Mallet

Box joints

Homemade sheet good rack

I recently built this sheet good rack that swings out of the way against a wall for storage, but will swing out so that you can pull your sheets out. I saw this in a magazine several years ago. It is made of a piece of scrap plywood I took off of the top of a skid, and a piece of scrap 2 x 10 I just had lying around.

I first cut the plywood (which was about 35" square) on a diagonal. I off set the cut so that it would leave a flat edge giving me some height for support out at the end of the bottom.

I then cut a piece of 2 x 10 35" in length to fully support the bottom, and used the left over piece to support the back.

I attached heavy steel casters that swivel to the bottom to support the weight of the sheet goods. I used two casters, one at the front and one at the back.

Attached a heavy duty door hinge to the back and attached that piece to a stud in the wall to keep the hinge point in place. All of the weight will rest on the casters at the bottom, but when the rack is fully loaded with wood it will be heavy and pull on the hinge. So it is a good idea to have a strong hinge and attach it well.

Here is the rack fully assembled and loaded up with sheet goods. It is a much better solution than leaning them against a wall like I was doing.

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Keepsake box

Just started putting together some keepsake boxes for the girls in my family. I found plans for them in the September 2002 issue of WOOD magazine. They use two contrasting species of wood to make a box that looks like it has some very nice inlays. The work can all be done on a table saw and sander so it fits a small shop pretty well.

I made my prototype out of curly maple and mahogany.

I learned several things after building the first one, like glue up all of the sides in one long piece and then plane and sand to thickness. Also move the dado for the box bottom up to 5/16" from the bottom edge of the sides so that the groove doesn't hit the glue joint for the trim pieces.

Start to finish you should easily complete a couple of boxes in a weekend.

Here is a look at the trim detail on the side of the box. Make sure that you are cutting the trim pieces from the far side of a wide blank for safety because they are pretty thin. You can also see the splines sticking out of the end of the box that I haven't trimmed up yet.

Cross cutting sled

Here is my new cross cutting sled. It works pretty good. Will come in pretty handy for future projects.

Bird house

Here is the most expensive bird house around. It is made out of oak plywood. Coen wanted to build a bird house for his mom really bad, so I agreed one Saturday morning. After getting to the garage I realized the only material I had enough of was the oak plywood. He was determined to build this bird house today so we used what we had on hand.

How to build an oak end table in one day.

I scored some nice red oak boards at the local Menards fairly cheap.

Since I have no real good way of making curved cuts, I decided a simple design would be the most practical. You can see here that I put my Kreg jig to good use. I used it for all of the joinery in the table. I know, it would have been nicer with some mortise and tenons or pins and dowels, but keeping it simple and quick was the goal. And the pocket holes make a great tight joint. Notice the mouse traps that I used as shims to set the reveal on the aprons. They were about 3/16" of an inch and worked perfectly.

Here it is almost done. I am trying to decide weather I want the bottom shelf higher or lower.

The low position won. I think it looks nicer that way and you can put a tall vase on it if you want. Now it just needs some stain and poly to make it last a long time.

The table is 25" H X 16" W X 18" D. If anyone is interested, I will post detailed dimensions of the components.

Here it is with a first coat of stain.

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