Completed Knife block

Over the weekend I applied 3 coats of garnet shellac to the knife block and then a coat of wax. Once the shellac and wax were dry I began cutting the skewers, I bundled 100 skewers together at a time and cut them with a hand saw. I am very happy with the way the knife block turned out. Here are a few more pictures.

Mid Week Update: July 12th

Last night I got in about an hour of shop time after the kids went to bed. I applied a coat of boiled linseed oil to the knife block. The oil really brings the wood to life.

I am going to let the oil dry for a few days and then I will start applying shellac. After the shellac all that is left to do is cut the bamboo skewers to length and start using it.

I also had time to mount the router to the router table insert. Next I need to make the fence for the router table.

Cross Cut Sled and knife block update

Over the weekend I had a chance to finish building a cross cut sled to use with my table saw. I My last post I mentioned that I had the base cut and had laminated the fences. The first thing I did was true up the edges of the fences, and cut them to length.  I cut them 2" narrower than the base.  I used some oak strips as runners for the sled.  The runners slide in the miter slots on the saw top. After attaching the front fence and the runners to the base I cut through the base most the way to the back fence.  I then used a large square to square the fence to the saw kerf. After the initial squaring I used a 5 cut method to test the accuracy of the sled. I had to do the test twice, but I was able to get the fence dialed in. I also built a blade guard to keep the blade covered as it comes out the back fence.

I wanted to build the cross cut sled before I tried to cut the finger joints on the knife block, in the pictures above I had already used the sled to work on the knife block. I got the joints cut with the table saw and then cleaned them up by hand with chisels. Every wood worker knows you can't have to many clamps, and I need more.

I have already glued a bottom in place and sanded all the surfaces. Next it will get a coat or two of boiled linseed oil and then 3 coats of shellac.

Planer test and Knife Block project

I had to resist the urge to put every piece of wood in the shop through the new planer. The surface it leave is amazing. I planed down some spalted maple I had cut from a piece of firewood into 1/4" boards for a small box I plan on building. Over the weekend I took some of the walnut that my grandma had given me a started building a knife block from it. I got the plans for the knife block from Popular Woodworking.  Then plans called for 1/2" thick stock so I used the planer and planed down the walnut to 1/2" thick before cutting the parts to size.

I also did some "wood working" building a new well cap from composite deck boards. The hand pump is functional.

 A upcoming project is going to be building a chip separator to work with my shop vac. The planer creates a lot of chips and dust. The picture below is how much was created by planing the two  32"x7.5"x 3/4" pieces of walnut to a final thickness of 1/2".