woodworking – Nothing In It

Bento Box from Maple

Posted on 2025.11.142025.11.13 by Elliott Evans

A while back, probably a year or two ago, I bought six small-ish (4 inches across) “Black/Red” melamine dishes from one of the Asian markets here in Pittsburgh. See, the problem with most bento is that the tray inside is so big that you can’t actually fit it in the dishwasher. I figured that if I got a few small dishes, then made a box to hold them, I could use the collection as a bento box. Once I’d used the dishes to hold lunch “courses”, I could pull them out and line them up in the dishwasher rack.

Here is what the box and lid look like with the dishes inside. You can see that the lid has a little lip around it, but it is basically the same construction as the body, only slightly larger. The corners are mitered, and the surfaces (lid surface, body floor) are rabetted to fit into dadoes in the lip/sides. There are no fasteners in the box, just glue and finish. I did most of the cutting and mitering on the band saw, and did the rabbets and dadoes on the router table.

The body interior is just a little bit larger and deeper than the bowls themselves. The interior is about 12.125″ by 8.125″ and 2 inches deep. The maple is 0.375″ thick, so it is sturdy enough to hold the densest of lunches.

The panels that make up the floor and lid surface are actually “book matched”. I started with a 7/8″-thick rough board, then re-sawed it into two thinner boards using my band saw. Then, a few passes through the planer to smooth it out. That’s why the grain doesn’t match up exactly, because my wavy resaw cuts meant more grain was lost to the planer.

The entire box is finished with “General Finishes” brand ‘Wood Bowl Finish‘, which used to be marketed as ‘Salad Bowl Finish’. This is an oil-based urethane finish intended for food contact. They have taken care with the solvents so that once the finish is cured it is non-toxic and as safe as they can manage. It is much less stinky than the polyurethanes I tend to use, and it dries very hard like lacquer. Due to the (intentional) loose fit of the panels in the edges/walls, the box is not water-tight, but the wood is thoroughly sealed.

New Phone Tray

Posted on 2025.11.11 by Elliott Evans

Since I have a new phone, and it is not the same size as the old phone, I needed to make a new phone tray.

I made this from some 1/4″ cherry I had around after doing some re-saw work on a thicker cherry board from the Alben Sawmill. The sides are just tall enough to hold the phone, and the assembly is glued and pinned together with no fancy joinery. I left it all unfinished so it can age naturally in the sun. The cut-out at the bottom enables me to plug in a USB cord if I need to charge the phone or connect it to the Android Auto system. It also makes it possible to grab the phone and lift it out of the tray when needed. Can’t press the side buttons, but maybe that’s a good thing?

Underneath the tray is a metal clip that attaches the tray to the parking brake lever. The clip is screwed to a wooden block that is attached to the tray with removable adhesive strips. The other wood block keeps the tray level, which was a problem with the old tray that I fixed this time.

If you need a tray for your Unihertz Titan 2, but you don’t have the time or ability to do woodworking, you can get this perfect fit plastic tray at IKEA for $3. You will have to figure out a mounting system yourself, however.

Oshizushihako from Maple

Posted on 2025.11.06 by Elliott Evans

Oshizushi is any kind of sushi that has been pressed into shape, similar to the way that onigiri rice balls are pressed to form the rice into a hand-holdable mass. When I was in Toyama back in 2016 for the TV show, Yokkaichi’s mother made masuzushi as part of a large festive dinner. Masuzushi is a specialty of Toyama, and it is an oshizushi made in a round press. The press is lined with bamboo leaves and layered with rice and then fresh trout before it is pressed into a solid “cake” of sushi. The masuzushi is then cut into wedges like a regular cake and served. This dish is so iconic to Toyama that you can buy it in the train station as a souvenir.

Anyway, in order to make oshizushi of any kind, you need a press. I have a plastic press for making onigiri, but it is not good for making anything other than the triangular rice balls. The best presses are a kind of bottomless box, with a lid that slides inside like a piston. It does not have to be super-solid since you’re only applying finger pressure, but it should be fairly sturdy. The open bottom enables you to place the box (“hako” or “bako“) onto a sheet of nori or other flat surface, fill it with rice and other tasty stuff, then insert the lid and compress the ingredients into shape. You can then lift the box from the surface and use the lid to push the oshizushi out the bottom.

I made my oshizushihako from some maple I bought at the Alben Sawmill and machine-planed down to 5/8″ thickness. The corner joints are the large-fingered box joints that I see on most medieval Japanese boxes, and since I didn’t want my food to contact glue I secured the joints with copper nails. The piston lid is a flat piece of maple that is roughly 3″ x 4.24″ to follow the 1 by 1.414 ratio that is commonly seen in Japanese woodworking. This is also a good size for making onigirazu “rice sandwiches”.

Pressed cake of rice on a sheet of *nori*

Roasted chestnut *onigirazu* ready to serve

For best results, use hot freshly cooked rice and wet the box and lid thoroughly to keep the rice from sticking.

