A slide show of a house I'm working on and couple of photos of the gate I made in Shetchup with twisted iron and a twisted cage. If you hover over the 3d view with your curser click and hold you can rotate the 3d view.

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Get your own

Unfortunately after I completed the gate and closed SU the next time I opened it the file caused my computer to crash so this the only chance to see the gate finished.

Spiral staircase plugin

So I got some new plugins for SketchUp and just wanted to do a short video to show one of the many tools included in these toolbars. This one is for drawing spiral staircases in three easy moves. It from the folks at Quarr IT and on the website you will see the link for ruby scripts they call them SCF toolbars so I wanted to give credit where credit is due especially since they offer them for free.

spirsl_stairs


Well hope you enjoyed that

Completed house in SketchUp

This is a house plan I have been working on for a while now. It was drawn using SketchUp and a few plug- ins I have one of which is house builder (credit goes to D. Bur). It actually builds walls, floors and a gable roof. There are several different layers to see the floor plan, walls,an roof. It was done for a friend that supplied the plans and will some day be built. Hopefully. you can click on the link to go to my 3D Warehouse and download it in to SketchUp if you have it on your PC. If not your missing out.
If you do and your unfamiliar with SU you can simply go to View and animation to go threw the different scenes.
Link is here Thanks for Looking.

SketchUp 1

I've been recently learning SU a program to do 3D modeling I've used it before without much success. Until I ran across a video tutorial. This fellow taught me more than basics of modeling but more importantly how to organize the model in such a way that it becomes easier to do some actions and developing into more complex modeling. Some of my models are at the Google 3D Warehouse .. you can clink on either on to go to the link.

This a little video i recorded as a test for some new software i downloaded for free.
I'll be posting new stuff I learn here. So if you know how to subscribe to a RSS feed then you can do so.
To see what progress I'm making. Thanks

Sewing desk

My daughter Sarai wanted a sewing desk for her birthday last year,(Feb.) but since my shop isn't heated she had to wait a while till it warmed up like July ? No that's when I really finally got serious about it.
  We took some measurements and came up with a plan. So I knew somewhat what I wanted it to look like and some of the details I wanted. I wanted to use mortise and tenon joints and some tapered legs. I built a tapering jig for the legs so I could cut them on my tablesaw and used m & t joints to join the legs and rails that would support the left side of the desk and built a separate case on the right to house the drawers I built using half blind dovetails .
  The thing is I've studied woodworking and joinery for sometime know (20 years or better) and I finally got a chance to incorporate some of what I know into designing and building something I didn't read out of a book

                                        

                                     

                The edge of the top was given a taper to go with the tapered legs.

  The wood I used was pine. The thing about pine and some other woods like cherry is they become blotchy when you stain them. In other words you have some parts that look darker or lighter than the rest of the piece. Which is fine for store bought furniture but not for a custom made piece of fine furniture if you want to be proud of it.
  The end result of what color of stain to use was my daughter's idea and while at first I was hesitant about it I was glad she had the vision of thinking outside the norm of traditional woodworkin

       Yes teal. Add a back to it and several coats of brushed on polyurethane and Wala

  Pretty sure they look better than the desk.

the top to bloodwood jewelry box

I finally took some pics of the top installed. The hinges were not what I wanted but they worked.
The next step will be a tray for small things like rings and necklaces Then some velvet I’m thinking a cream colored velvet.

Bloodwood jewelry box #3

Well everything is going pretty well with the jewelry box . I got the box glued up and the feet attached. Now to finish the top and put some velvet on the inside and install some hinges. This project has not been with out problems though in that the main box wouldn't fit or work with any clamps I had, and the miters didn't come out as nice as I wanted. The chipout that occurred was at least on the inside of the box and I think I can fix that but it is posing some problems also but all in all not to bad.

bloodwood Jewelry box #2

I had to decide on the dimensions I needed to make the box so I could utilize the whole piece of lumber as I didn't want to use any other type of wood for the project. So I came up with 9 1/2 x 4 3/4 width and depth, the height was predetermined by the board being 3 1/2 inches wide. There were a couple of considerations here. One was how much wood I had and two what proportions to use. Well there is a formula in design that is used in most circumstances and that is 1.618, it is sort of a golden rule I read about some where and it works pretty good when designing a project on your own.
The next thing to do was to figure out whether to use some type of feet for it or incorporate feet into it by cutting the sides to look like feet (something that is done on small boxes to keep it looking good yet keeping it simple and cost effective) well I choose the first option since this is a box that I want to be proud of.
The type of feet I came up with were Ogee bracket feet since that was sort of the theme of the design

