So… a week and an half ago, just getting over the flu I’d had for two weeks, I decided I needed a second wooden spatula in the kitchen. So I made one from cherry. And broke it when I put in the inlay of ash which was just a hair too big.

The cherry spatula is 3 inches wide. The maple ones are 3½ inches wide. The blades vary in length from 3 to 4 inches.

Then I made five more from maple because I figured I could do better. I had planned to get four from a 12/4 x 7 inch x 20 inch chunk of maple, but after cutting the first two out, I realized I could get three from the thickness I had. And if the board were 9 inches wide, I could probably get nine blanks from a 20-22” long piece. But anyway.

Roughed them all out on the bandsaw, changing blades way too often. Had a ¾” 2/3 tpi hook blade for ripping / resawing out each spatula shaped piece from the 12/4 board, then a ¼” 16 tpi blade for cutting out the shape.

From there, the blanks went into the carving vise, and I dialed in the shape with spokeshaves. I used the large and small HNT Gordon shaves, as they both have tight enough mouths that I can work the “wrong way” on the grain and still not get bad tear-out.

On a few of the spats, I used the belt sander to flatten the back of the blade, but generally I did that with the large shave. I think the two with the worst blades were ones I cut with the tension too low on the resaw blade.

Carving was mostly done with a 45°︎ V tool palm-gouge. I think it’s 3mm wide. I also used a #3x6mm and a #2x12mm on the blue and yellow spat. The plum painted ones just got lines carved with the v-tool and then I made some thin plum milk-paint and painted it into the lines.

#woodworking #batchProduction

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The bowl was made from a crotch in a juniper tree with a large bark inclusion where the branch and trunk had partially grown together. Wacky grain, multiple different bits of heartwood, and all the sorts of things that make for a pretty result if you can keep the bowl from exploding on the lathe.

Finish was a few coats of Tried and True Varnish Oil, followed by Birchwood Casey TruOil gunstock finish which I used when the 24-hour wait for the T&T to cure felt like it was going to take forever.

I really like working with flawed wood like this and seeing what I can do with the wood and resin, but it was almost a month in progress, which feels like FOREVER when people keep asking, “is it done yet?”

Got the wall thickness down around ¼ inch (6 mm), but any thinner would have meant waiting even longer for the epoxy to cure and a hidden crack in the bottom of the bowl probably would’ve let go if I’d kept turning.

#bowl #woodTurning #resin #juniper

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This is a vase I turned from a chunk of Bradford Pear. I wanted to try a round-bottomed vase, without thinking about how I would hold it upright once it had something in it.

Turning the vase went pretty well. And once I had it turned I had the idea of having a sort of halo holding up the vase. Then, thinking about how I'd hold the halo, I came up with the current design, using some sticks through a halo, cradling the vase.

So I got busy and mounted a hexagon of live oak on a sacrificial face plate, and turned a wooden donut on the lathe.

Then I drilled holes for the legs, and used the offcuts to make three live-oak legs, which I painted black and finished, then glued into the wooden donut, then finished that with some spray-lacquer.

I placed the base against the vase and pencil-marked where the legs hit. I drilled shallow holes with a spoon bit and slightly rounded the tops of the legs to match. Not a perfect match, but close enough.

I then finished the vase with some carving, some enamel paint, and multiple coats of spray lacquer. It's slightly more matte than I was hoping, but I think overall it's good.

Once everything was finished, I poured some black-tinted epoxy into the inside of the vase to make it waterproof. I really need to get an old bbq rotisserie motor one of these years so I don't have to hand-rotate a piece to get an even coating on the inside of it, but for this one, it was hand-work. Then a little more 5-minute epoxy to hold the legs and the bottom of the vase together and it was complete.

#woodworking #vase #legs #woodturning #art

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I’m fairly pleased with the result. I intentionally left a live edge on the bowl, and I think it adds something. My sweetie is less sure about that, pointing out how the bowl would be no good for soup.

Thanks for the wood swap, Nathan! This was a fun one to work.

#woodworking #bowlTurning

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The first box is Russian olive from La Capilla Hops Farm in La Cienega, New Mexico. We buy greens from Shawn and Kevin nearly every week, and when Kevin learned that I did woodworking, he offered me some Russian olive. It tends to crack a lot as it dries, but I milled one log into small lumber, and then filled the cracks with epoxy with a blue pigment in it.

