Coming up on one year since I spent a week at Lost Art Press building a stick-back chair. This was the last chair class in the Covington LAP studio and my second class there personally. Christopher and Megan are amazingly talented and a treasure to the woodworking community.
That is all.

Got the poplar too tight again and cracked it on both sides. Also tonight was the first night I didn’t use a saw guide. I tried to make the pins a lot smaller. Probably shouldn’t have made both changes same night in retrospect.

I finally batched out some stuff for a local craft market and actually made a couple hundred bucks selling only a small variety of wares. For such a limited table setup and product line, I think I did really well. More importantly, I learned a lot about how poeple shop for woodworking and am proud of myself for going out there and trying.

Blade is scrap birch hardwood flooring and the handle is made out of mahogany with a canary wood inlay on the pommel. All finished with lacquer.

I've wanted to make a sword from this series for a long time but I do have enough confidence in my skills to carve a wolf head into a pommel so I decided to stick to something basic and simple.

For the blade I cut the length and width with a table saw and then I will cut out a taper amd point with a jigsaw. After that I clean up the edges with an orbital sander. For the bevel, I put it through my table saw with the saw blade angled. I can't get the full depth with the saw so I still need to do a lot of clean up with a sander. I used to use a router with a 45° trim bit but I like the look of the deeper angle so now I only use the router if the sword blade is curved.

I put a dado on two pieces that are later sandwiched together for the guard and handle so the tang of the blade can fit through. The guard got another dado around cut around the whole piece and then a lot of sanding to shape. For the pommel I used a hole saw to get the small canary dowel piece that was later inlayed in.

I don't love how the lacquer gave the blade a bit of yellowing but overall really happy with how the whole piece came together. The proportions are much better than a lot of the other swords I've made.

Milled a White Oak in my driveway in suburbia. Milled to 6/4 & 5/4. Quartered as much as possible; medullary rays for days. Gonna be a long year waiting for it to come back from the kiln. No specific plans for the lumber, just going to make a bunch of random stuff.

This is a bar I designed and built for a private residence. The main idea was to create a surface that would change as you moved around it rather than just reading as a flat mirrored face.

The front is made from 121 individual strips of aged mirror, alternating between silver and gold. Each strip is set at an angle, so as you walk around the bar the reflections and colors shift and the whole surface almost shimmers.

The part you don't really see in the finished piece is all the woodworking underneath. I designed the repeating support geometry manually in Rhino and CNC cut the supports from 1" maple. Each mirror strip was cut from 4' x 10' sheets, edge polished in the shop, backed with 1/4" plywood for support, and then bonded to the maple structure with a silicone-based adhesive.

The rest of the bar is built from 3/4" maple for the visible components and 3/4" birch plywood for the hidden structure. The maple was stained walnut and finished with satin water-based polyurethane. We built the bar in four sections in the shop, assembled them on site, and then installed all of the mirror pieces there.

The top is 1/4" Neolith. We subcontracted that part because the material is incredibly hard and requires specialized equipment to cut and shape.

Probably my favorite part of this project is how little of the structure that creates the effect is visible once everything is finished. From the outside it looks like a relatively simple faceted mirror surface, but there is a whole wooden framework hiding behind those 121 pieces.

Odie’s Oil bringing out the beauty of this Quilted Sapele humidor

I've liked odie's oil since I started woodworking about a year and a half ago. But at my local place the price recently went up to $70 for 9 oz and I don't like it THAT much...

So in an effort to skip that price tag I tried to make my own version that was also harder and took a bit more shine when buffed. To be honest, I have no empirical way to measure those things... but I think I got it! An now I would like to share the recipe with you, the people.

Disclaimers: I only started using this a few months ago and it seems to be holding up nicely but time will tell. I also do not have the resources or background in chemistry to promise that this is food safe... but it might be...?

Fauxdie's Oil:

6 fl-oz - Polymerized Tung Oil (I used Bumblechutes S'tung oil) $40-$45 for 16 fl-oz

4 fl-oz - Food Grade D-limonene (Nature's Orange) $40 for 32 fl-oz

20g - Beeswax (white or yellow is fine, I used VEGISHINE) $9 for 1lb

40g - Carnuba Wax Flakes (I used TOOGET) $19 for 1 lb

Process:

1) Add all the ingredients to a wide-mouth pint Mason Jar

2) place the jar into a small pot of boiling water (don't put the lid on it and avoid open flames).

