Halftone is an app I’ve written for making halftone-style carves with Inventables’s Easel CNC design platform. A halftone image uses different sized dots to represent light and dark areas.
Upload an image, and Halftone will convert it to a grid of holes with each hole sized to reflect the brightness of the image at that point. Darker areas are represented by wider holes; if you’re going to backlight your carve, you can invert it and have lighter areas use wider holes.
We bought a photo-a-day calendar for 2019, but because it didn’t come with any sort of stand, it was in danger of getting broken apart prematurely. I made this stand for it that doubles as storage for the used pages so they can be used as a notepad.
Underneath the calendar, there’s a slot where old pages can be inserted or removed. (The wooden divider between the calendar and the old pages is not attached to anything; it just floats up or down depending on how many pages are underneath it.)
I made this stand out of an interesting block of wood that was given to me by a friend. I don’t know what type of wood it was, but its coloring is pretty similar to red oak. For scale, the calendar is about 3″ square, and the sides of the stand are 1/8″ thick.
I made this sliding-top pencil box for our three-year-old goddaughter. It’s all Baltic birch; the sides are half-inch and the top is quarter-inch. I carved the design with my X-Carve, painted the carved area, and then finished the entire box with a spray enamel clearcoat.
I built this Shaker-style jewelry cabinet for my wife. You’ll never guess what’s inside…
The cabinet box itself is only 1 3/4″ deep. These are the four sides; the top is shorter because it won’t be mitered, since the top of this box will be hidden in the final product.
I cut a rabbet into the back of the sides so that they could accept a quarter-inch piece of plywood for the back of the cabinet.
I love my 90º clamps.
I would love to have more clamps too.
Here’s the main box after being glued up.
I added this half-inch pine board so the hooks (for hanging necklaces) would have something to screw into and to keep the hanging jewelry away from the back of the cabinet.
I painted the interior of the box at this point because it would be very hard to reach with a brush or sprayer after installing the face frame.
I’m not sure why I didn’t install the top board before doing these coats of paint, but I guess I did it at this point.
Here’s the assembled face frame, made of 3/4″ poplar.
I don’t normally fill any of my pocket holes, but I had four plugs that came with my Kreg jig forever ago, and these holes might have been accessible to dust and lint inside the cabinet if I left them open.
I glued and nailed on the face frame and then filled the nail holes:
I then gave it another three coats of white semi-gloss.
I installed the hooks in two rows, with each hook an inch from its neighbor.
And I hung it up in the bathroom while I worked on the door.
The door was built using cope and stick joinery. These are the four sides; I cut the groove and tenons with a dado stack on my table saw. The groove is a half-inch deep and a quarter inch wide, and the tenons are sized to fit perfectly in the groove.
This is how they go together. Pretend that I also took a photo of the door after inserting the plywood panel and gluing it all up and painting it, because I forgot to do that.
This is a jig I 3D printed to help install the hinges. You drill a hole in the hole, and then the hinge fits in there.
I added a handle to the door, and boom: a door with a handle.
See how easily the jewelry hangs from the hooks?
We decided that the cabinet could use a second row of hooks about halfway down, so I made a second row of hooks about halfway down.
Tada!
In a picture frame, that is! I made this 30″x20″ frame for my wife, who wanted one for our wedding picture in the same style as this smaller frame she found:
The new frame is constructed of 3/4″ Baltic birch plywood. I started by making the sides (each 3″ wide) and cutting a rabbet into the back of each to accept the glass, photo, and backer board, and then I mitered the ends and glued them together into a basic rectangular frame. (There are no photos of this process, so you will have to believe me. You MUST believe me.)
Then I drew the scalloped shape, cut it out with a bandsaw, cut a cove into the edge, and stained it with Varethane’s Kona stain.
This is so the stain can show through on the edges, which I will weather after painting. Speaking of painting:
I gave the frame three coats of semi-gloss white and then roughed up the edges to match the frame it was modeled after:
I used window glazing points to secure the backer board.
And then I hung it on a wall. The end!
Come along with me on a journey; a journey of craftsmanship, cabinets, and canned goods. Observe as I detail the steps I took to build this new cabinet in our kitchen so that we could move all of our food out of the cramped pantry and into the light where it belongs (the light where it belongs).