The box is dovetailed together and has a top of citrus wood from Arizona. The bottom is more Russian olive. There are ash inserts inside the box which serve to align the top and hold it in place. The box is finished with seven to ten coats of Tried and True Varnish Oil, and then a coating of carnauba wax to give it a nice shine.

The pen within the box is a pen made from cholla from our yard in Eldorado at Santa Fe filled with a resin with purple pigment in it. The metal on the pen has a gunmetal finish, which I thought worked nicely with the purple resin.

The second box is made from Rocky Mountain Juniper, harvested near Taos, NM. A fairly large knot and bark inclusion have been filled with resin with a blue pigment, which really stands out against the almost purple reddish-brown juniper. Again, the box is dovetailed, but this time with a juniper lid which is hinged. The corners of the box are covered with citrus feet, and the lift for the lid is also made from citrus.

The bottom of this box is granadillo, which has a nice brown color that worked well with the juniper. The lid is held shut by a magnet in the lid which engages with two small magnets embedded in the front of the box. The box is finished with seven to ten coats of Tried and True Varnish Oil and a coat of carnauba wax.

The pen within the box is also made with juniper, though this time from our yard in Eldorado. The metal hardware is gold and chrome, which work well with the reddish juniper.

#woodworking #penTurning

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I built a screen for our fireplace recently, and am fairly happy with the result. The screen is for times when we’re not using the fireplace, since it looks dirty, and when the wind gusts, sometimes the damper blows open, and then we get a cold wind into the living room. This also greatly reduces the noise from wind blowing across the top of the chimney.

Two years ago, we got the front of our fireplace painted by a local artist. It’s a very nice result, but especially with that fancy paint-job, we wanted something that would look better than the fire-stained firebox.

The screen has a few features that are unique.

The hearth sits a couple inches above the floor of the firebox, as is typical. This provides a lip which I use to keep the bottom of the screen from sliding forward.

I cut a lip and curved edges on a board to sit on the lip of the hearth, and then built the frame up from there.

The frame is walnut, and around the back edges of it, I’ve put a three-layer-thick roll of felt, which can lean against the painted front of the fireplace without damaging it. The felt is simply stapled in place, first the innermost layer, then the entire roll is stapled right next to the MDF backer, which should prevent the staples from damaging the paint on the fireplace.

The center of the frame is filled with a piece of MDF, which gave me a support for the juniper “rays” and the citrus-wood “sun.” They are simply glued to the MDF backer.

The juniper rays are all of different thicknesses. Rather than mill them all down to the same thickness, I intentionally left some of them thick so I would have more visual interest in the surface of the screen. The rays are all thinned down to roughly a quarter inch where the central sun sits, glued onto the rays.

And finally, the completed screen wanted to tip forward due to the distribution of weight in it and the uneven hearth, so I added a couple feet to the front, which I glued in place only after everything else was completed, adjusting the angle of the feet to hold the top of the screen tight against the fireplace.

The finish is tung oil, followed by a few coats of shellac (between four and nine, depending on which part of the screen), followed by three-five coats of Tried and True Varnish Oil. I thought about using a more traditional varnish, but the difficulty of keeping that dust-free in my shop convinced me to use the slower, but more friendly oil varnish.

That’s all. It was about a month from cutting the first frame section to setting the completed screen in place on the hearth, but I received the juniper from a friend almost three years ago, and have been thinking and sketching designs for most of the time since then.

#woodworking #project

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I finished another cholla and resin lamp this morning. Started pouring the resin for this in March or April, so it went somewhat quicker than previous lamps.

I’m using a solid pigment in the resin on this one, rather than translucent dyes, which gets a different effect. I like it, but I really want more swirly effects along the boundaries, which is going to require getting fancier about my pours.

That said, there are still some very cool effects in the resin, especially where I went back to fill in bits that had bubbles in earlier pours. I also like the more random arrangement of the cholla in this one. I basically just poured some chunks into a cup, shook them down, and started pouring, rather than carefully arranging the cholla first.

