The Woodshop Shed

Uncle Sam

Furnished content.
(from Lumberjocks.com)


A customer contacted me and wanted me to carve an Uncle Sam for her, similar to one I had carved some time ago. Here's a pictorial of the process.First, I laid out the pattern front and side on a block of wood, then cut it out on the bandsaw. The completed carving is about 10.5 inches tall, not counting the base.Next is rounding off the corners and beginning to carve the basic shape. I have also drilled a hole for the separately carved hand. I have re-drawn the key feature lines on the carving, as well.The basic shapes are carved and I'm now beginning to add details.Carving the hand is next. I draw it on a small piece of wood. The extra length gives me something to hold onto as I'm carving.Carving is complete and the hand is glued in. I can now begin painting. I paint the lightest colors first, as a dark color can easily cover a light color, but rarely the opposite…Painting is complete! I sent these progress photos to my customer as I shot them so she'd know I was actually doing some work on the carving.

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A couple cross cut sleds

Furnished content.
(from Lumberjocks.com)


This project started from wanting a bigger cross cut sled in hopes of replacing my GIANT Dewalt sliding miter saw with a much simpler miter saw. So I watched some videos, read some articles, and settled on a modified design from Bourbon Moth Woodworking.Materials are baltic birch plywood, cheap Home Depot MDF, some T-track, and hold downs. Super simple but super handy to have around.First two images are of my big sled. Its 30” wide with 18” on the left and 12” on the right. The inside depth is 17-1/4 so I gained 3” on what my big sliding miter saw can do and this sled is WAAAAY more accurate.The second sled is a remake of my small sled that fits in a drawer. I only made it because I had enough pieces left over. I did not have quite enough MDF to do the fence and I wish I had. The fence is just ever so slightly crowned and had I used the MDF face I could have shimmed it.One thing I didn't see Bourbon Moth…seriously weird name…do with his design was add any sort of chamfer for saw dust. Since the fence sits behind the MDF bed I chamfered the MDF where it meets the fence. Its working out quite nicely. I used the big sled to make the small one and didnt get dust or chips interfering with cuts at all.
The forth image is of a material support runner I made from the last of the materials I had left over. It has a couple notches to accept 123 blocks. For long cuts set the fence an inch larger, drop in the block, and make your cut. It has a couple magnets that keep it firmly against the square tube of the rails.And what good is a cross cut sled if they aren't accurate? Well this is where that 1/2” MDF face came into play in those results. First up the small sled is averaging 0.003” to 0.005” out of square. So for wood working pretty much dead on as far as I'm concerned. However…If you can't read the image the caliper is reading 0.0005” out of square on the large sled. I seriously doubt that is accurate because that's a Husky caliper and I'm not that good but i got the same measurement twice. I used the 5 cut method to get the results for both sleds and all I can figure is I used a machinists straight edge to shim the MDF on the large sled to make sure it was bang on.The last thing I wanted to point out is my design leaves a bit of an ass on the sleds for a couple reasons. Most of the force you apply is on the fence and after time I assume that can effect accuracy. Also it makes a very nice SAFE place to put your hands.
That's all for this one. As always I probably way over thought this project but I had fun and made something super useful.

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ISOtunes PRO Aware Review

Furnished content.
(from Popularwoodworking.com)


Tool: PRO Aware Shop Now  Manufacturer: ISOtunes MSRP: $129.99 Every once in a while a new product comes along that's a real game-changer in the workshop, and the new ISOtunes PRO Aware headphones is one of those tools. …Source

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Herringbone pattern serving tray

Furnished content.
(from Lumberjocks.com)


My wife had been wanting a serving tray for some time, and I think she felt she couldn't buy one because I always told her “I could easily make you one”. Well I finally got around to it. I made this tray as a Christmas gift for her.It's made of walnut (the same scraps I salvaged from an old discarded end table, which I used to build my valet tray). It was a lucky day when I discovered the walnut in that old end table.I didn't have enough pieces of that scrap walnut that were long enough to do anything meaningful with, other than cut into a bunch of little “bricks”. So I took advantage of the small pieces by gluing them up in a herringbone pattern, and was very pleased with the end result. Hard to tell from the pictures, but light reflects differently off the different bricks with their alternating grain direction, making the pattern pop.It was fun to polish up some small scraps and offcuts in a project like this, and my wife loved it!

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