As I had mentioned yesterday, I just returned from a great family visit in Raleigh, North Carolina where both of my brothers and our families were together for the first time in forever. I seriously have got to change that. We had a blast.

Rhonda, the boys and I stayed with my older brother John and sister in law Kim at their house. While there, I saw a family heirloom I hadn’t seen in a long time. This toy chest was built by my dad when our family lived in Ridgefield Park, New Jersey, and belonged to my brother since before I was born.

It’s a very simple affair – number 2 pine boards screwed to a series of interior battens with a plywood bottom. My dad took the time to carefully round over the tops of the interior battens to keep them from splintering, and there were traces of a lid stay which had broken off years ago. I imagine that was to keep the lid from slamming down on my brother’s small fingers.

The hinges for the lid were pretty fancy looking brass ones, obviously held on with brass screws. One of the heads had snapped off sometime over the past 45 plus years, but, come on, that’s sweet looking!

The handles have a movable finger pull, allowing them to lay flat when not being used to move the box. They are still in very good repair after all of these years.

The lid is built up of four boards screwed together on a pair of battens. A few of the lid boards had warped, but other than that, it is in amazingly good shape, even after all these years. My dad definitely built this sucker to last, and that’s exactly what it has done.

The thing that makes this chest so special, however,is that I can see the crayon writing my brothers and I put on the inside lid of the piece. It’s almost like being transported back in time to me as a two year old, reaching into my brother’s toy chest to pull out a Tonka truck or some other treasure to play with.

I hope that one year thirty or forty years into the future, someone looks at one of the projects I built and feels the same sensation of awe I had this past weekend …

I love to quote movie lines. Ask Rhonda. She’ll tell you.

• Open the pod bay door, HAL.
• We have both kinds of music – country and western.
• We’re going to need a bigger boat.

After a while, she will just roll her eyes and walk off into another room. Good for her!

One of my favorites to throw around is from the movie The Sandlot. Whenever someone is giving me a hard time at work, I always have to counter with the line made famous by the movie’s character Ham Porter:

I usually mutter this under my breath whenever I mess up in the shop. But, there are times when working on smalls – or small projects, in this case – can help keep you sharp, even in the middle of a big project.

We are flying up to visit my nephew for his first communion, and I wanted to make him one of my small wooden crosses to commemorate the occasion. Moving the hope chest to the side of the shop, I grabbed a piece of walnut and a piece of zebrawood I had been holding on to for close to a decade now.

I ripped a few piece, got everything nice and true and slathered a little glue on the pieces to prepare them for glue up. Glue up?  How was I going to accomplish this? After all, I would probably need about two dozen clamps to evenly distribute the clamping pressure along this long stick I was trying to make… or did I?

Turns out, the cauls I had made a few years ago were perfect for this application. With a hump planed into the middle of the cauls, two clamps – one on each end – were more than enough to bring sweet, even pressure along the entire piece from top to bottom. Easy peasey.

Once glued up and out of the cauls, I turned my attention to joinery. Since the cross project needs only a simple half-lap, I turned to my table saw and used my regular combination blade to nibble out the material to make the cut. It took a little fussing, but the joints came out looking great.

The half lap joints were nice and tight when fit, and a little bit of glue is all it required to get the pieces together. A single clamp on the piece held everything together until the glue dried.

With the glue now dry, it took just a few minutes to sand the piece down nice and smooth, ready for some finish. I went with the Rude and Crude method, starting with a coat of dewaxed shellac.

Once that cured. I sanded it down with some 320 grit paper (the finest grit I had on hand) and wiped on two coats of my home brew finish.

Now that it’s dry, it’s ready for Uncle Tom’s signature and some wrapping paper.

There’s nothing quite like the smell of a successful small project. It smells like victory….

We are rounding the clubhouse turn on construction for the newest hope chest, and there is a special embellishment I wanted to add to the piece. Unfortunately, it was going to require an inlay, something I really REALLY have a tough time doing.