#lamp #cholla #resin #woodworking

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I made another touch control nightlight over the course of the past few months. The body is cholla and resin. The base is birch, and the top is sapele. It’s a nice red glow at its brightest, and barely noticeable at its dimmest, but it will last for over 80 hours on a charge at that brightness.

One of the things I found was that in dry weather, a larger touch-sensor is too sensitive, and will turn on with no touch sometimes. So this lamp uses a much smaller sensor which seems to work great, unless your skin is really dry. If that’s the case, put on some lotion or lick your finger.

The lamp is a little under 7 inches tall, and a little over 3 inches in diameter, and the guts are taken from a Lanterna lamp from Lee Valley.

#woodworking #cholla #lamp #resin

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Got some Russian olive from a friend last Saturday. This bowl came out of one of the pieces. There are two cracks that wanted to come apart as I was turning it, and the shape was largely dictated by another crack that did come apart (and which put a dent in the ceiling of my shop).

The lid was part of the chunk that came off. It had a branch near the middle that had rotted, so I filled that with epoxy and stuck on a handle turned from another offcut.

Mostly turned with a bowl gouge, but I also used a few scrapers, a carbide turning tool, a skew, and a bedan. Finished with homemade friction finish plus some wax.

#project #bowl #woodturning

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I've been wanting to learn more about bookbinding for a while, so when a Surprise Swap came up on Craftisian, I decided part of the build would be a box built with some bookbinding techniques.

I started by making a faux spine, using a piece of spalted elm I had on hand, and rounding it to approximate the spine of a book. I cut rabbets in the front and back of it to accommodate covers (made of poplar, more on that later), and then cut some small pieces of hard maple to make the other three sides of the box, which would represent the edges of the pages.

I then drilled holes through the spine and wrapped some nylon string through them to look like bands. They seemed fairly thin, but I guessed they'd “read” ok through the leather, and that worked out pretty well, though I forgot to take a photo of that.

With the hard-maple pages glued into grooves in the back cover, I applied some cloth strips between the bands to work as hinges for the front cover. I used Titebond II diluted about 3:1 with water to apply these hinges, and that seemed to work pretty well.

I also had grooved the page-edges by using a slitting gauge on the hard maple, making small cuts along the length of it, spaced about 0.6mm apart (the smallest amount I could reliably adjust my gauge). Then I painted the edges with three coats of a thin (1 part milk paint, 4 parts water) wash of lemon yellow milk paint, which gave the pages a more paper-like look.

I put magnets into the page edges and the front cover to hold the cover closed, and then I applied the outer book paper. I remembered partway through that the leather was supposed to go on a half-bound book first, but it was too late, plus this gave me a look of how the book was going to look. Also, I hadn't received the leather I wanted yet, so at least I got comfortable gluing on the book paper on what would have otherwise been a wasted day.

Before applying the leather, I spent a morning carving away part of the spine of the faux book. I realized that it extended beyond the edges of the pages and that didn't look right, so I carefully pared it down so it was even with the edges of the pages. As the spalted elm was pretty soft, this meant hardening it up with some thin CA glue so that I could pare it with chisels and gouges without getting too much tear-out.

Once it arrived, I applied the leather. I didn't do a great job paring its edges down before applying it, but I figured this is my first book, so I'm allowed to make a mistake or two. Plus, with book paper yet to go on the outside, I could pare the leather down and then apply the book-paper and it would look ok.

With the outer book paper on, I was waiting on USPS again. I had ordered some nice book paper for the inside of the box, but it got held up in customs for over a week. When it finally arrived, I glued it to the inside of the box, and I think everything looked pretty darned good. The only problem was that the glue for the inner book paper swelled the wooden cover a bit, so the front cover wouldn't close for a couple days, but once the poplar dried out again, it worked fine. Also, I tore one of the creases in the inner book paper getting it pressed into the box.

And that's the project. When I do it again, I'll change a few things. I'll make the spine of good quality hardwood, rather than something soft like the spalted elm I used. The covers will be made of either good quality thin plywood, or I'll home-make some thin plywood from veneer I have around, rather than poplar, which moves too much with moisture changes. I'll remember to apply the leather first, and pare down its edges better before putting it on. And I'll be more careful applying the inner book paper. That's a tricky job you wouldn't have to do when binding a real book, though.

#woodworking #project #bookbinding

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