongue on all the slats. It works like a charm and is a great time saver. Scrapes nice and flush with a card scraper.

I did have a slight challenge in the raising and lowering of the mattress and instead of spending a good deal of money on the metal gadget sold on the internet that has many different settings, I opted to make my own platform which has two settings. One for when they are little and down all the way for when they start standing. Simple and easy! It sits on two cleats that are attached to the side rails and the riser on the platform remove for the lowering of the mattress.

Another challenge was the sleigh style beveled tops. I had no idea how I was going to make the curve. After deciding to bevel one board at 20 degrees, it left a lot of sanding to fine tune the curve since I had increased the mating surface of the beveled board. What I should have done was bevel both boards 10 degrees (20 degrees total) which would have made the mating surfaces equal. (Learned that from TWW’s Headboard Video)

All in all, I am very happy the way this crib turned out and the red oak looks great with it’s natural hand-rubbed poly finish. Our friend wants a second crib so when the twins start to move around more they won’t wake one another. That is my spring project since it must be done by July.

The hardware for our bed is sourced from the big box store. I’m not using anything too fancy, just some carriage bolts, washers, and threaded rod. To make the hardware work better and look better, we’ll make some basic modifications.

We’re going to paint the carriage bolt heads matte black. Because the bolt heads have raise markings, I use a file to level everything out. Sandpaper does the final smoothing and provides a nice mechanical tooth for the paint to bind to. The paint is matte black enamel in a rattle can. I gave each bolt two coats. The bolt heads will only be seen behind the headboard, but if anyone ever looks back there I’d prefer they see the painted bolt heads instead of the manufacturer’s markings.

Because the nut access holes have flat bottoms, we can make our lives a bit easier if we flatten one end of each washer. A grinder does this job with ease. The washers are then pressed into a nice curve to match the profile of the nut access hole. If you recall, the footboard has threaded holes, so we won’t be using carriage bolts here. Instead, we’ll cut a piece of threaded rod to the specific length required.

The Supports

The center support rail is held by a modified French cleat, which I made from small pieces of bubinga scrap. The center rail itself will receive a series of notches to accept the cross supports. The ends of the rail receive a notch and the French cleat angle is chiseled by hand for a perfect fit. The French cleat brackets are then glued and screwed to the footboard and headboard.

The support slats will be made from maple and each one receives a notch that mates perfectly with the notches in the center support rail. For additional support, I’m making two block feet that will sit under the center rail as you see here.

The Finish

The entire piece was sanding to 320 grit in preparation for the oil finish. I’m using pure tung oil diluted 50% with mineral spirits and heated with a double boiler hot plate setup. I am not a huge fan of pure oil finishes, but this is what the customer wants. The finish is applied with a brush and then wiped back with a clean cloth. For the rest of the day, I’ll come back and check on the piece and wipe back any standing oil. The oil finish needs about 24 hours to dry to the touch.

I hope you enjoyed the free version of this build. If you’d like to see the full version, which clocks in at 6 and a half hours of high quality video instruction, head to thewoodwhispererguild.com for all of the details.

This table represents the culmination of my skills thus far. When the weather changed in the north east, my un-climate controlled shop wound down to a close. I started woodworking last March. Before that I have only tinkered and never really made anything out of wood. My goal, albeit lofty, was to create a table in this style. I am quite pleased with it, but as always it is far from perfect and there is a lot I would change. I feel I utilized the really curly wood as best as I could. However if I had to do it over, I would have cut the top into 3/4 strips and used the side grain. The randomness of the grain in all three pieces is interesting, but there is no rhyme or reason to it and I find it distracting.

Materials – Ash (a lot of it curly) and Walnut accents

Dimensions – 21” tall, top is 21” wide and 24” long

Construction – Mostly mortise and tenon, the top is attached with figure 8’s

Details: Over-sized breadboard ends, edges chamfered, pinned with walnut dowels; Shallow V grooves cut into the vertical slats; Legs are tapered to a point toward the bottom and inlayed with walnut

I wanted to keep the piece “light” looking, so I added a 3 piece shelf accented with walnut. I finished it with 2 coats of danish oil, 5 coats of GF Arm-R-Seal semi gloss, sprayed. The top is buffed out with Minwax furniture paste wax applied with 0000 steel wool.

I had a lot of trouble with the top warping. It had to be cut and re-glued 3 times. This also represented a lot of firsts for me: my first time with arts and crafts anything; my first inlay of any kind; my first breadboard ends; and my first time spraying finish. I am never going back to brushing or wiping. There are no runs, sags, or brush marks at all. A very quick pass with some 600 grit was all that was required for the next coat.

The corbels were the worst for me. I don’t have a bandsaw and I’m TERRIBLE with a jig saw. About 75% of the shaping was done with some 60 grit on a spindle sander.

Overall I don’t think this is that bad. From not owning any woodworking tools at all to this in 7 months is an accomplishment for me! I also have many of you guys to thank! I can’t wait to see what I can do by this time next year!

Festool Systainer Package

– Winner: William Kroger
First up is an awesome shop organizing package for one lucky winner, provided by our friends over at Festool.

Woodworks Season 2

– Winners: Andrew Bugg & Calin Cole
As most of you know, Woodworks was a great show hosted by David Marks on the DIY Network. And now you can own it on DVD! We are giving away a copy of Season 2 to two lucky winners!

2013 TWW Calendar

– Winners: Paul Loney & Keith Lackner
We know it’s March already, but these are one of a kind. Originally designed for SUPERFAN Guild members, we happen to have a few extra to give away. If you’d like Marc will even sign it for you. If you don’t want to take your chances in the giveaway, we also have a very limited number available for direct purchase. We have 2 of these up for grabs this month! No restrictions on location

To enter the giveaway, please fill out the form below and we will randomly pick our winners at the end of the month.

Update: The giveaway has ended and our winners have been announced!

I think most of you know by now that I am indeed one of those weirdos who likes things to match. Not only does it look good, but it makes organization easier. Clamps are a great example. If you go with a bunch of different brands, you’ll find it a little trickier to organize since the clamp components will likely be sized differently. And while I will go to some length to have things look similar, I won’t do it at the expense of overall quality. Quality is always first in mind, and if I can get a match from that point, I do.

So how important is matching to you?

This poll was created by Tom Iovino of TomsWorkbench.com.

My junked up, low budget garage shop! I’ve only been woodworking for about 10 months but have acquired a decent amount of tools. The structure is 20 x 20, about 70 years old and still needs a lot of cleaning up from the mess the previous owners left behind. As far as equipment, I would say I have “the best of the worst.” Just about everything I own I would recommend to anyone starting out on a tight budget like myself.

Tablesaw – Ridgid R4512 with a built in router table using a Jessum router plate, and about a dozen blades, many sleds and a few leecraft aftermarket inserts
Drill Press – HF 38144 16 speed floor drill press with the HF drill press table
Lathe – HF 65345 10×18 benchtop lathe. HF HSS 8 piece turning tool set, Easy Wood tools Rougher and Finisher
HF 8” Grinder with shop made wolverine style jig
Planer – Craftsman 21758 12 1/2” lunchbox planer
Bandsaw – Craftsman BAS350 14” (Rikon 10-320 clone), Rikon fence with resaw bar, Carter 5 bearing upper and lower guides
Edge/spindle sander – Ridgid Eb4424
Jointer – Craftsman 21789

Routers: Craftsman professional 27680 (x2), Porter Cable 7518 (table), Ridgid R2401 laminate/trim router. Most of my bits are Whiteside with a few Freud quadracut mixed in
Miter saw – old (~10 years) Craftsman 10” CMS (next up for replacement)
Scroll saw – Porter cable 93926 with stand
Power hand tools: Ryobi circular saw; vintage Black and Decker worm drive 8” circular saw; Skil jig saw; Bosch 4” grinder; Milwaukee Magnum corded drill; Milwaukee M12 Fuel impact driver; Milwaukee M12 Fuel Drill/driver; Craftsman C3 Drill/driver; Deremel 4200 rotary tool, Dremel Trio, Dremel multi-max oscillating tool; HF cordless Lithium ion cordless oscillating tool (awesome!); Ryobi ROS; and Dewalt D26453K ROS

Hand Tools: Windsor Design no33 plane; Stanley type 13 #7 jointer; Various vintage rasps and files; Woodriver 6 piece bench chisels

Sharpening: scary sharp for establishing new edges or working out nicks, Norton 1k, 4k, and 8k waterstones for general touch up and honing

Clamps: About 40 Pittsburgh bar clamps ranging from 6” to 4 feet; a few Jorgensen Cabinet masters; some Jorgensen HD bar clamps; and various C clamps and quick grip clamps

I am in the process of building a proper work bench, I just need warmer temps!

This poll was created by Tom Iovino of Tomsworkbench.com.

My wife and I have been married for just over a year now, and we recently moved in to a new rental property. With a lot more space than before the place looks a bit bare, but a few pieces of furniture should sort that out. My wife, Kata, had been complaining that she had nowhere to sit while using the computer, writing, drawing or whatever else she would use a desk for. As her birthday was coming up I suggested making a desk for her.

With some inspiration from Google, a few scribbles on a piece of paper, and finally a Sketchup model, I was ready to buy the timber. This was my first experience to a timber yard. A bit scary at first but I knew what I wanted and the guys down at McGregor & Sons in Belfast where pretty helpful. I wanted to use at least two contrasting woods, two drawers and legs that were a bit ‘out of the ordinary’. I think you can see from the pictures I kept to this through out.

The legs are made of two 1″ pieces glued together. I made one and then used the pattern bit on the router to make the others identical. Once glued, I tapered them on all four sides with my jack plane. The joints for the main structure are all mortise and tenon apart from the front top rail, it was dovetailed to the top of the legs.
The drawers are hand-cut half blind dovetails at the front. (Thanks Marc for the informative video! They are anything but perfect. Some practice needed I think.) The table top is made of MDF pre-veneered with oak,framed in walnut. I felt that making this from solid wood was just a little bit out of my skill set. I don’t think it’s too bad for my first attempt at something so substantial.

This is a log bed that was requested by a friend for a Christmas gift for his wife. We hand fitted all joints, no round joints were used. The joints were cut using square mortise and tenon style joints and then hand fitted as tight as possible. It was requested that I not make a standard ladder style bed as they are common.

