Making custom coasters

Over the summer I've been experimenting with various woodworking projects, and one which I made on something of a whim was a set of coasters. I thought it'd be fun to take some thin strips of different-colored wood, glue them together (laminate them), cut out short pieces, then glue those pieces together in a pin-wheel, like this:

Woods used are whenge (black), jatoba (brown), maple (white), and purpleheart.

Here they are after I leveled out the slight differences in thickness in the wood strips and applied a finish (on top of a few cutting boards I also made):

The mineral oil in the background is for the cutting boards, for these I used a spray-on tung oil finish.

They came out looking pretty good, but I'd underestimated how much wood doing the spiral would take, so from my initial, roughly 24-inch-long piece of laminated wood strips I got a grand total of two coasters. However, they were thick enough that a friend suggested cutting them in half to make four…which I proceeded to do in possibly the dumbest, hardest, least-efficient way by using the reciprocating saw I'd acquired as part of a package deal when I bought my first power tools back in November (and hadn't used until now).

Have I mentioned I don't own a vice?

Though even if had it wouldn't have helped much, as I discovered when I built a Frankenstein-ian contraption of various clamps and pieces of wood to hold the coasters as I cut them. My attempts to secure them usually lasted a couple of seconds before the oscillating action of the reciprocating saw worked them loose resulting in a lot of awkwardly re-clamping coasters, but it somehow – incredibly – resulted in two sets of roughly-equal thickness coasters with a remarkably straight cut across them.

They're definitely not perfect (even after some more sanding and smoothing), and it was mostly a lesson in what not to do, but y'know, sometimes those are helpful. They might still work as coasters (I haven't really tried), they do look pretty, and it was just a spur-of-the-moment project, so it's all good in the end. Just part of the learning process! A hui hou!

On the difference between gasoline and electric chainsaws

Around the time I moved in last year I realized I was going to need a lawn mower, and also that (for the first time in my life) I was in a position where owning power tools made sense. I hate dealing with gasoline and internal combustion engines and the house has solar panels, so electric was the obvious way to go for a lawn mower. After some deliberation I settled on Ryobi, which fit my needs (and budget) as a DIY-er rather than a professional tradesman. I've been pretty happy with the self-propelled mower I got, along with a number of power tools for woodworking.

One thing I didn't have much need for was a chainsaw, due to there not being many large trees on my parents' property. In May, however, someone I know in Puna who'd heard I was getting into woodworking through a mutual friend reached out to say he'd had some trees come down during some stormy weather in March, and asked if I wanted some of the wood if I'd come cut it up. I said yes to free wood, and while I started out using his landlord's gas chainsaw I knew I'd eventually need one of my own to cut the wood further when I got it home. And that's how I became the owner of a 16" Ryobi electric chainsaw, and had opportunity to try both gas and electric saws recently.

The difference in volume is the obvious point of comparison; I've never been fond of what I can only term the aggressively angry whine of a gas chainsaw revved up. The electric version isn't silent, but the noise it produces is primarily from the chain moving around the blade, and it is a lot quieter – you barely need hearing protection at all.

A less obvious difference is how an electric chainsaw is always ‘on,’ essentially. With a gas chainsaw you have to explicitly start it. This can be an involved process if it hasn't been used in a while, and at minimum requires giving the starting pull-cord a couple of pretty good yanks. It's a point of friction, so you'd rather not do it too often – yet once it's running you want to minimize time spent not cutting, since it's burning gas while idling. This inherent tension makes cutting up a fallen tree tricky since it's an iterative process: you usually can only make so many cuts before needing to move the now-separated branches out of the way so you can reach more parts of the tree. (To be fair, this is based what I encountered doing it solo ­– someone to help move branches out of the way would alleviate this somewhat.)

With an electric chainsaw, however, it's trivial to make a single cut, move a branch, make a cut, etc., in ways that would be really inefficient while burning gas. If I were a professional lumberjack or arborist I'd probably still have reason to be using a gas chainsaw, but for occasional home use like cutting up a single downed tree it's a much more pleasant experience.

