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I'm not sure why, but some projects when we work on them turn out to be favorites, and this is one of my all time favorite woodworking projects. It wasn't that hard to do but it did take time and detail to make a good job. Of course it is a "one only case" which means there is no pattern, you have to make things up as you go along.
All I really knew when I started was that I wanted a wooden smartphone case and that the phone would need to fit snug into it so that the phone would not slide out and get broken, and of course it had to look nice. I didn't just jump into making this case, I have been thinking about it for over a month and just mulling it around in my mind and trying to think of any pitfalls before they arise.
Before you get started ... a word about safety!! Cutting small pieces of wood can be dangerous! always make sure your wood is secure when it is being cut and that your fingers and other parts of your body are well protected and away from any cutting surfaces. TAKE YOUR TIME and work safely.
The first thing of course is to select the wood. With small projects like this you really need to take your time selecting the wood. It should be one of the harder ... hardwoods and needs to have tight, straight grain.
There must not be any voids or cracks. In my case I selected a small piece of Arbutus or Madrona that has been collecting dust in my wood storage room for a lot of years. The chunk of wood is too small to do much with but for a project like this, it's perfect ...
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We all get different kinds of satisfaction from all sorts of different projects. For me, utility projects and furniture have the most appeal but once in a while I like to make things for other members of the family too. In this case, a young niece. Another member of the family hand made a doll's quilt, so to make a complete package a doll was purchased and of course some sort of a bed is needed, so why not a cradled.
Since this is a child's toy I wanted something that would not be too heavy to carry around, yet sturdy and of course easy to clean. The wood I selected was some rough cut Cedar of Lebanon that was well below 12% on the moisture scale. I knew at the outset that this cradle was going to be painted (not by me, I hate covering wood with paint) so I was not so concerned about how the colors of the wood matched up.
As usual, this was a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants project, which means I wasn't working from a formal pattern, so I needed something to work with. I started by measuring the hand made quilt and from that could determine a base for the cradle which would be around 9 by 20 inches on the base and 10 inches in height.
The first order of business is to size the wood which means breaking down the rough cut wood on the jointer, then the planner then the bandsaw and finally back to the planner .... I always love dressing lumber because it's just like a ...
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Trying to integrate technology into a woodworking shop can be a bit of a challenge, depending on the tool. It's pretty easy to purchase cordless drills, grinders, sanders etc. but what about bringing technical information into the workshop in the form of a Tablet or iPad? To start off with, the tablet needs to have a place to stand, because you can's always be picking it up and holding it, and often your hands may be dusty or dirty, which you also don't want to transfer to an electronic device, so the first step was to get a stand for my tablet. I had looked at the dozens and dozens of tablet and iPad stands, but found nothing that really inspired me, yeah, they all worked but ... hey, this is a workshop and here we try to make nice looking, functional things out of wood - not plastic.
I decided a simple "sandwich board" type design would work well, would be easy to make and would look good. The first step in the simple design was deciding on what angle would work best for both sitting and standing, and I determined that 30 degrees was near perfect for both.
Since I wanted the stand to be quite rigid, I decided that making box joints along the top edge would not only look great, but once glued, would hold the stand together extremely well and last for a long, long time. Next I had to determine what wood that would look nice, yet would hold up well which means it is probably best being a hardwood, and what thickness would it be. Then I needed to .....