So I still have a lot of work ahead of me, but at least the dust is clearing and things are getting back in order. Thanks everyone for your patience. Time to crash!

Marc & Nicole

This was my first creation that was not to serve a purely utilitarian use. This was a Fathers Day gift for my Dad who is a minister. My little brother was staying with me for a week while his place was being remodeled and had an idea for a gift for Dad. He had an old beat up Bible and wanted it displayed with a plaque that said, “A Bible falling apart can be found in the hands of a man who isn’t.” As soon as he told me about it I went into design mode. I’ve been wanting to do something with the Greene and Greene style joints ever since I sat down in rapt awe and watched you build the Gadget Station. I’m afraid I may have ripped you off a bit but that piece has really stuck with me.

I started by looking at what I had in the garage. Pine 2×4s and some birch and oak plywood and some small scraps laying around. I’m a bit strapped for cash right now so I used what I had. My woodworking tools consist of a Ridged contractor table saw, some Blue Chip chisels, some tapes and squares and a hand me down Porter Cable plunge router (no table yet). I found an old picture frame we weren’t using and stole the glass out of it and that minus 1/4 inch all around became my size to work with. I did some basic drawings and jumped into cutting down some 2×4s to square 1×3 stock. (I use my table saw with an Amana Prestige for all my cutting because it’s all I have and have had great luck creating square boards no taller than 3 inches.) After that I cut to length and started working on the proud standing finger joints. I did not batch them out all at a time but cut one with the center finger and two shoulders and then matched it up to the mating piece and cut it. When both were done, I went on and did the next pair starting from scratch. To make the first cut was simple: two kirf cuts on the sides of the finger and then two more to remove the waste and then chisels to clean it up (my greatest woodworking revelation to date is the use of a nice sharp set of chisels and if I could, I think I might do everything with them). Then I laid that piece down on top of the next and traced it out and cut just inside of my lines with the table saw and then removed the excess with repeated passes. Then, a little nibble at a time, I got it to fit the first piece with a nice snug fit. I went on in this manner until all joints were done and then cleaned everything up with the chisels and sanded it all down. Now my frame had a basic shape.

I worked with a rasp I had bought for rough metal work and had never used and some sand paper to create the rounded ends on the fingers. Next I had to figure out how to create the super thin dados for the back piece and the glass in front. The top and bottom pieces I could make with kirf cuts on the TS but on the sides, the groove had to go past where you would see them on the outside fingers to give full depth for the panel and the glass to fit. I sat for 45 minutes trying to figure that one out and ended up doing the scariest thing I’ve ever done on a TS. I marked where the blade started and stopped on the fence at a certain depth and transferred those lines to my work piece and turned on the saw and dropped my workpiece slowly down onto the moving blade and ran it until I reached my line and stopped the saw and pulled it off. Now I was left with the cut too shallow for the panel and glass at the very edges and the panel side was OK because it was 1/4 inch and I have a chisel that would fit in that, but the groove for the glass, I ended up cleaning up with a jewelers screwdriver and a hammer.

I cut to length and glued up a panel of 1/4 x 5 oak plywood for the back (My very first time gluing wood) and fit in the slot and fit the glass in the front slot and looking at it and said to myself, “something’s missing… PLUGS!” I watched your videos again and set out to find a 3/8 hollow chisel mortising bit and some wood for plugs. WOODCRAFT! YES! I was thinking walnut but at Woodcraft I fell in love with a wood called Bocote. I went home and googled, “square plugs” and who pops up but Marc Spagnuolo on FineWoodworking.com with pillowing square plugs. I watched and learned again and went back to the shop. I didn’t do pillow tops but beveled the four corners on the top with a chisel and then chopped them off using the miter gauge and a short auxiliary fence on the TS and tapered the backs. I made a handle for my hollow chisel mortising chisel and used it with a 3/8 forsner bit and a hammer to create the square holes for the screws and plugs and slapped it together for a dry fit. It looked good so I batched out a bunch of those plugs and then went to work on getting the inscription in the box.

I found a piece of pine from old landscaping timber my neighbor gave me that I thought would be perfect. This timber had been buried underground for about ten years, I think. He pulled it out to reinforce a retaining wall with concrete and gave a bunch of them to me. It has some beautiful grain but you won’t be able to see in the pictures. I cut this with an angled front and wrote out the words for the inscription and then went over them with a woodburning tip on my soldering iron and glued it in place to the back and the bottom pieces and then glued the Bible in place above it and let it cure over night. I also used a key hole bit in the router to make places for mounting to the wall. In the morning, I screwed it all together and pounded the plugs in place with a claw hammer and a block of wood and that was it…no glue (I’m afraid the glass may break sometime in the future and have to be replaced) and no finish (no time, it was Sunday morning by then).

When my brother, Greg and I gave it to Dad after church this morning, he broke down in tears and said he would cherish it for the rest of his life. It was the best Fathers Day ever.

The new shirts are in! We are now carrying two new “shop-friendly” colors: Sports Grey and Chestnut Brown. The shirts also feature the new (slightly modified) Wood Whisperer logo. Get ‘em while they’re hot!!

