Category: Woodworking

Deer

—- by Alan Guo, Instructor: Oliver Steele & Andy Garica

    

Inspiration and Design

This project intends to make a deer head using only wood. The initial inspiration is out of my personal interest, as I like the sculpture of deer horn a lot. For this project, as I could have the opportunity to make something with wood, I chose to make one deer head as one sculptural decoration. For using the real deer horns as decoration are cruel and inhumane. Using wood as substitution conveys the signal of animal protection and appeals for the attention to profitable animal killing.

More detail information about the inspiration could be found in the previous blog post of “initial plan for final project”.

After doing research on the Internet about the design, I decided to use wood boards for the fabrication. I was inspired a lot from one art piece from Kalalou, I referenced his idea about the assembling and designing.

The first thing to do is to find out how would the whole piece be constructed. As the project would be made of wood boards, I did some sketch to design how should each board be used, and the outline shape of each piece.

As shown in the sketch, I separate the project into several parts. Face, neck, cheek, ear and horn are all make separately and joined together later on.

After deciding the outline, I started designing and drawing shapes for each part. I found some photos of deer from different angles on the Internet, and used Adobe Illustrator to trace the shape.

With each shape drawn, I then 3D modeled the whole sculpture using the stretch from illustrator. The process of 3D modeling is really important for the whole project as this is where I shall figure out how big each piece should be and how could different pieces be assembled together.

I used tinkercad for this step, however it turned out that tinkered wasn’t the best option for woodworking model. Tinkercad is easy to use, but with limited functions. With other modeling applications, I might could try with different texture, joints and so on. Luckily, the most important goal for the modeling is to find out the proportion of each part. And Tinkercad gave me an rough idea about how big each part should be.

Wood Choosing

After the initial design, the next step is to choose the right kind of wood for the sculpture. My plan was to find some wood board with width of 20 – 25 centimeter and thickness of 2 – 3 centimeter in light color. I reached out to one lumber yard that we once paid a visit to. The manager there said that the size I wanted isn’t so popular, so there might not be wood that could match all my requirements. He then recommended me with one wood called Jatoba, which satisfies my size requirement. However, after consulting with professor Steele, he told me that Jatoba might be too hard for this project, based on what we found in the wood database.

Professor recommended me with some other kinds of wood, including teak, ash and beech. After finding out that teak is much more expensive than other wood, I turned to white ash, as the lumber yard had some white ash boards that meets my size requirement.

I asked the lumber yard to send one sample piece of white ash to test first.

The test piece wasn’t so big, but I did many tests on it, including most of the process I would work with, cutting with band saw, table saw, sanding with different grids and also finishing.

   

    

After the whole test, I found out white ash is easy to work with, it is not to hard for cutting and sanding, and not as soft as pine wood. Thus, I ordered all my wood for this project. The manager sent me seven pieces of wood board, their size varies a bit, but larger than I expected.

Fabrication

Preprocessing Wood

I used the miter saw, power planer and table saw to preprocess the wood. The wood I got from the lumber yard were around 1.5 meter to 2 meter long, which is definitely too long for any process. So I first used the miter saw to cut down pieces, then the power planer to plane smaller pieces. Miter saw and table saw might be used again after plane to cut exact length that I want since pieces too short can’t go through the power plane.

   

Redesign I

In previous designs, I calculated the width as 25 centimeter, thus I planed different ways to join the head with the neck together (options 1 – 3), since the contact surface between two parts are not straight, the joinery would be very difficult.

However, after receiving the wood, I found that there are several pieces have width of 35 – 40. Thus, I redesigned the joinery of head and neck so that I don’t actually need to join the two pieces together as I made it one piece at the first place (option 4). Thanks to the lumber yard, the wider wood saved my day from difficult joineries. 

Gluing

Gluing is really one big part of this project. I designed the head and neck to have three layers of wood board, thus the head along has nine pieces of small boards, and all of them have to be glued together. I first glue the three layers together as the surface is big, then the side face with three board would be thick enough for another gluing.

      

      

I practiced and learned a lot during the whole gluing process. I practiced about how to do a dry test that clamp everything together without applying glue to see how could everything work best, I learned how to clamp for best force and use other wood to help spreading the force. Also that since the gluing process would take up to twenty-four hours to dry completely, planing what to do everyday becomes so important cause I need to leave the night for glue to dry out.