The actual procurement and hunt for the logs for this head board proved to be more of a challenge than anticipated. We logged nearly 100 miles of dirt roads looking for something that fit our size range and was still usable. We saw LOTS of arched trees but for numerous reasons had to keep looking. This one is actually hollow over the left side of the arch as you face the bed, which is why we had to trip the upright slightly to get it into a solid area to glue and secure it.

The massive bed rails are 82 1/2″ long, 6″ wide, and 3″ thick. But we need to start with standard 8/4 (1 3/4″) stock first. The tenons are cut at the tablesaw using a cross-cut sled and a dado stack. I actually had to sacrifice my regular cross-cut sled for this task, but it’s just as well since I needed a dedicated dado sled anyway.

After a test fit, the tenons were finessed with a rabbeting block plane. The great thing about using hand tools to fine-tune the fit is the fact that they give you so much control. Each pass removes only a few thousandths of an inch worth of material. So even if you go one pass too far, the joint still fits reasonably well.

The Headboard Hardware

The rails are held in the headboard mortise with carriage bolts. I start by drilling through the back of the mortise and into the tenon itself. The drill bit only goes so far but makes a deep enough hole in the tenon that it’s easy enough to extend the hole to full depth after disassembly. Both bolts have some lateral movement for expansion and contraction.

The bolts aren’t very helpful we we don’t have a way to tighten them down. So in order to have access to the bolt, we need to drill a flat-bottomed hole with a forstner bit. This hole gives us plenty of room to install a washer and a nut.

The Footboard Hardware

For the footboard side of the rails, the hardware is going to be a little different. Because the footboard is so thick, I decided to use a tap to create threaded holes. The rails will receive the same nut access holes they did on the headboard side and a piece of threaded rod will be used to make the connection. If you want more information on the wood-tapping process, check out Episode 167 – Tapping Threads in Wood.

Beefing Up – Outside Strip

The rails need to be brought up to a full 3″ thick. We’ll do that by adding a few strips of bubinga to each side. This will not only give the rails a thicker appearance, but it will also help them resist sagging. Furthermore, it creates an additional shoulder for the tenon joint which will help to further stabilize the structure. With careful attention to grain direction and materials, the rail will appear as one piece.

Beefing Up – Inside Strip

The inside strip is treated a little differently and receives a long rabbet. The rabbet will create a ledge that will later serve as a support for our horizontal mattress supports. The strip is attached to the inside of the rail with epoxy and screws for extra strength. The screws go in at a slight angle so we’ll need to pre-drill at that same angle. A small shim under the workpiece did the trick at the drill press.

Plug it Up!

To cover the screw heads, I cut my own plugs from scrap and drive them in with glue. Once the glue is dry, I trim them flush with a flush trim saw.

This is my new garage workshop that I just moved into the 1st of the year. It’s a big upgrade from my last shop which was 16×18. This is a 2 1/2 car garage with 10 ft ceilings 24′x 24′ with a 6 x 10 nook in the back.

About 3 months ago I found a pickup load of reclaimed western cedar on craigslist that was used in a hotel lobby. They were all 7-12″ wide 1″ thick and 8′long. I used those to panel the walls of the garage since I absolutely hate drywall in the garage. I wound up with only 2 boards leftover, talk about cutting it close. The floors are covered with 4 x 6 livestock mats of 3/4″ rubber. Everything is hardwired in 220v which I ran myself along with 3 extra florescent fixtures. As you can probably tell, everything is Grizzly in my shop.

I’m equipped with the following: 10″ 5hp Sliding Table Saw; 12″ spiral cutter head Jointer; 15″ spiral cutter head Planer; 24″ Dual Drum Sander; 19″ Bandsaw; and a 1 1/2 hp Cyclone Dust Collector.

I just finished putting it all together a few months ago and I’m telling you it wore me out! LOL But anyway, I’m extremely happy with my new shop and am looking forward to refurnishing our new home with custom furniture. Thanks for looking!

The real trick is making sure your joints are all protected from the finish. Of course, finish seals wood and sealed wood doesn’t accept glue. So if you do pre-finish, be sure you tape off all of your joints. Not every project can be pre-finished but if you can manage it, I highly recommend it.

This poll was created by Tom Iovino of TomsWorkbench.com.

This is my latest carving. I start with an angle grinder and hand sand from there. This was a donation to the Memphis Child Advocacy Center for their yearly silent auctions. The size of this leaf is 14″ x 48″.

I have been carving boxes and art vessels for a while, but about 4 years ago, I started carving leaves, larger than life. This Ginkgo leaf was especially challenging, as the leaf is one I have always loved for 2 reasons: The shape of the leaf and usually the curl that comes in from the edges and the length of the stem, so delicate.

Usually, when I carve wood, I make a clay model, but this time, I really relied on nature (and will do the same in the future). I had collected many Ginkgo leaves this past fall in a baggie and whenever I got “stuck”, I would refer to the real deal.

To craft the sculpture, I needed to use a close, but straight grained wood. Yellow heart seemed to fit the bill perfectly both in color and grain. I even looked for a bit of a curve in the long straight grain of the wood so the curl of the stem would stay strong. I cut the leaf with a much longer stem, in case I had to shorten it or if it broke during the grinding and sanding process. I bought a 5.5 ft board and cut the bottom 1.5 ft off and attached it to the top. This was my “leaf”. The remaining 4 ft was the stem. I cut the shape out with my band saw, cut a hole in the “leaf” to imply where I was going to cut the curl (this clean drill process allows less sanding inside the curl) and started grinding away the yellow heart. I wear a Air Shield Full Face Mask with Filters when I pick up the grinder to work. It’s a very safe and comfortable solution. I use a very aggressive concave bit on my angle grinder. When finished, the entire shop was covered in yellow heart, about 1/8 inch everywhere.

I waited to round and lighten the stem until I was almost finished making the leaf. This way, the leaf kept it’s strength while most of the grinding was taking place. A hard lesson learned, with lots of broken stems.

After the leaf is rough carved, I start by hand with 60 grit sandpaper to smooth out the grinder marks. Power tools usually don’t come into play with the sanding, as my work is always so curvy. Air grinders and small round air sanders help with shaping the stem from square to round, then more gentle hand sanding.

At first the weight of the wood was so heavy, it was hard to mange. By completion time, it is very light. I always sand my sculptures to 2,000 grit sand paper/fabric and one of the nice benefits of this yellow heart, it allowed me to skip some grits of this process, yet yielded the same quality finish. All my pieces are meant to be touched.

I also learned that presentation is everything! By placing it on a black surface, the contrast of the wood and the boldness of the Ginkgo just made it POP!

I’m working in a 2-car garage with a need to have one car parked in the garage, so I’m always in need of space and mobile equipment. This project allowed me to have a router table and some extra storage space for my feather boards, router bits/accessories, etc. As you can see from the tabletop, I still don’t have enough storage space.

The workstation was built in 3 stages.

1st Stage: Table Saw Base
Built the mobile base for the table saw unit. I figured I would have gotten more than 1 drawer out of the unit but after building the dust collection chute, I had very little space left for more storage.

2nd Stage: Extension Base for Router Table and Drawers
I added this for more storage and created a double door to keep access for the table saw internals. I also needed this base so I could create the enclosure for the router table.

3rd Stage: Router Enclosure
As you know the router table can create a lot of saw dust so this was built and seems to work pretty well. I have a 4-1/2″ dust collection port for the enclosure and a aux 2-1/2″ dust collection port for above the table.

May 2013 Wood Magazine

First, check out my safety-based article titled, “Before Making Sawdust, Saw Some Logs”, in the May 2013 issue on page 22. Just in time for Safety Week in May, the discussion surrounds how I became acutely aware of the dramatic effects of fatigue on shop safety. During the first few months of “the apprentice’s” life, it was incredibly rough going. As many of you know, when the baby’s awake, we’re all awake! It’s a fun read and a great issue overall, so check it out if you can.

America’s Best Home Workshops 2013

I, or more accurately my shop, was featured in the article, “The Detail is in the Design” on page 134 of America’s Best Home Workshops. Although my shop is far from finished, the article talks about how I used SketchUp to plan and execute my ultimate floor plan. Because I am still trying to get my shop in full working order, I am constantly on the lookout for new ideas. I feel like a kid in a candy store with this particular issue. So forget about me! This issues is a must-have for anyone looking to improve their workspace and get inspired by seeing what other people do in their shops.

In November 2009, I wrote an article for Popular Woodworking Magazine that talks about this exact topic. Taking some influence from Nicole’s Glamour magazine, I constructed a quiz specifically for woodworkers. Answer the questions honestly, and you should end up with a reasonably objective result that tells you whether you should build or buy.

You can download the full article here. And if you want to take the test, download the Build or Buy Worksheet.

For those who might be wondering, this is an older article from the archive, but I now have permission to distribute the article and the worksheet directly. I felt it was worth re-posting.

The headboard’s raised panel will be constructed from two pieces of wenge. The boards are milled flat and glued together using Dominos for alignment help. Once the glue was dry, I scraped the glue line and then drum-sanded the board nice and smooth. To make the raised profile, I used a standard raised panel bit with the back-cutter removed. This gives me a larger “tongue” to work with later. With several passes at the router table, the profile is looking good!

The Lower Frame

The frame parts of our headboard are carefully selected and cut for grain continuity. The cross-cut sled at the tablesaw is a great way to cut these thick 8/4 boards accurately. Once cut to size, the assembly of the lower frame is done using Domino XL joints. The Domino XL DF700 is the big brother to the smaller Domino DF500, and it is capable of making larger joints appropriate for things like entry doors and beds.

The Upper Frame

The upper frame is cut and assembled in much the same way as the lower frame, only a groove is cut around the inside perimeter. I used a router for the stopped grooves on the side pieces and the table saw for the through grooves in the longer top and bottom pieces. Because the grooves are cut deeper to allow for movement, there’s a possibility that the panel could move and even rattle when housed in the frame, so I insert small strips of foam to help cushion the panel. I guess you might call this poor man’s Space Balls.

The frame is assembled with glue and Dominos using some of the longest clamps I own. I knew there was a reason I bought those!

Mortises

Both the footboard and headboard receive mortises for the bed rails. It’s much easier to make the mortises in the lower half of the headboard frame prior to assembly. Using a router and a large straight bit, the material is removed in several passes. Final cleanup is done using a chisel.