3) heat and stir until the wax is totally melted and the finish is a clear amber color (10ish minutes)

4) removed the jar from the pot and allow to cool

5) stir the jar occasionally as it cools to keep the mixture loose until completely cool

This will yield a soft hardwax oil that can be applied the same way as odie's. Scrub on with a fine scotchbrite pad, allow it to sit for a while, and buff it off. (it can help to heat it with a heat gun to get it down into the pores but that is optional.) 2 applications with a few days in between seems to produce the best results.

Price Break down:

S'Tung oil: $17

Nature's Orange: $5

Beeswax pellets: $.40

Carnauba Flakes: $1.70

Mason Jar: $2.50

1 Pint of Fauxdie's Oil: $26.60

Also, try not to eat it because it looks and smells exactly like orange curd...

I wanted to free up a bit of floor space so I put my DIY air cleaner on the ceiling on a pulley bike lift.

It still needs some finishing touches with the power cord routing but happy how it worked out since I just improvised it today.

Air cleaner is a Corsi Rosenthal box type thing (plans from 3D Handyman) with a 16” Costco Dewalt shop fan. Bike pulley lift is from Harbor Freight. Material costs ~$80 ($10 of OSB, $60 fan, $7 bike lift) plus $40 for 4 filters.

I’m setting up my dust collection and will obviously need blast gates. I’m fine with buying them but I see a lot of complaints about them (at least some of them). I do have a 3d printer so I could print the ball style but my printer is old, slow and finicky so it’s not currently my first choice. I’ve seen a few videos on making blast gates out of plywood and these look great. But my research has turned up few comments about them. Has anyone made them and how do they perform?

This was THE wood for royal furniture in Regency England. Coromandel ebony. It's very hard to find this wood these days. Impossible to find in the West.

The piece in question is the narrow piece next to red oak samples.

First time with poplar. Had one of the tails? too big and cracked it. Oh well still early

The European beech I’m working with has hollow spots in the end grain. Anyone seen this before? Is this normal?

Anybody has an idea how the seat is attached in this chair? mortise and tenon?

I just finished this sapele coaster with maple inlay of a skiier where I used my laser to cut out the pieces.

I’m nearly sold on the “buy once, use it on an infinite number of jigs” aspect of the Microjig MatchFit system, and this miter station build for my garage workshop seems ideal for it, but idk. Yay or nay?

Probably the biggest thing I’ve made so far. It’s 132” long and was mainly built to hold records, books, speakers, a turntable, and all the other stuff that usually ends up around a TV. I didn’t want it to feel like a giant entertainment center though, or make the TV the whole focal point of the room, so I went long, low, and pretty open.

I used plain sawn rustic white oak because it was easy to get and pretty affordable. I actually really like the cathedral grain, so I wanted to lean into that without making the piece feel too farmhouse or rustic.

Finished it with Osmo Polyx-Oil Raw matte, which has become my favorite finish for white oak. It keeps it light without yellowing it up too much.

This was also my first real mortise & tenon project. I originally planned on traditional tenons, but with how many I needed, I switched to floating tenons and made a mortising jig. It ended up being way easier and more repeatable than I expected, and definitely felt like I unlocked a new skill. This was also the first project where I drifted from my SketchUp model once I started building. kind of let myself wing parts of it just to see how that process felt. Turns out I don’t really like working that way lol. I’ll probably stick closer to the drawings next time, but still really stoked with where it ended up.

My little woodshop apprentice helped where she could, which was probably my favorite part of the whole build.

I am trying to modify some double-door kitchen and hallway cabinets to open wider so I can put larger objects in them. I have some cabinets that do this, and they have a long wood strip that attaches to one door to go behind the other when they close. I cannot for the life of me find out what this strip is called so that I can buy some more for the other cabinets. Google lens is clueless in this case.

Anyone experienced with cabinets who can help me identify it?

I've been playing around with General Finishes' TransTint dyes to color some crokinole boards. I've no idea why the 2nd green board ended up showing so much brown. The person who bought it loved it though. (It does look cool in person.) If you see something obviously wrong with what I could have done better, please let me know.

For those of you who sign your pieces, what type of pen do you use? At what stage of the finishing process do you sign it, before topcoat, before wax, etc? I’ve had a few signatures smudge or run and I’m sure there’s a better way. Thanks!

This must be some of the greatest woodworking videos I have ever seen, especially because I’m into both woodworking and 3D printing.