A glimpse of my recent woodworking projects

Oak corner table

We live in a cozy little home. The elbow room is outside, which is where we want it, but that means every square inch inside counts. If you've ever read Sarah Susanka's The Not So Big House, you'll understand the kinds of creative challenges we enjoy. The corner table I just finished is an example. We needed a place for Garima's growing stack of quilts. The only place we thought might work was a corner in a small bedroom, but it wasn't quite big enough.

The solution is an oak table sturdy enough to hold a couple dozen folded quilts (they're surprisingly heavy). And to make things more interesting, this was the first time I used mortise and tenon construction (previously I had always used dowels). I used a tenoning jig on my table saw and a bench top mortiser. It turned out very nice, but it took hours to cut the eight tenons and plunge the eight mortises!

Here's a close-up of the edge (the top isn't really bowed; that's just a flaw of my cheap Cybershot camera). Everything is softly rounded so there's nothing for the quilts to snag on.

The table top is offset from the legs a bit in order to overhang the bed, but is high enough above the bed to leave plenty of wiggle room for feet, and with the legs set back, there's plenty of room for the quilts that are on the bed to comfortably hang over. There's also space for one of Garima's favorite woven baskets beneath.

This is now the most colorful corner in our home! And it should hold another winter's worth of quilts, no problem.

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Mad hatter

About ten years ago I got quite sunburned on a hike (we're pretty close to the sun here in the Rocky Mountains) and because there's just about nothing worse than sunburned ears, I decided to wear hats after that.

Over the years I became pleasantly addicted to hats and slowly figured out that there are hats suitable for hiking in the mountains under a hot summer sun (Tilley Airflo), and others more suited to strolls on cooler days (the leather Kakadu Bushranger pictured below on the hat hanger), walks in the rain (oiled leather or waxed canvas), saunters in the park (Montecristi Panama), winter jaunts (wool with drop-down ear flaps for when the wind kicks up), or an evening cruise at a Colorado county fair (a nice felt or straw Cowboy).

Challenge is storing a bushel basket full of hats like that in a small home like we have. Coat hooks are too pointed and will damage the crown over time. Hat racks are typically ugly and also too pointed. So I decided to make my own oak hat hangers.

The half moon provides a large surface for the top-back of the crown to rest on. The rounded and tapered saddle (I do love what a bandsaw makes possible) provides a wide rest for where the crown meets the brim, holding the hat horizontal to the wall surface (a bookshelf side next to my desk in this case) with the brim floating just off the wall.

Works quite well. If I were to do it again I'd make the half moon and saddle one piece, but this will do. Now I just have to perfect tossing the hat onto the hanger from across the room, and we're good to go!

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Happy Chewers - Natural maple chew toys

A friend of mine asked me if I could make some natural chew toys for her baby daughter, because she was concerned that the ones available weren't fully non-toxic. This led me to do quite a bit of research about the appropriate woods and finishes.

The wood was pretty easy to decide: it should be a hardwood with a dense grain that doesn't splinter easily, and not an exotic wood, because those sometimes contain toxins. Loving maple personally, that's the wood I settled upon. Of course, I was also excited to have an excuse to use some of my recently acquired tools, so I jumped right in and made nine maple toys with 2-1/8″ holes so they could all be stored on a 2″ poplar dowel.

Because of my love of polyhedra and the shapes that make them, I ended up making a set of basic shapes: triangle, square, pentagon, hexagon, and octagon. To this basic set I added a bit of spice: circle, star, bird, and whale. They all have rounded corners and rounded-over edges, and I spent a few hours sanding them to a silky smoothness. (I now have a pair of audio-capable ear muffs from McFeely's that enable me to listen to audiobooks while I work, which makes sanding a much more pleasant pastime!)

My research into finishes was not as easy. Though there are many finishes that claim to be non-toxic and safe for use on foot utensils, I learned that these often contain toxic solvents and dryers, and are only considered non-toxic because all the toxic ingredients are presumed to evaporate out of the wood as the finish dries. While that may be true, it left me feeling uncomfortable because I wouldn't want to make something for a friend's young baby that had even the remotest chance of containing a minute residue of a toxin.

