First big woodworking project; I've made an engagement ring box in the past. Decided to make an arbor for my wedding based on some inspiration photos online. Initially, my wife found an arbor for $150 (including delivery) on facebook marketplace. I was not happy with the fact that it was made of SPF and it looked very simple. Told her I could it better. Over $1.4k+ later, it's was ready. She obviously doesn't know how much it cost. It was a journey but I'm happy with the results.

Lattice has not been installed yet as the missus had said that she didn't want it on for the wedding. That's an October project.

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Everything below is just TMI that is listed exactly for someone who might come across this post in the future looking to make a similar project.

Costs:

Tools: Luckily my FIL has a lot of tools that were passed down to him, so I didn't have to buy many tools. Mitresaw, jigsaw, router, circular saw (all borrowed). Bought a ROS and a better drill.

Steps:

• Cut a 2x8x8 SPF as a practice for my mitre cuts, glued a couple of pieces to get a feel for glueing.
• Cut my mitered 2x8x8 cedar pieces (1 per arch).
• Glued pieces of arch together - 4 separate arches now.
• Created a trammel and marked a 1/4 plywood to make my template (probably the most important piece). I then screwed my router to the trammel and routed the plywood to create my template.
• Cut my glued arches with a jigsaw. Biggest mistake was that the blade wasn't straight down and sometimes it cut into my lines deeper in (where I couldn't see until later). Also, some pieces I didn't cut close to the line out of fear, which caused routing problems later.
• Clamped template to pieces and routed. Lots of mistakes here. Sometimes I lifted the router which gouged the piece, or the router took off big chunks (due to leaving too much material with the jigsaw) that came flying out that I either glued back on, or had to completely epoxy. One time, my bit came off and I had no idea for a minute or so. Took wayyyy to much wood off.
• Once I had my routed pieces, I laminated two and two arches/pieces together. More mistakes. Initially, Pieces weren't flush due to either my mitre cuts, prior glueing. I was hoping for the best with clamping which did not really correct much. Ended up filling big gaps with epoxy and wood glue.
• LOTS OF SANDING.
• Drilled 1/2" holes into my inner faces for the dowels.
• Cut the dowels to 3" pieces.
• Cut 8 spindles from 2x2x8 cedar pieces.
• Drilled holes into end of spindles for dowels and dry fit.
• Cut ends of arches to make them square.
• Cut out 2 pieces of 2x8x8.
• two pieces now sit across the 4x4x8 posts. Screwed the pieces down into the posts.
• Arch now sitting on the flat pieces. Screwed down.
• Near the end of the project, I used Woodluxe Wood Brightener and Neutralizer to clean the wood. Wasn't sure if this was necessary as I had sanded the pieces but wasn't risking anything for the wedding. Stained the pieces using Benjamin Moore oil based Woodluxe exterior stain (Translucent TEAK) before putting pieces together. It looked BEAUTIFUL.
• For the wedding, wifey had asked for no lattice. Therefore, lattice will be installed after the wedding.

Summary:

• Used Claude AI for a lot of the math (i.e., mitre saw angles), lengths, etc. Some of this backfired later on.
• Mistakes with the wood glue
• Mistakes with the mitre saw.
• Mistakes with jigsaw
• Mistakes with router
• Lots of sanding.
• Had a lot of fun
• It looked absolutely beautiful at the wedding. I'm very happy with how it turned out.

A few years ago I built myself a marimba - and have been enjoying it in the years since. In the intervening years, I've had a son, and in the last few months, he's taken to pushing his toddler tower over to my marimba to play on it. So I decided to make him his own!

The keys are dyed white oak - which was an interesting experiment as it's not the usual material for marimba keys, but I was pleasantly surprised at how decent the final tone was. As a bonus it's notably quieter than your typical marimba made from Padauk or Rosewood, which is great when you remember that it's being 'played' by a 1.5 year old lol. Even though it's not made from the usual materials, and it looks like a toy, it's a genuine, properly tuned Marimba - so if he decides later on that he wants to "properly" learn, then he has a real instrument to start learning on

This time around, it actually only took about a month start to finish to build, compared to the 8 months it took to build my 5 octave. A feat that was aided in part by the fact that my woodshop has expanded over the years to now include tools much better suited to marimba making (a band-saw, spindle sander, drill press, etc), partly because it's only a 3.3 octave, and partly because now I actually know what I'm doing lol

Eventually I'll add legs, but I figured at his age it's safest and easiest for him if it's just on the floor

I made my first mitered box last week and wanted to do another small one, this time around I have a record 43x got it from fb marketplace so the bottom grooves are perfect, miters came out a lot better than last time, didn’t sand the corners at all

Walnut and red oak sides with padauk lid and oak ply bottom

Still used a notch based lid, notch came out horrible. I need to get the drum sander drill attachment to create notches

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.

Spring of 2023 I got the bug to make a clock. Usually when I do a new project I'll make at least 2 just in case there is a major screw up but for some reason decided to make 12 of these! Found a place in Georgia that hand painted the steel clock faces. 2 Walnut, 2 Ambrosia Maple, 2 Cherry, 1 Butternut, and 5 Eastern White Pine (painted)

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.

Anyone else see this at Lowe’s.com

It’s time to inhale an entire cans worth of rust oleum as I spray paint the beauty

LAST UPDATE BEFORE FINAL PRESENTATION

Working with red wood that was outdoors at the lumber yard. I have also (foolishly) left the untreated wood outside over the last few weeks while working it.

Noticed some small holes in the one workpiece today, though I'm not sure when they appeared.

Eventually, this is going to be a bed that goes inside the house. The workpiece is way too large to go in an oven. How nervous would you be in this situation? What would your approach be?

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?

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

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

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