DIY Walnut and Curly Maple Knife Block

Finished Product for the Impatient

First things First

So this is the first project that I made after getting my Uncle's old table saw and fixing things up on it (zero clearance insert, v-link belt to reduce vibration, squaring everything up, etc.) so first thing first, gotta build a cross cut sled! Okay so I didn't have to but it made things much much much easier. Plans for this I got from the wood whisperer who is an invaluable resource for anyone getting into woodworking.

Ended up with a similar tolerance to his (.025 after the 5th cut so about 1/32" of an inch over 10 feet I'm pretty okay with that)

Alright now that that is done time to actually make something.

Design

I had previously just had a magnetic knife bar at my old apartment but the new place didn't have anywhere to mount them so they just were banished to a drawer and that wasn't acceptable. So it was time to make a knife block. Most of the ones I have seen completely hide your blades or aren't very interesting in general... that is until I came across this post which oddly enough had the same brand of knives as I did.

So as with most of my designs I like to utilize CAD to help me visualize proportions and dimensions. Depth is based on my longest knife allowing it hang freely.

Wood Selection

I'm a sucker for the maple/walnut combo and had some curly (tiger) maple laying around that I had picked up from Menards, turns out they get "maple" in regardless of figure and price it all the same so it's one of the very few times it's actually worth going to Menards for hardwoods opposed to a hardwood store. The top pieces are made out of  1/4" thick walnut.

Building

Walnut Slats

For the top slats I am using 1/4" walnut so I ripped the boards I had to 2" and used my sled to do the cross cuts, all 15 of them (one extra just in case I fucked up), the sled came in super handy with these repeated cuts. I don't have a picture of the initial set up but it's basically like this but the stop block was clamped further over.

So you'll probably notice that the kerfs here weren't on my original plans. After the initial cuts I brought them over to my knives and noticed the handles on my knives don't have flat hilts like the ones in the reference photo:

So I had to improvise a bit. I added channels 2 saw kerfs wide and about 1/8" deep to each end a little over 3/4" from the edge. I then realized that that basically made every other slot useless so I added a center channel on the back side in the middle. On the end pieces I didn't need the center channel so I left that out. Here is how they will be laid out, only 8 are shown here rather than the total 14 in the final product.




The basic process was to do the 3/4" location first flip the piece do the other end and repeat for all the pieces, then move the stop block over a blade width and repeat... then find the center on the back side adjust your stop block so the kerf falls on one side of that line then rotate the block again and then you have a center channel 2 blades wide. The picture above is when I was cutting these center slots.

Below is after applying some Watco Danish oil to all sides of the slats

Maple Base

The overall width ended up needing to be 7-1/4" and my material was 5.5" wide so I had to glue up two pieces to make the width. I cut two pieces to 24" which was a bit oversized but I wanted to make sure everything was squared up and give me a bit of play if I messed up one of the cuts later on. Ripped these two pieces to half the final width and glued them up.

I took a scraper to remove the glue and planed down both sides to be flat as there was a bit of a ridge on the glue up. I then squared up the ends with on the sled. The first time through I cut my 45s just referencing the fence and they came out pretty well however as you will see I fucked up the finish and needed to make a second set and that time I just made a miter sled since I still had a bunch of ply.

After the main cuts I had to cut the finger joints for the walnut slats, thankfully I have a dovetail jig and it had a jig for 1/2" spacing so with that in place I centered my work piece on it and used a 1/4" router bit and went to town. Centering was super important here as the jig is made for a max of 3/4" material and they usually have a bit of roundover on the inside of the joint for my application however that wasn't really acceptable so I could only get through about 1/2" cleanly then I flipped the board over and came from the other side to finish each finger. If you don't have a jig like this it could have easily been done on the cross cut sled or with hand tools, plenty of guides on how to do box joints/finger joints with varying tools out there. 

