Woodworking

Working on a Christmas gift. I got the wood scrap, but I think it’s walnut. Eventually planning to polyurethane and fill in the engraving with black paint, but I’m stuck on how/weather to stain it.

I have a few stains from various projects, but on a sample piece they showed up really dark, and didn’t show the texture that well. It’s a little too late to do boiled linseed oil.

What would you recommend?

I made three sets of classroom mailboxes, for passing in papers / storing journals etc. Sides and back are 3/4" plywood, shelves are 1/4" plywood. Corners are rabbet and dado joints, my first time doing that. I did the cuts on my table saw. (I tried to route them, but didn't get as clean a cut as I'd like with the cheap Ryobi bits I had.) Shelves slide into dados. The sides/centeres are designed so one fence location could cut the top and bottom dado. I didn't have a dado stack, and am using a Shopsmith which has the table saw blade arbor on a quill, so I set the quill stop for my dado width and used that to make multiple cuts slightly apart. That worked fairly well but must have been slightly off on some cuts where it was very hard to slide the 1/4" plywood shelves in; I ended up sanding the edges of some slightly thinner.

Hi all!

I think the title says it - I would like to build an adjustable height desk out of wood and currently think of ideas to do that. The standard options online tend to be sort of ugly imho, really expensive, and/or have various electronic components that can fail and are hard to repair.

Some features that would be great to have:

• adjusting height doesn't take too long. It should be feasible on a daily basis, e.g., for standing in the morning and then sitting down, standing up after lunch again etc.
• adjusting should also be feasible by one person alone
• at least 2 different heights (standing and sitting), but it doesn't need to be super flexible otherwise.
• it can't be attached to the ceiling for example, because I'm not allowed to drill holes here
• robust enough to hold the weight of a monitor and things office workers have on their desk (maybe a water bottle, coffee mug, 2-3 books, their arms, ...)

My first thought was this table template by Enzo Mari. It allows you to adjust height, even different heights for the front and back of the table. But it seems difficult to adjust on your own and I don't need the added front/back flexibility. However, in combination with a magnet or spring mechanism to fixate the height, this could be nice. I don't know how to build such a mechanism though and would be grateful for pointers!

Another thought was to extend the legs above the height of the surface and pull the surface up with a pulley mechanism.

This guy built a nice table, but has the same problem with changing height.

But I'm really open to other ideas as well. Any ideas/pointers/suggestions are very appreciated!

I recently bought a Kreg ACS Project Table combo kit. I did all the proper setup techniques. I cut my zero clearance line in the table. Installed all the measurement strips. All that setup, done by the book and YouTube videos.

I lined up all my stock against the bench dogs and started ripping…

After checking all the boards, they’re not all cut perfectly square! I thought the concept of this system was it was near impossible to get misaligned cuts? Anybody else have this issue? Help please! Haha

I wasn't expecting to be able to fit many tools in my basement shop area, so it was a pleasant surprise to learn about the Shopsmith. Pictured are belt sander, jigsaw, and drill press; I've also got the band saw, table saw, and lathe.

Apologies if this is the wrong community.

I have a house renovation project ongoing. Before winter I fitted European oak internal windowsills which over winter have badly warped (cupped and bowed). I'll have to replace them so would be grateful of any advice as to how to stop new ones doing the same.

We were told that the wood was dried, and it was sanded and given several coats of Danish oil prior to fitting. I think they were glued in place with PU adhesive, but I didn't do that but so am not sure.

The winter was relatively hard with dramatic changes of humidity and temperature in the unheated house, if that would have an effect. One window sill was not fitted but was left in the house all the time. It's still in perfect condition. The sills are approximately 20mm thick and 200mm deep. The warping is in the order of 5-10mm.

Any advice as to what went wrong or how to prevent it happening again would be much appreciated as it's heartbreaking seeing that much oak being spoilt.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/190570

Doing it by hand with sandpaper is a nonstarter.
Also I don't have a lathe :-/

What's everbody working on now? My main project is going to be storage for various places around the house. This weekend will probably be a quick rack for yard tools rather than anyrhing all that pretty.