More “Pennsic Chairs”

Posted on 2025.10.012025.09.29 by Elliott Evans

Some friends of ours who were living right around the corner from us were about to move to Portugal. They had a bunch of lumber that they had been using for storage shelves in garage, and they asked me if I wanted it. Three of the pieces were 8-foot 1-by-12s, so I decided to use them to make three brand-new “Pennsic Chairs“. After this photo was taken, I put a few coats of finish on the chairs, and later wound up giving them away to other friends.

I realize now that for as many years as I have been making these chairs, I never posted detailed visual instructions. Let’s do that now.

First, I planed the lumber smooth, and cleaned up the edges. Mark a middle line 42 inches form one end (for the seat), and 54 inches from the other (for the back).

Next, on the back piece, 12 inches up from the middle line, mark a mortise about half the width of the lumber (so, 5 or so inches), centered, and a little more than the thickness of the lumber.

Then, on the seat piece, starting 12 inches down from the middle line, mark the tenon. It should be a little less than the width of the mortice, centered, and all the way from the start line down to the end.

Using a jigsaw, I cut out the mortise. It’s best to start by drilling a hole, then cut towards the edges in curves until you can cut clean on the line.

You can use the same saw, and cut the edges of the tenon on the seat piece. These are long cuts, so take your time.

It’s easier to cut the joinery with the lumber in one big piece, but now you can cut along the middle line and separate the two pieces. Use files and sandpaper to clean up all the cut edges, and maybe round over the corners a little bit.

Test the fit by sliding the tenon through the mortise and standing up your new chair against the floor. Now all it takes is some finish and waiting.

Weekend Woodturning Work

Posted on 2025.09.292025.09.28 by Elliott Evans

I bought a woodturning lathe more than ten years ago, but I set it up so rarely that I have not made very much progress on learning how to do anything interesting with it. There are three things that most people want to do with lathes: spindles, handles, and bowls. I will have plenty of use for spindles when I get back into making marudai, but they are not really a part of my woodworking needs. Handles don’t interest me very much because they are mostly a way for companies to sell you hardware you don’t really want to make tools you don’t really need. I don’t really need bowls, but bowls are cool, right? How hard can they be, right? They don’t have any hardware, so they won’t make you buy more stuff, right?

OK, so totally wrong on most counts. I had to buy a real chuck for the lathe so that I could start the exterior of the bowl using what is called a woodworm screw to hold the bowl blank steady. Then, of course I had to buy a special gouge, and special scrapers to cut the interior of the bowl. Then, of course I had to buy better jaws for my chuck so I could hold the size bowl I wanted to make. Also, the lathe spent so much time sitting around that I had to order a new drive belt from the lathe manufacturer because the old one was falling apart.

Anyway, bowls are still cool. A pain, and a risk to life and digits, but cool. The value of these handmade bowls justifies the hundreds of dollars I have spent on stuff to make them, right?

The first bowl is turned from some surplus ash. It is about seven inches in outer diameter and two inches tall. The foot was damaged during turning, but I just removed it with a chisel and sanded the bottom mostly smooth so it is hard to notice.

I really like the way the angled grain in the blank produces those cool ripples in the finished bowl. There’s some food-safe beeswax finish on the which really makes that grain pop, I think.

The next bowl was a spectacular failure and a waste of about an hour’s work. What happened was that after shaping the exterior and switching to the inside, the scraper caught (technical term) along the rim of the interior (visible in photo) and wrenched the bowl off of the chuck jaws, breaking the foot of the bowl. Then, when the spinning bowl hit the concrete of the shop floor, the rim broke.

I declared this bowl a loss and put it in the burn bin. It’s frustrating to spend time on something, and just look at that grain, and then throw it away, but I really could not figure out how to salvage it after so much of the foot was lost.

Luckily, I had one more blank to go. This one got started at some point, then I must have had problems with it, so it wound up on the shelf. I drilled out the center for the woodworm and got started. Learning from the two earlier bowls, I left a much beefier foot on the bottom so it did not fail even when I had problems with my tooling.

Third time lucky, I guess. I’m pretty happy with this one. No major problems, no major errors or failures, just a simple little bowl.

I mean, you can really see how much thicker and better supported the foot is on this one. It really gave me the stable grip the chuck needed for me to work the rest of the bowl.

I feel like I learned a lot during these three bowls, including how I have been possibly mis-using one of my tools. Now I have two usable bowls, too.

Cado Royal Shelf From Cherry

Posted on 2025.09.252025.09.23 by Elliott Evans

One of the wonderful mid-century modern things that came with the house we live in now is a “Cado Royal” wall unit in the upstairs den. This is a really great wall-hung modular shelving and storage system, but the pieces are now collectible and so it’s a pain to expand an existing installation to accommodate, say, an ever expanding media addiction. So, once I had the plant shelf all done with some cherry lumber left over, I decided to try my hand at making my own shelf.

