For a larger view, click on the picture and wait patiently.  Every item shown here is finished entirely without any stains, thus the colors you see are the natural ones of the wood.  Only hardwoods are used in these items.  None of that soft pine crap you see in craft shows.  Real men use hardwoods you know.  No screws are ever visible unless they're meant to be.  Many of these pieces, such as the jewelry boxes , appear shiny, as if a gloss finish had been applied.  Ahhh Grasshopper, if only that were indeed the case.  How I do it is my secret, and if I blabbed how it's done then it wouldn't be my secret anymore would it?

 

I recently constructed a homemade drum sander.  I works perfectly, with the only concession to a store bought unit being the lack of automatic feed.  With this one you have to shove the wood through yourself.  See it here...   Drum Sander

 

I've often entered my stuff in the woodworking judging at the Iowa State Fair, and since roughly 1990 have accumulated 15 First Place ribbons, 5 for Second Place, and 3 for Third.  Two of the First Place awards were also for Best of Show .  Additionally, I've wrangled a Best of Show at an art gallery, as well as a Second Place Merit Award.  The items below which somehow garnered these awards are shown below with purple backgrounds for Best of Show , blue for First Place and red for second.

A subsection of this page consists of only Jewelry Boxes .
 

Let's begin with something I built to enter in the 2001 Iowa State Fair.  No Best of Show this time, but it did get first place for tables.  Oh well....  Anyway, it has a birdseye maple top, a bloodwood drawer pull, and walnut and maple for rest of it.  Construction takes into account the various pieces expanding and contracting with humidty changes, by allowing the top and two shelves to move across their grain.  A real eye catcher when seen in person. This piece won Best of Show at the Heritage Art Gallery in downtown Des Moines.  Jan 2002.

Here's my 2004 Iowa State Fair entry which was totally ignored by the senile judge.  Maybe his seeing eye dog enjoyed it.  It's a nightstand it is.  As you can see, it's made from walnut, walnut plywood, 1 1/2" maple, and birdseye maple.  Bloodwood pulls too.  The top doors hinge down, and the bottom door folds upwards with pins in a track.  Gnarley eh?  As an additional feat, the top consists of green granite tiles with brown grout.  The tolerances are excruciatingly precise (I had to use a spell checker on that word) and the doors shut with the precision of a fine Ford.  Or maybe even a Mercury.  I won't be building any more of these, it was a pain.

This here cedar-less chest is meant to hold blankets and such. Or maybe a body, assuming the corpse had no shoulders.  I cheaped out and made most of it out of walnut plywood instead of solid stock.  Hard maple is the light colored stuff you see.  Ummm, it took a first place for furniture at the 2002 Iowa State Fair, which makes no freaking sense whatsoever.  The nightstand in the above photos makes this thing look like crap.  It really isn't that ugly.

My first "Best of Show" at the State Fair.  The legs are fashioned from a huge plank of walnut that my Pop had stored in his garage rafters for 30 years.  They don't grow trees like that anymore.  In fact, let's take this even further and say the walnut plank came over from England on the uhhhhh, Mayflower.  Yeah, that's it.  Crappy photo, I'll take another one eventually.

Here's a little critter which is virtually useless, and is thus ART.  That's the best way to recognize art you know.  Inspired by the game of Cootie, it stands about 20" tall, and consists of oiled walnut legs and a water based polyurethane soft maple body. Best of Show at the 1998 Iowa State Fair.  Sold at a rip-off art gallery in Des Moines called Absolute Art, whose owners closed the store and re-opened under the name S. Teshan Boutique.  They paid me for this item, but stole 4 others without paying.

For those of us who feel the need to make a statement in a PC tools carrying case, there's the solid walnut and oak unit shown on the left.  Complete with sculpted handle, dual lid locks, and box joints, this will loudly proclaim to the world, "I'm anal!"   Another first place at the fair  :)~  I thought I was gonna be a desktop PC support dude a few years ago, but since I've never done it that means I never can do it.  Just ask any H.R. person.

My lone entry at the 99 State Fair, First Place for tables, but not up to Best of Show this time.  Constructed of walnut and birdseye maple, it folds up by grabbing the ends of the table top and pulling outwards.  Oddly enough, this brings the legs together and allows the top halves to fold down.  This is the only item on this page I didn't completely design myself.