It all started with a SketchUp drawing:
My wife and I designed this cabinet to take up an entire wall in our kitchen that had previously only been home to a smaller more decorative cabinet that was more suited for display:
A very nice cabinet to be sure, but it was not meeting our needs. The room directly behind the wall the cabinet is on is our pantry, although it also holds the water heater and furnace air handler, so it is awkward to get in and out of. Once the new cabinet is built, we’ll move all of the food into it and use the old pantry for storage that won’t need to be accessed so frequently.
I started by building the box for the drawers. Plywood and pocket holes, nothing unusual here.
The corner cabinets are triangular in order to match the layout of the kitchen; I made them separate from the drawer box so that I’d be able to carry it into the house myself.
The intersection between the corner cabinets and the center drawer box is a 135º angle, so I glued up these pieces for the face frame so it could all be one piece to avoid having seams in the finished piece where the different cabinet boxes meet.
This worked better than I expected it to:
Here you can see the full face frame before I painted it.
I used full extension ball-bearing slides for all the drawers. They’re installed on spacers so that they will clear the edges of the face frame.
Each drawer is just a box held together with lock rabbet joints and a piece of quarter-inch plywood fit into a groove in the bottom. I’m glad I bought a strap clamp for this, although I should have bought more of them so I could glue up more than one drawer at a time.
At this point, all of the drawer boxes are built and installed and are ready for their fronts.
I cut all of the rails and stiles for the drawer faces and cabinet doors at the same time (sixty-eight pieces). They are all 2 1/4″ wide. (Ripping these pieces from larger S3S boards I bought from a lumberyard allowed me to both get the custom size I wanted and saved me about 65% of what I would have paid to buy poplar 1x3s from a big box store.)
I used cope and stick joinery for all of the drawer faces and doors. Here they are all dry-fit before I cut the panels…
…and after being glued together with the panels, which are made of quarter-inch plywood.
I moved the three base cabinets into the house. By this point, I had also painted the insides of the corner cabinets and drilled holes for adjustable shelving. You can also see an outlet that I would later extend into the corner cabinet.
I painted the face frame and all of the drawers before installing them in the house. And it only took forever! I should have used melamine for the drawer boxes; it would have cut way down on painting time, and I would have gotten a better finish.
The base cabinet has an oak countertop to match our kitchen table, garbage cabinet, and shoe cabinet. I made this the usual way.
Time to install the lower cabinet doors!
Oops. It isn’t very useful to have a handle six inches from the ground. I used a very strong magnet and dragged it up to the top of the door.
The upper section of the cabinet is made up of four parts: two corner cabinets, a lower shelving unit, and an upper display cabinet.
The face frame for the upper section was constructed in the same manner as the lower cabinet frame.
After painting and drilling more adjustable shelving holes, I learned how important it is to leave yourself an inch or two of wiggle room. I had designed this cabinet to come within half an inch of the ceiling, but when I began installing it, I found that our ceiling is 3/4″ closer to the floor on one end of the room than it is on the end that I measured on.
Luckily, I was able to make some adjustments and just barely get everything to fit.
I had originally been painting everything in my 8′ x 8′ spray booth, but with so many drawers and shelves to spray, I masked off the front of my shop instead. I used semi-gloss paint and did all of the painting with an HVLP sprayer. By the time I finished this project, I was consistently getting a really nice smooth finish.
The corner cabinet shelves are amputated triangles.
Haha, look at all those triangles.
The very top section of the cabinet is meant to have glass-front doors so we can display some of our very fancy things. This necessitated a different door construction so that I could easily paint the door before inserting the glass. I went with mitered half lap joints, my first time trying them.
I installed the glass doors, and the cabinet was almost done. (There are a lot of 3/4 views of this cabinet because the kitchen light fixture prevents me from taking a full shot from the front.)
After a week-long wait for my moulding order to come in, I added 3 1/2″ baseboard moulding and a 3/4″ cove moulding around the top.
Show ’em what you got, cabinet!
Not content to live in a house with only one barn-style sliding door, I’ve built another over-toilet cabinet
I made a few changes since the last time I made one of these:
Stay tuned for more updates on my bathroom activities!
