WoodWorkWeb - Woodworking Community

Building a Box Joint Library Cupboard

Read Time: 7 mins

Book, Magazines, Newspaper clippings, photocopies of wood working projects and pictures. That pretty much describes my woodworking library. Now let me describe where I keep it, in the book case in living room or next to my favorite chair, some in the bedside table, a few others in the workshop, and of course at least a couple of magazines in that place where we all go for a bit of quite time every day.
When it comes time to try and find something that I have bookmarked or need reference to, just finding the magazine, book or photo copy can be a challenge, so I decided it was high time to build a small Library Cupboard for the workshop so I can find things, when I need them. The first thing I did was stack up all by library items in one place to see how much space they take up, then allow for a bit of extra room that will surely be needed in the future.

Since this cabinet is going to be holding a fair bit of weight, I decided that instead of the standard rabbets, I would make the corners of this cabinet as box joints. That way The carcass will be strong enough to hold the books and can still be wall mounted and have doors attached to keep the dust out.
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Cutting Boards for Accolades and Profit

Read Time: 9 mins

Here's a question for you! How many cutting boards do you have in your house RIGHT NOW? I'll be you have at least 2 and many of you will have 3 or 4. And, if you are up on the latest news, the wooden ones are still the best because the natural chemicals in the wood, the oils and tannins for example, are anti-bacterial apparently. That's right, the natural oils in wood actually kills bacteria, making wooden cutting boards more food safe than plastic cutting boards. Amazing!
In this article we explore not only the aspects of making cutting boards, but we will also touch on revenues that can be made in selling them. If you think about how many houses there are in your country and that each one of them has at least 2 cutting board, you can see that the potential for selling cutting boards is quite significant. But you can't just throw together any cutting board, you need to make something unique, different or otherwise more useful than just the run-of-the-mill cutting boards that can be found in many stores. And, if you have some sort of a venue where you can sell them yourself, like a flea market, garage sales, on-line etc. there are many different ways of selling and distributing cutting boards, we'll leave that part up to you.

Cutting boards can be made from pretty much any kind of wood. Hard woods work best because they last longer. In my opinion, the best cutting board wood is Oak because it has both tannin and natural oils to help combat bacteria, but any wood will work fine. Then next thing you need to decide on is design ...

Refurbishing a Random Orbital Sander

Read Time: 5 mins

bosh random orbital sander Every good woodworker knows that keeping your tools in good shape is paramount to good turning out good results. That is why we keep bits and blades sharp, why we make sure parts are installed correctly and why we do routine maintenance from time to time. And if you are like most other woodworkers, you will be doing most of that work yourself.
The latest tool to fail on me was my Bosch Random Orbital Sander. I love this little sander, it's quick, easy to use and it does a good job. I also happen to like the dust catcher actually works, despite the fact that I do almost all of my sanding out-of-doors to help cut down on the fine dust in my workshop.

It seems that in time, all tools will fail, wear out or cease to work, and in my case the hook and loop base of the sander all of a sudden stopped holding sanding discs. I knew right away what the problem was, the little plastic hooks that form the bottom of the base had become brittle over time and and many had probably broken off to the point that there were not enough working hooks to hold the loops in the sandpaper discs.

Halloween Woodworking - SCARY

Read Time: 5 mins

Halloween has grown to be a pretty big non-holiday for both kids and adults. It's really a fun time where everyone can be little bit silly. One of the great things about Halloween is all the costumes and decorating that happens, and it's a perfect time to introduce non-woodworking people to the craft.
One of the safest woodworking tools and one that has LOADS of potential is the scroll saw, and when it comes to making Halloween ornaments, like window and lawn figurines, the scroll saw is the perfect tool. Finding scroll saw patterns is pretty easy, but when it comes to Halloween, there's an even easier source. For the cost of little more than a dollar, you can go to your closest dollar store and find all sorts of Halloween items that can be used as patterns. In most cases, you can't buy scroll saw patterns anywhere for that great price, and they have a pretty extensive selection, at least the ones I was into.

Now that you have a source for scroll saw patterns, you will need wood. Scrollers often use thin plywood for making figurines like the Halloween ones, so if you have any scraps of thin 1/4" or even 1/8" plywood around, that is perfect for scrolling. If it turns out you need to buy a bit of plywood, many stores sell cut sheets, BUT, many of them also sell Door Skin plywood. This is very thin plywood ...

Making and Arts & Crafts Style Umbrella Stand

Read Time: 5 mins

There aren't many woodworking projects that are nice looking and useful that you can make in one day, but this is one of those exceptions. This little umbrella stand is easy to make and even finish in one day, provided you are using a pocket hole system, and in our case we used the Kreg unit. Of course the advantage of holding joints together with pocket screws is that you don't have to wait for glue to dry, which speeds things up immensely. We love the Kreg Pocket Hole System for other reasons too, there is no glue oozing our of joints, so you don't have to worry about white spots that the finish didn't penetrate because there was left over glue on the wood, and for some projects that need to be taken apart later on, the pocket hole screws are perfect, and they really do hold very well.

To start off with we needed 4 corner posts and after fitting together some scraps and knowing that our middle cross gable pieces were going to be 3/4 inch, we finally decided that the corner posts would need to be 1-1/4 inches square and 26 inches long. See CUT LIST in the Read More Section. When ever possible, always cut the largest pieces of your project first because what is left over can often be used of other pieces in the project, and in our case we were able to get about half or more of the spindles that were needed, these were the half inch square by 17 inch long pieces in the middle of each side.

The next pieces we need to make were the upper and lower gables. We decided on 3-1/2 inch by 3/4 inch Garry Oak. The first thing we needed to do with these pieces was to run a 1/2 inch by 1/2 inch dado in one end to hold the spindles. We set up the table saw as close to the center of the edge of the board as we could, and ran the board through.

Making a "Pickers" Display Box

Read Time: 4 mins

pickers box If you are one of the millions of people who watch programs like The Antiques Road Show, American Pickers, Canadian Pickers, Pawn Stars and other similar shows, or if you have ever been to an antique or collectibles show and sale, you have seen these little display boxes at various sellers tables. You may have even seen them in someone's home or business to display small, featured and valued items. They are called all sorts of things, slanted display boxes, pickers display boxes, collectible boxes and sellers show boxes and so on.

In this video we make our version of this box with a bit of a twist, our box will use box joints for the corners to make it more attractive and sturdier and instead of painting the inside or lining the bottom with felt, we are going to flock the whole inside of the box, a rich green to make items in the box stand out. This project will consist of 3 parts, making the box, making the top or lid and finally, finishing and flocking the box.

Part 1 - Making the Box

Part 2 - Making the Top or Lid for the Box

Click below, for more details on sizes and other construction detail.

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