Anyway, we'll see what comes of all this cypress wood I've acquired. The trees were clearly healthy and just went down in the storm, as they were still sopping wet when I cut them up even months after falling. From what I've read they'll need to dry for some time before I can really use the wood, but I'm looking forward to eventually making use of them. Future projects, perhaps. A hui hou!

Creating props for the game table: crafting an alien laser weapon from scratch

We're fast approaching the end of the spring semester, and I swear I've been doing things besides teaching and woodworking this year…but I have another project to show off. This one's a bit different, since it came about from an RPG campaign I'm playing in. A friend of mine has been running a years-long series of campaigns in the same homebrew setting using a number of different game systems where the events of one campaign become the background and history for the next, as the world changes and adjusts based on the players' actions. Perhaps I'll talk about it more at some point, but in the current campaign (using the Draw Steel system) we found ourselves fighting off a murderous hit squad of a mysterious alien race from the heavens, who fought with weapons of yellow light.

One of those weapons which my character recovered after we survived the attack was described as a laser chakram which could be thrown like a boomerang and also used to fight hand-to-hand (perfect for my sneaky dagger-wielding Shadow). As I was driving home after the session, I suddenly found an idea of what it might look like popping into my head…and then found I couldn't get it out of my head. It took me most of a weekend working obsessively to fashion it out of wood and paint, but I think the result is well worth it.

A chakram would normally be a single circular piece of metal, but in my head I saw an idea of a two-part weapon which could be split into semicircles for hand-to-hand fighting, then combined into one for throwing. I haven't done this yet, but I'd like to eventually countersink some magnets in the two bases so that they can snap together and simulate my vision for it. I realize it's hard to tell the scale in these pictures, but I can comfortably fit a hand into each half to hold on to it.

This is actually the first woodworking project I did without a pattern to follow (before the ones I mentioned in an earlier post), and it's remarkable how straight the path from my head to finished product was. I had to buy a router to trim away wood to make the laser “blades” stick out from the thicker board, and it turned out to work pretty much exactly like I'd expected it to (I'd been planning on getting one anyway, this was just a good reason to speed it up). Making the round cuts required a jigsaw, one of my favorite power tools but also one I hadn't had much occasion to use before. I realized after I'd made the cuts that I had a better jigsaw blade for fine cutting than the default one which came with the saw, so they could be slightly better, but as long as you don't look too closely it's fine.

Here's a shot of them on the campaign map. And yes, the laser portions do glow in the dark – this is me we're talking about, after all (you can just see a hint of it in this photo). It took several attempts over a few days, but I eventually figured out a way to mix my yellow glow-in-the-dark pigment with a regular yellow pigment in such a way as to look good in both light and darkness. I also took the chance to use some of the metallic paints sitting around in my paint collection, since I don't usually have much use for them in my paintings. The semi-random circuitry-inspired detailing was a late addition as they were coming together to break up the visual monotony of the design, and I'm really happy with how it turned out.

This was a very interesting project for me with how I didn't really plan it, it just sort of…happened. I did feel a bit like one of Dwarf Fortress's dwarfs forging an artifact in the grip of a Strange Mood, hauling materials to a workshop and laboring on a great project until it's finished (fitting, in a way, for my character who is also a dwarf). I haven't been similarly inspired again yet, but it did sort of open my eyes to what I could accomplish with what I have. Will there be more like this in the future? We'll find out, I guess! A hui hou!

Edit (4/29/26): It took some work, but I managed to get some photos of the blades glowing in low light:

It's very hard to get the same effect in a photo compared to seeing it, but hopefully this gives a feel for what it's like.

End table improvements

I have been doing things besides woodworking this year, but I did get into it rather heavily and still have several projects to show off. One I finished mid-March is another end table using the same pattern as the first one I made. I actually started this one back in December not long after finishing the first one, but got interrupted by my family arriving and wasn't able to finish it until March (which led to some interesting differences, as I improved both my skills and equipment in the meantime). 

Whereas for the first one I used all pine, for this one I used a mixture of pine (for the legs and stretchers), red oak (for large flat surfaces including the top, drawer, and bottom shelf), and fir (which…you can't actually see in these photos, but it's essentially trim on the sides). I was a little worried at first that the colors would clash and I might need to do some staining, but the oak and pine actually came out looking fairly well-matched in the end. (The fir's a little off, but, well, live and learn…)

Here you can see the first table (on the left) next to the second one. There's a definite improvement in my opinion. The first one is functional, and the proportions generally work, but it's not the prettiest thing I've ever made. I wasn't paying much attention to the wood I used in it, and while I personally like the look of pine the color and patterns are kind of a mess, and it's got screws visible all over (though they might be hard to see in the photo).