So I kept searching and eventually came across Mike Mahoney's finishes. Mahoney is a bowlmaker, and his bowls are exquisite works of art. He makes his own finishing oil, pure walnut oil that is heat-treated to make it harden faster once it has penetrated the wood. He also makes a wax, which is a combination of his pure walnut oil, beeswax, and carnauba wax. He received so many requests for his finishes that he eventually started selling them: Mahoney's Fine Finishes.

It's an entirely different experience to use Mahoney's finishes. For me, oiling typically means wearing a respirator (looks a bit like a World War I gas mask), opening the windows, turning on the fans, wearing latex gloves and safety glasses, and still getting a headache. With this walnut oil, I used no mask, no glasses, no fans, and no gloves … and I didn't get a headache. The oil is totally pleasant to use; I actually like the feel of it on my fingers. Both the oil and wax smell faintly, but it's a pleasant fragrance. The smell dissipates as the oil dries.

To dry it, I kept the pieces under a 150-watt full-spectrum bulb in a reflector hood. That kept the wood nice and warm even in my winter cool workshop. I turned the pieces once every morning and evening. Each coat dried in three days. The slowest part to dry was the end of the poplar dowel, which makes sense because it sucked up a lot of oil. The wood, especially the maple, ended up with a nice, deep sheen.

The waxing step was also totally pleasant. Application took only a few minutes. I kept the full-spectrum bulb on it overnight, then turned it off in the morning, let the warm wood cool for a couple hours, then buffed the wax. Ended up with an even richer sheen that feels good to the touch, with a lingering, very subtle, quite pleasant fragrance.

I'm feeling quite good about my choices of wood and finishes for the Happy Chewers! I've continued to research the safety of woods and finishes for use in food utensils, which I think gives me a good idea of their safety for a chew toy, too. The woods that are mentioned most often as safe are Maple, Birch, Beech, Cherry, and Walnut. The finish that is mentioned most often as both safe and effective is walnut oil and beeswax. Walnut oil is a drying oil, so it won't turn rancid and won't evaporate out of the wood. The beeswax adds water resistance.

Best of all, the Happy Chewers have passed the crucial quality assurance testing!

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Small barn wood picture frame

Recently I've had the honor to play a small part on the team that has been creating the new Google Groups, which launched at the end of 2010 to many cheers from fans of Google Groups. One thing that we found both delightful and humbling was to use it to view the announcement by Tim Berners-Lee: "WorldWideWeb wide-area hypertext app available," which is a part of the Usenet archive that can be viewed via Google Groups.

So I decided it would be fun to hang a framed image of the announcement in the office to remind us what we are a part of, this enormous communications medium that has grown out of the seed that Berners-Lee planted. Of course, it needed a special presentation, so I printed it on archive-quality fine art rough texture rag from Red River Paper, and made an old barn wood frame for it.

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Weathered picture frame

The photograph hanging on the wall above my desk is called Landscape in Sandstone. It is by a friend, Tom Andrews of Wildland Art, who lives up the mountain a bit and has for years traveled to and photographed some of the wildest places still left in the U.S.

I never tire of looking up at this view into Paria Canyon in Arizona's Vermilion Cliffs Wilderness; it gives me a serene respite from the busyness that takes place on my computer screen, and even after many years I continue to discover new details in it.

But I was never quite satisfied with the frame that came with it, an absolutely perfect dark cherry frame with crisp edges, because it felt to me to be too perfect for the canyon it enveloped. One day not too long ago I realized that what I really wanted was a weathered barn wood frame that matched the hues and textures of the background rock on the canyon walls, and that I felt would really help the orange and salmon-hued rocks pop out vividly.