This is the story of how I turned this:
into this:
and how it only took me 411 days.
It all started when I pried some flagstones out of the hill next to our house. They were sticking out of the grass, and I thought I’d use them for a path somewhere.
As I pulled stones out of the grass, I noticed that there were more stones underneath. My sons and I decided to investigate, so we dug into the hill to see what we could find.
We found lots of rocks — fat rocks, skinny rocks, rocks who climb on rocks.
Some of them looked really interesting too. Lots of colors were represented: tan, gray, slate, blue, red, orange, purple. (Just like the ol’ rainbow acronym: TGSBROP.)
Once we found that there was a seemingly unlimited supply of these stones in our hillside, we decided to make an entire patio out of them. Before my wife could change her mind, I stripped the woodchips from the side of our house in preparation for laying down stones.
I had to move some dirt around to level it and get it down the appropriate height down to allow for space for the sand and gravel foundation.
In other parts of the yard, I had to add dirt to get it up to the correct height. I ordered a load of topsoil and a willing helper.
Some parts of the yard needed to be raised as much as 18 inches, so I set up some guides to let me know when I had the dirt high enough. This didn’t work especially well, but it did work.
Of course, when adding dirt, you need to compact it. I bought a hand tamper from Home Depot and started compacting.
Two days and one case of carpal tunnel syndrome later, I bought a mechanical compacter instead. This allowed me to finish this part of the project before I die due to the heat death of the universe.
Because the edge of the patio would be a foot and a half above grade in some spots, I bought some railroad ties and used them as a retaining wall around the edge.
I secured the bottom run of ties to the dirt with 24″ rebar and the top ties with 12″ galvanized spikes (into the bottom ties).
While I was preparing the site, I was still digging out stones from the hill, and they were getting bigger as I dug deeper.
Some of the larger stones were too heavy to carry up the hill, so I had to either break them in half or pull them up on a makeshift sled.
By Memorial Day (of last year), I had the dirt leveled out and all of the railroad ties installed.
I had a couple of extra railroad ties, so I built a pad for a hot tub we were considering buying.
By this time, I had been mining our hillside for three months and had amassed a sizeable collection of stones. I did a double-take when I noticed I had accidentally arranged them like this:
I ordered a load of gravel and a load of sand. Laying these down on top of the dirt should ensure that water doesn’t pool underneath the stones and cause problems, especially during freezing/thawing times of the year.
I rented a Bobcat to make the chore of moving the gravel and sand a weekend job instead of a rest-of-my-life job.
Well worth the money.
Now that I had the soil leveled and covered with three inches of gravel and two inches of sand, I could start laying the stones down.
As I continued to lay down more stones, the building inspectors stopped by the check my work.
Here’s an overhead view from around the time I stopped working on the patio last fall. As school started up and the weather got colder and rainier, I lost a lot of motivation.
In the spring, I kept digging up stones, and again, they kept getting bigger.
Maybe too big… I broke my shovel trying to pry this one out.
This is the point that I gave up on the idea of covering the entire patio in stone. It was taking far too long to dig up enough stone to cover the entire patio, and I was getting tired of hauling them up the hill.
Plan B: artificial turf. Fake grass has come a long way from the plasticky Brady Bunch sod of my childhood; Costco sells a brand called Pregra that is easily mistaken for real grass once it’s installed.
It came in two 25-foot rolls, which each weighed about a million pounds. I wrestled them over to the patio, unrolled them, and cut them to fit the space.
While the flat grass look is classic, I wanted to try something more reminiscent of the rolling foothills of southern Oregon, but I was overruled.
After cutting the turf, I secured it to the ground with landscaping spikes and then filled the spaces between the stones with Polysweep, a polymeric sand. It’s like sand, but it hardens once it gets wet.
Here’s a better shot of the dried Polysweep and the pad for our fire pit.
The last step for the artificial turf was to add infill to puff up the grass and give it some extra durability. I used four hundred pounds of play sand, and I spread it with a grass seed spreader.
After spreading the sand, I brushed it in with a push broom, and then I wrote a perfect segue into the end of this post.
If you scrolled to the bottom hoping that instead of reading a boring write-up, you could watch a timelapse of the entire process, you’re in luck. Enjoy!