The Dreaded Bevel

One of the trickiest parts of this project was the final assembly of the headboard. Because the top portion tilts back at 20 degrees, a bevel needed to be cut on both the top and bottom pieces (10 degrees each). A question I always seem to get is “Why can’t we just cut a 20 degree bevel in one piece and keep the other square?” The reason is because the 20 degree bevel actually makes the mating surface just a bit wider than the adjoining piece. So in order to keep the width of the mating surface equal on both pieces, the same exact bevel must be cut on both pieces. I almost made this mistake myself and thanks to a knowledgable Guild member, the crisis was completely avoided.

The long bevel was cut using a Festool tracksaw. Believe it or not, the saw is capable of making a glue-ready joint and I took full advantage of that fact. After cutting each piece, I attached 2×4 scrap cauls to aid in clamping. Without a doubt, this was one of the more stressful glueups of my career. Long bevels are always tricky but when they are part of two large and heavy workpieces, the complexity goes up a notch or two. Thankfully, everything worked out and the joint came together. Epoxy was the glue of choice for this primarily because I needed as much working time as possible.

The shop is within a 3 bay garage attached to the house with an enclosed breezeway. It started out as a one bay space with a radial arm saw and a drill press, both long gone. I then decided space from a second bay would be a lot more useful as an expanded workshop rather than housing an old beater against the rain. So the shop grew to its present size–23X23–and it is well insulated!

I’ve been retired 5 years. What I build is for family and friends, built-ins, tables, desks but no chairs. Happily going through a Greene & Greene phase.

It is a small shop and everything is on wheels except for the drill press, the Kapex and long work bench. The DC is in the remaining car part of the structure along with most sheet goods, which is great for muffling the sound. The jointer and planner both have the Shelix cutterheads which I have found makes a BIG difference when working with highly figured woods.

Most of the tools have been upgraded within the last few years. I figured, hell, I might as well enjoy my retirement and have no regrets whatsoever about the costs. They have not generated any income but they have generated a lot of fun and joy! The assembly table on wheels also does double duty as a desk and in and out feed surface for the band saw and drill press.

In hindsight, the only thing I would do different is to have the floor heated like the rest of the house.

Stock Breakdown

Ever rough board that enters my shop is broken down with a jigsaw. I just find this easier and safer than any other method available. Not only does this allow me to take the tool to the wood, instead of the other way around, it provides a safe and kickback-free cut. Using a nice aggressive blade is the key to making this process quick and easy.

Cut & Glue Back Together

The massive footboard of our platform bed is going to be made from three footboard pieces glued together in a big sandwich. Each footboard piece is cut from a single board in order to maintain grain continuity where the feet meet the rail. Instead of using something like a jigsaw to cut out the a big notch, we’ll be slicing the boards up and gluing the feet back on. This yields much better results and gives us nice crisp inside corners. After being cut to size, the feet are glued back onto the rails using glue and Dominos. The Dominos are really only there to help in alignment and you could substitute biscuits, dowels, splines, or use nothing at all. The long grain glue bond is certainly strong enough for the job.

After the feet are glued back on to each piece, we can glue the three footboard pieces together. Careful attention must be paid to the grain patterns of the end grain otherwise things will look wacky. Essentially, we want the grain to be harmonious so if possible, the grain should all go in the same direction. The video goes into a good amount of detail in terms of what we’re aiming for as well as what we’re trying to avoid. This glueup isn’t all that different than the methods used for building a workbench top. As long as the pieces are milled flat, they will take on the appearance of one giant slab of bubinga after the glueup.

End Grain

One of the unfortunate side-effects of this type of glueup is the massiv amount of end grain we need to clean up. If you have ever made an end grain cutting board, you know just how stubborn end grain can be. So I recommend employing whatever it takes to get the job done, be it a plane, a sander, or what I decided to use: a Festool Rotex sander.

The outside endgrain of the footboard is actually the easier part to deal with. The real challenge lies in cleaning up the inside end grain. Fortunately, this area really won’t be seen all that often so it isn’t necessary that it be absolutely perfect. I had some slight discrepancies between my pieces and I found a chisel worked really well for paring away the high spots.

Finishing Up

The entire footboard is then planed and sanded to about 120 grit. I don’t like sanding to my final grit this early in the process since I still have a lot of work to do. We have some mortises coming up very soon! So we’ll sand it thoroughly, stopping at 120 grit, and then we’ll set the footboard aside.

This is a Learning Tower that I built for my 2 year old son. He can climb up the side and hop onto the platform, which allows him to be at counter height so he can help prepare food or watch what we’re doing in the kitchen. He’s gotten pretty good at putting toppings on home-made pizza. The platform has 4 positions it can be in so as he grows we can adjust the height to minimize risk of him bending over the top side and flipping out.

The design is an exact copy of a commercial product. My wife’s friend let us borrow their Learning Tower for a few months while they got ready to move to a new house and didn’t have room for it. My wife and son really liked it so I took it apart and used it as a template to build my own using a tablesaw, jigsaw, bandsaw, and my router. Joinery is screws.

I finished it with clear shellac mixed with a few drops of tint to darken it a bit. For the most part, the project was completed with about 9 hours of effort – half of which was sanding up to 220 grit and then applying the shellac.

My personal wood stash primarily consists of project left-overs. I don’t have a huge amount of material simply because I like to run fairly lean. While it’s nice to have a lot of wood, I need to be able to get to it in order to use it. So if the boards are on the bottom of a large pile, I don’t enjoy having to get up on a ladder to move things around. So while I have the propensity to hoard wood as much as the next woodworker, I try to keep it under control.

This poll was created by Tom Iovino of TomsWorkbench.com.

My wife isn’t that tall and I like to sit and chat. To accommodate these two things we had to have a stool and a small step stool kicking around in our small kitchen. I saw this plan in Woodworker’s Journal for a Hoosier Step Stool a few years ago and finally had enough confidence to try to build it.

The construction was actually pretty straight forward, a couple of mortise and tenon ladder frames that the steps got mortised and tenoned into. The seat is attached with a couple of screws through each of the top rails and with the four braces. The wood braces are further reinforced with metal angle brackets set into routed out grooves. The light color of the maple with the clear wipe on poly finish goes well with the natural hickory cabinets of the kitchen. Each time I do a project I learn something new and this project was no exception. I really like the look and feel of the maple, but you sure have to have really sharp tools to work it.

I just got into woodworking last August 2012. The house I purchased in 2008 came with a ghetto mailbox–a tire rim with cement in it on a post. I finally got around to re-landscaping my yard and I wanted to replace my mailbox with a real one.

After a few weekends of frustrating hours designing what I wanted, I decided I clearly needed better tools to do a decent job. I spent HOURS on forums looking for advice. I found websites like the Wood Whisperer, LumberJocks and Sawmill creek and spent even MORE time there. The mailbox turned out very nice and elicited my favorite comment, “That’s the nicest $2000 mailbox I’ve ever seen!”. From this point I started watching Woodworks with David Marks and I went crazy. Within about 2 months I had transformed the garage into a “shop”.

I started by demolishing the old “shelves” that a previous owner of the house had just tacked on the walls, they were essentially cast-offs from a kitchen remodel. The garage was insulated, so I dry-walled all but the ceiling, put up pegboards, shelves, and a clamp rack. If I had to start over, I might have gone with an all-one-brand setup. Instead, I have been trying to find quality machines in my price range with good reviews and good value. My first “project” will be as many have done, a torsion box assembly table. Then, a workbench since right now all I have are these cobbled-together, wobbly 2×4 tables that I made 10 years ago. I also added extra electrical outlets, 2 new fixtures and a lot of daylight bulbs, plus a heater so I can work during Idaho winters.

As a fortunate boon, I was able to salvage the “tops” of 53 armoires from the hotel I manage, including all the hardware, hinges, knobs, etc. plus enough board feet of veneered MDF to fill an entire room in my house. I just need to get the shop in order so I can cut it down into usable stuff. Which means–torsion box assembly/outfeed table since I don’t have a big table saw. I don’t have a lot of hand tools yet or clamps but I’m working on it.

Equipment:

Bosch 4100-09 10-Inch Table Saw
Makita 2012NB 12-Inch Planer
Shop Fox W1741 8-Inch Jointer
Grizzly G0555X 14″ Bandsaw
Bosch 1617EVSPK 2-1/4-Horsepower Plunge & Fixed Base Router
JobMax Work System
Air Compressor
Ryobi Drill Press
Rigid 16 Gallon Shop-Vac
Hitachi NT32AE2 18-Gauge Brad Nailer
DEWALT D26453K 3 Amp Random Orbit Sander

Ever since building my own Split-Top Roubo Workbench, I have been interested in the clever ideas people come up with in terms of hardware alternatives. Matt Armstrong came up with a solution using a steel shaft and a linear bearing that once setup, requires no adjustment. Let’s check it out! — Marc

There are a variety of mechanisms and means to get a leg vise to clamp firmly. All of them, in one way or another, restrict the range of motion of the bottom of the chop in order to increase the force applied to the top of the chop. While a parallel guide and pin are a fine way to approach the problem, they require pin changes to accommodate differing material thickness along with additional complexity in construction. Furthermore, unless you use roller bearings (such as the “glide” system from BenchCrafted, pictured left), you have a fair amount of friction and/or slop to overcome in the mechanism. Alternatives to the parallel guide and pin are numerous – some are highly mechanical in nature, featuring chains, sprockets, gears, cams, and so on. Some of you may also have seen that Benchcrafted is reviving the St. Peter’s cross, a simple scissoring mechanism that keeps the chop parallel to the leg.

My design is nothing more than a hardened steel shaft and a linear bearing. Simple to design, simple to implement, and simple to maintain. I used a 30mm linear bearing and 500mm long shaft which ended up setting me back around $60 for the pair.

A hole was bored into the leg vise chop at a 1 degree angle (more or less) so that the top of the chop is tilted slightly forward. The hardened steel shaft was roughed up with sandpaper and then I used polyurethane glue to secure it in the chop. Another hole was bored into the leg for the linear bearing. The hole for the 1.25″ threaded rod and acme nut was match drilled once the bearing was installed, and then the rest of the steps are like any other leg vise installation (secure the nut to the back of the leg, attach the handwheel to the threaded rod, etc).

How does it work? Amazingly. The linear bearing not only restricts any out-of-parallel racking from clamping pressure, but supports and aligns the entire chop so that its motion is buttery smooth. Best of all, it was cheap and elegant. I saved a decent amount of money and, for once, time. I actually think it looks fairly cool, too!

