News from the shop 🥶
If you’re local, you’ve likely experienced the bitter cold we’ve had recently and it’s kept me out of the shop most nights. When I have had the opportunity to go into the shop, I found myself cleaning and organizing after the chaos that is the holidays. With my workbench finally clear, I started organizing the area around the lathe. There are a lot of small parts and attachments that you use when turning bowls, wine stoppers and pens. When you’re turning, wood shavings cover every available surface and all those little parts go missing. I was able to make some sliding trays to fit in the lower section of the lathe stand, and I found a very cool organizational system called Gridfinity. After many hours with the 3d printer, all the small parts and attachments are neatly organized in the sliding trays and the table saw is no longer strewn with bits and bobs from a turning session.
Small Boxes
When it wasn’t too cold, I started experimenting with making small boxes. What makes this interesting to me is the attention to detail that is necessary to make a box that is visually appealing and not just four pieces of wood glued together. One way to do that is with what we call a “grain wrap” where you cut all four sides of the box out of a single piece of wood and then reassemble those pieces from a flat piece of wood into a box. The box below was made from a single piece of morado (the top and bottom are curly maple) and if you look closely at the corner you can see that the grain flows from one face to the next. This was a fun learning exercise and I will be making more like this while experimenting with different contrasting wood. I am pleased with how this one turned out, the miters are crisp, the corners square but it’s not quite good enough to bring to market.
The tricky part when doing a grain wrap is that you cannot make a mistake when cutting the sides to length, or cutting the miters — if you have to cut more than once, you’re losing wood due to the saw cut, and that changes the alignment of the grain and the wrap is “close, but not close enough”. Precision matters.