You want these joints to be fairly tight so you can slide the slats in with a bit of "negotiation". I just used a bit of sandpaper until things fit properly

Alright so this is where things kinda started going not so great! The fingers were actually a 1/8" or so too deep, this coupled with the slots allowing the knife hilt to sink below the slats caused my longest knife to touch the base... I thought "no biggie" I'll just leave a gap big enough under the slats to make it look like I meant to do it that way. Here you can see the gap below the blade is less than the gap under the walnut

On to mistake No. 2 I wanted to bring out the grain. I learned that if you use a stain use one that you want the flat grain to end up with and your curls/figure to be darker not the color you want your curls to be. After applying the stain it got super dark super quick (I thought wiping it on then immediately off and hitting it with a bit of sandpaper would put me where I wanted) and ended up looking like this:

Which I will admit it looks nice, but it really is way too close to the color of the walnut to mesh very well. Soooo I redid the base but this time built a miter sled (very much like the crosscut sled above just for 45° bevel cuts).

After re-doing all the above steps a second time and making things a bit taller I glued everything up, I just used painters tape on the back side of the joints and then folded the pieces into position after applying glue.

I then slid in a pair of the pieces of walnut to make sure the top was at the right width as my miters seemed to be a bit off. I actually liked a bit of overhang here so there is about a 1/16"-ish on each side

After it dried I thought some splines would look nice so I got my spline jig (link to the one I built) out and added slots for some scrap 1/4" walnut.

Flushed them up with a block plane and had a bit of chip out, I'll have to get a flush trim saw in the future so I'm not removing so much material the next time I do these which I think caused a few issues, which you can see in the above photo.

Next step is the finish, I picked up some Vintage Maple transtint and followed these steps which is basically adding 7 or so drops of the dye to 1/4 cup of Bullseye Sealcoat then waiting an hour or so and sanding it back, this is before sanding/scraping:

This is after scraping

Now it's just applying a top coat, it was suggested by the guys at my local Woodcraft to use Waterlox, so this is after one coat... in person it's a bit less vibrant at most angles hopefully after a few more applications the figure will come out a bit more consistently

Hooray for most mess ups:

Kinda hard to see but there are some streaks this is actually due to using the "satin" version and not the "original" version, to make it more dull they add solids to the mix and if you don't have a base coat on it absorbs in more in some parts than others and you get more solids in some areas so it looks streaky but is actually very flat and smooth. If you want to use this finish apply the original finish first then use this as a top coat. Another option is to just use the original formula and it'll actually end up somewhere close to satin/semi-gloss anyway and if you want it more dull you can buff it out a bit.

Anyway after 2 more coats things were looking good (other than the streaks I can't get rid of)

I slid the slats in with the help of a block of wood and hammer and it was good to go, the friction fit is tight enough to hold things in place.

So here's the finished product again from a few angles:

DIY Mahogany Display box

Finished Product Up Front

So my Mom is selling some products from WildTree and wanted a display box for them so she asked me if I could put something together. The bottles are a forrest green so I thought a red mahogany would look nice to go along with them, I picked up some African Mahogany however it is a lot more light brown than the reddish brown that Genuine Mahogany is. First step was to get the boards to width and plane out any inconsistencies in the glue up, this stuff is a dream to work with.

This is an older project so pictures are again sparse since I just decided to start documenting my builds. I cut the miters and added peg holes for the self using an edge guide on my router and then chamfered all the corners on the inside. I also added a slot for the 1/4" ply I used for the back of the box, you can see that in the photo below too, it's basically just a floating panel. If you do something like this you'll want to stain that back panel before glue up since it'll be hard to get good coverage while it is in place.

That photo was actually because I messed up the holes, one set started 9-1/2" from the top... and one set started 9-1/2" from the bottom...Whoops! Ended up adding more peg holes to even things out, thankfully the spacing worked out.

Glue up was actually just done with painters tape as clamping miters is a royal PITA. I used this method:

 It worked really well. Now miter joints on boxes are basically end grain to end grain and are fairly weak with just glue so most people will use dowels or splines to strengthen them. I decided a bit of brass would work well with the darker wood... I don't have a lathe so I cut pieces of 1/4" brass rod to length and threw them in the chuck of my drill and used progressively higher grit sandpaper until I got the finish I wanted. I also used the same material on the pegs for the shelf, those I went to about 600 grit on everything where the dowels I just went that high on the exposed head.

