Santa's Workshop 2009 - Writing Desks

Ever since Sarah and I were married, we have exchanged hand-made gifts on Christmas Eve, a tradition that we have also shared with our two daughters. For me, the crafting began in November when I bought the materials I'd need for my projects from Home Depot. (I'd love to buy rough lumber and mill it but until I have a planer and a jointer, I have to buy my wood pre-milled.)

For my daughters, I built two versions of the same thing: a small writing desk with an internal divider for paper, pens, etc. I used half-inch poplar, four inches wide. I cut the sides to length while mitering them on my chopsaw then I cut the dadoes for the tops and bottoms on my table saw. Even my smallest dado combination was too wide so I just used my regular blade and cut two dadoes side by side. The tops and bottoms are hardboard that I cut with the circular saw and cleaned up with my block plane.



For assembly, I taped the back sides of the miters with blue painters tape, spread the glue, and held it all together with a band clamp. I used a couple other clamps to clamp it down at the corners to keep it good and flat (the top of my table saw was good for that, as you can see.)

Cutting the top off of a box like this seems like it should be easy but it has caused me trouble every time I've done it. I need to come up with a better technique. I didn't wreck anything but the top and bottoms don't meet nearly as neatly as I would like. Maybe hot-gluing some scraps inside to keep it all even as I run it through the table saw would help? Regardless, I cleaned up the top and bottom with a block plane and sand paper so they came out OK. The divider inside the box (with rounded corners) provides just enough friction to keep the lids closed and provide just the right amount of resistance when opening them. That is a nice feature of my design that I didn't anticipate.

The thin stripe on the front of the box in the picture is evidence of a lapse in concentration while I was cutting the tops off the boxes. I wasn't thinking and made a cut in the wrong place. After a bit of head scratching (every shop needs a chair or stool for long bouts of thinking) I decided to glue a thin strip of cherry in the mistake and show it off as a decorative feature. It works!


The finish is a coat of urethane inside and out (not on the hard-board, of course).
A close friend gave me a set of plastic triangles that elevate workpieces off of the bench for finishing that are very, very helpful. He probably has no idea how much I use them!

Here's a summary of the highlights of the design:

• Sides are 1/2" x 4" poplar
  
• Top and bottom are 3/16" hard-board, smooth side out
  
• The boxes are square, about 12"x12" inside dimension
  
• The corners are mitered and do not use splines
  

This design is so flexible and easy to build that I suspect I'll make a few tool and storage boxes using this technique.

Santa's Workshop 2009 - Spiral Candle Holder

The last gift I made for Christmas, 2009 (with a lot of help from my youngest daughter) is this spiral candle holder. It contains 24 small candle holes (1/2") and one regular candle hole (7/8").

I actually designed the spiral a year ago but didn't get around to finishing it until this year. Drawing a large spiral is not as easy as it may appear at first. I laid out a large piece of paper on the floor to start with. Next, I took a regular sized vegetable can (# 10?) and tied a long string around it with a pencil tied at the end. Using the can as the fulcrum, I drew a line on the paper while wrapping the string around the can, giving me one spiral-shaped line. I then moved the can over a bit (an inch or two) and repeated the process, giving me two roughly parallel spiral lines. This took a bit of experimenting so YMMV.

I cut out the spiral and traced it onto a sheet of half inch plywood. I then cut out the spiral with my jig saw. I smoothed the edges up, too, since this template can be used many times. I eyeballed where cuts should be to break up the spiral and cut them on the chop saw. So at this point, I had four curved pieces that when butted together formed a spiral.

Next, we laid out the ply wood pieces on a nice piece of clear 3/4"x5" poplar, traced the shapes, and cut the poplar into shorter pieces on the chopsaw. We used the scroll saw to cut out the individual blanks. Lots of sanding a smoothing ensued at this point to make the sides nice and soft.

Again, we eyeballed where the candle holders should go by laying them out on the spiral and getting what looked like the right layout. Then we traced each candle holder in place to make drilling the holes easier. I decided to finish the pieces with urethane before drilling so that I wouldn't have to worry about drips of glue getting in the holes and distorting their size. We finished all four sides, of course.

Drilling was pretty straight forward for my assistant as was inserting the candle ferrules. The big one fit nice an snug but the little ones each needed a drop of 5-minute epoxy to hold them in place.

This gift was a big hit and now we have a template to use to make many, many more if we want.

A Nice Trade

All that firewood has paid off! I traded about a cord for this old utility trailer. The lights are broken but that's OK since I'm mostly going to be banging around the woods with it. I had to replace the coupler (from Northern Tool) so for about $30, I got a new trailer. I'll rig up some lights on a 2x4 or something so I can take it on the road but I don't have to do that for a while yet.
The picture, above, was taken after we had cut a bunch of small trees to decorate our school's Winter Fair. The trees all go up in the auditorium at school to create a little forest grove where people can eat their lunch and listen to live music. It's quite beautiful. (In case you're wondering, yes: I drove it on the road without lights. But hey, this is Vermont in deer season so nobody noticed! That and I didn't drive through town or anything.)