In the meantime between starting and finishing the second table, I made a few upgrades to my workshop. For one thing, I got a pocket hole jig, which allowed me to hide the screws holding it together away from sight (by screwing in at an angle rather than straight into a surface). I had to do a little trial-and-error to get that working, but I'm quite happy with how it came out. I also got both a miter saw and a table saw in the interim, which let me make much better cuts than with the circular saw I was using (though there are still a few wonky cuts from the early stages of construction which I couldn't fix without completely tearing it apart and starting over).

Overall it's a big improvement, and while I think I could do even better now it's satisfying to see my progress already. I still have a lot to learn, but it's nice to see that I'm getting better. I don't have any plans to make more of these at the moment (though being able to start out with a table saw would be a huge help), but the skills I've been honing transfer, and I've got plenty more ideas for things to make. A hui hou!

Farewell gifts (and geese)

In addition to the larger furniture pieces I showed off in my previous post, I've been making a number of smaller woodworking projects too. Two friends of mine are both moving away from Hawaii in the near future, so I put my newfound skills to the test to make them some farewell gifts.

For my friend Mark, I wanted to try an end-grain cutting board after watching a video on how to make them. Basically, you glue a bunch of strips of wood together (all cut along the grain, or “rip cut”), then cut them in strips across the grain (“cross cut”) and flip them up 90° so that the end face of the board is made up of the end grain faces of each piece (the end grain is where you can see the rings). I haven't been able to test it myself yet (for reasons of time), but from what I've heard this results in a more durable cutting board than simply leaving those strip glued together to make an edge grain cutting board, though it's also more work (and has more wood lost to kerf from making more cuts). Experienced woodworkers can make all kinds of fascinating patterns by the selection, arrangement, and cutting angles of various kinds of wood, but the basic premise is relatively simple.

After wetting it down to “raise the [wood] grain” to get a smoother sanded finish.

The project still took me over a week, since I discovered the miter gauge on my table saw isn't really accurate enough for repeated cross cuts like I needed to make. I ended up with a bunch of wood strips which, when glued together, weren't all quite the same thickness. There are some tools which could potentially solve this easily, but I don't have them, so I had to spend hours trying to sand down and smooth out the irregularities. (Going forward I intend to preemptively solve this by making a cross cut sled, a simple jig made using plywood and some screws which should make getting repeatable cross cuts much easier.)

And here it is after applying a protective mineral oil and wax finish.

Anyway, after a lot of sanding and small cosmetic fixes I got it to a state where I'm mostly happy with it. It should serve as a cutting board, at least, even if it's not perfect. I wanted to make something using local woods as a reminder of Hawaiʻi, so I used koa and ʻōhiʻa (plus some African padauk for a pop of orange contrast. The edges and center are koa, with ʻōhiʻa to either side of it down the middle and then padauk just inside the edges.) I haven't decided on whether it'd be better with things like a juice groove or edge handles, but since Mark's still got some time before he leaves I'll probably just ask him.

For my friend Josh, whom I worked with at my job with NEON last year, I decided to make a little coaster from some scraps of Phillipine mahagony I had from another project (which I'll reveal at some point). A few years ago I bought some novelty coasters designed to look like little wooden pallets, and I thought something like that would make a practical gift.

Raw materials after cutting them out, and the inspiration.

The strips of wood I had were slightly wider than in the original coasters, so I went for a solid flat face on the top. The result came out looking pretty good, in my opinion!

And since Josh enjoyed seeing the nēnē while we were working up in the natural area reserve, I pulled out my wood burning kit and doodled a quizzical nēnē from a photo I took while visiting the Hakalau Forest National Wildlife Refuge last year. This project was a lot quicker, and only took me a few hours over the course of a day.

The inspiration…

…and the (slightly off-center) result.

