Finished gifts

The walnut box I was building for my grandma and the cherry and maple cutting board both turned out great.

The cutting board was a gift for my sister and she was very excited to get it. 

 I was really proud of of how the box I made for grandma turned out.

I have a feeling I am going to be making a lot of cutting boards as Christmas gets closer.

This is only about 3 weeks over due. I am going to try and get into a schedule of posting more often.  

Gift making

Saturday morning I managed to got a little shop time in and work on a few projects that are need to be finished up rather quickly.

The maple and cherry cutting board was ready to run the glue up through the planner, next I cut it into strips and reglued it in a end grain checker board pattern. Here is a picture of it out of the clamps and ready to sand and finish.

 I also worked on the box I am building for my grandma. I routed a grove in the sides to hold the bottom, and then after some trial and error I managed to make some acceptable miter joints on the corners. This is mainly a display piece, if it was something that would see extensive use I would add some splines to the miters to strengthen them.

 The piece I used for the bottom is a lot of sap wood but I wanted the to be made completely from wood that was grandpa's. If I add any ascent wood it will be from the few piece of wood I have harvested myself.

 I still have to cut the lid to size and add hinges. I will be working hard this week to have the box ready to give to Grandma this weekend at her birthday party.

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.