Another habit of mine is plant stands. On the left is a maple and walnut model.  Second Place Merit Award in the Greater Des Moines Exibited art show at the Heritage Gallery.  The one on the near right has the woods reversed with the top made from Ambrosia Maple, which has little worm holes in it.  That makes it artsy of course.  The second on the right is one with legs which appear to be twisting, that somehow got a First Place at the Fair.  Finally we have one with a gorgeous piece of figured walnut for the top, supplied by Dad.

Trish's 2003 birthday present.  A nifty terrarium with a pletora of features.  Genuine cat litter box to hold the soil, glass sides, acrylic panels on the hinged top, lots of interior caulk slopped about, and constructed of walnut and oak.  Not meant for the State Fair, but for being used.  ( That's code for  screws showing and sloppy workmanship. )   It's currently full of plants which may or may not be growing.   To the right is yet another plant stand.  This one consists of a hard maple top with the rest being Padauk, which I may never use again.  Padauk comes from Central or South America, I dunno, someplace really really hot you know.  The sawdust this wood creates should be classified as an environmental hazzard.  It sticks to everything and travels everywhere.  Nice looking, quite hard, but evil to work with.

I designed and constructed this oddity back in 1990 or earlier.  Tis a clock, which tells time in the manner that computers operate, which just happens to be binary.  Look close, and you can see that the time shown is 3:26 and 53 seconds.  It uses the 60HZ from an outlet to derive the one second timing pulses, and then divides it by 60 and such for the minutes and hours.  For you techies, the circuitry is plain old 74LS type, with the sockets wirewrapped.  For you non-technical types, it's built with little black things which have legs.

This is a custom made table / kitchen island made for a friend.  It's stained cherry to match his kitchen cabinets, and features the same hinges and countertop as well.  Most people don't realize this, but cherry is not naturally this color.  It's actually quite light, and must be heavily stained to end up looking like what most people think cherry looks like.  Additionally, cherry will naturally darken over time.

 

Here are a pair of 2006 home projects.  A buffet on the left, and a home entertainment cabinet on the right.  The buffet features a birdseye maple top, oak sides and front, and walnut corners from Pop's plank.  The lower right is where the booze lives, behind lock and key.  The entertainment cabinet is a bunch of oak plywood with sliding doors filled with smoked acrylic, behind which resides electronic devices too cool to be shown here, such as a homemade pre-amp and a Hafler power amplifier which can heat a small house.

Let's see some more big stuff.  This is the rear of our house.  I've ripped off the crappy hardboard siding, which I had personally replaced 15+ years ago, and installed nice beautiful cedar boards.  Cool huh?  Gives a person that cozy cabin feeling.  There's a awning-thing mounted about 7 feet up which sticks out two feet and shelters much of the cedar from the elements.  It too is made from cedar with steel roofing, and is attached firmly to the top ridge plate (or whatever the blasted thing is called) of the stud wall.  All bolts and nails are stainless steel, which prevent streaks.

Here's a garden shed being built in the summer of 2005.  It's only 8' x 12', but the walls are 8' tall and the peak is waaaay up there.  There will be a solid cedar door (already built), 4 windows in the cedar walls, two lofts inside with a window in the peak.  The usual green steel roofing has been wrestled into place on the second shot, as well as top hinged windows.  Gnarley huh?  Here's the snazzy part.  The entire thing is bolted together so it can be taken apart and moved.  Yup, even the roof.  Speaking of the roof, that's how I got the materials home, thanks to Yakima roof racks.

Completed in August 2005, the Garden Cottage is now ready for Trish to run her gardening operation out of.  It features an 8' long workbench, running water on the outside, electric on the inside, two lofts accessable by a ladder, top hinged windows with stops and locks, a trapdoor in the floor to sweep out the dirt, a fluorescent light mounted with pulleys which can be lowered over seedlings, and a bunch of bees which have moved in underneath the south wall.  The loft over the front door is large enough to sleep two or three kids, or one husband.  I done forgot to get some interior photos.  Maybe later.

My magnum opus.  Built in 1993, this table features a top made from strips of hard maple, walnut, and oak with the grain all running lengthwise with the table. The top is mounted to the frame with sliding cleats and screws through oval holes which permit the top to expand and contract with changes in humidity.  Took a long time to build this sucker it did.  As I slowly glued the various pieces of the top together, it would warp in various ways, thus requiring it to spend time on the kitchen floor with a damp towel placed on the concave side of the warp to straighten things out.  Somehow, it all came out fine, and has been perfect since.  Second Place , boooo.