The angle-y, peggy things are the support brackets. The 45-degree dowels slide into angled holes in the wall standards. The 90-degree dowel stubs go into hole sin the underside of the shelf and hold the shelf in place. As you might imagine, accuracy of measurement and placement is vital to this system working as intended. Here is what it looks like with my new shelf added to the existing installation:

The cherry will darken over time to match the teak or whatever that stuff is that the existing shelves are made of. I think my shelf is actually nicer than the others. The existing shelves are all veneered, whereas mine is solid wood. The ends of the existing shelves don’t show any end-grain!

Box for Feast Gear

Posted on 2025.09.192025.09.18 by Elliott Evans

At Pennsic this past year, during the discussion of “things we need in camp” that led to the shelves project, a friend offered to barter for a wooden box in which they could carry around their feast gear. A few weeks later I was in one of the DIY stores and bought a piece of lauan plywood that I thought might make a nice box. Lauan plywood has two smooth faces of thin veneer, sandwiching a single core layer of lightweight wood. It’s basically the wood equivalent of corrugated cardboard. As such, it is lightweight, reasonably durable, and attractively priced.

The interior of this lidded box is roughly 24 inches long, by 12 inches wide, by 6 inches deep. The lid fits fairly snugly. I added some surplus maple strips to the joins to hopefully boost its durability. Everything is glued together and reinforced with 23-gauge pins, but I figured a little bracing could not hurt. I put a light coat of stain on the surface to give it a little bit of water resistance.

This was a quick project, and I was awfully glad to be able to just go out into the garage and make a thing that somebody I know needed. Maybe I’ll make a few of these to hide some of the plastic storage boxes and random items we have sitting around in camp.

Box-shaped Armrest from Maple

Posted on 2025.09.152025.09.14 by Elliott Evans

A while back, I made an early-medieval kyousoku from poplar. That one is more what comes to peoples’ minds when Japanese floor-seated armrests are considered. However, in Traditional Japanese Furniture Kazuko Koizumi mentions another kind of armrest. “A sturdier, box-shaped armrest featuring feather-stuffed pads on top and usually storage space underneath emerged,” during the Muromachi/Momoyama period.

During Pennsic this year, I went over to the Alben sawmill and bought some excellent maple. Ray had already run it through the planer so it was pretty smooth, but it was still almost an inch thick. I knew that because of that thickness and because of the hardness of the maple, that my ability to make things out of this maple using the small selection of hand tools I had brought to Pennsic was going to be somewhat limited. I decided I would make a siple box, and this idea quickly developed into making a box-shaped armrest. I was able to get all the pieces cut, and and most of the joinery.

Once I got home, and had access to more tools and a sewing machine, I was able to finish shaping the pieces and assemble the armrest. I made a custom cushion out of cotton canvas and polyfill, and used to to upholster the lid of the box. I used copper nails to secure the joinery so it should be quite sturdy. given the density of the wood and its thickness, this completed box weighs more than ten pounds.

The inside of the box is roughly twelve inches by six inches, and four inches deep below the inner lid. I think it’s a bit smaller than the one in the image, but it’s a comfortable armrest when seated on the floor next to it, and I can fit a bowl and cup inside it.

It is not a comfortable seat, although you could probably park a midsize car on it.

Monitor Booster

Posted on 2025.09.12 by Elliott Evans

Here’s a silly little quick project that barely even rates a blog post, but here it is anyway. So I have this external monitor that I used to use for work back when I worked from home. You can see in the photo that if I have the tablet in its charging stand, it blocks the lower-right corner of the monitor. The monitor’s stand is not height-adjustable. I only needed to boost the monitor up by like 1.25″ to get it above the edge of the tablet.

Luckily, regular “l by” lumber is 3/4″ thick, so stacking two layers would get me 1.5″ of boost. I still had some of the same cherry-stain pine shelving that I made the little desk hutch out of, so it was just a mater of cutting one piece the same size as the footprint of the monitor stand, and making four little feet. The whole thing is just glued together, and I put some cork pads on the feet to make it just a little nicer.

Enjoy the reflection of my messy studio.

Phone / Tablet Stand

Posted on 2025.09.102025.09.13 by Elliott Evans

For a short period of time (ten weeks) I worked for a local Pittsburgh company with an office up in Cranberry. This was the first company I’ve ever worked for that handed me a smartphone on day 1 and said, “We don’t have desk phones any more. This is your phone.” I have worked for companies that did voice-over-IP through your computer, and I have worked for companies that just did calls through Teams, but never a mobile phone.

Consequently, this was the first job I ever had where I was sitting at my desk with two phones to keep track of. I have made a couple of wooden phone stands before, but never one wide enough to hold more than one phone at a time.

That’s all it is. I had a chunk of some kind of tropical lumber, and I cut it to shape. There’ a little bit of oil finish. Here’s how it looks with my personal phone and a small 8″ tablet.

It’s totally wide enough to support two or maybe three phones or one extra-large tablet. No, it’s not possible to charge the device if the USB port is at the bottom, but I don’t buy devices that are that power-hungry anyway.

I don’t have that job any more (My only regret is ever taking the job in the first place.), but I took my swanky stand with me when I left.