The precision shaft, acme rod, and acme nut were McMaster-Carr purchases. The linear bearing came from vxb.com, and the handwheel was a splurge- a Kipp from Germany. I used a single sae841 thrust washer between the chop and the handwheel, and a roll pin to secure the handwheel to the rod. Lastly, to keep the threaded rod from binding, I put a bronze bushing inside the leg, similar to the function of the acetal block that benchcrafted sells. It wasn’t necessary, but it makes the mechanism even more precise.

Here are a couple videos of Matt showing off his new vise.

Matt Armstrong is a Wood Whisperer Guild member hailing from the SF Bay Area who is a full time husband, new father, and software release manager. He has butchered thousands of board feet of wood in his garage shop and spends more time building shop furniture than working on the projects he promised his wife he’d do.

And let’s be honest, not everyone wants to spend the money on the hardwoods that look beautiful with nothing more than a clear coat. Sometimes we have to make do with slightly less attractive species and on those projects, stain can work wonders. So how’s about you?

This poll was created by Tom Iovino of TomsWorkbench.com.

If you like programming like this, the best thing you can do is watch, enjoy, and share it with others!

In spring 2012, Tri-Lox was invited to participate in the 12 x 12 NYC, a furniture design exhibition that paired twelve contemporary designers with reclaimed wood from twelve historic New York City sites. We were honored to be part of the exhibition, which was in conjunction with Design Week 2012. Our materials were salvaged from 131-137 Emerson Place, a storage building in historical Fort Greene, Brooklyn that saw the neighborhood’s population explore over the course of the 19th century. Fort Greene has been home to artists and writers from Walt Whitman to Robert Maplethorpe and we wanted to create a piece that paid tribute to the area’s rich literary and artistic history: hence the writing and drawing table. The wood was donated by Sawkill Lumber and delivered to our workshop as massive beams. We had the beams milled to fit the parameters of our design, though we chose to build our table around a loose tenon and lap joints, which pay homage to the materials. The tabletop itself features a live edge, displaying the natural characteristics of the wood. The piece is adjustable, hinged on two brass slides attached to the back legs of the table. We created a matching stool, but the stool’s seat is made not of the Long Leaf Yellow Pine, but instead of an Alaskan Yellow Cedar salvaged from a New York City water tower; the dark color of the seat is its natural patina, a result of its years of exposure to the elements.

We were thrilled to take part in this exhibition because it encapsulated everything we at Tri-Lox stand for: reclaiming and repurposing materials from our environment that the world would have otherwise overlooked.

I’ve been fairly active in the online woodworking community for a while but have never really produced anything I would classify as furniture. I began working on this table about 7 months ago but got sidetracked with priority shift of renovating 6 rooms in our house. A few weeks ago, I was finally able to dive back into the project and managed to finish it.

It’s clearly influenced by much of Darrel Peart’s Greene & Greene styled work as well as work by Marc Spagnuolo, Timothy Rousseau and looking at other random Asian tables builds. I do sincerely apologize to all of the above for my poor bastardized attempt to be influenced by them.

The table is crafted out of solid cherry and ebony and finished with shellac and satin Arm-R-Seal. It’s a bit orange right now, but should mellow and darken as the cherry ages over the next few years.

This was a challenging project for me as it was my first real attempt to incorporate curves into any of my woodworking. Almost every edge in this entire piece has some form of curve to it.

As much as I love Greene and Greene styled work, I think my next couple projects need to focus on a style that is slightly more efficient to build. :)

So what about you? How far have you traveled for wood?

This poll was created by Tom Iovino of TomsWorkbenchcom.

I originally built this pole barn to store my boat and work on my cars. But after working on airplanes all day the last thing I wanted to do when I got home was to turn more wrenches. So the shop didn’t get much use. And then came the start….

I wanted to buy a shelf for under the TV to hold DVD’s and my wife said you can build something like that. So I started looking into it and got side tracked by plans for a router table and all the things you can do with one. Well that was my first project. It was so much fun, I was officially hooked. I sold my Shelby Mustang and started my wood shop.

The shop is 30′x 32′ with 11 ft. ceiling which gives me lots of room to move sheets of plywood even with the dust collection ducts hanging from the ceiling. I heat the shop with in-floor heating using a hot water heater which I highly recommend to anyone building a shop. Its nice and quiet and keeps my feet warm. I just finished re-doing the shop for the fifth time, hopefully the last! I painted the walls and ceiling, painted the green 6in. drain and sewer pipe that I used for dust collection black, which I think looks a lot better. I just finished building the split-top Roubo workbench using hard maple for the top and walnut for the base (Thanks for the great build, Marc) Anyways hope you enjoy the tour. Oh and by the way, I have yet to build the shelf for under my TV…although I do have some ideas brewing in my head.

This was my first attempt at a Maloof style piece of furniture. As with many woodworkers, this was on my “must-build” list. This one is for my wife and is a petite size. The overall chair is cherry and the back braces are walnut faced and ash inside for flexibility. I am now building numbers 2 & 3. Overall this was a fun project to build and I think using Hal’s book and video, places it within most average woodworkers’ ability to complete successfully.

Hal has a unique interpretation of the Maloof rocker which is what attracted me to this design. The coopered headrest which is molded into the back legs and the flexible back braces are departures from Maloof tradition, but in my view makes a more appealing look.

From a build perspective, Hal’s approach is to do much of the carving and shaping before assembly which is FAR easier than lots of grinding on a finished chair. This helps in case you butcher a piece. You can always remake the piece, rather than ruin the whole chair.

I would encourage everyone that has this on their “must-build” list to give it a try!

I recently finished my 7th banjo. The last time I built one was over 30 years ago. Since I recently retired, I decided that a new one would be a good way to spend some of my newly found spare time.

Several years ago I picked up some very nice mahogany at our local flea market. It was lumber salvaged from the interior cabinetry of a 100 year old sailboat, which had been dismantled. The color had oxidized under the varnish to a beautiful dark red color–almost black in places, with lots of glow and figure. The boards were a full inch thick, so I picked up several planks. The wood was rift sawn, so I was reluctant to use it for a banjo, but the planks were dead flat, and if they were going to move, it probably would have happened by now.

I planed the lumber down to about 7/8″ thickness to remove the surfaces and was surprised to find the mahogany was still quite dark in color. I don’t know if oxidation can penetrate an entire plank, but I doubt it. I have some suspicion that this might be Cuban mahogany rather than Honduran. Maybe someone reading this has an opinion. In any case, the wood was finer-grained, darker, harder and heavier than any Honduran I have worked with.

The peghead and inlay is of my own design. I’m an amateur astronomer, so I included Saturn, Jupiter with three of it’s moons, a shooting star, a smiling man-in-the-moon, a double-star on the octave fret, and a rising sun on the heel plate.

I suppose the most unique design feature is the carved heel. I’ve done unicorns on the last three banjos I made. They are all slightly different, but the design seems to fit the banjo heel quite well, both structurally and esthetically. The “horn” is carved from antique ivory taken from the handle of an old table knife. It’s inset into the neck and the forehead of the beast. It was a tricky fitting job, but will never come loose. I had a scrap piece of Brazilian mahogany kicking around my shop for years. It was too small for a fingerboard or guitar bridge. I ripped it on the bandsaw into three pieces of 1/16″ veneer and bookmatched it to laminate a facing on the back of the peghead. With the left-over veneer, I carefully grain matched it and glued pieces around the back edge of the rim. The result looks like a solid piece of veneer. Not much of that nice rosewood went to waste, I am pleased to say.

I made the rim from the same wood as the neck. It was made without the use of a lathe. It’s basically a block rim, with a veneer on the outside to hide the block pattern. Fitting the veneer was a bit of work. I re-sawed a piece of figured mahogany veneer from one of the planks, double-stick taped it to a flat board and ran it through my planer to get it nice and flat and 1/8″ thick. I made a quick and dirty steamer from a piece of 3″ PVC pipe and a pressure cooker, and steamed the wood until it was pliable. I then clamped it around the block rim with hose clamps for a day, took it off and re-clamped it with glue. Then I trued the rim with a sanding drum on my drill press–using the tone-ring clamped to the rim as a guide, spinning it against a couple of clamped boards. This brought it down to the exact diameter of the tone-ring. The last photo shows my setup. A quick pass on the router table, using the same clamped-board technique allowed me to cut a perfect rabbet to fit the ring skirt.

I finished the banjo with three coats of de-waxed shellac, sanded down to bare wood to seal and fill the pores. Then I gave the banjo five coats of Behlen’s Rock Hard Table Top oil varnish, wet sanded with 600 grit wet/dry paper between coats. Finally, I rubbed it all down with a felt block, pumice and water, followed by polishing compound. The resulting finish is very nice. The pictures don’t quite do it justice. Varnish has a unique warm glow, and is remarkably durable.

The banjo sounds most excellent. Lots of ring and snap. I plan to play it open-backed for a while, but will eventually make a resonator for it. I kept enough of the boat mahogany to do the job. I play both bluegrass and frailing styles, so the banjo will do double duty.

I love looking at everyone’s shop! There are great ideas for unique storage solutions, organization methods and floor plans that are helping me plan and build my shop.

My shop’s a 14′x14′ corner of our basement with bulk head access. It is outfitted with a Ridgid chop saw, Milwaukee router and a Ryobi circular saw I bought 10 years ago to repair our first house (a falling apart 1850s era home). For all my home repair needs, which was constant and unrelenting, they did well. When we bought our 2000 era home last year, constant repairs became a task of the past. I decided to spend my new found free time building furniture.

My father-in-law gave me his grandfather’s old Delta tilt-table, fixed-blade table saw. Absolutely love that machine*! So, as soon as I could, I pushed it into the furnace room, searched Craigslist and bought a well used Ridgid contractor saw from a local woodworker. He told me the table scratched, the base was wobbly and the blade and miter tracks did not align. When I got the saw home I noticed that every bolt was loose! I completely disassembled the saw, hand sanded the top, realigned, reassembled, re-leveled and gave it a good waxing. Now it runs like a champ. (*That statement was dripping in sarcasm – that machine is not safe at any speed. Nader wouldn’t approve.)

The out-feed table is also a router table. It is height adjustable and made from 2x4s and MDF. I used aluminum U channel under the table and some wing nuts allow a router plate be leveled and flushed to the table top. I traded a plumber a 12″w x 12′lx4/4 board of Jarrah for a bench top belt/spindle sander and a old scroll saw. My family spoiled me last holiday season and helped me get a Grizzly 17″ bandsaw. I recently installed the overhead Jet dust collector and built a dust separator from an old trash can, left over plumbing parts and a can of spray foam. It’s a lazy separator and only separates about 1/2 of the dust. I’ve been thinking of laying it off and letting it go, but it just doesn’t feel like the right time. It’s a trusted worker, and has been with me since the beginning, but it is missing the skill set required to move the team forward.

