Here’s an ultra-simple workbench that I made out of a solid-core door and dimensional lumber. Everything is just screwed together with deck screws. I was able to bang this out in an afternoon.
I pulled the door from a garbage pile. Apparently, it was a bathroom door in its former life:
Now all I need to do is organize my workshop enough so that I have a place to *put* it.
For my youngest’s birthday, I made him this toy train, where each car (except for the engine and caboose) is an activity toy.
The first one is a miniature towers of Hanoi/stacking game, the second one is another stacking game with a roof that also fits the house playset, and the third has working gears.
The three cars are actually identical, with different stacking/interlocking toys that can be put on top of them.
I found dice at the dollar store the other day, and brought home 30 of them for $3. I then glued them together into a puzzle called a “Soma Cube”.
It’s a great puzzle for kids. Not only are there 240 different configurations for the cube solution, but there are a lot of other shapes that you can make. I was barely able to pry it away from my youngest for long enough to solve the cube and take the picture.
What does it do? It doesn’t do anything. That’s the beauty of it.
This was a relatively short project, but I had more fun with it than with any other this Christmas season.
It’s pointless, mechanical, and mesmerizing.
It has been named The Marble-a-gig by my son, who received it as a gift.
This is a toy set that I made for Christmas. You can arrange the blocks, roofs, and accessories together in any number of ways to make farms, villages, etc..
Each picture below shows about 1/3 of the set that I gave my daughter for Christmas.
What was really fun was making the accessories (fences, trees, bushes, outhouses, etc.) when I was done with the main set.
Each year we get a new set of Christmas tree ornaments — one for each member of the family.
This year, Mary Cate and I made the ornaments ourselves.
Mary Cate designed them, I cut them out, and then she painted them.
I wanted to go with just the simple silhouette, but the painted turned out pretty good.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a goat Christmas tree ornament before.
We had a lot of extra milk this summer, so Mary Cate tried her hand at cheesemaking. The results were pretty good, especially for a first attempt.
To facilitate further attempts, I’ve made her a cheese press. It’s designed to put and hold free weights on top.
It’s made from hardwood dowels, oak that I salvaged from some old shelves, and plywood that I salvaged from old church cabinets.
This fall, Mary Cate tried tanning leather from our goats to make buckskin. The first hide was, well, a learning experience, but the second one turned out much better.
Part of the tanning process involves scraping flesh away from the skin.
This is a scraper that I’ve made for her. The blade is a 15″ planer blade that I got when the local sawmill shut down. The wood is the same mystery wood I used in the legs of the toy grasshopper .
The blade was too hard for me to drill, so I just epoxied the handle on.
A mallet like this was one of the first projects I ever made on a lathe, with my father’s help. I gave the mallet to Mary Cate, who used it in the kitchen (you’d be surprised how often a mallet for whacking things comes in handy in the kitchen).
Unfortunately, this was during the time when our youngest liked to toss things in the trash. At least, that’s why we assume that it disappeared forever within a couple of weeks of me making it.
So years later, I made two more. One is for the kitchen, and one is for me in my shop.
The heads are made from maple. The handle of the one on top is ash, and the one on bottom is oak.
Last year I busted in the back window of my pickup while picking up a load of firewood. Ever since, I’ve been really nervous whenever I’ve loaded anything like that, often coming back with less than a full load instead of risking my window again.
So I needed a grate to protect it. I went down to the local metal recycler and go some old metal railing and some expanded metal grating. I cut it to size, painted it, and attached it to my lumber rack.
I kinda felt like I was in an episode of The A-Team, tankifying up my vehicle for the big battle at the end of the episode.
