Meet the muddlers This is a mini muddler: for making short drinks. What is a muddler? A bartender’s tool for crushing leaves and berries so the juices can escape into your glass. Big brother muddler: for muddling or beating up intruders. Baseball bat muddler, for home runs. Carved muddler for hipsters, Or anyone who likes facets. Emergency muddler… Read More
Single serve mini speaker Today I opened a package that I had forgotten that I had ordered. It was a $0.76 mini chip amp from China. I wanted to test it, so I searched to see if I had any free drivers. Lo and behold I had a busted laptop from my brother’s college days. A few minutes with… Read More
Shop is now live I finally finished setting up my shop last night and posted the wallets I have been making recently. Let me talk about my goals with selling things here: I want to fund future projects. I spend a lot of my discretionary money on tools and supplies so that I can realize a vision. That gets… Read More
Coffee scoop proliferation I have enjoyed making coffee scoops lately. These are short and sweet compared to many of my projects. They have a beginning, middle, and end without much extra anywhere. In short, they are fun. Left is walnut, the roundest of the scoops. The middle two are hawthorn that my dad cut from the woods in… Read More
Small walnut coffee scoop I’ve started making spoons recently. This is one of my most recent: a little walnut coffee scoop. I carved this with a hatchet and 2 knives: my homemade carving knife and a morakniv hook knife. The process goes like this: Draw shape Use hook knife to hollow bowl Use axe to cut away everything that… Read More
A short stool for sitting on As I was building the small Welsh stick chair there was a time when the undercarriage was finished but the top wasn’t attached. Wouldn’t you know it, we sat on that thing all the time. We put coffee mugs on it; we set laptops on it; we used it as an end table wherever we… Read More
The carving knife part 2 In my previous post about my work on the carving knife I mentioned that I thought I had stumbled into a differential heat treat. But I wasn’t sure until I actually etched the blade. Well my ferric chloride arrived the other day. It comes with all kinds of fun tidbits on the bottle, like “caustic”… Read More
Faster 3D printing Let’s get this out of the way: 3D printers are awesome. I have had mine for about a year and a half and it has let me build fun and crazy things like my homemade keyboard. But 3d printers are obnoxiously slow. It makes sense; it’s the world’s tiniest glue gun putting down layer after… Read More
A pretentious carving knife The other day I finally figured out how to sharpen my hook knife and so I took a shot at making a spoon. In the end it turned out a little bit leaky. In this process I realized that I needed a decent carving knife for the outside. So that’s what I made. First I… Read More
What do you use chisels for? I have been getting my brother into woodworking. We went tool shopping yesterday and came out with a huge haul. Last night I was showing him how to flatten the backs of his chisels and he asked, “When would you want to hit the chisel with a hammer?” So I pulled out my chisels and… Read More