One of the major reasons I love woodworking is to build things of emotional value, in this age of rampant consumerism. Handmade heirloom wooden toys are something no made-in-china plastic electronic gadget can beat in terms of value and the sheer amount of fun a kid can have.

I wanted to build classic toys since I took up this hobby in 2006. I had to wait till my friends started having kids, but in the meantime I made a bunch of furnitures and gizmos to justify my addiction for tools. I did learn enough to design according to my time at hand, and turn it into a product. The hardest part is figuring out the exact sequence of operations. It is not uncommon to do everything well and then glue on the wrong side right before the final assembly !

I got this idea from John Michael Linck’s riding airplane model. I only needed to know the exterior dimensions and I designed the parts according to my own plan. I just hope my friend’s kid finds it comfortable when she starts walking in a few months.

For the curious, the wood is softwood pine. The top wing span is 24″ and the fuselage is about 28″. For the wheels I used omnidirectional casters from home depot. A jigsaw was needed to cut the curved fuselage. The round profile of the wood is done in a router after corner rounding on the drill press with a sanding drum. Joinery is mostly glue since I wanted to minimize screws on a toy. I hope it will hold.

Can’t wait to see this toy in action early next year. Maybe I will see a pilot’s logbook with imaginary flight plans very soon.

My desk at office is raised high because I often like to work standing up. The ergo folks are good and I feel quite comfortable in that setup.

It bites when working from home. My only desk being occupied by my personal laptop, the office macbookpro goes on the bed and I am in a pretty bad ergo position when sitting on my chair. I could make a wooden table specifically for work, but it would take up valuable space, and won’t still be adjustable. There gotta be a simple solution but I kept procrastinating doing anything about it. Till yesterday.

I got a light box for my color slides and got the urge to bring out my projector and enjoy viewing them on the wall. Again I faced the table issue, ‘coz the projector needs to be adjusted at the right height to enjoy a good quality show.

And then it hit me – a wooden plank on top of a sturdy tripod can work as a super flexible platform.

Quickly implemented my design at the woodshop around midnight and after the epoxy dried, it looks like it is working absolutely fine. A small piece of velcro can ensure the laptop does not slip. A bungee cord can secure the projector.

The most important construction part here is obviously the attachment of the quick release (QR) plate to the board. Some fairly heavy and expensive gadgets are gonna be on top so I had to design this part carefully. A standard 1/4″ nut is equivalent to a standard tripod socket, and it is pretty small, so it must be installed at the center of a foot square plank very rigidly. I drilled out a 1/4″ hole and then using a forstner bit, drilled a flat bottomed hole just big enough to fit the 1/4″ nut, till just a millimeter from boring through the other side. As a result the nut could sit a mm away from the QR plate, separated by the wood. It is now secured from the bottom and sides and I poured two-part epoxy on top of it to completely lock it in place.

My first serious attempt in oil painting on canva-paper turned out a pleasant surprise. What an amazing medium and workability. Love the fact that I can paint right out of the tube and one color can go over another easier than in watercolor. Painting in watercolor, in comparison, seems like a minimalist approach, and quite a lot different than oil, with its own charm. I guess I will keep working on both mediums.

I find myself very much hooked to woodturning by now, so I decided to have a better lathe. Thanks to craigslist I sold off my earlier central machinery lathe within 24 hours of posting an ad.

I was deciding between the Jet and Rikon mini lathes and visited the San Carlos Woodcraft today morning with Bhaskar. The shop guy recommended the Rikon for its better feature set over the Jet, and a $50 discount on the Rikon made them both equally priced. They didn’t have the Rikon in stock, but booked one for me at the Dublin Woodcraft. We drove for 40 min to go there and found it to be a bigger store. There was also a free demo of sharpening woodturning chisels by a local artisan, and it was a perfect tutorial for both of us at that moment.

Here is the Rikon model I got.

Came home with a lighter wallet but lots of anticipation to turn bunches of spindles and possibly bowls in the coming weekends. Keep checking my woodturning gallery often.

Woodwork projects with Bhaskar are without doubt getting ever more interesting. The proof is now at hand. With a couple scrap maple and a single piece of walnut from a wood shop made this project possible in a weekend.