The summer was a rough for woodworking. The temps in the garage door open or not were often close to 100 degrees. I had a commission I began working on back in May and didn’t finish until November. Some of it was just not having the time, some of it was the challenge of the project, but some of it was definitely the unbearable heat.
I was able to get a split unit AC installed, so that solved for the heat issue and it has been heavenly! We’ll see how the heat works later this year.
On to the projects – the one that took so long was a set of dog feeder stands. I used some maple that came out of dad’s garage along with some of the leftover scraps from the Michigan cutting board.
I had to remake several pieces of it due to issues. First – the tops kept potato-chipping up on me, and I didn’t have enough wood to remake them. Luckily I had milled up some extra pieces of the darker wood just in case I had an issue. Unluckily I didn’t really have any extra scraps of the lighter wood, so I had to very carefully sneak up on the exact sizing, and even then the glue lines didn’t match up perfectly due to the slight cupping. If it were one piece of solid wood, this would have been easy to fix, but with the top and bottom layers needing to stay exactly the same… I couldn’t just plane off the imperfections.
Second I messed up on the legs, so I spent a weekend remaking a piece only to decide to go ahead and cut off the excess and live with a more narrow look. The same thing happened with the legs. I’ll have to try to make angled legs again for more practice.
Cutting the lap joints in the legs for the front and back connectors was a challenge too. Ideally I would have thought that through further BEFORE I template routed out the angles. I had to clamp them together and use supporting blocks to hover the angle off my saw fence. It worked out in the end, but due to the inexact cutting, I had to spend alot of time with a hammer and chisel to get them to fit right.
Here are some pics that show a bit of the process. The floating tenons without using a domino were an adventure for sure. I even had someone offer to let me use theirs.
Due to the challenge and mental gymnastics I went through to make these, I took a break to make some pencil holders for the same school I sold the easels to. Only this time it was a donation. It also gave me a way to get some of the leftover wood out of the garage.
Scraps and Cutoffs 