walnut end table

I finally started, and finished, a walnut burl end table I've been meaning to build for the past year or so. I got some really sweet looking burl veneers - approximately 9x9", and quarter-matched them into a very pleasing pattern.

The legs and apron are domestic walnut, with a cherry inlay band on the top. It was built similarly in style to the coffee table, but with narrower stock for legs, and a 2" apron instead of 3 inches.

A picture's worth a thousand words. Here's 4000:

coffee scoop

For my first turning project after getting back into the game, I decided to go small and turn a coffee scoop. It comes in the same sort of kit that the pens do, where you buy the brass parts and turn the handel out of whatever. I started with what appeared to be a really nicely patterned wood blank that I had laying around, but by the time I turned it down to size, there was no more interesting grain patterns left. So I bailed out on that before I assembled it, because it was really boring looking. And lets face it - if you're making your own coffee scoop, "boring looking" isn't really a desiralbe quality. The 3 plastic ones I already have were "boring looking" - I might as well have just stuck with those.

50 cents for a new brass tube insert later, and I found a piece of (what I think is) ziricote or bacote that was too short to make 2 halves of a pen, but plenty long enough for a coffee scoop handle in my pile-o-randomness. The end result is pictured throughout this post. I think it came out pretty nice.

Coffee Table

I'm pretty much finished with my new coffee table. Given that it will take a lot of abuse, I want to put several more layers of polyurethane on it before calling it "officially done", but it's pretty close. Since the shop (garage) is so dusty, I've been applying the finish up on the dining table, so I had to put off the finishing project, what with Thanksgiving and the whole "needing the dinner table for dinner" thing. Women!

I used cherry for the legs and aprons, and imbuya veneer over MDF for the table surface. The more observant of you will remember that these are the same woods I used in the speakers I made several months ago. What can I say -- I really like the way they look together. Plus I was relatively certain that I wasn't allergic to either of them, which was a big deal for a "first forray back into woodworking." Sawdust, in general, is an itchy thing which tends to dry out skin, so naturally my mind went into paranoid mode as I was cutting the parts, but fortunately I didn't break out or anything.

The legs are made from 2 glued up pieces of cherry, totalling about 2.75" square. The outside edge is rounded over, and the inside faces are tapered to some degree that I found pleasing to the eye. I was intending on making them as close to 2" square as I could, but once I got done planing the 8/4 stock, they just seemed a little bit too narrow, especially when I considered how they'd look with the taper. I think I made the right choice -- the thicker legs add a nice visual balance. The aprons are inset about a quarter of an inch, which I also think add a nice look.

One of the legs came out a little crooked during the glue-up (I need more clamps!), but not enough for a casual glance to notice. Overall, I'm pretty pleased. We may have to turn into a "coaster-using" household, though, which would pretty much be impossible to enforce with 50% of our friends and 66% of the household members.

first attempts at turning pens

I turned my first 2 pens over the past couple nights. The first one is actually a combination of 2 different pens - one that was going to be cherry, and the other an unidentified pen blank that I got some time ago. When turning them, I got a little bit too heavy-handed and wound up splitting the wood when it got thin, effectively ruining that half of the pen. Rather than waste the effort, I put them together into one mismatched "first try" pen.

Honestly, I'd have to say it's more of a "use this for paying bills" kind of pen, rather than a "showpiece that's going to net me millions of dollars in lucrative pen-turning contracts" kind of pen. It's hard to not be disappointed, because the grain on the mystery blank was really really nice. The pictures are a little blurry, because apparently my camera doesn't auto-focus so well when you take pictures in near darkness, which was the case when I took these.



I'm far more pleased with Pen #2 - made from another mystery-wood pen blank. I even managed to make a captive ring on the top part, though it's shaped more like a thick washer than a doughnut. But to be fair, I don't have a fancy special captive-ring tool - just a skew chisel, so...

I didn't plan it, but the clip for the pen comes meets up pretty well with the "lumpy" part at the bottom of the top piece. Now I wish I'd planned that out better, so that the clip came down right at the center. Oh well.

