Category: Woodworking
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I Built a Set of Cabinets with CNC-Carved Doors
The area above our washer and dryer (not pictured) was mostly wasted space, so my wife asked me to build some custom cabinets. (Actually, she said, “Can you just buy some cabinets for above the washer and dryer? You really don’t have to build custom ones. I just want something better than this shelf. Anything.…
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Today’s CNC Carving: A Chisel Rack
In today’s “new meets old” news, I’ve used my CNC router to carve a rack for my chisels. I designed the rack in Easel, Inventables’s CAD/CAM software, which only took a few minutes. The chisel holders are just circles superimposed on rectangles to allow each individual chisel to fit vertically in the rack, and the…
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Generating Dovetails in OpenSCAD
I’ve written an OpenSCAD library for generating dovetail pins and tails. No longer will beautiful dovetail joints be solely in the domain of skilled woodworkers; now, anyone with a 3-D printer or CNC router can participate too. Include it in your OpenSCAD script like so: use <dovetails.scad>; dovetail_pins() will generate just the pins of a…
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Today’s CNC Carving: Doll Bunk Bed Insert
My wife and I decided that we were spending far too much money on factory-carved objects, so we bought our own CNC router — a 1000mm X-Carve from Inventables. I finished setting it up today, and the first carving on the agenda was a replacement insert for my daughter’s doll bunk bed: The bed broke…
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I Built a Tool Rack and Custom Tool Holders
We moved into a new house this summer, and it has a separate workshop with a built-in workbench. As I unpacked my tools, they ended up on the workbench in no particular order: If I ever wanted to be able to find any of my tools or have space to use them, I needed to…
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I Built a Treehouse
After we moved into our new house last month, my kids started asking for a treehouse. I told them I’d need to see some plans before I could get started, and the next morning, I found this on my workbench: Fair enough. The previous owners said that there had previously been a tree fort built…
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I Built a Tilt-Out Trash Can Cabinet
Just looking for the plans to make this? You can get the PDF plans for this double tilt-out garbage can cabinet on Etsy or download the SketchUp file for free. I’m going on a work trip later this month, and Christina asked me if I would be able to build something to hide the kitchen…
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This is a post. It’s a post about a post.
We just moved into a new house, and the 20-year-old signpost is showing its age. It had deteriorated at the bottom, so it was no longer set in a hole and was just leaning against a tree. I decided to restore it and make use of a gift that the previous homeowners had left us.…
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What’s Old is New Again… and Then Old Again
My father-in-law built this hutch in the 1980s, and after being used as a bookshelf for twenty years, it sat unused in a rabbit shed. My wife asked me to repair it and refinish it. Here’s the main problem: one of the legs broke and had been replaced by a piece of scrap. Such an…
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…And Some Benches
After I finished our kitchen table, I started on two benches: one for each long side of the table. At the last minute, my wife and I decided (a.k.a., my wife decided) to include some storage areas in the benches too. Just like with the table, I started with a design in OpenSCAD: (And just…
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I Built a Table
Before we moved, we sold our kitchen table. We had bought it new a few years ago; it was expensive, but it got so thoroughly scratched and dinged up (and it couldn’t be refinished, since it was basically a plasticky veneer over fiberboard) that we didn’t want to bring it with us. So we sold…
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I Made a Grasshopper Pull Toy
As soon as the weather warmed up enough to move the car out of the garage, I wanted to get started on a new woodworking project, and this grasshopper pull toy project from The Wood Whisperer looked like a fun one to make for my daughter. I started by gluing up some scrap to make…
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Published Again: WOOD Meets Plastic
The backhoe that I printed in plastic last year is featured in the May 2015 edition of WOOD Magazine. To complete the circle of irony, all of my future woodworking projects will be published in Plastics News.
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I’m a Published Tipster
The March 2015 issue of WOOD Magazine will feature a Shop Tip from yours truly: This tip was devised while I was building a cutting board/sink insert last year: Fame and Fortune, here I come!
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Today’s Functional Print: Shop-Vac Adapter
In today’s “printing meets programming meets woodworking” news, I’ve printed an adapter that allows me to hook up my Shop-Vac hose (1 1/4″ diameter) to my planer’s dust port (4″ diameter). The adapter was designed in OpenSCAD using a module I wrote that can create adapters between two hoses of any size. This print was…
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Printing Construction Equipment for Fun
For Father’s Day, my wife and kids got me this “Construction-grade Backhoe Loader” kit from WOOD Magazine. The kit contains hardware and wheels; you build the rest of the backhoe yourself: I planned on doing this project with my sons (ages 5 and 3) until I realized that the fine detail woodworking involved would bore…
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My Minneapolis Table Has Found a Forever Home
I’m happy to announce that my Minneapolis table has found a home at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.
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I Built a Rolling Workbench
Just looking for the plans to make this? You can get the PDF plans for this rolling workbench with a table saw cutout on Etsy or download the the SketchUp file for free. This weekend, I finally got tired of having this guy be my only workspace in the garage. Any time I wanted to…
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I built a Minneapolis table
Earlier this year, I had an idea to build a table that is an inverted 3-D model of a metropolitan downtown. Take a bunch of 1×2 boards, cut them to scale lengths of the buildings in downtown Minneapolis, glue them together, and you’d have something like this: Invert it, and you can see the city…