Bird from egg, "Take Flight", a balanced kinetic sculpture that glides around slowly and gracefully with the motion of ambient air in a room.

This was to be my first attempt at edge-joining boards. I originally planned to use dowels, but later gave in, and bought a nice Porter cable 557 biscuit joiner. I love when tasks trick me into buying tools.

Prior to using the clamp/random orbital sanding technique, I had tried to fake having a drum sander at my drill press, seen in the background here. It 'sort of' worked, but the fake fence, made with some scrap wood, and clamps, wasn't the best solution, and not quite as clean as I'd hoped. It was also a rather small drum sander head for making straight lines. I've since bought a larger arbor, and drum sanding tubes, and cut a new sacrificial plate with a new adjustable hole cutter that fits it. In the process, though, I lifted up the sacrificial plate, which then spun around, burning a circular patch in my Woodpeckers drill press table's laminated top :(

Note in this pic that sanding the edges of the boards with my clamp/random orbital sanding method worked great. They sit flush on the table top.

Crafting wooden pieces in a workshop during the day with a focus on skilled hands at work

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Pre-sanding, here's how the bottom of the top panel turned out. You can see the wax paper adhered where my homemade flat-bars were clamped on. This sanded out just fine later with the random-orbit sander, and several grits of paper. I achieved a super-slick finish.

Balancing, "Take Flight", a balanced kinetic sculpture that glides around slowly and gracefully with the motion of ambient air in a room.

One last shot of the flappy shavings of Styrofoam™.

And I'm out! This was a big project for me. My garage is too small, I didn't have nearly enough clamps in the beginning of the project, and I purchased, learned how to use, and then incorporated into the project a thickness planer, a biscuit joiner, pipe clamps, a belt sander, and I learned how to do some times of hinge mortising. I also worked a bit with stains and for the first time, dyes. I did more sanding, and more proper, fine, incremental sanding than I've ever done, by far, to achieve amazingly smooth finishes. I made perfect roundovers with my router table and a new bit, and even ball-corners by hand. I made grooved shelving that came out as I'd hoped, with rounded over front ends. I got to try my hand at several little craft boxes, and those came out great. I found and fell in love with my new favorite woodworking store - Rockler, and I even ordered up a custom color of paint from Home Depot for the first time.

This was a really great project! One to grow on, and learn from.

Mom says she has some pics of the final location for me. I'm hoping to get those soon, and probably add them to the TV stand collection.

Then, "Passing Through", a balanced kinetic sculpture with interacting elements that glide around slowly in delightful patterns with the motion of ambient air in a room.

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I used all 1/4" poplar in 2"-4" strips from Home Depot. Anything wider than this was heavily bowed. This is the general layout of the magazine box - many 2" strips would be glued up edge-to-edge into panels for the sides, and a few 4" panels would become the back, front, and bottom faces. In the background, several stacks of wood are intended to become the small boxes for the opposite side cabinet.

The boxes are now "Windsor Haze." They look quite "country," and very similar to lots of things mom has picked up over the years.

I went over just about every surface with several grits of sand paper, getting it down to 400 grit by the end for the outer surfaces of the larger panels.

I've labored over how to make knobs of the right size, texture, finish, and style for this thing. Mom is into acorns, stars, pinecones, leaves, and many other design elements, so I've decided to try to create my own knobs that she'll love. This is a surprise element in the design. If it doesn't work, I'll just resort to some store-bought stuff that looks nice. These are my practice knobs - although a tad pricey ($7.29US for the one on the left) - and I will be using the many bits in my router toolbox, along with the metal-carving, and engraving bits above, and my cut off wheels, and bench grinder, and mini lathe to shape something I like.

The plan then is to use my vibratory tumbler to clean the knobs up a bit, and then acid-etch them in muriatic acid, which I've had sitting around for a year now (PCB etching project). I'm not sure how that will all work out, but have read up a bit, and cobbled together a process plan. I'm hoping it will blacken the brass (or bronze if the two on the right are bronze), and allow me to polish only the high points back to a more golden hue. We'll see... The fun is in the exploration, and discovery.

Here I've already done the glue-up on the bottom panel, which I chose to do first, as it was the uglier of the two. I chose the best-matched patterns for the top, leaving lesser-matches for the bottom panel. I figured as it was my first attempt at biscuit joining, and gluing up larger panels from smaller planks, I should make any mistakes on the uglier piece that I could hide better. I didn't make any mistakes, though, and moved on to the top. You can see the top panels have their biscuit slots cut out. I'm ready to glue them up.

I'm matching up grain colors, and patterns here in the birch panels to get as nice a top-surface to this TV stand as possible. This looks pretty good so far, but I need two more planks for the full width of the top panel (14").

The stain remover in the can bottle there did nothing to remove the aniline dyes I had used on these, so it came down to simply sanding and sanding (and sanding). Eventually I had them back down to close to the original color. It wasn't until after this sanding that I decided to go with paint. I didn't need to sand them. Sigh.

The little hand-held "belt sander" there helped cleaning out the inner corners of the boxes. This is just a pen-sized detail sander I picked up at Rockler on my last (and 2nd) visit. You advance the belt by hand when you need a clean piece at the wedge tip, which is often given how thin it is. I have a package of spare belts for this, as well as a 2nd version of all in a thinner, shorter size.

Instead of taking the doors off and using the drill press, I used my General marking ruler to figure out where to put the knobs, drilled a through-hole by hand with a cordless drill, and counterbored the back carefully with the same drill and a Forstner bit. This isn't ideal, but it worked fine.

A simple cantilevered shelf for lighting and other uses, made of birch plywood and solid cherry. Light fixture is from Ikea.