This is after staining with "Red Mahogany" stain from minwax if I were to do it again I probably would have used dye to get the depth a bit better. Here you can also see one of the dowels in place

After that I just applied about 4 coats of wiping varnish (50/50 poly/mineral spirits) sanding in between coats and making sure I got rid of any drips. Below this is still a bit wet so much higher gloss than the end product.

Here are some glamour shots after finishing everything, it turned out a bit more red red than red-brown so I'll adjust the next project if I ever want to use Mahogany again. It's really hard to capture the luster of this wood the colors really change as the light hits it at different angles, extremely interesting and pretty wood. Overall the piece is a bit "heavy" and probably would have looked a bit better in 1/2" or similar stock 

Simple DIY Mid Century Modern Walnut Wall Clock

Finished Product up front!

So this was a quick afternoon project so I didn't end up taking many photos, I had wanted a large piece for the dining room for a while now and saw some MCM clocks that might fit the bill but nothing large enough that it'd look good just by itself on the large wall. I had also seen large clocks around at furniture stores and the like but everything was obnoxiously expensive and most of them weren't actually clocks just looked like one with non-moving hands. So after a quick google I found large clock hands on KlocKit.com and picked some up along with a high torque movement which is also linked on that page, I ran with the long shaft  but probably could have gotten away with the short shaft and recessed it a bit.

The center piece is about 9" in diameter I cut that with a circle jig on my router and put a chamfer on both sides. Size was basically decided on based on a piece of wide scrap I had and what size circle I could realistically cut on it. The size of the number indicators was just the difference in length of the two clock hands, I believe the width of them is just over an inch or so... again was just looking at boards I had on hand and tried to minimize the waste.

I put chamfers on those as well, I really need to get a router table... this probably wasn't the safest way to put the chamfer on...

After everything was cut to size and sanded I applied some danish oil and let it dry 

after the surface was a bit rough so I applied some creamed beeswax with 0000 steel wool, which I think darkened the center piece too much, will have to use a scraper next time to get it smoothed out. After that just followed the directions on how to mount the movement in the dial.

To line things up I mounted the center piece on the wall and printed out a sheet of paper with the correct angles on it I made it in AutoCAD but it could have easily been done by hand with a protractor everything is just 30 degree angles

I slid this on the center of the clock face then used a piece of string with a mark with the correct distance of the outside of the circle to know where to place the pieces. To attach them to the wall I just used velcro command strips this seemed to be the simplest solution to be able to eventually remove it while not putting 24 holes in the wall.

After that it was just attaching the hands like it showed in the instructions... pretty simple

End Grain Cutting Board

Final Product

Build Process

Who says convertibles aren't practical? This was made while I was still building everything in the parent's garage so had to transport everything down there first. Materials are 4/4 Paduk 8/4 Maple and 8/4 walnut

First stage was planning the pattern, I used CBDesigner for this project super cool little program to help visualize the end product I had a couple different designs planned but ended up making a wrong cut so I had to do some finagling before proceeding with the pieces I had on hand, I had cut these on my uncle's table saw and brought them back to my "shop"

Landed on the following design (I think)

First step is to glue up the edge grain design

Then plane everything flush, I didn't have a good workbench so I just used my planing board on the steps.

Once everything is dead flat you do crosscuts at whatever thickness you want your end result to be, in my case it was 1.5" thick. I however didn't have access to a table saw at this point so I ended up taking a straight edge and circular saw to it... I would highly recommend using a table saw so you don't have to spend half a day with a belt sander flattening all the minor errors out.

For the glue up you take all your pieces and flip every other one to get the pattern.

Here's the glue up after the initial cuts, you can see that my circular saw really didn't like going through 2" thick material.

Lots of belt sanding later....

it was "flat enough". I threw a chamfer on all the edges and added a bit of a lip to the center of the ends to help with picking this beast up. Here it is after that and with a bit of water on it. You want to hit any sort of cutting board with water a few times to raise the grain so that later if it gets wet it won't raise again and become rough.

After it stopped raising after water applications I put it on a drying rack and soaked it in mineral oil

reapplying after each time it soaked everything up. Once it stops drawing in oil you know it's saturated, so hit it with some bees wax and buff it out.

A few shots of the final product:

This was given to a friend for a wedding gift, hope they get many years of service out of it!