Against the “back” wall we installed an old barn door for access to the rest of the basement. Currently it’s flat wall space where I store all my jigs. The jigs in the photo are for a DJM inspired cocktail table. The lumber photo is parts for more tables – family gifts – in different stages of progress. The lumber pile is Jarrah. Awesome story…4 years ago our porch collapsed. I took a risk and bought 200 bd ft of “construction grade Jarrah decking”, sight unseen, for $4 a bd ft delivered. It arrived and was so beautiful that my wife made me rebuild with douglas fir and paint. The order was awful decking material! About 1/2 the delivery was 4/4×10″x12′ the other half was 8/4×8″x14′. My router, circular saw and I would have never been able to make it into decking. All of the Jarrah is straight grained, furniture worthy, rough sawn lumber. I have since found out what Jarrah is worth and realize how lucky I am. I think the price was a 2008-US-economy-collapsing-panicked-lumber-yard special. After the Jarrah arrived, I impulse bought a Dewalt planer and then realized I needed a jointer. So, for 4 years the planer sat on the lumber pile. I still don’t have a jointer, but two months ago I was introduced to a coworker with a really nice Grizzly jointer. We’ve worked out a Jarrah for Jointer [time] exchange.

Matt Vanderlist might have outgrown peg board (podcast 113) but I haven’t. I have two more sheets to hang! My shop is a wreck and I need to build some storage. I am finding out tools are like rabbits, start with two and before you know it they are everywhere and multiplying out of control. I would love to install a lumber rack similar to the metal adjustable ones I have seen in a lot of the shop photos and Marc’s new shop video. Lastly, after beating up my out-feed table trying to chisel out mortises, I would love to build a work bench. But alas, my wife has me on a 3 project at a time diet!

The Arbortech TURBOPlane

The key to this process is the Arbortech blade. It’s a carving blade that fits into a standard grinder and turns it into a wood-hogging machine! The blade I have been using all this time is the Arbortech Industrial Woodcarver. It was just recently brought to my attention that they have another carving blade called the TURBOPlane. The TURBOPlane differs from the Industrial Woodcarver in that it’s capable of a much finer cut. Not only that, because of the shape of the blade, you can get more or less aggressive depending on how you approach the wood. The other intriguing thing about the design is the fact that the blades don’t extend to the outer rim. That means you can butt this thing right up against a template, which is incredibly helpful for things like chair seats. Since I plan on building a Maloof-inspired chair some day, I decided it would be good practice for not only rough-carving a chair seat but to also get to know this new tool.

The Power Carving Process

Whenever you’re doing a project that involves power carving, the first order of business is to make some reference marks with a template. These marks will serve as guides or border lines. While your eye has to fill in a lot of blanks and you do need to be careful, the reference lines are there to remind you not to go too far. For me, the lines turn a relatively “artistic” process into one that is more systematic. My science nerd brain understands systematic!

The next step is to hog away the bulk of the material. It took a few minutes to get the hang of using the TURBOPlane. For those of you who turn, it’s kind of like using a super flute bowl gouge where one subtle change in the angle of approach can make a huge difference in the aggressiveness and quality of cut. But once I got to know the tool, it was smooth sailing.

I put the TURBOPlane’s template-cutting ability to the test as well and it passed with flying colors. Unfortunately, my technique did no fare so well. I mistakingly gouged my template thanks to one wayward stroke. Two things would have prevented this: using a thicker template material and changing the angle of the tool as I round the corner. Fortunately, that was the only mistake during the entire carving process but it’s one that I am thankful for. Sometimes you need to make mistakes to truly understand what a tool can and can’t do!

The Verdict

After this little practice exercise, I feel much more comfortable with the TURBOPlane and I actually prefer it to the older Industrial Woodcarver. It gives me a finer degree of control and more options in terms of cut aggressiveness and template use. When the time comes for me to make my first Maloof-inspired chair, I’ll feel quite confident going into the seat carving exercise.

Arbortech

If you aren’t familiar with Arbortech, you can visit their website at Arbortech.com.au or check them out at the Woodworking Shows coming to a town near you!

And if you just can’t get enough wood-carving goodness, here’s a quick video from Arbortech showing how to use the TURBOPlane with a template.

Finished Bed With Comforter

This project is currently being presented in the Wood Whisperer Guild but I do plan on producing a shorter free version for the regular site, so stay tuned for that. What makes this build a little different than previous is that I focus quite a bit on the evolution of a design and what it’s like to work side by side with a client. Check it out if you’re interested!

So here it is in all its glory! This queen size platform bed features solid Bubinga with a Wenge raised panel headboard that slants back at a 20 degree angle. There were a number of construction challenges along the way but in the end, I am very happy with the finished product.

The Details

All beds have to break down to some extent so it’s necessary to include hardware. My goal was to incorporate the hardware in a way that would have minimal visual impact. After trying a few different threaded inserts, I decided to employ a trick we showed a while back: tapping threads in wood. Bubinga is a very dense wood and threads quite nicely. Once the hole was drilled and tapped, all I had to do was cut a length of threaded rod to serve as my bolt.

On the underside of the rails are a couple of access holes for installing the bent washers and the nuts. Because the space was still a little tight, I modified/sacrificed one of my wrenches and gave it to the client upon delivery. You gotta do what you gotta do! The back of the bed received carriage bolts and although their heads would only be seen from behind, I wanted to make them look a little nicer. Some matte black paint did the trick.

One thing you may notice in these pictures is the oil spotting. I took the photos on the same day I applied pure tung oil to the project and the oil likes to creep out of the pores all day long. So please forgive the appearance in the closups.

One of the biggest challenges in this project was to provide enough support for the bed while maintaining the floating platform look. This was achieved by bracing the rails with extra stock (which also gives the appearance of a thicker rail) and by including a center support rail. The center support rail received a series of notches that interlock with the maple support boards. You’ll also notice the extra support block under the center rail. I convinced the client that for the long-term viability of this design, the bed needed at least some direct contact with the floor. So I constructed two supports that not only support the underside of the center rail, but also the horizontal maple support that rests above it.

One of my favorite details on this piece is the integral French cleat system I used for the center support rail. I really didn’t want to employ hardware on a piece of that size so I created two solid wood cleats that were screwed to the headboard and footboard, and the center rail itself was cut so that it would nest perfectly into the cleat. I also made an effort to have grain continuity wherever possible. So you’ll notice that the vertical headboard legs were cut from a single board and matched back up after cutting the bevel. This minimizes the impact of a cross-grain joint. I did the same thing for the horizontal lower headboard rail, only the cut was with the grain and resulted in a perfect match after the final glueup. It’s details like this that help set your work apart from the crowd, so never forget the power of grain continuity!

The piece was finished off by burning in my initials and the date. I know some folks have much fancier ways of applying their mark to a finished project, but something about the raw nature of the burn-in really appeals to me. I usually use a Sharpie to sign it first and then follow the lines with the burning tool.

This was a great build and it’s one that I’m proud to remember as the first project to come out of the new shop. This client is looking to have an entire bedroom set made to match so there’s probably going to be a lot of Bubinga in my future.

How Much?

One question I seem to always get when I post a finished project like this is “How much did you charge?” I am happy to answer that as best I can. Keep in mind this project was filmed and posted as a project in the Guild. As a result, it took about four times as long to make. Also, because of the filming process I didn’t even bother to track my time. The best I can do is give a VERY rough estimate. I can tell you that the wood alone approached the $2000 mark. If that sounds like a lot, that’s because Bubinga and Wenge aren’t cheap and I needed to buy a lot of it to get the grain I was looking for. If I had charged the customer full price, I doubt I would be able to charge less than $6000. That isn’t what I charged my client, however. The fact that I am publishing the project in the Guild makes me feel a little weird about “double-dipping” with the client. So he received a screaming deal on this one!

So that’s what we want to find out from you with this poll: where do you do your woodworking?

This poll was created by Tom Iovino of TomsWorkbench.com.

If you haven’t heard the buzz already, this week is Get Woodworking Week, an effort by my good buddy Tom Iovino of TomsWorkbench.com to help push new woodworkers out of research mode and into woodworking mode. Blogs and podcasts from around the web are participating by publishing content that aids in the effort.

As I gave it some thought, I discovered that this is a rather difficult thing to do. There are probably hundreds of reasons people who like the idea of woodworking might not be able to pull the trigger. And while I can certainly try to write an inspirational article, it will only be a shot in the dark in terms of actually helping to solve your problem. Not enough tools, not enough time, not enough wood, not enough space? I suppose these will be the most common reasons but I am very interested to know what keeps you from making sawdust. Perhaps, we can discuss it here and find solutions?

So if you do have a reason why you can’t “get woodworking,” post it here and hopefully the community (and I) will be able to chime in and give you some practical advice. Additionally, this will give me a better idea of what to cover in future videos for 2013.

So what’s keeping you from woodworking?

Hello from San Diego–I set out to design “The Neptune” with some simple goals: hold the i Pad securely in all orientations, look great on the wall, and keep all i Pad functionality. I wanted to use minimal materials and create a “floating” effect by gripping only two corners. I named it “The Neptune” because it makes the i Pad appear to float on the wall, and nobody floats more stuff than Neptune, god of the sea. And because I like to say, “The Neptune.”

The Neptune comes in two pieces: the Neptune itself, which holds the i Pad, and the Neptune Mount, which is anchored to the wall. There are two brass rods in one end of the Neptune, which allows the smaller piece of the Neptune to slide out, then a heavy duty elastic cord retracts to hold the i Pad securely in place. The Neptune then has a back peg screw that slides in to a T-slot style groove in the Neptune Mount, which allows it to spin 360 degrees on the wall. This was my friend Russ’ great idea, who said, “Do it like the back of the dartboard.” The design leaves a lot of flexibility to expand on the types of mounts, so I have a lot of ideas for other mounts to do next.

I make the end pieces and the Neptune Mount using custom router templates that I designed over several months. I chose glue-and-screw for joinery, because any other type of joint I considered would have led to unnecessary waste, and I like the look of the brass screws with the brass rods. I cut the brass rods by hand, then file and polish by hand. I sand the wood with a machine and then by hand. I found a local piano shop and they do a beautiful job on the stain and finish. Then I have number of very precise finishing steps to ensure all the pieces fit together around the i Pad like a glove. For instance, the back peg screw does not exist in the right size, so I have to cut it to the right size with a hacksaw and then make very minute adjustments to fit snug in the groove of the mount.