I also did some testing about the gluing. If pieces are well glued, then one can’t really see the trace of glue from the cut surface. So I was wondering whether there is a way to actually show the audience that these two wood are glued together as part of my design. 

I tried to sand the edges of each piece before gluing them. This method works well through I still have to clean up the glue squeezed out from the edges. And during the process, I found out the most easy way to show two glued pieces, by not matching the wood grain.

               sand the edges                            grain not matching

Redesign II

In the process of gluing the “nose” to the head, professor Steele told me that the side surface used for gluing is the end grain, which would not perform well in the gluing process, and it might fall apart later. So, other joineries has to be applied for these wood pieces.

I chose the dowels for the joinery, which is one wooden stick inserted into the holes made in each piece of wood. The difficulties of this joint is to match the holes in exact position so that the wood could fit together, also holes need to be straightly vertical or the two pieces wouldn’t be at the same surface after joining.

There is one jig for dowels, but it didn’t fit my pieces so well, I then reassembled it in a way that could work on my wood board. The jig helps to make parallel holes on both pieces of wood to match. The Drill press is used to make holes.

              jig for dowels

However, just before I clamped and glued the pieces with dowels, the wood fall down accidentally, and the wooden sticks broke inside the wood. Luckily, the plier helped to take out the dowels so I don’t need to drill holes all over again.

    

The similar technique is also used when joining the neck to the head part.

   

Redesign III

Right after I glued everything together, I found out that my piece too big and heavy. I followed the size in my previous design, but only when having the real piece of wood in front of myself I could figure out how big the sculpture really is. Thus, I reduced the whole design for about one-third to one-fourth, though it turned out later that this reduced size is still too big for a deer and myself.

Band Saw Cutting

Almost all shapes for this project are cut by the band saw. Using a wider blade, the three layers of wood could be cut through easier, though smaller curves are more difficult.

One major problem I met when using the band saw was that my piece was too big, even bigger than the band saw platform. And the wood is too heavy for one person to hold and cut curves at the same time. For some tricky cuts, I asked friends to help me lift the wood a bit.

   

Since this project is about the deer head sculpture, the face should be symmetric at least to some extent. After trying to sand them into the same shape, I found out the better way is to cut one first, then follow the exact trace of the first one to produce the second part.

Router for edge cutting

Since the cheeks has different shape with the head, they can’t be cut at the same time but to glue later. The edges wouldn’t match perfectly after the gluing process, so professor Steele suggested me to use the router to get a flat side face.

    

The router isn’t one that is easy and pleasant to use. After setting up for more than one hour, professor Steele and I figured out one way for the router to have more reference surface so that the machine could be more stable. Though hard to use, the router removed the extra wood efficiently, leaving one flat side face.

    before router                                                          after  router

The only unpleasant thing with router this time was that it teared out one small piece at a large curve. But I think I could only live with it. My deer is now a wounded one.

Sanding

Sanding is one of the most time consuming process for the wood project. I used nearly all the sanding tools in the wood shop for the sculpture. The one I used most is the random orbital sander, it helped me for the surfaces. Sanding blocks, papers and disc sander are also used for side face and edges.

    

    

In order to prepare for finishing, I also applied water to my project in order to raise the grain and then sand it again, though it turned out that the piece is still rough after the finishing.

Redesign IV

In my initial plan for horns and ears, they could just insert into the gap on the head or use wood glue for joints. However, I made the slot a bit wider than the horns, so that it’s not tight enough for insert and even wood glue. And I also thought about making the horns and ears removable, since having those parts on the head would occupy a much larger space and difficult to carry or store. Professor suggested me to make dowels on the horns and the head, so that I could just insert horns and ears into the head.

However, after trying to measure everything and testing, I found it too hard to get exact position for both pieces of wood given that they are all in very curved shape that is hard to work on.

I then decided to make dowels joining not the head, but the two horns together, since the dowels could prevent the force pulling down the horns and ears from the head. Making holes on the horns are much easier than having them on the huge head piece. As I practiced the dowels before, making these joineries on the horns and ears didn’t take a too long time.

   

Finishing with Shellac

After trying and testing different types of finishing on white ash, I finally decided to use the light color shellac. The shellac makes no color different after applying to the wood. When I tested it on the offcuts, the shellac worked very well. But when having it on the final piece, surfaces become much more rough than I expected, even after I sanded again with water.

The process of applying finishing itself is quite easy, as always. The only thing I worried about is whether I was wasting too much shellac since I applied a lot worrying about that I might miss some part.

   

Also, since the finish would make it harder for wood glue to work, I covered some parts that I might later use glue when having further improvements with blue tapes. But some shellac still got inside the tape, I might need to sand those parts again if glue is to be applied.

Reflections and Improvements

reflections at current stage

For the whole project, I met two major problems. The first is that the wood piece is too heavy. Though I followed the exact size as I designed on illustrator and tinkercad, I didn’t expect the piece being such a big one, and only after trying to lift and hold it myself I found out how heavy the wood is.

The size and weight made many operations difficult, since the piece is larger than the band saw and other sanding machines. Cutting and sanding are much difficult. The weight also makes the piece hard to carry around. According to one classmate, the too large size even makes the deer head looks more like a bear than a deer if without the horns.

However,  I figured out this problem too late and there wasn’t enough time for me to turn everything over again and remake it.

The second problem is with the wood choose. I chose white ash as the color matches, the wood board has the right size and it is easy to cut with. After working on this wood for weeks, I found that white ash is a little bit too soft and loose. As I put the piece on some not entirely flat surface, the wood could easily get markers and pits. For some delicate shape like the horns, I’m afraid of breaking it as the wood isn’t that tight.

But if I got some other kind of tighter wood, it would also make my piece even heavier than what I get now. So neither these two problems would be easy to solve.

1. Knowing what you know now, if you were to start over again, would you make any changes to your original design design? What is advice that you would send to your former self?

I would definitely tell my former self to make the sculpture smaller, and maybe choose another type of wood if possible. As these are the problems that troubled me the most during the fabrication process.

Also that in the fabrication, I had made quite a few redesign decisions. Though the final product looked really similar to the initial design, these redesigns really changed my project a lot. As I substituted the joints between head and neck with one larger piece of wood, used dowels for some joints, all these changes makes my piece stronger and more stable.

Thus, if to start over again, I could have knowledge about all these changes before starting, saving me a lot of time struggling with different plans and trying to figure out which could fit my project the best.

2. If you were to build a similar project, what would you keep the same from this project? What would be different?

I think I really learned a lot about many woodworking skills in this project, such as gluing and joints, also the experience about handling large size and cutting symmetric shapes.

If to build a similar project, I could still use these knowledge as I’m satisfied with the way of gluing multiple wood pieces together for larger ones, I would also use dowels for tricky joints. And I find out that shellac is really great when I don’t what to change the color of wood itself.

For differences, I would probably try different kind of woods. And I also want to practice some real sculpture skills. Since I’m using only boards for this project, I could have everything cut with band saw and table saw. However, things would change a lot if I have one large piece of wood at the beginning, and I definitely want to try that out.

Improvements for Future

This project is only partial done due to the time limit, there still remains many parts I could improve on.

First, after applying the shellac finishing, the wood becomes rough again, especially on the side face. As suggested by professor Steele, I could sand off the finishing and applying it again. Or I can use higher grid sanding tools to only sand off the top layer of the raised grains without getting rid of all the finishings.

Also, the project now has a straight back cut with table saw and left unfinished, and it can’t really stand on the ground or hang on the wall. I can make one backboard and attach to the straight back of the project now. Maybe using screws to join the backboard and head tightly together, I can really hang this deer head on the wall, letting it become a real “wall mounted” sculpture decoration.

Finally and Most importantly, I should give one pair of beautiful eyes to my dear deer. 🙂

Thanks for reading ^

Reference

twitter.com/komena_mmd/status/1226164161828114432?

deer head sculpture

Ideas

Description:

For the final project, I would like to make a wooden sculpture of a deer head. The sculpture is made by multiple pieces of wood. The wood boards in two-dimension are assembled in the way that can make up  a sculpture in three-dimension. Larger piece of curved wood can also be used for the horns of the deer head.

Motivation:

I personally really like the sculpture of deer horns, and dreamed of having one on my home. For using the real deer horns as decoration are cruel and inhumane. Using wood as substitution conveys the signal of animal protection and appeals for the attention to profitable animal killing.

Examples of Object:

1.

This is one deer head sculpture using solid wood, much effort is used to cut the deer shape out of the big piece of wood, as well as the other details like the fur and bones. This project is mainly about cutting and carving one piece of wood into the shape of deer head.

2.

This project is one wood deer head sculpture made of several piece of wood boards. The wood boards make up the head in a simple and understandable way. The design and assemble of different wood would be the major difficulty for this piece.

3.

This deer head looks more like a cardboard project rather than a woodworking project. It used quite a few very thin wood boards for the different layers of the sculpture. Since it has more pieces of wood, many joints are used in this project.

These three projects are all wooden deer head sculptures, but is made up by different amounts of wood pieces. With fewer pieces, the project focuses more on the carving and shaping, and with the increase amount of wood, the project pays more attention on the assembling process.

Inspiration:

There is one artist named Roger Kentish who did several animal head wall mounted using wood.

                stag head                                             highland cow head

He had done several wooden animal head sculptures, the left one is a deer and right as a cow. One characteristic on these two projects is that the heads are consist of several pieces of wood with the clear appearance of distinct pieces. He didn’t try to hide the joints of each piece to make the project more like one piece. Instead, he emphasis the different pieces. This style makes his work distinctive.

Build Plan

Stock:

I would like to use several pieces of solid wood boards as well as two or three larger solid wood pieces for the three dimensional shaping as the deer horns and nose. I want to work with some wood with lighter colors like white or light yellow.

Building Process:

1. Design. I think the design process might be the most difficult part of the whole project. I have to decide the exact shape and size of each wood board as well as the deer horns. I also need to make sure that each piece can join together later. It might not be a easy task to guarantee the deer shape and at the same time having feasible plans for each wood piece.

2. Cutting. After deciding each piece, I would cut out each one. I would probably mainly use band saw for the shaping. Templates might be necessary to guarantee that I could get symmetric shapes for different pieces. I may also use table saw for the jointing parts.

3. Assembling. Having each piece cut and sanded, I would then need to join them together. With proper design, there should be corresponding joint shapes so that I could assemble them easily, wood glue would also be needed  for this process.

4. Finishing. The last step should be applying the finishing on wood. I think I would not add colors or other paintings to the wood, the color of wood would be just fine.

Hope I can do something better than this one 🙏🙏

Reference

The three samples:

Pieces by the artist Roger Kentish:

STAG HEAD Wall Mounted – Hand Crafted – Copper Verdigris Stag – Faux Deer Wall Mounted – Wall Art – Animal Wall Decor & Art

HIGHLAND COW – Magnetic bottle opener- Reclaimed timber – Wall mounted – Farrow and Ball (Railings) shield

Another woodworking piece：

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/806074033307126644/activity/tried

This bandsaw box project is mainly about making a wooden box with drawers using the bandsaw machine as the main tool. The project involves the process of planing the wood, gluing different pieces of wood together, using the bandsaw to cut all the shapes and then the sanding.

Design

Initially, I wanted to make a box with the shape of Ganger, one cute Pokemon character, with the mouth and two eyes as drawers. However, the bandsaw is harder than I thought to use, I had to make quite a few adjustments to the design,  and the final piece turns out to be more like a pineapple or an owl.

         

At first stage of design, I wanted to make the shape of an apple, having two drawers on the two sides. But I later found out that it difficult to fit the drawers in that position, since there’s might not enough wood holding the drawers from falling down. Thus, I turned to the idea of Ganger. I designed the drawer to have two sharp teeth, which looks more like a mouth, but Andy told me that the drawer has to be in one single cut, indicating that sharp shapes are not possible for the drawer. So, my final design is the round drawer.

Fabrication

The first process of this project is to plane and glue several pieces of wood together. I chose two African pear wood and walnut to glue. 

Both powered thickness planer and hand planer are used for the planing process.  The powered tool can plane large piece of wood easily by continuous flipping the wood and plane till both sides are smooth. However, for the hand planer used for smaller pieces, the hand tool took much more time. The hand planer isn’t so easy to use especially when the blade is not sharp enough. I took a long time trying the plane one walnut piece to fit other pieces, but it turns out that certain piece has a so uncomfortable shape to plane, and I chose another piece at last.

After planing the wood, I have to glue them together. This is the process with most stress because the wood glue would start to solidify in five minutes, so all the gluing need to be done within five minutes.

  

Multiple clamps are used so that I could clamp the four pieces of woods tightly together. The gluing process took a whole day.

After gluing the pieces together, then came the time for bandsaw.

    

The bandsaw is much hard to use than I previous thought, especially when cutting angles. For the cutting process, I first cut out the outer shape, then cut off the back, the next step is to cut the drawers. After having all the drawers cut, the back is glued back again.

When I cut off the mouth drawer, I noticed that I didn’t do a good job, the shape is not symmetric and I can’t control the bandsaw as I want. I didn’t think I would be able to cut the two small eyes, thus I decided to cut a bigger drawer with two eyes together.

The next step is to glue everything back, before the gluing, I sanded the pieces a bit for those faces that would be hard to sand after. Since I cut the two drawers, there are two cut left on the piece need to be glued back.

  

I used a wire to apply glue into the small gaps, then clamped everything together for another day.

After gluing, the next step is about sanding and making up all the mistakes and faults.

The back wasn’t glued to match the box exactly, as the two piece would move a bit in the process of clamping, the back and the front did’t match perfectly. This means a lot of more sanding to hide the gaps and trace.

I also noticed that one corner of the shape was off, which might because of a hit. But this shows that as one corner could be off, all the other corners might be hit off later too. So, I decided to sand all the corners to a smaller and more smooth angle, to prevent the piece from further damage. 

      

For the band saw cutting gap, the glue didn’t close up the gap completely. There remains a visible and noticeable gap after the gluing and clamping. Professor Oliver told me to use a wood filer for the gap. I then tried several different types of wood filer on a useless piece. It turns out that all those kind of filers didn’t match the color of the pear wood and they didn’t work so well for filling the gaps.  Thus, I decided not to use the wood filer and try to sand off the gaps a bit. It turned out that sanding helped covering up the gap. After a great work of sanding, the gaps were not that visible any more, so I didn’t use the wood filer at last.

                                          before sanding                                                                        after sanding

The last step before adding finishing is to make handles for the drawers. I used pieces of previous cut offs. However, this step is much harder than I thought. Shaping a very tiny piece is really difficult and frustrating. Since the piece is so small, I couldn’t use power machines for I might can’t fix the piece well. The piece is so small that I could not hold it easily for any hand tool either. I end up spending a huge amount of time using sanding paper to shape the wood handle. And the handle didn’t look so good after the hard work.

For the very last step, finishing, the color before and after finishing really surprised me a lot. The finishing oil made the pear wood even more red and the walnut really dark. The final color isn’t quite what I expected at the very beginning, but it looks good after all, especially that the pear wood after finishing oil looks red and shiny under sunlight.

Reflections

During the fabrication process, I have actually met quite a few problems and unexpected things since this project involves many steps. One thing I found most surprising is about the gluing. The wood glue is really strong, however, the gluing process is also much harder than I thought. One is about the time limit, since the wood glue could easily dry, everything during the gluing process are in hurry. Another is about the clamping, though clamping could fix the gaps and make two pieces tightly together, the pieces may also move around during the clamping step since the glue is slippery. This makes the matching of two pieces extremely hard. And pieces would often be not in the right position after one day of drying.

Thus, I was think about maybe we could actually shape and cut the wood after the gluing process, so that we don’t need to match the woods so perfectly. In this way, the order of making a band saw box might be first cutting off the back, then cut the drawers, gluing the back and then to cut the outer shape of the box. In this sequence, we don’t have to focus so much on matching the pieces when gluing.

1. Knowing what you know now, if you were to start over again, would you make any changes to your original design design? What is advice that you would send to your former self?

If starting over again, in the designing process, I would like to make more round corners and angles, which would not be that vulnerable. Also, I would want to think more about the position of cutting the drawers. The gaps I now have are hard to glue and hide. Given another chance, I would switch the gaps to somewhere easier to glue, or to make the design that I don’t need to glue back the gaps, as making the gaps part of the design.

Also, I would choose some easier shapes for the band saw to cut, as this time I changed design quite often when finding out what curves the band saw can make and what can’t. So, I should think more about the limit of the tool in the designing process rather than changing plans during the fabrication.

2. If you were to build a similar project, what would you keep the same from this project? What would be different?

I really like the design of the top drawer, having two separate space inside one drawer. I think I could adapt this kind of design into other projects. 

For differences, I would  change a lot in the designing. First, I might not want sharp angles. Also, I would make better use of the wood, which means that I could design bigger drawers, instead of the tiny drawers with much space of solid box I now have.  I might even change the choose of wood and test how would the wood look like after applying finishings before making the decision.

This project of the small object stand is about using the CNC machine to create a stand holding some small personal items. I used the adobe illustrator to create the shape and CNC to cut the wood piece. I then sand the piece and add finishing onto it.

Design

I designed the wood piece to hold my phone, ID card, glasses, mask and some other  like rings or necklace. I’m inspired by two similar wood piece from the Internet.

Thus, I decided to cut the shape of a hand and insert it on my object stand. I measured the size of the objects and use adobe illustrator to design the piece. I created the piece with the exact size so that my objects could fit. For the joint, I reduced a 0.2mm in order for the pieces to join together tightly.

Fabrication

CNC is used to cut out the shape of my piece. CNC is a quite powerful machine that I could directly get the piece of wood from what I designed on the computer. However, this CNC is actually not so easy to use and I met quite a few problems during this process.

It takes a long time to set up the CNC, involving creating each cut, initializing the position, fix the wood used for cutting and so on, which makes the CNC a bit time-consuming.

After setting up everything on the computer and initializing the machine, I covered the wood with blue tape so that it would not tear out so much.

During the cutting, Andy and I heard one loud and strange sound, so we paused the machine immediately. And then we found out the drill bit hit one of the fixing metal. So we changed the position of fixing metal and continued the machine.

However, it turned out the hitting had actually changed the position of drill a little, so that the machine was not cutting the same position as before. Thus, CNC cut the wrong position of one wood piece. We then have to initialize the machine again to finish the cutting of other pieces and recut the damaged piece in another place.

After the whole cutting process, I removed the pieces from the big board and did a lot of sanding for edges and all other parts. I also found out that though I covered the board with blue board, there were still many tear outs. I sand some of them, and Andy told me that I could glue the bigger ones.

After a long time sanding, using disc sander, oscillating Spindle Sander, sanding block and also sanding paper, I added the finishing onto it. I first tried one finishing using a sample piece, then conduct the oil to my own piece.

Reflection

I had actually make several mistakes in the designing process, and not until I cut out the piece did I notice those things. Since the CNC is too time-consuming, I didn’t have time to cut again, so I can only live with the mistakes and try to figure out how to solve them in another way.

After using the CNC, and having the piece on my hand, I found out that I designed one piece in the mirror position, which means it can’t join with another piece in the direction I wanted. I could only join them in the opposite direction, and thus changed my whole initial plan. Another thing I found was that I only measured the size in 2D, but forget the thickness of the wood. So it turned out that for the hand part, it is too thick to fit any rings I have 🙁

1. Knowing what you know now, if you were to start over again, would you make any changes to your original design design? What is advice that you would send to your former self?

If I could start all over again, I would change my design accordingly. Double check whether the different pieces and join in the way I want, also choose to use a wood board with a different thickness that could fit my rings.

2. If you were to build a similar project, what would you keep the same from this project? What would be different?

I find that the joint I used this time is quite tight and fits well. I think I could use similar joint or similar techniques for other projects. I would also like to try more different kinds of joint and unique shapes if using the CNC again, since I find that CNC is really good at cutting some weird and unique shapes.

This project is about making a tiny food tray from the very beginning using different machines and tools. It’s really fun to make something using my own hands though the tray is a little bit too tiny for real usage.

Fabrication

Several machines and tools are used during the fabrication process, involving the band saw, drill press, router, finishing oil and a lot of sanding.

Band Saw:

The band saw is used to cut the basic shape of the cutting board. I cut the outline appearance of my board, for those parts that have sharp curves, I used reliving curves that helped me to turn the saw easily and have batter curves.

When using this machine, I found out that making smooth curves is harder than I thought. Since the saw is really narrow, it’s very sensitive of the turns, I have to turn the wood greatly, sometimes more than 90 degrees to get a smooth curve I want.

Also, one flaw I made with this machine is that I started the cutting in a big angle, not being able to control the saw perfectly, I cut into the shape I wanted. Andy told me later that the better way is to start the cutting at small angles, cut it from parallel. After getting to know this trick, my later cuttings are much better.