While the occasion of their creation is for less-than-happy reasons, it was a lot of fun to stretch my creative muscles for these projects and make something new. I like making practical furniture, but it's also nice to make smaller practical (and decorative) wood pieces. I've got more things to show off here at some point too, so stay tuned! A hui hou!

Getting started in woodworking

I have a lot of hobbies. Some (including me) might say too many, since there's not nearly enough time in the [day|year|arbitrary amount of time] to enjoy all of them. So ,what have I done in the past few months on top of moving/preparing for a family visit/starting a new teaching position? Picked up another hobby, of course!

Yes, that's right. I haven't mentioned it yet in part because I've been so busy, but back in December I started trying my hand at woodworking. It's not entirely new to me – I did some woodworking in 4-H in my teens, and helped out with carpentry jobs around the house growing up – but it's certainly been a long time, and I had to relearn some of the fundamentals pretty quickly.

I also hadn't said anything about it yet because I wanted a few finished projects to show off. Between the aforementioned things keeping me busy my progress in getting things done has been somewhat uneven, and I wanted more to show than a bunch of in-progress photos. (Although having watched a number of woodworking videos now, I'm thinking it might be fun to make my own showing off the process of building something.)

My very first project, completed around mid-December, was this end table/nightstand piece. Following a plan I found online I built it out of pine with little but a circular saw, a power drill, and an impact driver. It was something of an achievement in ignorance; given what I've learned since then it's remarkable that I only ended up wasting one board while making it and that it came out as good at it did. There's a lot I would do differently now (especially now that I have more specialized tools), but for what it was it came out remarkably good.

Making that piece was sort of a trial-by-fire learning process, as I re-learned concepts like kerf (how much wood is removed when sawing), cutting straight lines, and joining wood pieces together. It was simultaneously confidence-boosting and confidence-draining, as I realized the extent of my ignorance. Thankfully, my brother Joel (who's been woodworking for years) shared an online course with me, The Weekend Woodworker, which introduces key concepts and techniques through a series of directed projects. I've been working through it since then and it's been really helpful as I learn and refine new skills.

The first thing I built from the course was this mobile workbench, which has been essential for everything since. For my first project up above I'd used two old sets of shelves which I found in the downstairs workshop as a working area, but this workbench (and its large surface) makes things so much easier. It's sturdy, and the ability to roll it around to wherever I need it is incredibly helpful. (I had to upgrade the lighting in the workshop as the bulbs down there when I moved in weren't really up to the task of illuminating it, and being able to move my working area around for better light is great.)

Using that workbench (and some new tools), I managed to get this little patio table finished before my family arrived at the end of December. This was an exercise in getting to know the miter saw, which makes cross cuts a whole lot easier than a circular saw! I used Douglas fir for this project, as I quite like the look of it, and chose to leave the table unpainted. Some people find softwoods undesirable to look at, but I think they can be quite beautiful when properly finished (though hardwoods have their own allure, too). Actually, writing this reminds me that I bought a dowel to use to add the look of some fake dowel joinery to the legs as part of an optional enhancement, which I should get back to one of these days (though functionally, it's finished).

The next project from the course was this bench, which is also made of fir and pine, but stained to look like hardwood. This was another lesson in precision and accuracy, since it's made of interleaved slats with spaces between them that all need to join precisely together. I started this project between when my family left and when I started teaching in early January…and it then took nearly a month to finish between how busy I was getting up to speed teaching and how many coats of pre-stain, stain, and finish it took. All of which were annoyingly difficult to apply, due to the large surface area of all those slats and the constrained volume between them. It came out looking pretty good, though! I was skeptical about the stain at first, but it's grown on me.

I have a few more projects I've completed (plus some on the way), but I need to cut this post short in order to head off to an observing run on the UH 2.2-m telescope tonight. I'll definitely have more to share in the future, though. I'm really enjoying the process of woodworking; it's a good fit for my 3D spatial reason capabilities, I love the smell of freshly-cut wood, and I love the idea of making things that are both beautiful and practical. I've felt the siren song of building practical things call to me in the past on the rare occasions I'd visit Home Depot, and being able to finally indulge it is an incredible feeling. A few friends have even expressed interest in commissions, so we'll see where this all goes in the future. A hui hou!