After a long hunt, I finally found some beautiful 1″ thick pine from an old corn crib that had been dismantled in the midwest, via the Old Barn Wood Company in Wisconsin. Yes, it's really a full 1″ thick. I decided to frame around the cherry frame in such a way that the weathered frame rode off the glass a ¼″ and the cherry was tucked back so that it can't really be seen. I also decided to use the wood at its full thickness, so that you'd have the sense of looking through a window opening out at the canyon.

It came out beautifully. I preserved the inside edges, and mitered the outside edges at 45 degrees, then glued onto the mitered outside edges a matching piece from the face that is a full 1¾″ wide. My point-and-shoot Cybershot camera distorts things, so the sides look a bit curved, but they're actually straight.

The wood is very aged, with deep grain grooves, as well as some vertical cracks (this is a closeup of the right side). This matches very well the striated and cracked canyon walls. The new frame has made the canyon feel much more intimate to me, and I love the way rock and wood share a common bond of aging. As a bonus, the wood released a wonderful fragrance when I cut it, unlike anything I've experienced before. Perhaps it had been imbued with the sweet fragrance of the corn it had stored for so many years. It lingered in my shop for days, a real sensory treat.

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Oak chair mat (aka: celebrating sawdust)

Some people say cheese when a photo is taken, but as this one was snapped, I asked myself whether I'd rather be at work (first days of vacation)!

This is not a new project; rather, it's a rehab. I made this chair mat many years ago to give myself a nice surface to roll around on, as shown below, when I'm at my desk in a room that is carpeted. But two of the boards had cracked over time, one quite severely.

The photo of me sanding is actually day two of the project. On the first day I cut out the cracked pieces and glued in the new ones, something that sounds trivial but actually took considerable time. After cutting out the cracked sections, I used a special router jig I made some years ago (an alternative to a jointer) to ensure the edges between the new pieces and the original mat aligned well, drilled in ten matching glue dowel holes per edge, and then slowly glued the mat back together, one section at a time. The entire process took several hours.

After it had dried overnight, the next day I went at it with the Bosch 1276DVS 4″ belt sander and its sanding frame, which ensures a near perfectly flat surface. What an amazing tool! By the time the first photo was taken, I had ground down the old surface and was working with a 240-grit belt to polish out most of the scratches. The mat, now looking nearly new again, was starting to feel like … well, like only finely sanded wood does.

Next step was to rub in some good Danish Oil, and now it's slowly redeveloping the glowing patina that oiled oak gets as the months and years pass, hopefully with no cracks this time.

Took longer than usual to clean up my shop today

Translation: it was a good vacation! Ended up with big piles of wood chips, shavings, and sawdust around every major tool: bandsaw, table saw, router table, miter saw, and planer. In addition to the oak mat project, I also made another picture frame. I was inspired by how nicely the framed frame worked on the previous framing project, the mahogany and maple picture frame for the photograph of Hanging Lake, so I did something similar for the photograph hanging over our fireplace titled Aspens on Deer Mountain, which is by our friend Tom Andrews of Wildland Art.

The photograph is fairly big, and I always felt the frame was too small for its size, 1½ inches wide for a frame that was about 43 inches across. I also didn't think the color, a mahogany-hued stain, was quite right. It's an autumn mountain scene, aspens in a blaze of color set against a pine forest in the background and surrounded by golden tan grasses, so I framed the existing frame with maple, which matches the hue of the grasses, and used a much wider size, 2¾ inches. I left just a ¼ inch of the original frame showing as a highlight.

What has one hundred feet and is made of maple?

But it was the third project that really filled my shop with sawdust. I began preparing the wood for the next lamp I'm going to attempt, something I've been thinking about for probably seven years, but that I forced myself to defer in favor of remodeling and making furniture for our home. The shape is my favorite polyhedron, a rhombicosidodecahedron, which is made up of 12 pentagons, 30 squares, and 20 triangles.