Drill Press:

The drill press is used for making holes on the wood. There are different sizes to choose from. This machine is not hard to use. The time used for set up is much longer than the real drilling process. After setting up everything and fixing the wood, pressing the drill is easy and intuitive. I didn’t need to press as hard as I thought when drilling the hole, and I can speed up the drilling process simple by pressing a bit harder.

There is a special sound when the wood piece is drilled through, also my hand holding the reel can also feel it. So, it’s easy to find out whether the hole is complete.

Disc Sander & Belt Sander:

These two sanders are used to sand the straight side face or outer curves. I didn’t use the belt sander this time, but I used the disc sander a lot to shape my curves. This machine is very useful in making beautiful curves that the band saw might not cut.

One thing I found out when using the disc sander is that if I kept sanding the same position for too long, the wood turns black. This is might because that the temperature turns high and burnt the wood. So, I need to keep moving the wood piece when using this machine.

Oscillating Spindle Sander:

This machine can be used to sand holes and inner curves that the disc sander can’t cover. There are multiple radius of the sanders to choose when sanding different size of the holes or curves.

This machine is not hard to use, but it’s not that stable and keep shaking when it’s turned on, so I need to press harder to hold the wood piece. Another thing I found out when using is that, when the dust collector is turned on, it would keep inhaling air at the center of the spindle. So, if the radius is small, the dust collector might inhale the wood and makes it difficult to change position or lift.

Random Orbital Sander:

This sander can sand the surface of the wood. By changing sanding paper of different grits, the sander can have various of outcomes. This random orbital sander is much heavier than I thought, and it’s also not so stable since it’s rotating the sanding paper in high speed.

One thing happened when I was using this sander was that I fix the wood on the table, but I made it too hard that the side face of my piece is damaged by the fixer. So, I needed to use the oscillating spindle sander again for the side face.

Sanding Papers & Blocks:

I used sanding papers and blocks of different grit to smooth the edges and the side faces. I used 240pp, 320pp, 360pp and 600pp. As the grits get higher number, the surface becomes smoother. And it’s really exhausting for sanding by hands!!!

before sanding                                                       after sanding

Router:

The router is used for cutting the edge of the wood piece in order to get rid of the sharp angle and have cute edges. There are many different types of edge to choose from, I just choose the normal rough one, which fits my piece. I used the router for one side of the edges and both sides of the hole. I tried and practiced on a sample piece to test the height of bit before having that on my wood.

I think the router is the most difficult machine to use in this whole project. I have to hold the machine myself, since the router is heavy and it moves along the edge, it’s not stable at all. Also, I can’t see the exact situation when shaping the edges.

During the process, I burnt several places. Also, after reposition my piece to route the other half, the height of the bit changed a little itself, thus the edge shape is not the same for the two halves. I spent a lot more time on sanding the edges due to that.

Finishing:

Mineral oil and wax are used for the finishing. This part is the easiest during the project. All I have to do is to pour the oil onto the wood and clean it up afterwards. There’s no much space for me to make mistakes. The wood color changed a lot after the finishing.

Design

I drew several basic patterns on the class, and just picked a good-looking one. After seeing my classmates’ design, I thought about about shapes and drew a whale. I spent quite a long time deciding to adapt the original one or the cute whale. The origin design won over the animal at last because I think the ring shape can be used as handles or lift something round, like an orange or a tomato.

When making the design onto the wood, I found it really hard to draw the symmetric pattern, luckily, the final piece looks quite symmetric and balance.

Reflections

1. Knowing what you know now, if you were to start over again, would you make any changes to your original design design? What is advice that you would send to your former self?

I would try to design something a bit harder to make. Since my piece is rather round and all about curves, it was not difficult to cut and sand. I think I would design more elements, like corners, angles and small shapes.

Advice would be that I can challenge myself a bit more, and accept the fact that there would definitely have mistakes and flaws during the fabrication. Not everything in my mind can be carried out perfectly. Plans can’t keep up with changes. And also, remember to pick a larger piece of wood from the very beginning 🙂

2. If you were to build a similar project, what would you keep the same from this project? What would be different?

I would keep the ring shape of this project, this shape is really handy and good-looking, the process of making it was fun, too. However, I would change to shape of the upper part, adding more designs to it. I’d also like to change the edges, the edges used in this project was the normal round one. I want to try some new edges using different bits of the router. Furthermore, I can try different shape of holes instead of the round one made directly from the drill press.