Category: Woodworking

The salad servers were made as a Christmas gift to my two daughters. They are a copy, structurally speaking, of the ones I my for my wife Janet about a year ago. That set was made from contrasting wood of soft maple and walnut. The set pictured below are made entirely of white oak. The “bread butter” t protect the wood from continued exposure to water is a combination of mineral oil and beeswax.

The original design was taken from a post by the YouTube maker Steve Ramsey. I modified his design and made these a little slimmer for looks and functionality purposes.

 

 

I made this keepsake box for my wife for Christmas. I got the inspiration from a YouTube maker channel called Newton Makes. It’s made from wenge and curly maple. I planed the wood thickness down to about 7/16 inch and the shelves to about 1/4 inch.

This is the first time I’ve used wenge and it is the most splintery wood I have ever worked with.  Three times I left the shop with splinters in my bleeding hand, especially under the fingernails.  

Newton’s box didn’t have the shelves but I added those after the wife wanted a little more versatility to store various sizes of jewelry and what not. At some point I will be adding red felt to the shelves and to the very inside bottom of the box.  I tried adding the fancy shaped legs that Newton made but I couldn’t get the twice sawn bandsaw shape to come out as intended.  Wound up just cutting an “L” shape bracket leg and adding a small taper towards the bottom.

I used Minwax Clear Semi-Gloss as a finish and applied about 4 coats in total. Fun project!

The box was made of 1/2 inch walnut plywood and purple heart scraps left over from a cutting board I made last year. The dimensions are 8″ wide, 6 1/2″ front to back, and 7″ deep.  

The top handle is made from solid walnut and its is finished with clear satin  wipe-on poly.

 

The bookcase is one of the projects I built from plans and a video created by Steve Ramsey. A shout out to Steve. He got me started in woodworking about 5 years ago. He thoroughly explains procedures in his course offerings and videos. He uses tools that are affordable and doesn’t over think his projects. Sometimes I think he goes a little bit too much on the cheap, but overall I really like his work.

My youngest daughter had an old TV cabinet that she recently replaced with a new, more open, sleeker model and gave me the old one to repurpose the wood as I saw fit. The old cabinet had a lot of wood to it, some was solid wood, some was MDF, and some was OSB.

I knew she needed a small end table for her living room so I selected various parts from the old cabinet and built the table pictured below. It was to replace an existing older table and the dimensions were fairly specific. No more than 16 inches tall and about 15 inches square.

All the wood but the banding around the two shelves came from the original cabinet. The banding was from scrap red oak that I trimmed to 1/4 inch and used a multi-beading bit in my router table to give the profile to the top edge.

The legs were a couple of pieces glued together and then tapered on a quickly put together tapering jig for the table saw. A first time for me using a tapering jig or the multi-beading bit profile.

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The foot stool above is the first attempt with using any kind of fabric with wood. It is a faux leather that stapled to a piece of thin particle board and glued to the stool.