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Projects: Miscellaneous Projects
On-going
Here are a few unique, unusual, or sometimes even flat out weird
projects that I've made. All are functional, and almost certainly
one-of-a-kind.
"Butsudan" (buddhist altar).
I made this project for our grown son after he moved away.
He wanted to continue exploring his spiritual development
and asked that I build him an altar for his new place. It is made
out of walnut, with a maple ply back. It is one of the first
relatively nice pieces I ever built. By far, the biggest
challenge in this project was aligning the double-hinged folding
doors. Grain matching worked out pretty well, but unfortunately,
I had not yet started paying much attention to
project photography.
Wall-Hanging Hat Rack.
My wife still laughs at this project, but I really like it and it
is extremely useful. It is much more attractive installed than
you would expect from these photos. I had just started
working on lathe-turning projects and wanted to see how well I could
duplicate multiple pieces. I had a bunch of scrap maple and
walnut, and started experimenting. I first laminated two pieces
of 4/4 maple and two pieces of 4/4 walnut to construct the center
portions. Then I turned one spindle to make a tine. It
worked out ok, so I used it as a template to turn several more in
both maple and walnut. Then I decided that I would mix-and-match
the tines to the bases to get a contrast. That
also worked out ok, but then I realized that to be usable,
the top piece would have to be angled so that the hats wouldn't
fall off or interfere across the two levels. That then required
some creative clamping and drilling to figure out how to install the
tines perpendicular to the face of the bases, and to glue-up the two
dowels that connect the levels. In any event, it came out
surprisingly nice and is well used today.
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