Marking Gauge in progress

While sorting through the free wood I picked up last week I had the idea to make marking gauge and set a few pieces of walnut aside for it.   I cut out the marking gauge with the band saw and then planed the faces smooth.

 I used a drill and cleared most the waste before chiseling out the mortise for the beam to go through.

 It needs a little fine tuning on the fit. I am going to have to make sure that the beam is square with both faces.

I plan on using a xacto knife blade instead of the marking pin a lot of older marking gauges use.

Bandsaw Box

I was inspired by a few videos on you tube to try and do a few things with the bandsaw. One of them is to do some small scale saw milling from firewood pieces and trees from our property. The other was making a bandsaw box.

One problem, I don't have a bandsaw. However my dad got some of my grandfather's tool when grandpa passed away. So I have brought grandpa's bandsaw to my shop and have been putting it back to use.

I have some walnut that the power company cleared at our old house that I had been saving because I wanted to mill some boards from it. And I saw some nice looking pieces of apple wood while I was splitting fire wood (apple is a very good wood to smoke with.)

So after I did some cleaning and tuning on the bandsaw it was time to try and cut some planks. I cut one of the smaller piece of walnut at around 1" (4/4 for the wood workers reading this) and then just made a squared up blank of the apple wood. I set the walnut aside and then used a hand plane to smooth up the apple blank. Now I had a apple blank that was roughly 2" thick and 8" long and 3" wide. I knew I wanted to make a bandsaw box but had to stew about what shape to make it and where to go from there. I ended up making a oval shaped box. I will do a how to write up next time I make a bandsaw box. I applied several coats of boiled linseed oil to the box before putting 4 coats of spray on poly on it. For my first attempt at a box I am happy with how it turned out.