Friends, fellows, lurkers, I have suffered a temporary field promotion. For the duration of this post you may address me as Major Aggravated.

I am building a sideboard/buffet/server/credenza/whatever you want to call a low cabinet for the dining room. Shaker style, mostly out of walnut. It features posts/legs at the corners to which the doors will be directly hinged, and the way I've designed this cabinet, the doors will be 3/4" thick, and sit 1/4" inset from the front of the leg. The leg is 1+3/4" thick, so there's 3/4" of leg inside the cabinet. There are other structural reasons I did it this way.

This complicates the matter of door hinges. I know of no pin-and-barrel hinge that will do the job, there's some weird specialty mortise mount concealed hinges that I'm just not sure if they'll work in this application, pivot hinges are too "too cheap for Ikea" for the project, and then there's European-style concealed cup hinges. I've known of these things for awhile but never really looked into them.

Until a couple weeks ago.

These hinges attach to the door with two screws and a big fuckoff hole. The offset from the edge might change slightly from project to project but the door half is pretty standard across the range.

On the cabinet side, there's like 8 different ways they can attach, depending on the anatomy of the cabinet, whether it has a face frame or not and if there are any offsets to consider.

The hinges actually come in two halves, the door side with the cup and the bracket for the cabinet side, and they clip together in a standard way, so that you can fuck up and mix and match parts in ways that won't work.

There isn't a European hinge made to attach to my cabinet as designed, because it sort of does and doesn't have a face frame simultaneously. The no-frame type wants to screw to a wall farther back than the leg, so that's a no-go, and the face mount type wants to attach to a face frame that is flush with the back of the door. They don't really make this easy to learn. They like to refer to the features of their hinges by marketing names that they never explain anywhere, and they don't really describe what they do. You just have to learn that "BLUMotion" means it has a damper through osmosis.

No website that sells these damn things organizes them well. Go shopping for wood screws, you get 90,000 results and you can then refine it by shank diameter, length, drive type, button or bugle head, self-tapping or no, self-countersinking or no, material/coating/finish etc. until you have 3 results, a 4-piece bag, a 50 count box and a 50 pound bucket.

Not these goddamn euro hinges. Nowhere that sells euro hinges in the Western hemisphere does it that way. It seems like a wholesaler buys parts from Blum, assembles them into kits, and these kits get dropshipped on eBay, Amazon, Rockler, the usual scumbags. So you don't get to query a database to narrow down your selection, you get to try to guess what search term will get you what you need and then look at the pictures, a practice that shall henceforth be known as "euro shopping."

You'll see the same marketing images on different platforms accompanied by different diagrams, dimensional drawings or installation instructions. Put it all together and they still don't tell you everything you need to know. I note that Rockler issues their own manuals for these things, not Blum's. Looking at Blum's publications, I can understand why.

I finally figure up what hinge set I think I need, given the little diagrams they provide. I order a few sets for my current and immediate future projects.

What arrives is not what I ordered.

The door side, the actual hinge, looks right. But it comes with the wrong bracket. I see they sell just the brackets, I can order those and get them faster than processing a return. I order some of those. They fit. I make a model out of scrap to make sure they'll work, and the reveal between the frame and the door is like a quarter inch too big. Because it turns out the curvy bit of the hinge is 9.2 more bodacious than what I need, and you'd only learn that by carefully comparing the hinge in your hand with two diagrams in their catalog.

None of the components are stamped with a model or part number. Hell, the people selling these hinge sets don't say "Contents: 2x 640449 hinges, 2x 630449 brackets" so you can compare to Blum's catalog.

It's the smell of ten million monkeys fucking ten million footballs.

It's very irritating. And I'm making a lot of it this week. Shut your tracts folks, this one's a doozy.

Man makes a giant belt sander from an old treadmill and it actually works quite well.

First router project. My family had a trivet like this when I was growing up, and I wanted to recreate it. Made from a scrap end of an oak board.

One of the channels on the bottom has a little deviation but otherwise they came out pretty much straight. And there's a fair amount of burning on the sides. I was moving very slowly at full depth, so I wouldn't have to try to get to the exact same endpoint multiple times at different depths. Curious if that's a likely source of burn and what a better way would be; it's not really a problem on the oak but would be on lighter wood (and I have an ash scrap waiting to be v2).