It’s not that I am a dunce (well, I am), it’s just that when it comes to routing patterns with even my trim router, it takes me a little bit of time to get the feel of what I’m doing. Which is a nice way of saying I waste a lot of material to get one good inlay.

But, first, let’s take a look at what I am inlaying.  This is a special piece of wood I was asked to include, and I wanted to get some nice slices out of it for the inlay process. So, I started by making a cut on one side of the board with the band saw so it would ride against the rip fence. I set the ripping ball bearing guide for a 3/16″ cut to peel off a few nice slices from this well-seasoned board.

As you can see, the first couple of whacks on the board really made some nice slices, perfect for cutting into inlay pieces.

The next thing I had to do was rig the router for inlay work, which involves a special router guide bushing and a very fine 1/8″ router bit. With this attached to the trim router, I was ready to take my first tentative steps toward cutting the inlay.

I had to really secure one slice of the special wood in place to ensure it wouldn’t move. At all. So I secured the pattern to the piece and a plywood backer board with a screw. Then I tacked the piece down with a few brads. Then I stuck a few spare pieces as spacers under the sides of the pattern so it wouldn’t move.

Then I flipped on the router switch and prayed.

And, on my fourth attempt, I got a great cutout!  Woo Hoo!

The next step was to put a special bearing on the guide bushing and clamp the same pattern down on the lid of the chest. This was going to be a little easier, since I had more space to work with. A few clamps, a little bit of router application, and blammo, I had the recess routed to take the inlay.

Now, for the moment of truth. Would the stupid thing fit?

Hey, I didn’t mess up too badly!  I glued the piece, smacked it down with a mallet until it fit the recess and broke out the belt sander to flush everything up. To get a real feel of what it looked like, I wiped a little mineral spirits over the board.

Woah. I’m going to say that went better than I expected.

Now, for the sanding and finish, and this baby will be ready to get off to the recipient and I’ll be ready to move on to the next project.

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So, remember when I was left with a divot after planing some cherry on the lid of my latest project?

Yeah, I was hoping you’d forget, but I knew you wouldn’t. But, that’s cool!  I’ve got this one nailed here. I went out and bought some new, fresh 80 grit belts for the sander and got ready to set to work.

But, safety first!  You will also notice that I’m wearing my full safety complement – which really needs to be dusted. But, hey, there’s no substitute for safety.

I also took the time to attach the dust collector hose directly to the sander. This way, all of the sanding dust was going to get picked up at the source instead of floating all around the shop.

I clamped the lid down to the bench and took the time to mark a pencil line across the piece. This way, it would help ensure that my sanding would be nice and even. The clamping? Well, that was to make sure the lid didn’t become airborne…

As I had explained in my should-have-been-award-winning 2011 post My Abrasive Personality, I started the sander across the grain, which just so happened to be with the grain on the breadboard edges, and worked it evenly across the surface. Surprisingly, it took very little effort to level out all the little imperfections in the lid, and fix the divot I dug with the hand planes. I even used a straightedge along the surface just to make sure I wasn’t sanding hollows into the lid.

To ensure I was sanding with maximum efficiency, I stopped every few minutes and ran the sanding belts against a crepe rubber sanding block to remove any sanding dust that embedded itself on the belt. Sure, I could have used a crepe rubber soled shoe, but a) I didn’t have one and b) I bought this crepe rubber block on a stick about a decade ago, and it still has plenty of life in it. Cost me a whopping $6. Woooo…..

With the heavy leveling done, and the kids needing help to get their homework done, I decided to call it a night. But, I wanted to make sure I had the next tool ready to roll in the prep process.

Yup, the random orbit sander is going to get a workout, followed by a little scraping to get a nice, smooth finish on this beauty.

Then, the embellishment, followed by a finish and – hopefully – the presentation to a happy niece…

I’m getting close now… so very close… with this latest project. In fact, this past weekend, the temperatures were very comfortable here in my shop and I was a woodworking fool.

First thing I had to do was take those planed down panels and trim them up to size. That was a piece of cake with my Osborne miter gauge… held the panel nice and square to the blade, and kept my hands safely out of the danger zone while I pushed them through. That was an easy way to make that happen.

Since there is going to be a special embellishment on the project, I decided to go with flat panels for the chest. Believe me, there’s plenty of visual interest coming up on this project. So, I used my dado blade to put a rabbet on the back of the panels and decided to call it a day there.

From there, I knew I had to shape the bottom of the legs for the corners of this chest. There was no way I was going to assemble these things with square legs to the floor. In the past, I might have turned to the band saw or jig saw to cut away the majority of the waste, but I was feeling kind of plucky, so I decided to just use my spindle sander do to the work. All of it.

When you figure out how much time it would have taken to set up the band saw or break out the jig saw, I was done using the spindle sander. That was easy!

Talk about simple…

And, with a dry fit, everything seemed to work well. Now, it is a simple matter of deciding on a joinery option for the side pieces, then a glue up of the frame and panel, attach a few cleats, cut a bottom and then it’s off to the sanding and finishing…

Oh, and that embellishment… Can’t forget about that.

Now that I have the frame pieces done and the panels glued up for the chest, it’s on to do a little work preparing those panels. Man, there’s nothing quite like a thickness planer to make fast work of leveling these glue ups…

By the way, can I take a moment just to revel in the fact that – dang – the grain on these boards looks totally SWEET!

So, now comes the hard part – what kind of design do I want these panels to have, and what methods will I use to make them look their best?

Of course, I could just simply go with flat panels. Classic look, classic design. Since I plan on doing a special embellishment for the lid, I could go this route for sure. And, it would be easy. But, I could have just bought a sheet of cherry plywood and made it happen.  Not really what I had in mind to showcase the skills.

Now, I could easily set up a tall auxiliary fence, tip my table saw blade oh – I dunno – 12 or 15 degrees off plumb – and run each of the panels through to raise them. Easy peasey lemon squeezy.

I could pick up a vertical or horizontal router bit and do a fancier profile. Heck, the sky is the limit when it comes to those kinds of bits and the profiles they can cut. From the plain to the ornate, it’s definitely something to consider.

Now, I’ll just have to decide how I will make it happen, then it’s off to the races, and this project will be nearing completion!

Spring is in the air … along with all the oak pollen in the state of Florida. Ugh. I was so clogged up, that I even had to miss the Woodworking Show at the Tampa Fairgrounds. I was able to get some shop time, but it was in small bits and pieces as my allergies – and the grogginess of the antihistamines – allowed.

Fortunately I had all of the pieces cut to size. The next step was to do the cope and stick jointing that was going to hold the frame and panel chest together. Times past, when I tried using the cope and stick router bits, I would get strange results because I was using the set with my table saw side wing router setup, something less than ideal for that kind of precision work.

This time, however, I am using a real router table and a router with a micro adjustment setup , which really helps make the whole shooting match go much more smoothly. I was able to dial in the bit carefully to cut the sticking – the side that holds the panel – into the rough pieces. Besides being decorative, the joint can be made very quickly, and it more than strong enough for what I want it to do.

Using a GRR-Ripper to hold the pieces down also helped ensure that the cuts were consistent and that my hands were well out of the way. Those bits are big, and they can chew off fingers with great speed – obviously something I wanted to avoid.

The coping cuts were easy to make using a coping sled, which allows the pieces to fit together snugly – the key to a good joint. By immobilizing the pieces, I was able to get the cuts to come out looking good and even with no tearout. A backing block is a must to ensure you don’t rip out as the bit exits.

Not bad work for being able to scratch out the time as it allowed. While I was at it, I also took the time to start the glueups for the cherry panels that were going to fill the frame. They are all glued up, and fortunately, are all narrow enough to be fun through my thickness planer to get them down to the right size for the frame.

Now, if the pollen would only let up for a day or two, I might be able to get some more work done!