Found this beat-up old table on the side of the street by my house. The top was scuffed and the paint was chipping, but the base and legs were sturdy, so like a good scavenger, I scurried off with it.



After a sponge bath, I started sanding down the table top, only to discover that underneath that ugly brown paint, there was a lovely red-oak body. Who paints over oak? Pine, sure; poplar, maybe--but oak? Truly a furniture faux pas.  



When it was all sanded down, it was actually a pretty nice looking table.



All that was left was to stain it with a nice rich color (English Chestnut) and seal it with a few coats of polyurethane.







Not bad for $15 worth of supplies and a few afternoons of work. Just look at how well the desk accents those classy items: leather-bound portfolio, bottle of Port, a log or something, some fruit... a still-life for the ages!

I did not do this.

Chip carving is difficult. In theory, you make angled cuts into a piece of wood so that they meet at a single point (think upside-down pyramid). 

The intended result is a clean-cut depression which, fittingly, is what I ended up with after botching this lovely rosette. 

Naturally, I blame the wood. Poplar is too splintery, and Oak is too hard. At some point I need to invest in a basswood tree so that I can have all the basswood I need. That's how nature works, right Mr. Lorax?

I did this.

Check it out-- bullet time!

Now that we had a collection of 14 or-so coasters, we decided that we were going to give sets of coasters out as Christmas presents. Now, these puppies were fine gifts on their own; however, being the perfectionist I am (and I guess Olivia a little bit too) I wanted to give them a little more professional feel.  



First things first, I didn’t want to hand out a stack of four coasters that would immediately get dispersed and lost; they needed a holder. Having no real clue what I was doing, I just cut out a 5.5” square of 0.5” pine I had lying around. That gave enough room for the coasters to fit, but not look wonky or oversized. After sanding the squares, I drilled four holes in the corners to accommodate 0.5” dowel rods. Why 0.5” dowel rods? Because that is what was lying around in my garage. Through a combination of drilling, sanding, and fudging the numbers, I managed to get the four posts into the square. Using wood glue, I put the posts in and let them sit (Also using wood glue, I managed to seal the wood around the post-holes, which resulted in weird blotchy spots where the stain didn’t soak in). After they were set and sanded, I applied some stain I had lying around (Gunstock, I believe) which added a nice dark compliment to the coaster’s lighter aesthetic. 

With the holders finished, I handed the presentation over to Olivia, who selected some red and gold ribbon to tie around the set. Using her Bee-Beep Bow Tying Skills, she skillfully weaved the ribbon into a series of folds and bends, the likes of which the world has never before seen!



The coup-de-grâce of the project was a little “about me” card that I printed out and glued to some cardstock. Like any pretentious hand-made craft, I romanticized the story told here and used a fancy font to make it seem much more artistic than it is. 



 And there you have it! That is how babies are made.

One day, whilst being the rugged mountain-man that I am, I came across a fallen tree. I felt the branches; are they looking at meeeee? Wait– never mind. I came across a tree that had what appeared to be a deep purple wood running through it’s core. I decided to harvest a small piece for further study. I came to the conclusion that the wood belonged to a Juniperus virginiana tree (Eastern Redcedar, to the common man). 

Not knowing for what purpose, I harvested some logs; two pieces, approx 3ft long, with 5in diameter (See the picture below for a view of an unfinished limb). Along with my co-wood-worker Olivia, we decided to use the natural beauty of the wood to make some good old fashioned coasters. After removing the outer bark, and sanding the surface, we used a circular saw to cut the log into 0.5” slices. This gave us about 18 circular wood-rounds, which is good, because we were going to mess up a lot of them. 

After sanding the faces and edges of the rounds, we prepped the coasters for some kind of sealant/protectant. This was actually the most difficult part of the project; finding a wood treatment that would protect, without overpowering the natural beauty of the wood. 