It’s been a great learning experience, I really enjoy my new woodworking hobby and am hoping to make it in to a profession. Thanks to The Wood Whisperer for the all the great info on the website!

Twist Drill Bit

Eventually I got to the point that I was ready to buy a really good set of bits that wouldn’t need to be replaced any time soon. After buying several sets of bits, I already spent quite a bit more than I would have if I purchased the higher quality bits to begin with. Grrr! This this leads me to the reason for posting this video in the first place. Like me, many of you are ready to final plunk down the cash to get a set of bits that will last a good long time and stand up to years of abuse.

The Carbide-Tipped Brad Point Bit

Enter the carbide-tipped brad point bit! I recently purchased this particular set from Lee Valley and I couldn’t be happier with the results! I think I’m in love! In regards to their durability, here’s an excerpt from Lee Valley’s sales page that explains the value of carbide-tipped bits and their relationship to High Speed Steel:

“High Speed Steel (HSS) drills stay sharp up to 10 times longer than carbon steel models; carbide outlasts HSS by another 10:1. These are the drills of choice for production work where you need a bit that can take continuous use.”

Of course, most of us aren’t doing production work. But if a bit can survive for a reasonable amount of time in a production environment, imagine how long it will last in a one-person wood shop! The bits aren’t cheap, ranging from $15-$25 each, but if you think about how much you’ve spend on crappy bit sets over the years, you can see how you are likely to save money in the long run.

Performance

I put these bits to the test on the recent Dogon Platform Bed project. I had to drill numerous holes into Bubinga end grain for the bed rail hardware. The bits performed flawlessly and showed no evidence of overheating. In fact, once I wiped the dust off I couldn’t even tell they had been used. So I am hoping this bit set will be with me for a good long time.

So if you’re one of the folks who emailed me asking for my recommendation on brad point bits, here it is. If you have recommendations for another manufacturer of good quality carbide-tipped brad point bits, please feel free to leave it in the comments section.

In 2011 my wife and I embarked on changing our wet room and bathrooms as they hadn’t been touched for a number of years. We decided to tile them from floor to ceiling and the look we were after was an expensive designer bathroom in a hotel. We did the wet room first and then set about remodeling the bathroom.

In the wet room we mounted the sink directly to the wall but in the bathroom we had decided upon a free standing bowl. I then needed to mount it on something. Then it suddenly occurred to me. I was in the middle of the Chest of Drawers Guild Build from summer 2010 (yes it was a year late!) and I could make something that used a similar frame and panel construction technique. We had already booked the builder for January 2012, three months away so if I was to make it, I needed to put everything on hold including the half built chest of drawers. Normally I would say that was plenty of time but, as always, work got in the way of woodworking and I had to limit my time to occasional weekends and 2 or 3 hours in the evening time when I could.

I got out Trimble (ex Google) Sketchup and set about designing a piece that would fit in this location. I intended building it using oak, sapele legs and a nicely figured sapele top. This was the same stock that I was using for the chest of drawers and I had plenty in reserve.

The 2 car garage shop was sharing space with gardening tools, a lot of the bathroom white goods and the half built chest of drawers, including boxes of tiles (to the ceiling), toilets, bidet, radiators, electrics, sinks and a huge tub in it’s shipping container. Fortunately I could use that container (the world’s biggest cardboard box!) as an assembly table of sorts when I put a few sheets of ply on top.

The construction is frame and panel the legs are sapele and web frames. There are two banks of 3 drawers separated by a compartment with a door. The compartment was sized so that it could store toilet paper above and below a shelf. The front area was to be tall enough to take items like bleach bottles, shampoo and the usual containers used in a bathroom. The drawers were to incorporate a centre guide similar to the chest of drawers. However, in practice I found that as the drawers were relatively small in width, they would slide easily between the web frames, making the guides essentially redundant. I kept them in purely as they also worked as end stops to keep the drawers from going in too far.

The drawers themselves are conventional hand cut blind dovetails with a ply base. I made the clearances a little wider as they have to cope with high humidity swings in the bathroom.
All the plywood is 1/4″ thick with a thin veneer of oak on just one face.

The top is made from two boards of 10″ wide sapele jointed in the centre. I left the edge square but did route an ogee along two of the edges. The other two faces were intended to be against two walls. The top is fixed on with shop made wooden clips that are free run in slots to account for seasonal variations.

When it came to making the door, I didn’t have any figured wood in stock so I decided just to put a sapele faced piece of plywood in. I plan to make another door with a nice raised panel of solid wood in the near future but the ply door is okay “for now” (so my wife tells me!)

I asked General Finishes’ advice as to which water-based finish they recommend for use in a bathroom. They no longer supply oil based varnishes in Europe due to VOC restrictions. I think that is the same in California. The finish they recommended is called General Finishes Exterior 450. At the time I didn’t have any HVLP equipment so I decided to wipe it on and was really surprised by the results. It was very similar to Arm-R-Seal in viscosity, dried quickly and had the added benefit of being very waterproof. It also has a light amber tint and brought out the grain of all the woods.

I made the drawer-pulls from some 1″ square bubinga with a very simple, but modern design to echo the pattern of some of the wall tiles. I used the table saw blade over on an angle to cut the finger slots. I then ran it over a round over bit in the router table and cut them all to length. I finished the ends again with the round over bit.

The only thing left to do was cut the slot in the base to pass the waste and water supply pipes and I was done. The drawer guides and web frame guides are lubed with wax and I had the piece finished and ready to be installed with 2 weeks to spare. The piece is free standing in the bathroom and is fixed to the wall with a line of flexible sealant. The taps are plumbed in with flexible tube couplings as is the waste pipe.

I now have to make a similar piece to go into the wetroom underneath the wall mounted bowl. I have already designed it but that is for a future post. Hope you like this one!

I have to admit, I am a bit uneasy about sharing my project with this particular group of people. I absolutely love building boats and to that end, craftsmanship can often take a back seat to eagerness to get on the water. Living in the North East section of the US, there is a limited window of opportunity to actually see your project in action and absolutely nothing is more disappointing than watching your new boat sit in a cradle for 5 months waiting for the first thaw because you put one too many coats of finish on your boat last Fall. That said, I submit myself to your mercy and share this project which has been a goal of mine for many years.

Some of you may recognize this boat as being a Whitehall style boat. I read countless old boat building books and most references on classic American craft will all have a section on these beautiful boats once relegated to hauling cargo and passengers around the harbors of Boston and New York.

This particular boat is a 14’ New York style Whitehall which I thought would make for a great day out with my 9 year old daughter. The original lines for this boat were published 75 years ago based on a design originating in the mid 1800’s. These boats were originally designed to haul heavy loads in the harbors so I softened up on the lines a bit to accommodate more typical loads of 150 to 400 lbs figuring I wouldn’t be ferrying any cargo other than human. There were a number of other minor changes to better accommodate advances in techniques and materials in the last 150 years, however I did everything I could to maintain the spirit of the original craft.

The most amazing part of this journey was the revelation that even though I have been rowing boats since the day my dad handed over the oars of the 14′ aluminum boat some 40 years ago, I had no idea what a pleasure it could be to row a boat until I pulled the oars on this Whitehall. She rides stable, fast and pulls with almost no effort at all.

So I submit these pictures and a brief detail of how this boat (affectionately named “The Blue Berry” by my daughter) was built for your review and maybe to offer some inspiration to others to build that project that has been nagging you for some time now.

The wood on this boat for the most part is only two species, Western Red Cedar for the hull and Ash for the floor boards, decks gunwales and so forth. The boat is stripped with ¼” cedar strips which are bead and coved and covered with fiberglass cloth and epoxy both inside and out. The skeg and deadwood are laminated Ash and a keel is laid from skeg to stem.

The boat is trimmed out simply with care to keep to the original spirit of the boat. Interestingly enough the trim which required the most thought in this build was the design of the floorboards. Doing the math to make sure that they are wide enough to not flex, end at the right spots so that there is no points to stub your toes on and land so that there isn’t a big gap around the edges yet still be able to get your keys if they fall between the boats was a bit more thinking than I thought it would be.

Although some seem to think it heresy to put paint over a wooden boat, I am not one of those people. Traditionally these boats were painted white with a colored stripe at the gunwale to identify the boat shop they came from. However, this is where I broke with tradition. White boats drive me nuts. Every little ding is a new touch up project. So my daughter thought this Midnight Blue paint was simply perfect to offset the Cedar hull. I have to say, I liked it more and more as each coat went on.

Well there it is. That’s my project and I hope you enjoy the pictures.

This table took me a year from start to finish. I did not work on it everyday, just when I had time.

There are 750 pieces of veneer in this table. The design for the top came from my wife and daughter. Each piece was cut by hand and placed into the walnut burl veneer field piece. The top is a torsion box construction with a 1/4 MDF piece on the top and bottom with structural pieces between them. We wanted something really different that could seat 10-12 people. Legs were constructed with frame and panel. Both of the leg assemblies have casters underneath that allow the table to be moved. The table weighs in at approximately 250 pounds. The different veneer pieces are made up of a combination of Satinwood, black dyed Pear, Amboyna burl, and Holly.

Twenty-two coats of Polyurethane were applied to the top, and then it was wet sanded to 1200 grit. There are two removable leaves at 18 inches wide. The table is 124 inches long with the leaves installed. The trim pieces that run along the edge are Walnut. I cut a side groove in them to accommodate the banding pieces into the side and made a relief cut in the top portion of them to hold the Satinwood veneer.

Busy Boy!

It’s going to be a very busy year for me. The Guild is now on a schedule building 4 projects per year. Sadly, that doesn’t leave me with as much time for free content production as I’d like. So I plan on trying a few experiments where we provide heavily edited versions of Guild projects as “episodes” on the free site. Of course we’ll continue to provide technique and product-related videos as well as our Whisper Minis. I am also in the process of getting some help on the business and editing side of things. We have a lot of content just sitting on the hard drive waiting for someone to take the time to edit it down. On deck are the following: a wooden-geared clock project from Guest host Rick Urschel, a tour of the Thorsen House with Darrell Peart, my Clear Vue Cyclone and ductwork installation, and a free version of the Dogon Platform Bed project.

