I really enjoyed making the last Segmented Bowl so I decided to make another one. This time I wanted to make it wider, lower, and more curved. I drew up a rough scale design to figure out the sizes of the rings: Using the same software as the last time I figured out the segment sizes based on twelve segments this time. I think this was a good choice because it made the initial rough turning a lot…
I’ve been continuing my exploration of wood turning and I wanted to try an alternative method of constructing a turned bowl or other hollow object. The technique is called making a Segmented Turning and you build up the rough structure of the object out of rings of wedge shaped pieces of wood using 8, 10, 12 or more segments to create the ring. There are handy sites on the web that help you…
So… In the six years and some months since I retired I’ve been doing a lot of woodworking. I’ve learned a lot and the shop has evolved steadily and I’ve even joined a woodworking guild. One of the things that often comes up is wood turning and if I’m going to do it. I deferred deciding that on the grounds that I didn’t know where I would put a lathe in my shop. However, recently I figured out how…
After many years of not having a record player or for that matter vinyl records we now own both again. It’s been fun playing records at parties and small gatherings either ours or ones that other folks bring. I don’t think we’ll be collecting a large number of records, just a few special recordings that are fun to have in this format. We didn’t really have a place for storing/viewing records…
As I mentioned at the end of my previous post about folding side tables , I needed to build three more of these side tables to complete a set of four. This was the project of the last couple of weeks. They are very similar to the prototype with a few small improvements which I will mention as we go through the project. I went over to Boulter Plywood Corp in Medford, MA and got four straight, flat,…
This is another quick project, my beautiful and talented wife asked for a mirror for the hallway so she could check her outfit before leaving the house. I found a company that does custom glass on the internet ( https://www.onedayglass.com/ ) and after some mocking up with tape on the wall I ordered a nice custom sized mirror from them. They did a great job and it came well packed and exactly as…
We have a set of folding tables that we got thirty plus years ago and the hardware on them is failing, my beautiful and talented wife asked if I could replace them. I proposed an initial design for some triangular stacking tables but we decided we didn’t want to give up the floor space for the stack of tables so I modified the design to be a triangular folding table that uses a gate leg and a…
There was one corner of my office that was a bit messy. It was where I stored paper and chipboard and framing mat supplies. They were just piled on top of my filing cabinets. Every access to anything required going through some or all of the pile. I fixed that the last couple of days making an organizer for the top of the cabinets out of 3/4” natural birch plywood for the case and 1/2” for the…
Five years ago I built a Stickley inspired Morris Chair and I’ve really enjoyed having it in my office since then. My one regret was not making an Ottoman to go with it. I have now fixed that regret and built my version of a Craftsman-ish Ottoman to go with my chair. I designed it to be 22” wide and 18” tall to the top of the cushion to match the chair cushion height. I made the legs 2 1/4” square…
A couple of small projects came out of a recent cleanup of my ever expanding scrap wood pile. The first one is a “continuous grain” box about 3 1/2” x 4 1/2” x 1 1/2” that I made from a spare glue up of some scraps from a couple of years ago. The woods were maple, sapele, and western red cedar. I had a gift that I was sending to a friend and I decided to jazz it up by making a box for it. I barely…
I was watching an old Hot Ones episode on YouTube with Andrew Rea who is on YouTube as Binging With Babish and Andrew says this: This immediately struck a chord and I decided right then to make a Big Cutting Board. I also am accumulating a lot of extra lumber from past projects and I’m due for a cull to avoid a wood avalanche in my garage. I made the cutting board above out of Sapele and Maple. I…
Back in 2022 I built a blanket rack to store and display the lovely blankets my beautiful and talented wife had spun and woven. We don’t super heat our house and so in the winter I like to have a blanket while we’re watching TV. The rack worked fine for making them available and displaying them. However, we have two evil tabby cats who think that nice woolen blankets are something that they should…
My beautiful and talented wife had a couple of pictures and a certificate that she wanted to frame and put up in the house. I volunteered to make frames for all of them. The first item was a certificate from a Sherlockian club in Philadelphia that my wife is a member of, they are called “The Sons of the Copper Beeches” after a Sherlock Holmes story. I thought it would be cool to make the frame out…
When you have a small basement workshop you are always looking to carve out some more square footage anywhere possible. The image above is the reclaimed space and the project was to build the white shelving units and move the refrigerator back to the wall. Here is the before picture, below… Behind the refrigerator along the wall is an old shelf that I built many years ago when we first moved into…
Every defect gets respect Every project is a learning experience, some lessons are taught while you’re building the project and some lessons come after you’ve completed the project. Back in 2023 I built a set of outdoor chairs to go with the Fire Table that I had also built. You can see my write-up of the project here . I was very happy with how the chairs came out and we used them frequently over…
My neighbor has a Miniature Dachshund that has been having trouble getting on and off of one of the beds in their home. I offered to build a ramp to help the dog get on and off of things. They sent me a picture of a commercial dog ramp that they thought was good and I deduced the angle and size of ramp from the clues in the picture. I made the height/angle adjustable by having several possible…
This is another “after twenty plus years of putting it off” sort of project. Since we remodeled the kitchen and moved the laundry into this half-bath off the kitchen there has been a narrow shelf and cabinet unit from Target next to the washer and dryer. It was not a good cabinet, and one of it’s many problems was that the top shelves were open and the vibration of the washer and dryer would walk…
As it sometimes goes the last couple of weeks in the shop have been focused on a series of small projects. The first one was two more pocket knives that I wanted to put wooden scales onto. One of the knives was from a box of small knife bodies and other leather hardware that came from Noymer Leather back when my father was alive and worked there. Probably 30 years or more ago, it is the small…
In between furniture projects I like to knock off some improvements to the shop that I’ve been thinking of for anywhere from days to years. These are three that I just completed. The first one was to correct something about my main work island that had been bugging me almost since I built it a year or so ago. I had made the top of it out of crappy sheathing grade 3/4” plywood and a layer of 1/8”…
After deploying the Modern Wing-back Chair that I built, my beautiful and talented wife suggested that a footstool that could hide underneath it would be a nice addition. I had left over cherry wood in the right dimensions to do it so I did a quick project to make one. After determining the right dimensions, I rough cut all of the material for the top frame and the legs. I connected the frame…