The picture below shows several wood treatments, as well as an unfinished round (sample D). The first product we tested was a clear outdoor polyurethane, however this caused the wood to darken, and lose much its violet hue (sample B). We tried various other stains and oils (sample A is half-polyurethane and half-teak oil) before settling on a multi-coat shellac finish (sample C). After applying 3 coats of shellac, we sanded the coasters with a very fine grit sandpaper, and cleaned them with a damp sponge. 
 
The last touch on the coasters themselves was to trace, cut-out, and apply a thin layer of self-adhesive corkboard to the bottoms for added grip and protection. Additionally, adding the cork made them look like, infinitely more professional, and less like bits of circular scrap wood. 

This concludes Part 1 of the coaster saga; Part 2 involves the packaging and presentation of the coaster sets!

I don’t mind committing to a long-term project; I was actually looking forward to creating a woodworking staple: a hand-carved chess set. The standard chess set contains two sets of 16 pieces, broken down as follows:

• 1 King
• 1 Queen
• 2 Rooks
• 2 Bishops
• 2 Knights
• 8 Pawns

I assumed the pawn would be the easiest to make, plus having to make 8 of them I figured extra practice couldn’t hurt (in retrospect, I should have known that making 8 of anything would be prohibitively time-consuming).

Of the three standard types of chess sets, I decided to go with the Staunton chessmen. That way if I wanted to use my pieces in an official FIDE competition, I could.

You can see the progression in three stages. It starts out with promise; look at that beautiful pawn drawn on the face of the wood (I probably should have stopped there). Please keep in mind, dear reader, that this is a square of oak, which is a hard wood, thus harder to work on/in.
By frame two, you can see the piece taking on a decidedly more ‘butt-plug’ shape. Although popular with the more sexually explicit chess sets (see: Dinosaur chess) this was not my intended purpose. 

By frame three it begins to look like an actual pawn, albeit a rather stout one-- which I’m fine with. I like to think that this pawn is the lesser-known infantry unit, the pikeman (whose armor is shown to the right). So really, I'm nobly helping bring attention and credit to underrepresented historical persons. 












As for the rest of the chess set...I'm pacing myself. Check back in a few months; maybe I'll have a rook or something.

Now I know a lot of you are thinking, 'Does he do anything other than carve wood really, really well?' And the answer is: Yes!



I recently had an acquaintance move into a new place, and made this plaque as a housewarming present. Naturally, I insisted that it be placed directly over the entryway, so as to both inform and impress all who enter.  

Details: Pre-cut pine plaque, letters etched and burned*, then sealed with a few coats of shellac 

*Note:

Fig 2. Wood, burning

Fig 1. Woodburning

This is from a little while ago (pretty recently actually) when I wanted to give some wood  joints a try. For those of you unfamiliar, these are two common wood joints: a box joint (left) and, well -- you can read.






Naturally, I attempted to do the more complicated of the two. After watching some YouTube videos and looking up how-to guides, I decided to go ahead with the project. I used a 6"x1/2" section of a poplar board, since pine is too splintery for the fine cuts and details needed for a job like this.  I even created a template (that I printed out) so that my cuts would be as precise as possible. 




 
At this point, I'd like to remind the reader that this is what a proper set of dovetail cuts should look like:

Aaaaaaaaand here's what my cuts looked like:



Not exactly spot-on. Instead of conjuring thoughts of the tail of a dove, I ended up creating something that evoked images of the mouth of a meth head. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure methmouth-joints are useful for, you know, lots of things; I just didn't want them on my wood. 

Not to be deterred, I decided to go back and try the slightly more simple box joint. Using the same poplar board I marked and cut 1/2" pegs and notches in two pieces. I had to do a good bit of chiseling and sanding to get the fit right, but in the end it turned out better than I thought it would. Maybe in the near future I'll try to make some little containers using these joints... market them as hamster caskets...hmm...

This cheerful little guy was my way of testing out a recently-purchased jigsaw. Used a dremmel to make the eyes, chiseled out the nose and etched out the mouth. If there appears to be a booger in this gentleman's left nostril, that's because there is. 
 





*Yeah, I know, but when else am I going to get to make a jig-based pun?