I started with a practice on a plywood scrap.

The jig mostly just holds it in place, with a fence along the back and 1", 2" and 3" spacers (then flip it around to work in from the other side).

For the real thing, I cut it out first on a bandsaw circle jig. That left a pinhole in the center, still slightly visible after a sawdust + glue patch, but it's on the bottom. Placing a channel in the center could avoid that.

After all the criss-cross cuts (routes?) I used a 1/4" roundover. The set of the bandsaw left the outside a little rough, so I'd probably smooth that out before doing the roundover next time.

Finally, 80 + 150 + 200 with the orbital sander (just holding the trivet in my hand to do the edge and rounded corner), and butcher block finish.

I'm planning on getting a hardwood plywood board to attach to an antique(ish) teachers desk so I will have a larger desk. The teachers desk is only ~2.5x4.5' and I'm looking at creating a 3x6' desktop.

My question is, with what should I finish the hardwood plywood? I want to keep/see the wood grain, and would like a finish that will be reasonably durable from day to day wear.

Thanks.

I'm hoping someone here can explain something that I haven't been able to find a satisfying answer to - why don't traditional acoustic guitars crack? I mean obviously sometimes they do, but it seems to me like that should happen all the time. For anyone unfamiliar, the front (top) and backs of wood acoustic guitars have their grain direction running parallel to the neck. And inside, there is bracing. That bracing runs perpendicular to the grain of the top, and the bracing is typically glued to the top. Gluing perpendicular grain is generally considered a huge problem when it's an item of furniture and it would be reasonable to expect an object constructed like that to tear itself apart in a few years as humidity fluctuations do their thing. But guitars usually don't do that and I don't understand why.

Came with an L bracket I was using to put planters on a fence.

We've got our very first beautiful crying 1.5 month monster in our house now. We went bare bones with the preparations, only getting a crib, changing table and stroller. As the toys, books, play things from family start to come in, I want to start designing and building a storage area.

I'm thinking of an interactive storage area which grows along with my little girl and her play things. Interactive in the sense that the storage skeleton itself perhaps can be moved/ expanded/ collapsible, ala a treehouse or a fort.

I've dedicated an area in my house where the piano and wine rack used to be, it's a 1.2m x 1.2m corner next to a window in the living room.

Other things that came to mind is if one edge of the storage can be a hand painted vertical height marker (instead of being on the wall)

Open to any ideas and suggestions. I'm just trying to avoid the boring plastic storage containers and stacking them up.

It's a little scratch and dent given it's made out of offcuts, scraps and extras from other projects but I think it came out okay. Three coats of fake "tung oil" finish and it came up to a nice warm semi-gloss, and ambered up the pine enough to take the edge off the grain.

Detail shot of the side hung, center guided drawer and its rabbeted dovetail front and shop made handle.

Yeah I'm going on a bit of a victory lap here, I'm pretty happy with how this one turned out.

This sign hangs on my basement shop door. I didn't know Don personally. I think he was the first husband of the lady we bought our house from before he passed away. I've never seriously considered removing it. I don't know why exactly. I guess it feels sort of symbolic.

My shop was once his shop. Even though he's long gone, there's still at least one piece of evidence that he was here. One day it will be someone elses shop. Even though I'll be gone, there will still be evidence of my work. The labor of past generations that went into making a house "home."

Who would have thought woodworking could be so philosophical.

My woodworking shop lives in my 2 car garage. I have several large-ish machines, like a sawstop PCS, a 12" jointer and a dust extraction system.

I'm in the US. I'm currently in the process of selling my house and moving to a different state 2000 miles away. I'm dreading having to move my woodshop. My main concern is those large machines getting damaged in transit. I plan to use pods for the move.

So, people who have gone through a similar move, do you have any tips? How did you pack large/heavy machines?

Ain't she a beauty...

I'm slapping together a night stand for my cousin out of crap I have lying around the shop, and I'm using the project as an excuse to try out some stuff.

Carcass is "hardwood" mystery meat 7-ply from Lowe's. Joinery is all dovetails; lower shelf and mid frame are sliding dovetails, upper frame is half-blinds. I did that to see if I could. Answer: Barely. The sliding dovetails were fine but the half-blinds wanted to blow the plywood apart.