The New Book

Woohoo! I’m writing a new book! This will be a full-size book on the topic of Hybrid Woodworking and it’s backed by a major publisher. So obviously the pressure is on. In fact, I’m writing this blog post when I really should be writing! This project is pretty massive for someone like me and it will easily consume the next few months. If you don’t hear from me for a while, you now know why! I suppose it’s time to put on my hipster glasses and head to Starbucks.

“Free” Videos

I wrote an article in late 2011 about our Video Advertising in an effort to explain our situation. You’d be surprised how many complaints we get each week about the fact that our videos have ads, but I digress. Unfortunately, the video situation is getting worse before it gets better. Our host, Blip.tv, no longer supports direct downloads of videos. Direct downloads bypass their advertising system and consequently, they are now blocking them. This is why you no longer see download links posted with each video. Currently, the only surefire way to get the videos on your hard drive is to use iTunes. If you’re using something else to download the videos, it’s only a matter of time before Blip.tv blocks that too.

This has caused us to start searching for a new way to present and host our videos. No big deal, right? Wrong. You might be surprised to know that our silly little videos are now being viewed/downloaded over 3 Million times a year! With over 230 episodes in the archive and more being added each year, that number won’t be getting smaller any time soon. Further complicating things is the fact that we like to provide not only the standard web version of our videos, but also a high quality HD version for set-top boxes like AppleTV, Tivo, and also local television networks. It’s a recipe for some very expensive hosting bills and it’s the reason why just about any other major player in the woodworking world does not allow their videos to be downloaded. Well, I would imagine the desire to keep people on their website is an even larger driving force, but that’s just not how we work. The sad fact is the days of “free” podcast hosting are dead and gone. The landscape of online video has evolved and we must evolve with it.

I WANT to provide advertising-free videos. I WANT to let you download our videos at any time on any platform. And I WANT to produce oodles of free content for the world to enjoy. But there are now technical, logistical, and financial reasons why these things might not be realistic anymore. We are researching our options and if there is any way for us to continue to allow unlimited free downloads of our videos, without putting us in the poor house, I will.

And just a quick note for those of you who know something about online video hosting and are prepared to tell me about Vimeo, YouTube, or something else. All of these online services have one thing in common: they don’t give you permalink access to your files for direct download. Putting the video into an embedded player is not the problem. YouTube will provide that service for free. The real issue is hosting our video files for direct download.

Well, that’s it folks. Thanks for sticking with us for all these years and I hope this sort of “inside baseball” transparency helps you understand what we do and why we do it. As much as some people like to think we are a big corporation with numerous employees and deep pockets, we are still the same small family-run business we have always been. We are just a lot busier now and our newest employee is still in diapers!

Interestingly enough, if the wood is either quartersawn or rift sawn, I don’t have nearly as much of an aversion to it.

After we carefully placed the bed parts on the floor, I couldn’t help but notice another bed that overshadowed my own creation. In their living room was a hand-carved wooden bed that was impossible to miss. It appeared to be carved from a single piece of wood and was clearly designed for a specific purpose. The tool marks were plainly visible and the piece appeared well-used. The bed had a built-in pillow with some additional features that seemed to only add artistic flair. The client informed me that this was a ceremonial bed used for funerals by the Senufo people of the Ivory Coast of Africa.

After I got over my initial squeamishness knowing that many dead bodies previously adorned this amazing creation, I asked if I could photograph the piece and feature it on the website for everyone to enjoy. The bed is approximately 79 years of age and it is indeed a one-piece carving. While they don’t know for sure exactly what wood species it is, they do know it is no longer legal to harvest the tree it came from. I imagine the original logs must have been massive!

Beds like this one were used to hold the bodies of dignitaries or wealthy people prior to the burial and during the funeral ceremony. Here’s an excerpt from RandAfricanArt.com that I found very interesting.

The complexity of the Senufo funeral rites derives both from the importance of the event and from the danger incurred by the whole group. The spirit of the dead man roams around the village and lingers in the spots he used to frequent. If this force is allowed to roam freely around, it could bring back the original chaos. It is therefore essential that it should be captured. The initiates alone have the power and energy to overcome the dead man’s spirit.

The Tyolobele blow on great horns made out of a single piece of wood. These are the nanaa, and they evoke the roar of a lion. The Poro dignitaries beat on thin, high-pitched drums called tyepingdaana. They are accompanied by the laladyogo, an enigmatic character muffled up in a cotton cloth which reveals only the eyes. On his head he wears a large plaited straw hat decorated with the white and black feathers of a fishing eagle.

The strange procession follows the tracks of the dead man’s soul through the village and up to the bed on which his body lies. One of the kponyungo masqueradors then takes a small armpit drum, jumps up on the bed and stands astride the corpse, all the time beating a rapid beat on the instrument with his fingers. He is assisted by an initiate who shakes iron bells to the same rhythm. The function of this ritual is to stress, with the help of the music, the power of the Poro society, and also to chase the dead man’s soul right away from the village and the cultivated fields and into the region of the dead.

While the overall craftsmanship might be considered “crude” by our modern sensibilities, one has to be impressed with what these folks were able to do with limited tooling and a giant log. What I found most impressive was the fact that this piece was still in excellent shape. I would love to know more about the process they used to create this piece and construct it in such a way that 79 years and another continent later, there isn’t a visible crack to be seen! A big thank you goes out to my client for allowing me to post these pictures!

Upon reading my article, the client was able to supply me with a little more detail on how the Senufo people make these tables. The logs are first air-dried and seasoned. Their carving is mostly done with an adze and finished with a hand made chisel type tool on a dry log. They only have a couple of tools, and they hold the adze like a hoe, stand over the wood and chip away with fairly shallow chips. Because the wood is so hard when dry, they soak it overnight in water to soften the fibers. While the wood is still wet, they do the initial carving, let it dry, and then soak it one more time before doing the final carving. Large objects such as this bed can take months to complete.

Even though it is small, it is the best shop I have ever had in 30 years of business relocations. I utilize it for woodworking and writing fiction. I am trying to master all of the facets of the craft.

I bought the Shopsmith and reconditioned it. It was made in 1954. I was made in 1952.

So how about you. Where does woodworking fall in your list of hobbies?

This poll was created by Tom Iovino of TomsWorkbench.com.

This gives me some inspiration to perhaps start a new blog extolling the virtues of a high carb diet with an Italian spin.

All you need is a long straight board (longer than your workpiece), and a few clamps. I also like to use a roller stand for extra support and a stop block for perfect repeatability.

This is just one of the many ways you can add things onto your cross-cut sled to make it one of the most versatile items in your shop. That’s why I call it Frankensled. A few clamps, some spare parts, a bolt of lightning and a little clinical insanity, and you’ve got yourself a sled that can do just about anything.

I’m curious to know what things you guys have added to your cross-cut sleds to make them more effective. Respond in the comments section below.

If you’re like most hobbyist woodworkers, you’ve been lusting after one of those fancy tracksaws for a while now. It all started with Festool and their TS55. They brought us the accuracy of a panel saw with the versatility of a compact plunging circular saw. For many small shop pros, this development was huge. But it came at a fairly steep price tag: currently $550 for saw and guide. A couple of years ago, both DeWalt and Makita stepped in with their offerings. I even had an opportunity to do a little side by side testing of the DeWalt saw that you might want to check out. Both saws made an initial splash simply because they represented the first “real” competition for Festool’s flagship product.

A couple years later, the reception to these tools feels lukewarm at best, judging from general forum/blog chatter or the lack thereof. While cheaper than Festool’s offerings at about $430 – $500, I don’t think the price difference is enough to motivate most fence-sitters. And general consensus seems to be that if you’re going to spend almost $500, why not spend a few bucks more for the version made by the company that lives and breathes this system?

Enter Grizzly

So why should we give a crap that Grizzly is getting into the track saw game? Because it’s going to cost $230! If you happen to be a firm fence sitter, consider this the schmear of vaseline that’s going to help you decide one way or the other.

Unfortunately, the product isn’t out yet and I can’t provide any sort of in-depth analysis or comparison. But I do have a unit on order and will report back as soon as possible. So at this stage, all we can do is speculate and raise interesting questions. I had a few questions of my own and decided to contact Grizzly directly for the answers. I’ll summarize their replies below.

Availability

They are taking orders now, but the product won’t ship until mid to late March 2013.

Festool Comparisons

There will no doubt be many comparisons to the Festool line. The saw looks to feature the same plunging motion and the track looks almost identical. Are any of the accessories and components (clamps, tracks, etc) going to be compatible with Festool’s saw? And conversely, will Festool’s saw work on Grizzly tracks?

Their reply stated that they did not take any measures to ensure compatibility with other brands and they can’t say for sure whether or not they will work together in any fashion.

Low Cost = Low Quality?

Grizzly’s track saw will hit the market at about 60% less than the cost of a Festool saw. How was this done? Are companies like Festool, DeWalt, and Makita simply over-pricing their products or are there areas where money can be saved without sacrificing quality? A lower-powered saw perhaps? Thinner gauge metal used in the track? In my circle of woodworkers, Grizzly has a reputation for being a great bang for the buck in stationary power tools. Obviously this is a very different beast, but this price difference is even more significant than usual. People are left to wonder if the quality is up to par.

Grizzly says that there are some differences between their saw and the competition, but one of the primary pricing factors is cutting out the middle-men. However, they feel that comparing their saw to Festool is a little like comparing a Toyota to a Lexus. They both will get you to the store and back but there are key differences. They are not aiming their tool at taking away business from these other manufacturers. Instead they are hoping to provide an option for those who would not or could not afford a track saw in the past. This allows just about everyone to have a track saw in their tool arsenal.

Personally, I can’t wait to get my hands on one of these bad boys. Many of you know of my affinity for the green Koolaid, but you should also know by now that I am honest and fair. So it should be interesting to see how this tool holds up to a little scrutiny. I have no doubt in my mind that it will be lacking in some key areas. The Toyota/Lexus analogy makes that perfectly clear. The real question we’ll have to answer is whether the quality changes will be worth the cost savings and whether this saw will indeed fill that niche. If it can make clean, tearout-free cuts in just about any sheetgood, then it just might be a winner.

This double rocking chair was built for my best friend and his future wife. His parents commissioned the chair for a wedding gift along with his brothers who commissioned a matching foot stool.

Even though this chair is about as unique as you get, we personalized the foot stool and bottom of the chair seat with an engraving of his wedding invitation and wedding date. We had the engraving done on a cnc then filled it with colored epoxy using padauk and ebony sawdust.