I'm also pretty sure that, with time, the captive ring will snap off, as it will take a fair amount of abuse given its location inside the pen clip. Maybe I'll just make this a "desk pen" instead of a "carry pen" -- that way I'll be less likely to break the ring off when clipping it in my pocket or something. We'll see..

Pao Ferro bowl

This is the small bowl I made this weekend. The wood is the smaller piece of the pao ferro I bought last week at rockler. I didn't make any major mistakes on this one, and I am pretty pleased with the shape. There's a little bit of tearout on the inside of the bowl, and I could have done a little better job blending the side to the bottom on the inside of the bowl.



I didn't think to take a picture of the blank before I turned 80% of it into shavings, but it pretty much looks like this larger blank that I haven't done anything with:

Lathe projects + Shopping experience

I finally got my new lathe which was on back order for a few weeks. I've spent my nights turning a few of my famous chipped-edge bowls, one bowl that came out half-way decent, and a lidded box that may be nice enough to sell for more than the price I paid for the wood, were I to try to sell it.

The patented chipped-edge bowl, made from the remains of what Judi says is a willow oak that died in our backyard. Interesting note: this is the same tree that (i think) kept rooting into our main sewer line. The wood was kind of punky in spots, and this was more of a "make some shavings" project than it was a "make something nice" project, so I didn't really put any effort into the finish.


A straight-sided bowl made out what I think is bacote. It's from a blank I picked up about a year ago in a grab bag from woodcraft, so I'm not 100% sure. I caught the wood a couple times with the tool, leaving some pretty deep gauges in the wood. In this picture, you can sort of see these from 9 to 11 o'clock on the inside of the bowl, and from about 6 to 9 o'clock on the outside of the bowl. Other than those, though, this one came out pretty nice for attempt number 2.


Next I decided to try a lidded box. This is from another uncertain species blank from the previously mentioned grab bag. The grain and color are remenicient of mahogany, but the wood doesn't feel dense enough (to me, anyways) to be certain. It's sort of hard to tell now, but when it was in "rough block" form, it just seemed too light. Anyhow, this one came out okay for a first try, if I do say so myself. I didn't apply any finish, and I could have done a better job sanding, but without a chuck, it was too much of a pain to try to remount the pieces for sanding after I'd parted them. And I didn't remember to sand the insides. The friction fit on the lid is the tiniest of hairs too tight, and when the lid is fully engaged, it is somewhat difficult to seperate. Also, when the lid is pressed down tightly, a small crack opens up on the side of the bottom piece, visible only when the pressure of the lid pushing out causes the bottom part to expand. :(


My friend Brian (the guy with the sailboat) loaned me his pen-turning mandrel, which allows you to (surprise!) turn pens on a lathe. I went down to the local Rockler on my lunch hour with the intention of buying some pen kits and maybe a bowl blank or two. Upon arriving, I was greeted by some overly-friendly employee. Apparently he was under the impression that since we both had a lot of facial hair that we were instantly "beard buddies" or something. Like most people (I'm assuming) that I've never bother to talk to, I'm a bit of an introvert. After about 5 minutes of pretending to be nice while listening to him yammer on all the gorgeous (and overpriced) turning blanks they carry, I was finally able to get rid of him and browse in peace. Tip for salespeople: if the person you're talking to is giving you answers no longer than "yeah", there is little you can do to influence the sale. Your customer is either uninterested in you or your products. Also note that they walked into your store voluntarily and are looking at your merchandise.

(hint: It's probably you that they're uninterested in.)

So anyhow, I picked out a few Pao Ferro blocks that will wind up being bowls or something, because they were relatively inexpensive and looked like they'll have an interesting figure. It's a new wood to me - we'll see what it looks like. I grabbed about 10 or so pen kits that happened to be on sale, figuring they'll be good for cheap gifts. (note to friends and family: "cheap gifts" = "thoughtful handcrafted gifts that for all you know must have cost a lot of money.")