Face frame is rift sawn traumatized pine. That's what I managed to salvage from a damaged section of 8:4, and judging by the growth rings that tree had been through at least one divorce. The curve on the bottom I laid out with a bowed spline. First time I've actually done that. It's attached to the carcass Norm style, with Tite-bond and #10 biscuits.

Tomorrow I'll build the drawer.

I have a Porter Cable dovetail jig. It works reasonably well when it's properly aligned, but properly aligning it a hilariously clumsy process of guess and check. The alignment lines on the templates are on the top surface, so there's a quarter inch of parallax error, and the brass adjustment nuts aren't graduated in any meaningful way. The instructions say things like "If the joint is too loose, move the jig away from you." How far? Depends on where you hold your head. It results in a guess-and-check, guess and check mentality. There is no try, measure how far off it is, and adjust it based on that measurement.

I solved both of these problems with a knife.

I printed out a little wagon wheel looking thing to use as a guide so I could put some graduation marks around the brass thumb screws. They run on a 16TPI threaded rod, so 1 full turn drives it 1/16th inch, 1/2 turn 1/32", 1/4 turn 1/64", and 1/8 turn 1/128". I stopped there because that's about the limits of my ability or need to measure. It's not on an absolute scale, but now I can move both sides of the template with some precision, if not accuracy.

I also scribed an alignment line on the back of the template, and then down each side of each template tooth. The factory alignment lines are like 1/16" wide or better, so I just scribed the location of the center. That should eliminate parallax error.

I'll give it a test run tomorrow and see if I helped it any.

I'm making my own white oak door jambs. So far I did one set. I milled some rough cut oak, made two passes through the table saw to roughly remove a rabbet for the integrated door stop.

Then I ran it through the table saw again with a dado stack to get the rabbet to the final dimensions. The problem is, it's difficult to apply even pressure as the wood passes over the dado stack. I already have a featherboard pushing against the fence, but I'm thinking I could use another pushing against the saw top.

I know I can put one on my fence, but that would apply pressure to the part of the board closest to the fence only. Do they make any contraptions that can apply even pressure downwards, but over a larger surface area? Like multiple featherboards extended out over the work piece.

Can anyone tell me how can I flatten a Minecraft heart please? I've put this together:

https://www.instructables.com/MineCraft-Heart-wood/

but I've noticed that it bows slightly. I've managed to get the ends to raise slightly when I've screwed it together. The top needs to be smoothed too, as there are some small differences between the pieces. Both sides are only off by a millimetre or two, but it's enough to be noticeable.

My thinking is to clamp it down at the centre, which seems to be mostly flat on both sides, then sand the top until it's level, then flip it over and clamp the edges to smooth the bottom.

Are there any likely problems with doing it this way, or is there a better way of doing it? Thanks in advance :)

Finished the wooden top structure for the enclosure for the soon to come land turtle.

It will get a kind of net to it (its purpose is to keep cats and birds of prey from messing with the turtle)

Made of white oak, with plenty of joinery and braces to keep it strong and stable.

Still a finishing here or there but I think I’ll leave it more or less rough sawn an untreated.

I had a plan in my head for a custom end table for quite a while, something made of local wood, a book shelf, and integrated wireless charger. This is the result.

Wood is arbutus wood, treated with tung oil just need to add a drawer. Plans are entirely unique, made in Civil3d. I took the raw wood, rough cut it, planed it, sanded and polished. It's as close to scratch as you can get.

I made a quick and dirty zero clearance plate to cut some small pieces, but realised that I needed to cut a larger piece of MDF while I was working. Ok, I thought, the saw is already set up, it won't take a minute.

Then promptly cut the zero clearance board in half...

I used walnut for the box and handcut dovetails for the joinery. I had triangular offcuts that I glued together to make the lid.

I made this a few years ago so I can't remember if I used handtools or a table saw to dimension the wood.

The finish is pure Tung Oil.

Thanks for reading!

god. dammit I have to table saw this butcher block apart.

Has anyone ever experimented with Banksia wood for woodworking? The picture used by one random seller online looks pretty interesting. I’m not in Australia, so I don’t really have the wood available and don’t want to spend $$$$ shipping something that might be awful.

What it came up with is too good not to share: