This is a manually-built list of #woodworking posts I've made. Clicking on the tag will get you to all of them, while this will take you to table of contents for the various series of posts I've done.
Kolrosing Notes are a collection of notes I've made over the years on kolrosing (cutting small lines in a surface, and then filling them with a powdered pigment), chinkin-bori (scratching a lacquered surface with tools, and then filling the scratches with gold or other fine dust) and other similar surface-decoration techniques.
The Forge Table#buildBlog describes building a small table with turned legs and a metal-clad oak top which I will use to hold my small forge.
A collection of Techniques I have written up over the years. There will likely be more additions to this from the various build blogs, as I get better organized.
This is a #buildBlog of the process of building the bookcases that hold my books in Santa Fe. I built them myself, and learned a lot about #woodworking along the way, and hopefully can share some of that knowledge in these articles.
Introduction, including a photo of how I set up my workbench for building the bookcases. Having my mise en place consistent made building 70 cases possible.
Building the Plinths, which describes and shows the method I use for cutting mitered dovetail corners while constructing the plinths, on which stacks of bookcases rest.
Large Case Tail Boards (sides), which covers cutting the tails on the side boards of the largest (at this point) cases. I also included answers to some questions people had asked me about the construction process, and linked to some of my Handy Tools I used while building the cases.
Large Case Pin Boards and Backs walks through the rest of the construction of a case. When this finishes, the case is in the clamps with the glue drying.
Winging it with Big Cases talks about how I discovered that the largest cases I had designed weren't large enough for some of my very large art books. So I had to change the design a bit. This is one of the many nice things about building the cases myself. Had I ordered them from a builder, the discovery of the extra-large books would've blown up the cost quite a bit.
A Back for the Oversized Case shows details of the ship-lap joint between two back-boards and puts a back on the oversized case. It also shows how to square up a case which was slightly out of square.
Cleaning up a Dovetail shows how I cut out the waste between pins (it's a similar process for tails) and then clean up a little using a rasp until the joint goes together smoothly.
First Shellac sees me applying the first two coats of shellac to a case.
Second Shellac gets the third (and final) coat of shellac on a case.
Back Boards discusses one of my first big “performance optimizations” building the bookcases. I cut the time per pair of back boards for a case to a quarter of the time it previously took, from about an hour to about 15 minutes per pair of boards.
Interlude and Medium Bookcases talks about the size of the medium-sized cases to hold hardcovers and shows the cut-list for the lumber. It also has a guest appearance by my Lava Lamp.
More Plinths, Different Sizes covers a couple more sizes of plinths (one for the art books, which will have a deeper case, and four for stacks with a medium case as the base, and smaller paperback cases atop that).
Art Books Case has another cut-list, this time for a larger case to hold art-books. It also describes making 1x16 boards out of narrower pieces by edge-jointing them and gluing them together.
The Littlest Case has the cut-list for the smallest case for very small hardbacks or standard (5¼×7¼ inch) paperbacks.
Three Sizes of Plinths has cut-lists for all three different sizes of plinths I ended up building to accommodate the different-sized cases.
The Little Things covers some tips and tricks I've learned along the way, and has a progress update showing 37 cases in 8 stacks.
A Periodic Update gets the total up to 47 cases in 8 stacks and shows some other numbers in the months of making boxes.
The End of January Update didn't have a lot of progress, but that seems to be how Januarys go around here.
The Home Stretch? is another progress update. Up to 57 cases at this point.
The Wrap-up is a completed project post. The grand total was 70 cases in just about 18 months.
In April of 2020, I started building a till (or cabinet) to hold all my braces, bits and other tools for boring holes. I kept track of the progress as I built it, which went until May of 2022. Here's the notes from the journey (all dated, so you can see how long various things took me).