[ More about the rhombicosidodecahedron … ]

I'm making the lamp from maple and mahogany. Each edge is going to be 5 inches long, which means I needed to prepare about 100 feet of wood for just the frame of the lamp (which explains all the sawdust in my shop!). Since there are two different dihedral angles in this shape, the wood needed to be different thicknesses to match up properly (hence the pile of planer shavings). I cut the angles with the bandsaw, then used the table saw to slice the mirrored angled pieces off the remaining board, both of which left large piles of sawdust. Finally, I used the router table to rout rabbets into each piece, into which I'll set the kumiko (the mahogany pieces), and that's where the piles of chips came from.

If it works out—and with the complexity of the angles, it'll be a while before I know for sure whether it will—I expect it'll take me the better part of a year to make the complete lamp, including the frame, kumiko, and a stand (it'll be a standing lamp), as well as to apply the finish and then attach the shoji paper. The next steps will be really nice ones: cutting the edge pieces with my hand miter saw, gluing them up into the three shapes, and then gluing the shapes together. I love those steps because they're quiet and tactile, and they put me into a space of slow, relaxed focus, a very nurturing contrast to the busyness of the everyday world.

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Mahogany and maple picture frame

About a year ago, we realized we wanted a more compelling photograph hanging in our living room, something that would invite us to wander in and experience moments of tranquility. A few months ago we finally found the answer, a stress-dissolving photograph of the waterfalls at Hanging Lake, which is near Glenwood Springs, Colorado, by Brian Brewington.

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Poplar and oak bed platform

My main project of 2010, a new bed platform, one of the bigger projects I've undertaken.

[ Jump to the story of this project … ]

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Mahogany keyboard tray

A nice weekend project. The keyboard tray is designed to mimic the shape of my maple desk and to give me a way to type when I sit with my legs propped up on the desk, as I almost always do, as I'm doing right now as I type this.

It's quite nice to finally have both a wireless keyboard and a big, wireless touch pad; makes it so much easier to browse the internet, edit photographs, and twirl and zoom Google Earth, which are a few of the things I spend way too many hours doing!

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Bamboo and pine shoji screen

This little project celebrates what a good miter saw makes easier. We have a parallelogram-shaped window in the hallway from our sunporch to our garage (my shop). Most of the year, the window gives us a nice view of Ponderosa pine trees and sky, as well as some beautiful full moons. For a couple months during summer, though, it frames the rising sun, allowing a bit too much heat to stream into the room at a time of year that is already often quite hot. So we wanted to partially shade the window, but still be able to see through it. The solution is a shoji screen that blocks about 60% of the light.

The screen's frame is made from clear pine finished with a water-base satin polyurethane. The screen itself is recycled from a bamboo shade we replaced, which I oiled with Danish Oil to give it a bit more UV resistance. (Oiling and wiping the shade actually was one of the more difficult steps in this project … bamboo splinters are wicked!) The shoji screen simply slides into place, is deep enough to hold itself in place, and can be slid out easily when we want to let in more light during the winter months. Here's a shot that shows the bamboo a bit better:

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Maple end table

Designed for our living room, this table provided me with an opportunity to explore angles. Finished with Danish Oil, it has a small plant stand on top, which doubles as a bookshelf to hold a nice set of little books I have, the Wooden Books series.

A friend of mine, Komala, sent me the first few of the Wooden Books by Walker & Co, and over the years I've gone on collecting additional volumes of these beautifully made books, which succinctly cover some of my favorite topics, such as:

The Golden Section
Symmetry: The Ordering Principle
Islamic Design: A Genius for Geometry
Li: Dynamic Form in Nature
The Sacred Number
Platonic & Archimedean Solids

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Refurbished workbench

This was my main project of 2009: I upgraded my 15-year-old workbench to be full height and to have a new maple top. After drilling 20 more ¾″ holes in the new top (gulp!), I oiled the workbench and a few other items (a maple end table and two refinished handsaw handles). The oil really highlights the beautiful mark the runs up one of the boards!

[ Jump to the story of this project … ]

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A parting thought

Reflecting on spending time on things that aren't our primary focus—hobbies, for example—something Robert A. Heinlein said comes to mind:

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, design a building, conn a ship, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve an equation, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.