As I'm heading up towards the registers, Beard guy comes out of nowhere with a board (I think it was lacewood) asking me what I thought of it. I said it was nice. He then went on to explain that (somebody) told him to "sort the wood in the back", and he found this and he was going to buy it before anyone else did. In other words, he likes to go through and grab out the "good stuff" before it makes it to the shelf. Which is cool - that's just one of the perks of working retail there. But it seems to me that maybe, just maybe, if you're going to do that.. maybe you shouldn't excitedly tell your customers about it.

In summary.. leave me alone.

New Speakers

I finally finished the new speakers I've been building for the past couple of months. The whole process took way longer than I'd anticipated, and naturally cost far more than I'd anticipated also.

They started out as sheets of MDF that I picked up locally at Suwanee Lumber, and slices of veneer that I ordered online at veneersupplies.com. If you're interested at all in veneer work, and don't have a local supplier, I strongly recommend checking them out.

These are the veneer slices I ordered from them:

I ordered a lot of 7 or 9 sheets (I forget) of these to use as the fronts and backs of the speakers. They measured about 48"x9" each. The wood is imbuya, and you can see it has an interesting burl pattern. I'd never heard of imbuya before, but it smells funny when you mill it, so be forewarned if you ever buy a board. The veneers weren't so bad, since you're never really creating any substantial sawdust.



I chose a complimentary imbuya burl veneer for the sides and tops. These sheets were about 100"x12", and I was expecting to get only 3 of them. They threw in a bonus sheet that had a pretty nasty split/tear about 16 inches long near one side (for free.) Since I didn't need the entire length for the center speaker, I just used the "bonus" sheet, so that worked out perfectly, and it left me with an extra sheet that I can save for another rainy-day project.



Rounding out the wood, I picked up about 20 board feet of 5/4 cherry, and about 6 board feet of 8/4 cherry, to be used as trim and for a base.

(I don't have any pictures of the cherry prior to it being milled. Sorry.)

I also purchased several miscellaneous speaker components, such as "grill guides", which you use to attach the speaker covers, terminal cups, binding posts, grill cloth, etc. I ordered the bulk of these from PartsExpress and MCM Electronics


A few dozen biscuits, more than a few quarts of glue, and about 2 months later...


I'm finally done. Mostly. They sound pretty decent - the bottom end on the towers is a bit "boomy" - i need to tweak that a little bit. Other than that I couldn't be more pleased.

Note for any "speaker builders" out there - you won't find any specs on drivers, crossovers, etc, from me. This was, at its heart, a woodworking project, wherein I happened to be building speaker cabinets.


Here are some pictures.


A full view of the speakers, sitting next to each other. Note the bookmatching (mirroring) of the front veneers - the rears are done similarly.



This is an angle view of one of the speakers. You can see where I burned the cherry with the flush-trim bit on the router. (the dark horizontal lines on the vertical piece of cherry.) Master woodworkers would say that's a "flaw" or "mistake". I say it's "character" and a "spontaneous design element".




Here are a couple pictures of the front speaker, which is made from the same wood, but which is smaller and horizontal, such that it will sit on top of the TV. In the picture on the right, you can see Judi's collection of small animal skulls (and a Bender toy. And a home-made Betty Boop "fisher price little people" figure.) These are purely decorative, and are not components of the speakers. But they do add a nice touch of class to an otherwise pedestrian livig room.





Here's a picture of the back, top, and sides. Not much to say about this one, other than that you can really see the figure of the wood in this particular photograph. So look at it.




Finally, here are a couple photographs of the speakers with the grill cloths on them. I made these myself, based on ideas in these instructions, using 2 layers of 1/4" MDF, with an extra 1/4" layer on the top and bottom where the pins fit in, which gave enough clearance to fit over the speakers. I wouldn't have had this problem if I'd taken the time to recess the speakers flush with the surface, but that seemed like far too much work. I also didn't make a cover for the center speaker, for a couple of reasons. First, it would cover the entire surface, and you wouldn't be able to see the figure on the wood. Second, since it sits on top of the TV, it's less likely to get run into by a wayward vaccuum cleaner handle, or attacked by a random animal or small child in a fit of rage.