DIY Tiger Maple Ergodox Keyboard Wrist Rests

Finished Product

These things have been around my shop for longer than I care to admit. Originally a friend of mine brought the idea up to me around January of 2016 and after a few failed attempts, throwing in the towel multiple times, fudging around with how to actually build them they got made 11 months later...

So the first attempt at starting these was in June, the biggest issue I had was that the rest needed to be an inch tall and I wanted to make these out of tiger maple... which was all 3/4" thick.

I had to stack at least 2 pieces to get the right height, initially I was going to cut the patterns out and just carve out the bottom portion 1/4" to make up the difference... that went not so great

 Painters tape and Super 77

Rough cut and starting sanding the curves

Looking good but we need that 1/4" extra depth...

This... was kerfing with my miter saw and it's depth stop isn't nearly as exact or consistent as what I can do on a table saw... which I didn't have at the time. It actually cleaned up decently well but depth was all over the place and things just weren't really great out of flat etc.

This got set to the side for way too long. Actually it turned out well that it was as the wood dried a bit more and started to cup so I had to toss them.

Justin Gets New Tools!!!

So after this was thrown to the side for most of the summer, I acquired a table saw and a thickness planer which allowed me to take a different approach. I planed some boards down to 1/2" and stacked them after doing the same process of getting the right shapes. 

So many shavings!

So here we are finally the right height and shaped correctly. The rests were shaped with a belt sander and a lot of patience. If I were to make more of these I'd have to figure out a way to use a jig and my router which would probably save a ton of time.

Finish was done with a few layers of Gloss Arm-R-Seal to make the tiger pop a bit and then 2 layers of Satin to get the final finish I wanted.

My super fancy temperature controlled finishing area for when my garage gets into the 40s w/o the heater running (aka my bathroom with the fan running).

After doing the top and confirming the correct angle I glued on some supports to tilt the rests at a 15 degree angle and put some satin Arm-R-Seal on the bottom. I wasn't worried about the grain popping as much so I didn't do the initial 2 coats of gloss, just 3 coats of satin to seal it.

Hopefully he enjoys them, he sure did wait long enough for 'em

Misc. Projects: Cutting Boards, Trivets, Cubicle Shelf

Cutting Boards

Christmas season aka Cutting board season. Just wanted to post some pictures of a few things I've made for record. Construction was very similar to the old cutting boards but now I have a few better tools for the job.

One of these will be in my kitchen, the other one will be sent up to Minnesota to live with my Aunt.

After I posted those to insta/facebook I had a few people interested in purchasing one, I already had made some extra cuts of walnut/maple so it was pretty easy to slap another one together. I was out of Padauk so I had to pick some more up and this time it was a lot more orange than the last batch. It came out nicely and has a pretty awesome look to the face grain on the edges, almost flame like.

I had run into some burning issues when putting the juice groove on the maple in the boards above, but slowing the router down by a large margin helped with that big time... it came out much nicer and more exact this go around.

Trivets

I forgot about having a secret santa event this week and my giftee wanted stuff for her kitchen, so I slapped together some trivets. 

Took some spalted maple (sometimes called Ambrosia Maple) planed down to about 1/2" then cut into a bunch of 3/4"x7" slats. I kept the pieces in order as I wanted to put them back in the same order that they were in the tree and my piece just happened to be the right width.

Assembly was pretty straight forward, layed them out upside down using some 1/4" ply as a spacer and then used Cyanoacrylate glue (aka super glue) to put the bottom rails on. With it being CA glue I didn't really have or really think to take pictures of the process

Finish was just some danish oil as these will see some heat you don't want any sort of film building finish like a Poly.

Some really pretty colors popping out of the spalting 

Cubicle Shelf

So I didn't get too many pictures of this one either as I whipped it up in an afternoon and it was pretty straight forward.

Figuring out what size it needed to be

 And this was the next photo I took... basically it was just a piece of scrap tiger maple I had from the knife block I made. Made a few miters and used my spline cutting jig to add some walnut splines. Made a little bubinga shelf and put a shoulder bolt for a coat hook

Prefinish dry fit

 Finished. Used Waterlox which I'm still not completely sold on personally, I probably don't have enough patience for it or something since people RAVE about it. It really makes the woods look nice but I always end up with a streaky finish. It also really yellows maple which I really don't like.