wood+resin redux

This year, I decided to try my hand at hand-making some Christmas gifts. One of the ideas I came up with was to use a wood and clear resin fusion, which I have experimented with in a couple past projects, to make a bottle opener. This one was fairly straightforward, once I worked out a design to use. First, I cut the end off of an existing dollar-store bottle opener, to have a blank that I could encase in wood. Next, I put a piece of scrap hardwood in the vise and pinched it together at 3 points, snapping the wood and revealing interesting, jagged grains along the split. Wrapping one end of the piece in packaging tape and standing it upright creates a good mould to pour resin into; I mixed up a batch, poured it, and pushed the remaining wood end into the top, to create a single piece.

After shaping the piece down , I cut a slot in the top for the opener blank to slide into, and used two brass rivets, similar to those found in kitchen knives, to secure it in place. I am somehow missing a photo of the final, riveted piece; since I gave it away as a gift, it’s too late to get another photo!

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To make up for the brevity of this entry, here’s another (on-hold) project: I started work on a cat tree at about this time as well. I got the platform design sussed out immediately -- a piece of plywood, some cushioning foam, and a piece of scrap carpet, and my test platform was looking and feeling great.

I also wanted the cat tree to have an organic, interesting shape to it -- to this end, I picked up a couple nicely sized Doug Fir limbs from my parent’s house, and got to work finishing them. Cutting the main post posed an interesting problem -- I had to cut two faces into each end of the limb, such that the bottom cut would be parallel to the top cut (entailing that the top platform would be level with the floor). I tried a lot of ideas for getting this perfect, including borrowing a laser level to mark a line all around the top top cut, but in the end it came down to trial-and-error to get it right.

Next, I chiseled off most of the bark of the limbs, but left on a lot of this interesting, scaly underlayer before varnishing, as I thought this would really enhance the natural feel of the end product. It was at this point, however, that I started to notice a lot of little bore-holes in the wood -- it turns out my limbs had lots of little wood-boring beetle larvae in them -- I actually cut through one on accident while cutting down my pieces. I guess there are ways of killing the larvae, but I was grossed out and didn’t want anything to do with them -- I ended up throwing out the limbs, and putting a (temporary) hold on the project. That’s it for now!