Wood Pens

Made these in a class at Highland Hardware today:

Mahogany Desk

I built this a couple of months ago for a friend of mine. The desk is solid mahogany with a mahogany gel stain and semi gloss finish. See my page on this desk for details on the project.

Mahogany Desk Page

Oak Bookcase

I built this bookcase for myself. I have a small bookcase in my room, but it isn't large enough to house my taller books. I read an article about a non-conventional way to build the case. The standard way is to build a carcass for a bookcase and then build the face frame to cover the edging of the carcass. The article made a good argument for why one should build the bookcase in reverse.

The claim is that the face frame should be joined perfectly with mortise and tenon joinery. The frame is what people see, and should be very well built. It is easy to make a mistake while joining the rails and stiles and can take some tweaking to get everything to match. It is for this reason that the frame should be built first and tweaked to perfection. Then one can take exact measurements to build the carcass.

I thought this made sense - particularly for myself. I don't have a mortiser - I do mine with a chisel and cut my tenons with a radial saw. So my joints often require a lot of tweaking.

I built the frame from poplar, the carcass from laminated oak, and the top from 4 solid oak boards that I joined with biscuits, planed, sanded, routed, stained, and varnished.

The case has a cherry stain and the top is red mahogany. I used a semi-gloss finish.

Bookcase Photos

Ruby's Dog Bowl Stand

This stand is made from Poplar. I cut the circles by hand and rounded them with a drum sander. Her water bowl and food bowl sit in it nicely and she doesn't have to bend all the way over to get her food :)

Chess Board

I made this board using scrap maple from my sister's bookcases, along with the scrap teak remaining from my friend's shower stool.

Christmas Pens

I made these after hours using stone scraps on a lathe at work.

From left to right: Peter, Cliff, Jessica, Dad, Mom, Rebecca, Rachel

Deck Table

Wood: Select Pine
Stain: Gunstock
Varnish: Spar Semi-Gloss Polyurethane

More Photos of Table

Rachel's Bookcases

Built-In Maple Bookcases

Office Desk

This one was pretty easy. My sister had the idea of taking two relatively cheap butcher block tops from IKEA and creating a desk out of them. I ripped the two tops to the appropriate width for the space and used smaller cutoff as a backsplash. My sister supported the desk with store-bought metal legs and a 2" x 4" cleat in the wall.

Couple hours and voila - a built in butcher block desk.