How to Price Your Work
We’ve gotta kick this one off with some sound business advice. For those of you that make things and sell them, David Picciuto explains a simple, logical way to calculate how much to charge:
Chess Board with Storage Drawer
Remember all of those chess pieces Jimmy DiResta milled and cast? Those aren’t much good without a board to play the game on, so this week Jimmy cranks out a pretty sweet one with a pull-out storage drawer. Building tricks abound here: I’m digging his wedge-based glue-up jig for the squares, using pushpins as detail clamps, and the way he creates those classy corners:
DIY Dog Hole Clamps
Side-action cam clamps that you can drop into dogholes are pretty handy. They’re also fiendishly expensive. So Izzy Swan figured out a way you can make your own, for just a few bucks. Here he builds two sets, one out of plywood, the other from oak, to see if there are any performance differences:
Trimming a Mirror with Aluminum
The great thing about aluminum is that you can cut it with common woodworking tools. Here Steve Ramsey continues his bathroom renovation and shows you how easy it is to integrate aluminum into a woodworking project:
Wall-Mounted Jewelry Storage System
Also continuing with her bathroom spruce-up, and coincidentally also incorporating aluminum, here April Wilkerson knocks out a series of DIY wall-mounted jewelry holders. I love the bit at the end when her husband walks in:
A Man of Many Vises
With his new, beefy workbench put together, Jay Bates now needs to kit it out with vises. He’s opted for not two, but three: A tail vise, leg vise and an inexpensive, DIY pipe clamp version of a twin screw vise:
A Tiny House for the Alaskan Wilderness
Ana White reveals the design of her and husband Jacob’s movable tiny house, specifically designed so that they can execute in-the-wilderness builds while bringing their two kids along, housing them in comfort, and feeding a crew. We get to see some of Ana’s design skills here, as she’s had to incorporate a couple of features atypical of a tiny house due to their needs. At the end we get a sneak peek of the structure they’ve already roughed out, and Ana’s enthusiasm is contagious!
360-Degree Shop Tour
This is so cool! This week Bob Clagett gives us a tour of his shop, but shot the entire video with his 360-degree camera, so you can look all around his shop at will. If you watch it on your phone, there’s no need to click and drag–just rotate your phone around and it’s like you’re there.
The Paulk Standing Desk is in the Works
Just a teaser video from Ron Paulk this week, who gives us a glimpse of his next project: A standing desk. Can’t wait to see how this one turns out, and based on the drawing he shows us, I’m very curious to see how he’ll engineer some ridigity into that center section.
One From the Archives: The Samurai Carpenter’s Top 10 Woodworking Books
I was surprised to learn that master builder Jesse de Geest learned much of his craft by reading books and then practicing; with his skillset, it seemed more like he’d gone through multiple apprenticeships. Here he runs down his top ten tomes:
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