This is a picture of the design, the template that was going to be used on all 8 pieces ( two per foot) and the size of the actual piece I was going to attempt to make the feet.
I cut the front profile with a ogee shaped router bit on the edge of the board, ripped  it to the width of 3/4"  and cut them to length one side 90 deg and the other end at 45 deg, this way you don't have to do dangerous cuts on the tablesaw . I used a smaller copy of a panel sled to cut the angles and to length (much safer and eliminates tear out).

So this is how they came out after cutting the profile on the bandsaw and gluing the together ( Quite proud of them) .                                                    

Bloodwood jewelry box

I was watching a video the other day on Woodworking-online a website run by the folks from Woodsmith Magazine. They were showing how to make cove cuts on the tablesaw, which I've seen before by a fella name Glen Huey he was showing how to make ogee bracket feet used in furniture making. But what I was intrigued by was if you change the blade angle to something other than 90 deg you end up with a asymmetrical cove cut.
Well I've had this piece of bloodwood (an exotic hardwood from South America) that I've been saving for a special project, this wood is very appropriately named.

So this is the piece with the asymmetrical cove cut
 you can see how it's different than a regular cove cut

3 tier inbox part 3

The project is finally finished. The drawers are glued up. Final step in construction was to make the cut outs in the front of the boxes to open the drawer. I built one final jig for the router table to make the cut outs all the same with rounded corners.
The project was finished by using three coats of wipe-on polyurethane. I like the wipe-on poly rather than a brush on poly because it eliminates runs and brush marks, however, it doesn't build up as much. The last step was to apply several coats of wax.

3 tier inbox part 2

Well, on with the the splines. There were 48 splines in all to rip to thickness and width. That would have been an exhaustive task without jigs (in woodworking it's all about jigs). It's sort of time consuming to make jigs, however, it's not only essential but a time saver in the long run.
All the splines are glued in and a round-over bit in the router table makes quick work of the miters. The next task will be to sand all the pieces and stain the frame and add a finish.

3 tier inbox

In the March issue of Woodsmith magazine, there was this project

of an inbox that featured mitered splines with contrasting wood.
So this a short description of how it was made.
I started with oak for the frame ripped and cut to size, mitered the ends and then cut the slots for the splines using a few jigs to help in cutting the slots.
The pieces are glue up and the splines added.

Inspiration

While some of my woodworking skills come from just trying things out (trial and error)or more commonly known as making sawdust and fire wood. I have learned a lot by reading books and magazines but the web has so much to offer in the way of videos. A few of my favorites are Fine Woodworking , The Wood Whisperer, The Woodworking Channel. you can also find quite a bit on , DIY (David Marks), and of coarse The New Yankee Workshop (Norm Abram)
When learning any new skill or hobby especially with power tools it's important to learn how to use them safely.

Shop Tour beginning of 2009

These are a few pictures of my shop out behind my house. Pretty self explanatory a short list of my power tools include,
Delta 10" contractor table saw
Dewalt 10" miter saw
Craftsman 6" jointer
Dewalt 744 12 3/4 planer
Delta 9" bandsaw
Delta 6" disk sander/3" belt sander

Past Projects

These clocks and the Quilt rack were built during my first year of woodworking. I lived in a two bedroom house. My daughters that were living with me, had moved out to start their own life, so I had an extra bedroom in the back of the house that was connected to a large room to the backyard. I bought me a Delta table saw the $99 model and built a pair of saw horses and went to work on a tool tray ( old time tool carryall ) . Once I had that done, I built a quilt rack . A modest project . I saw the plan for this in a Woodsmith magazine and looked like a good challenge. With a router and the first table saw it came out pretty good. It had a lot of challenging joints . The clocks however came from an inspiration I had one sleepless night and latter became Christmas presents that first year. I'm a self taught woodworker wanting to always better myself.