A friend of mine asked if I could make something for his sister who operates a local cat foster program. These follow the same design I used when I made these for my own sisters (previous post) only I did not make a frame for this one.

Here you can see the four layers of 3mm plywood I cut out on my laser cutter

Sanded and stacked together

Stained and glued together

Spray polyurethane added

I built this table for my sister-in-law back in 2016. She had just moved into her first home and asked if I would could maybe build a small farmhouse style table.

At this point I was relatively new to the hobby and had never built a proper piece of furniture that would function as a center piece for a room. She also did not have much money to spend so I came up with a plan to use some old barn wood I had scrounged up for the legs and construction lumber for the top.

There is a lot of internet hate out there for construction lumber projects, but I think if done right they can be an affordable option for folks. It's been 7 years now and this still sits in her dining room getting daily use. It has zero cupping, or wobble, and has remained as sturdy as the day I made it.

Being pine it is very soft wood and so it has its share of dings and scratches, but because it was made to look distressed from the beginning that just adds to it.

I picked the straightest and cleanest boards I could get from the hardware store. Focusing on 26 and 210 stock.

The first challenge working with construction lumber that I needed to overcome was moisture. It is kiln dried but still not to the level you'd get with higher quality lumber.I started by stacking the wood in my humidity controlled garage and letting it sit for about a month.

While that was drying I worked on the barnwood legs. I had two salvaged boards and came up with a design that used most of it

I used a wire brush and water to clean up the grime

Skipping ahead in the process a bit since I didn't do a great job taking pictures. For the top I ripped down the thicker boards, discarding the center part of the 2*10s to try and get rid of the tension caused by the center rings. I was worried this would lead to cupping. For each board I rotated the grain up and down so any cupping that did occur on an individual board level would hopefully off set. I used biscuits to help with alignment during the glue up

Breadboard ends are floating to allow for expansion and contracting of the top. I figured maybe this would be a failure point over time and someone leaning on the edges would break one off, but so far so good. The other issue here is that I made the tennon go all the way to the ends of the breadboard, which doesn't hurt anything but over time as the wood has shrunk it has left 1/8 gap on the ends that could have otherwise been hidden.

Testing out stain and destressing combinations

Adding prestain conditioner to help with the blotchiness associated with staining pine. You can see that issue with the through tennon I mentioned above. It was flush here but has since retracted a bit

Stained

Here you can see the solution I came up with for attaching the top to allow for expansion but keep it flat. There is also a center beam they used lag screws. Since that is only in the middle I don't need to worry about it pulling itself apart. This picture was several years later so you can see the shrinkage. It is otherwise flat and stable though. Ideally I would have had extra barn wood to help with the cross beams and more closely match the legs but unfortunately I did not

The top was then finished with a Danish oil and waxed

Edit: Bonus blooper

Picked up some walnut, cherry, and maple with the idea of making some end grain cutting boards for people for Christmas

Cut to rough lengths

Jointed and planed to square up the lumber

Cutting the boards into strips

Figuring out patters for the initial glue up

Initial glue up

Scraping off the dried glue and prepping for another trip to the planer

Getting ready for the second round of cutting

Figuring out the layout for the crosscut pieces for the second glue up

Second glue up

Glued dry now to the router table to round the edges so they don't blow out when I run them through the planer

Lots and lots of sanding

Soaked in mineral oil

Boards are finished with a beeswax and mineral oil paste that I made. Here are a sitting in plastic wrap getting ready to put in gift bags.

I had a gap in the wall from where an old monitor mount used to be attached so wanted to make something to cover it up.

The LEDs are controlled by an ESP8622 running WLED, monitor data from the PC comes from Hyperion software. It can be set to a constant color, dozens of set themes, or match the color output of whatever is on my monitor.

The microcontroller sits under the desk and receives constant power, it is the wired to a button on my desk to turn on/off power to the LEDs.

Laser cutter action:

I tried to give it an aged rock/stone appearance using some textured spray paint which actually turned out pretty well. I think some of that doesn't come across well in the photos, but in person it looks good (to me anyway).

