A family member received a motorized, adjustable-height desk frame and asked if I could make a desktop similar to the cutting boards I gifted everyone at Christmas.

I started by narrowing the wood selection process down using a PhotoShop mockup. We played around with a variety of woods and the order & size of the wood strips until we finally landed on the combo they liked:

• Walnut
• Wenge
• Zebrawood
• Purpleheart
• Curly Maple

We then went to CP Johnson Lumber to get the wood. They had everything except the Wenge. So we stopped by The Fredericksburg Workshop to see if they had any – no dice.

There is a shortage on Wenge as it is an endangered species because of over-exploitation and reduction of habitat; on top of that, the COVID-19 World-wide lockdown has essentially stopped production and shipping.

But we were able to find someone on Craigslist that was selling about 20 board feet of Wenge at a fair price, so we picked that up (and I now have plenty of Wenge for future projects).

I glued the strips of exotic wood in three sections in order to fit my 13-inch planer. I then glued those three sections together using a biscuit joiner for alignment.

For a final planing, I constructed a router sled and used a 2-inch planing bit to level everything before sanding and finishing with a water-based polyurethane.

I then installed threaded brass inserts to mount the top to the Jarvis Adjustable-height desk frame.

In early November 2020, my wife an I started to chat about Christmas gift plans for friends and family. Well… she started talking about it – I was mostly listening.

At one point she suggested that I make cutting boards as gifts. I thought that was a decent idea, so I agreed. Then we counted how many boards we would need to make and landed on almost 20 boards I would need to make inside of 6 weeks.

So Santa’s Elf (me) got busy and made a lot of noise and even more saw dust over the next several weeks,

A friend’s daughter recently graduated from Virginia Tech with two degrees. Naturally, he is extremely proud of her and wanted to gift her with custom frames for her diplomas inspired by the university’s colors. So I planed and sanded a couple pieces of Purpleheart and Paduak scrap and found our color scheme.

We have a dog-walker that take our pups for a stroll everyday around lunchtime. We have never had a good solution for keeping the pups’ leashes, harnesses and training treats in a standard location for daily access. So, I decided to build a box to solve this problem.

In addition to holding all of the above mentioned items, I also wanted to devise a way to leave our dog-walker notes and her weekly check.  So, I hid a magnet inside the box and created another decorative magnet to connect on the front of the box. Each week, we now lave her check under this magnet along with any informational notes we need to give her.

After completing the box, a friend order a duplicate for their pups. These are various pix of both boxes…

I built these frames with Padauk & Birdseye Maple to preserve two watercolor prints created & given to me by my former boss, Steve Wariner and his wonderful wife, Caryn, as a housewarming gift when we moved into our 1st house in Nashville.

I chose the Padauk wood because it reminded me of one of my favorite guitars Steve owns: a Chet Atkins’ 1989 Gibson Country Gentleman that was bequeathed to Steve after Chet passed away.

The glass is UV resistant and I sealed the back of the frame with acid free, 40lb “craft” paper to keep out dust. And the hardware & aircraft cable are rated to hold 20 x’s the weight of the frames – one should always over engineer a project.

If you’re interested, you can read more about Chet’s guitar here when it spent some time on my guitar bench.

One of the photos I had commercially framed to hang in a local coffee shop was returned damaged so I decide to make my own replacement.

I used some Wenge & Zebrawood I had on hand. After cutting the main blanks from the Wenge, I used the Zebrawood as an inlay down the center of the blanks.