The chair took about 150 hours, created using 8/4 Canadian Black Walnut and Brazilian Lacewood. The seat was created by laminating walnut on the top and bottom of the seat blank then after carving the beautiful lacewood grain is revealed. Other unique features include a coopered headrest, flexible back braces, and a mixture of style from the great Sam Maloof and Hal Taylor.

Its not much more than a one car garage. I am running all my tools off of two electrical outlets and a lot of extension cords. Even though its small, its a lot better than what I was previously working out of which was only a car port.

So until the day comes when I can move to a 2 or 3 car garage, this is my shop!

This poll was created by Tom Iovino from TomsWorkbench.com.

I made this crib about 2 years ago for my daughter to be at the time. A labor of love to say the least. (I know Marc can empathize with me here) The whole thing took about a month, but would take MUCH longer now as I used to have nothing but free time (again…Marc).

I spent most of my time designing the crib, there are all kinds of safety regulations that I wanted to stick close to for obvious reasons. I ordered a mattress frame online and decided to make the crib so that it will convert into a toddler bed and full size bed one day. I used bed frame hardware from Rockler on both sides (top and bottom) and also on what will be the foot board.

I used Sapele as my main species and all the construction is mortise and tenon. MAN, that was A LOT of M+Ts!!! I am a HUGE G & G fan and incorporate some aspect of their design in almost all my work. I used a variation of the cloud lift on all sides, which made the slats many sizes. A lot of hand sanding and fitting on this one.

Ebony plugs throughout. I designed a “tree like structure” on the foot board to add some visual interest, which has some exposed ebony dowels holding it in place. This was kind of a happy accident.

In what will be the headboard, I inlayed a tile from Motawi Tileworks, who do absolutely excellent work. I surrounded the tile with a half lapped cocobolo frame to give the appearance of…well, a frame. Glue up I remember having a challenging time keeping all of the slats square as I was clamping and ended up making what I’m sure now was a way too elaborate jig to solve the problem.

Everything was sanded to 220 grit and then a washcoat of shellac with trans tint brown mahogany for color matching was applied. I followed with 5 coats of amber shellac and 2 coats of wax to keep the whole thing non-toxic.

The crib came out beautiful and is admired by all that see it. The only thing more beautiful is what we ended up putting in it!

TWW USB Stick: Kurt Hampe
TWW USB Stick: Randy Johnson
David Marks DVD Set: Keith Brann
David Marks DVD Set: Rob Triplett
Yonico Router Bits: Eddie Wildsmith
ArborTech TURBOPlane: James Moore

It’s the time of year for giving so we really kicked things up a notch for December’s Giveaway. Let’s dig in! And be sure to watch the full video so you can see Nicole and our latest addition to the Wood Whisperer cast, the Woodworking Rock Star!

David Marks DVD 2-Pack

First up is the David Marks DVD 2 pack. The DVDs include the first season of Woodworks and David’s Double Bevel Marquetry DVD (over $100 value!). We’ll pick one lucky winner who will receive BOTH of these awesome DVDs.

Yonico Router Bits

Next we have an incredible set of router bits. Three sets in fact! Our friends at Precisionbits.com. are offering up a straight dado set, a roundover set, and a cove set.

TWW USB Sticks

To celebrate a new item in the TWW Store, we are going to give away 2 TWW 8gb USB sticks. We also packed these bad boys with some classic Wood Whisperer episodes for your enjoyment!

Arbortech TURBOPlane

And finally, we are giving away an Arbortech TURBOPlane blade! If you ever wanted to get into free-form carving or something like scooping out chair seats, the TURBOPlane is the way to go. Let the Woodworking Rock Star show you how cool it is!

How To Enter

To enter the giveaway, all you have to do is leave comments here at TheWoodWhisperer.com! As always, fluff comments like “Pick me!” or “I’m in!” won’t count. We have tons of videos and articles in the archive for you to check out so jump in and leave a comment. The more you comment, the better your chances of winning! International entries are welcome. Good luck!!!

Are you interested in offering something up for our giveaways? contact us for further details and information.

The inspiration for this project was my wife. I’d been playing around with a few jewelry cabinet designs and sketches for her for a while. I knew I wanted to use bubinga and maple, but for the functional design, I tried to think of what would work for my wife. She definitely prefers not to open (or at least close) little doors and drawers, so I figured it had to be primarily open for use. In the end, I wound up adding a few drawers anyway, but I think they will be more for storage of rarely used items. Her every day stuff would be stored in the open.

Necklaces hang from the eight hooks at the top, and earrings (stud and hook) can be stored just below them using the exposed slotted bar and the black ring bar. The two top boxes will likely hold the less used pieces, the empty space under the mirror is for pictures or perhaps other small jewelry or ring boxes. The bottom three drawers were basically needed to complete the look I wanted for the piece and we all know that a few more drawers for storage is always good. There is an integrated french cleat that makes up part of the back when the piece is sitting on a table or dresser, but can be removed and mounted on the wall if you want to hang the cabinet.

I was going for a bit of an asian/arts and crafts blend and think that comes across. There is a slight curve in the top rail and the sides. In hindsight, I wish I had made the curve a little more obvious.

The cabinet measures about 20″x 20″x 6″ and is definitely my most detailed piece yet, comprised of 16 sliding dovetail joints, dozens of pieces, and dozens of mortise and tenon joints. The two top boxes with the lift lids are all made with 1/8″ dados, rabbets and tenons (finicky router table work). I’m not sure of the actual time spent on this. I started sketching on paper at least three years ago and finally got started with real sketchup designs about a year ago. If I had to guess, I’d say over a hundred hours, but hopefully less then two hundred :).

I built this shop from the ground up starting in March of this year, it’s a continual work in progress. It is a well insulated 560 sq. ft. wood framed structure with a closet that has additional insulation to keep paints and glues from freezing in the winter and to keep the decibels from my compressor and dust collector down. I decided to go with a scissor truss sitting on 9’6″ walls to achieve 11’6″ height at center of the shop. It helps with storage and incorporating a bouldering cave my wife and I use for strength training for climbing. It hasn’t been cold enough to test it out yet, but I just finished wiring in a NewAir G73 electric heater that should be just enough to keep it warm during our mild winters.

Now that I have all of my tools organized for my occupation as a home remodeler, I can start to focus on outfitting the shop with some larger/newer equipment starting with upgrading from a bench top planer. I eventually plan on moving my truck outside to make room for larger projects in the winter and a possible finishing area. This has been a huge upgrade for me moving out of the uninsulated, horribly lit, and very small dungeon of a shop I worked out of for 4 years.

I was just waiting for the arrival of our first granddaughter to build a cradle. I’ve had this pent up desire to do this for years, and when the news came of the pending addition, I had to get serious about a design decision. I knew the basic shape that I wanted included a swinging pivot, but it took a while to decide on the rail style. I was either going to turn spindles or go with a mission style. Ultimately I chose the mission style, as the wood I choose was white oak. Instead of mortising the rails I choose to use a groove and filler pieces. The construction was easier and I went with the spacers cut just a bit proud, a simple sanding brought them level with the top and bottom rail.

The final two tests were “mom’s” approval–which was a breeze. As you can see, Maggie is a tougher inspector; perhaps it’s her angle of view?

This poll was created by Tom Iovino of TomsWorkbench.com.

So in celebration of the holidays, for 1 week only, our premium app is 50% off! Yep, for just 99 cents you can grab this great app (OK I might be a bit biased :)

The application features include:

* Access to the Wood Whisperer video archive featuring category. Finding the videos you topics you want to watch has never been easier!
* Airplay enable via the video player
* 100′s of woodworking articles, shop tours, viewer projects with a searchable interface.
* Listen to the Wood Talk audio podcast right inside the app!
* Easy access to the Wood Talk Online Forum as well as the Live Shop Cam Page and TWW Chat Room.
* Take a peek at What Marc’s Reading and discover great content from around the web!
* Check out Marc’s personal gallery for inspiration.
* Keep up with the latest live events and video releases with the integrated Calendar.
* Exclusive discount to the Wood Whisperer Store, plus hot deals & discounts from around the web.
* Brand new Wood Whisperer themed interface to make you feel right at home.
* Absolutely NO banner ads!
* Both iPhone & iPad compatible!

Please note that this app is content intensive and it may take a few seconds to cache the posts in areas like shop tours & articles.

Note: you can still download the free ad supported version of the app on both iOS & Android – both new & old versions

Second Note: I’m working on developing the premium app for Android right now and hope to release it sometime at the beginning of the year :)

Someone once told me that garages are for cars…silly. I use mine for my workshop where I build mostly built-in cabinetry. It’s a 2.5 car garage with insulated walls and ceiling. I’m still working on a dedicated heater/AC unit. Most of the exposed walls are plywood so I can attach anything anywhere it’s needed. The wall of storage cabinets is made from pallet rack bought at a big box and then faced with 1×4′s and MDF doors. My compressed air is coming from above which keeps the shop much safer and tidier while I’m working.

The table saw is a Craftsman with a hand made router table attached. I’m getting better at dust control, but the table saw base doesn’t catch it very well (maybe a Sawstop would solve some of those problems). The miter station is a work-in-progress at the moment. I still need to add an extension table and backstop.
My favorite piece is the wheeled tool cabinet. It holds a ton and everything is easily accessible.

I have to admit, I didn’t make anything for anyone this year. So, yes, I’ll be on time this year. haha!

This poll was created by Tom Iovino of TomsWorkbench.com.

A good friend gifted me an antique pie crust table. With laminated legs separated, blistered veneer, and failed joinery, it was a complete re-do. Once the finish was stripped complete, I re-assembled and made all necessary structural repairs. The blistered veneer and getting it to look good, which was my biggest concern, was all that remained.

After cruising the inter-web for helpful tips and tricks, I came across a video titled “Router-Based Inlay” introducing me to The Wood Whisperer himself. Thanks to Marc, I was able to endeavor into this as a solution with sky high confidence, minimal trial and error, and an overall understanding of this technique.

Carefully considering the location of the damage and shape of the table, I laid out my rose. Then I chose several species that best fit the design. Bloodwood Rose pedals and thorns, Walnut stems, and Maple leaves. Keeping track of so many pieces can be hectic. I found it useful to create a highly overly-complicated hieroglyphic systematic process (Which I won’t go into) to coordinate each part into the design. And to top it all off, I found a reason to get a cool pair of magnifying goggles and a really tiny bit!