LEDs changing color https://imgur.com/a/8CmepDk

How to get WLED running: https://tynick.com/blog/11-03-2019/getting-started-with-wled-on-esp8266/

More info about Hyperion https://docs.hyperion-project.org/en/user/leddevices/

I was attempting to build a Kentucky stick chair, but accidentally bought too stiff of wire so had to pivot to a more rigid design. The end result is a not so comfortable folding chair. It works for me because I am tall and my legs clear the seat and touch the ground without issue. Not the case for my wife.

Here is what it was supposed to look like. Because the wire I used was too stiff I could not get the chair to sinch together so had to add spacers.

This chair is made from a couple cedar deck planks. They were first cut into strips

Strips cut to size for the back, middle,seat

Jig made to quickly make repeat holes for the hardware

Holes done

Assembly begins

Back to the drawing board, spacers added

Applying deck stain

Done

Had some left over red acrylic so made a simple support for my GPU

I have a family member that is big into Weber charcoal grills, and each year he and all the other grilling enthusiasts from around the country get together for their annual meet up.

To commerate his last meet up I made him a set of slate coasters featuring Topper, the original logo for Weber grills.

Blank slate coasters purchased off Amazon. I think they come out to about $1 per coaster. The process is pretty simple. I put masking tape down on the bed of the laser then lightly etch a a few circles so that I can quickly center the blank coasters in my machine for batch etching.

You will notice some are darker than others, that is because I spray a light coat of poly which makes the etching pop. The darker ones already have been sprayed.

I also made a caddy to hold the coasters

This was my first real dive into Arduino and multiple button mapping. It took a significant amount of trouble shooting and learning the software to get things to map to the computer action.

Gif of the action https://imgur.com/a/XI9KTeH

Prototype 1:Started this project before I had a laser cutter and had tried to just drill through acrylic. It didn't work well, but it held my buttons during testing

Prototype 2 Still no laser cutter but I cut out using plywood worked much better for manually cutting out the holes

Prototype 3 Much better

I had bought a big box of bulk Pokemon cards off of eBay and had been giving the kids a few each time they did their chores or as positive reinforcement when the did something good.

I wanted to find a way to make it more fun so came up with this prize wheel. Instead of just giving them two cards from the pile they get to spin the wheel and the corresponding prize. Usually just let's them look at a few cards and pick the one they want vs random getting one.

There were some "rare" cards too which they had a chance to win.

I have been a hobby woodworker for about a decade now, and this thing is by far the most fun I have in the shop. Unlike building a big piece of furniture that can take me weeks, I usually can come up with an idea and be assembling things within a few hours.

I am posting this for people wondering what you get when you order a $350 CO2 laser cutter off eBay. I purchased this 2 years ago and have had no issues. All of my woodworking project posts that involve a laser cutter are using this machine, although I have upgraded/modded the machine since purchase

K40 is name for this generic Chinese laser cutter platform. There are lots of sellers under lots of names, but they are all basically the same thing.

There are some American resellers, like Omtech that you can buys these machines from and they will offer upgrades and tech support.

Here was the original posting, doesn't look like this seller is around anymore

Shipped from a warehouse in California so I didn't have to do any import tax stuff

Double boxed with unformed styrofoam

Inside stuffed with the "accessories" which were mostly tossed in the garbage, and some loose foam.

Cutting bed and fume extractor both of which I would later remove as part of the modifications

They had the water cooling tubes routing out through the exhaust fan for shipping, easy process of rerouting them during the initial setup

Lots of info online about ensuring proper grounding with these. I followed the guides around sanding off the paint to ensure good contact with the metal from the case. I think this is probably the only modI did before the first cut

This splice on the high voltage line seemed pretty ghetto to me, but the internet "experts" on the K40 forums assured me this was fine/normal.

Stock fume extractor fan and water cooling tubes. I added a water movement indicator and removed the fan and added a inline exhaust as part of later mods.

Mirrors were hot glued in place, but actually alignment was perfect right out of the box for me and this thing cut without issue on the first try. Over the years of mods and banging it around I have removed the glue and fine tuned but the tube and mirrors have held up well.

Here it is today in all it's glory.

Cross posted from my post here https://lemm.ee/c/lasercutting

This is my go-to site when my projects require any type of box. You put the dimensions in and it spits out a cut file.