The Router Bit of the Month winner: Tim Donahue
Eagle America’s Keepsake Box makes a wonderful gift for someone special and their Build-A-Box Value Package #199-1425 makes this project very easy to do. It includes a beautiful Box Side Bit, an elegant Foot Molding Bit, the Hardware Kit which includes hinges, lid supports and screws, and the project plan that shows you exactly how to make the box from A to Z. A great project for the holidays!

Fine Woodworking Archive Collection winner – Tim Gogley
Now, for the first time ever, you can get digital reproductions of the first 201 issues of Fine Woodworking magazine. All in a single compact DVD-ROM with a user-friendly search function.

Want a chance to win in November? Check out our Giveaway Page for details!

Let me first say that I love the site and all the podcasts! Your comical approach really appeals to the masses and all the great information is a solid reinforcement to your dedication to our craft. Great Job!

I am in my late twenty’s and live in the North GA mountains. I grew up watching Norm on Saturday mornings instead of cartoons. He taught me all the basics, and I still watch him to this day. Later in life I discovered David Marks, and he changed how I look at my projects and that there is an amazing rainbow of woods available to us. Most recently I have found your site. I love the fact that you combine all the great influences into your podcasts. You are a very fortunate person to have learned directly from these masters. I enjoy building furniture of all kinds, but my real passion is woodturning. I specialize in segmented turning and have included a link to some of my work.

Now then, enough with the brown nosing. One of my favorite projects was your gadget station. The use of woods, as well as the Greene & Greene and Asian influences grabbed my attention immediately. So using your inspiration, I designed and built my own smaller version to hold cd’s. It is constructed of walnut legs with a poplar body (spalted on back), and a spalted sycamore door. You may notice there is no handle on the door. I embedded magnets in the door to close it and also magnets in the spire on top to then grab and open it. I used a set of barrel hinges from Rockler to allow the door to drop down and be concealed at the same time. This touch anchored the medieval castle theme, I felt I had going on. Well, I hope my cabinet did you some justice. Keep up the great work.

Thanks to Kelly, Andy Hobbs (and Angela), and Sean Wisniewski for their respective Photoshop and pumpkin-carving skills!

If you like these, perhaps you’ll enjoy some of the other photos in our Goofy Gallery!

Its that time of year again: HOLIDAY PROJECT TIME! So this year, I decided to make a few little keepsake boxes, thanks to some advice from The Great WOODini. I also took inspiration from a box Nicole keeps on her nightstand and developed a new design that is much more practical for the average woodworker to make. The boxes feature a secret locking pin. Once removed, the lid slides off on a sliding dovetail. And as always with these holiday gift projects, you can modify them by trying different sizes, shapes, and wood species to make your own one-of-a-kind box. And since they are so easy to make, its no problem batching out a bunch of them in a single weekend. If you decide to make some, please send me pics of your variations.

Topics Covered:

• Creating sliding dovetails
• Using a dowel-centering pin to locate holes
• Cutting a recess with a pattern bit
• Sanding end-grain

And here are a few pictures of the final boxes:

Circle Templates – $32.99 This template set has been incredibly useful for numerous projects including these keepsake boxes and the Contemporary Clock Project from last year.

GRR-Ripper™ Adjustable Push Block – $59.99 The GRR-Ripper is the fancy push block you see me using in this video. Incredibly useful and gives you ultimate control of the workpiece!

Here are a few photos of a project I completed in April of 09. It is basically modified from Rockler’s Bunk Bed Plan, made from Maple with a few coats of water-based poly, for my youngest daughter. She has the smaller bedroom and uses the top bunk as a loft space for hanging out and reading (loves to read).

It is mostly to plan but I substituted hardwood dowels for the turned spindles (yankee thrift) and left out a few of the curves. I don’t own a bandsaw so curves are roughed out with a handheld jigsaw and then completed with a pattern bit and my router. The top loft got quickly loaded with her ’stuff’ including stuffed animals. The photos show the ‘backside’ view too (which is kind of funny, at least I think so).

Marc, I am watching your Entertainment Center Video (Pt 1) and noticed something odd with your large chisel. How did you flatten the back of it? It looks like there are three channels cut into it.

The chisels I use on the show (most times) are Fujihiro Japanese chisels. In general, Japanese chisels are made with harder steel than their Western cousins, which means it can take a lot longer to flatten their backs. And a flat back is an absolutely critical component to any chisel you actually intend to use! So to speed up the flattening process, a good amount of steel is removed from the back of the chisel. And as you can see in the picture, wider chisels can have multiple hollows. So now the actual amount of steel that needs to be removed in the flattening process is significantly reduced. Which means you are going to spend less time at the sharpening stone, and more time at the workbench.

This is the same concept behind creating a hollow bevel. Many folks prefer hollow bevels because they can be easier to sharpen, not just because of speed, but because its easier to balance with two points of contact. FYI, some may disagree with me on this but this is just my opinion from my experience. So the hollows are a little unusual-looking, but they do serve a purpose.

I borrowed the image to the right from a great article on FineWoodworking.com called “Speedy Freehand Sharpening” by Hendrik Varjhu.