too many projects

I guess I should start to hire some woodchucks for my little woodshop. Since I'm starting to get a little much on my hands to handle and my garage looks like a lumberyard.

First of all I'm now 13 days late to deliver a part of my valentines gift to my darling of wife. Since I can't figure out how to finish this project.

Basically I promised her a little guinea pig cage, so that Mojito can 'roam' the 'great outdoors', meaning our backyard and be save from Hawks and puppies.

The initial part of building the frame was rather simple and straight forward and I literally used every power tool in my shop for this. Which is exciting, that they are all playing together.

pairing the lab joints, with one of my christmas gifts

they are getting more and more precise

turning the tenons on the lathe, as an exercise to repair our chair-legs.

all parts are cut and ready to be glued up

frame is ready, now how to stop the guinea pig from escaping?

But I'm stuck at the point of adding some form of wire mesh, to make it look nice and safe. This has been the stand of the last 13 days and there is no end in sight. Which makes me feel rather bad.

The second project was to re-saw a part of a tree, for my friend martin and flatten the surface (so that he can polish it) This was done in about 6 hours and not to bad, and promptly maxed out the capacity of my bandsaw.

martins mystery wood, which smells strangely like cat urine...

building a small sled to keep all my fingers save and sound

cutting the first slice on the bandsaw. This piece of wood is about 14"/35cm heigh.

all cut into 1 1/2" slices and ready to be flattened

Last but not least, after 2 years of research and planning I decided to buy the first parts of the stereo system, I really want to have. Meaning speakers and amplifiers, but these need an audio rack. Apparently at a depth of 20", my amplifiers are now to deep and to heavy for normal audio furniture. Which means I need to build my own (or buy one for thousands of $$$, which I refuse).

So now I'm designing my first piece of furniture and hope it will work out ok, which will be a long process and let's me work with some new wood, called poplar. Which is rather cheap and affordable.

working with purple hearts for accents. The 'drill' is btw a mortiser, which drills square holes

first 30 mortises and 30 tenons cut and paired. Again using one of my beloved chisels

a first try at the legs, using a lock miter joint to simulate 3x2" wood. Since it's impossible to find in this size

glueing up the first leg

using a small block pane to cleanup the joints. Not to happy with the legs at this point in time and I really need some more lie-nielsen planes.

So at this point I invested about 200$ in poplar and generated quite a bit of saw-dust, but have no real results. Besides 5 legs, of which one is not really up to my standards and one cracked under clamp pressure. Which makes me rather nervous about trusting them with my amplifiers.