My girlfriend recycled an old Ikea shelving unit (I think it was a Gorm or something) into this planter. We want to grow peas and beans against this wall because it gets a lot of sun. To protect the wood and make it look a little prettier, we wanted to paint it. So we tried our hands at making milk paint.
Cigar box electric drum/low freq. mic
When I was in high school, in 2003, I started a band. The band, called Colligan, started out as a school band but soon grew to be much more, for us in the band at least. We did a lot of cool things together, such as play at a festival in Tirana, Albania, and perform on radio and television there in 2009. Sadly, when things really started to take off, the last of us graduated and moved on to do other things. One of us went to study across the country (which is a four-hour train-ride away, but still), which made it hard to see each other often enough to keep the band alive. So the band became a close group of friends.
Building a hewing bench, part 1: getting the log and getting off the bark
Last week, my brother got a call from an old friend that she had some wood that we could pick up for free. It turned out that she wasn’t kidding. They cut down an oak, a beech and an old horse chestnut on the grounds of this beautiful old villa just south of the city. I had requested they’d save a longer piece of oak for me, because I had been thinking about making a certain thing out of fresh wood. The inspiration for it came from a book by Roy Underhill. In his book, The Woodwright’s Shop, he uses this little hewing/sawing bench made from a halved log.
An old drawknife John Doe
I’ve been working on a log of oak, on which I will do a blog post soon. The last few days I’ve worked on getting the bark off and getting the outside nice and smooth. I had a couple of restored draw knives to do this but the log is so wide that their handles touch the wood when I try to cut off any bark. My father-in-law gave me this old wide drawknife. It used to be his father-in-law’s, my girlfriend’s grandfather. He did coachwork and worked with metal and wood. My father-in-law had this drawknife in an old tool chest in the shed. It was kind of rusty and crusty, and very blunt.
You should make your own furniture wax
Update: I found out after some experimenting that this stuff is also great for waterproofing veg-tan leather. I finished this Nexus 5 case with it.
In my post on making tablet stands I used hard wax from Clou. The stuff is not very expensive, but not cheap either: 9 euros or so in a German DIY store. Since the tin stated it only contained linseed oil, beeswax and carnauba wax, I thought I’d have a go at making it myself. I’ve been making cosmetics for a while (very manly stuff, lip balm and such), and I reckoned this stuff is not that dissimilar. Here’s how I did it:
Stand for tablet #1 and #2
I made a little stand for my Nexus 7 a while back, before I had this blog. My mother recently bought a Nexus 7, so I decided to make another one for her. In this post I will show you how I made this. All measurements are in metric, with an approximate translation to inches given.
Tea box
A little tea box I made from recycled wood. Most of it is really old cedrela (also called Spanish cedar). It’s a lot like mahogany. The top has an especially nice ribbon figure. The inside is made of lighter wood. I think it’s just younger cedrela. These are from cigar boxes that I took apart. You can still see the brand, “Nederlandsche Munt” in a few places. The corners are small pieces of wenge .Corners are just box joints, nothing fancy. The finish is hand rubbed shellac.