Tuesday, September 3, 2013

Quick Project - Children's Blocks


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The pace of publication around this blog has been slow of late.  It's near the end of summer here, and very hot and humid in my shop with no air conditioning.  Vacation season has now pretty well come and gone, and hopefully there is only another month or so of hot weather.  But enough excuses for why I haven't been publishing enough articles.  I have the remedy - an article!

 My wife was hosting a baby shower for a friend, and as a shower activity she wanted the attendees to decorate some children's blocks for the mother-to-be.  These blocks are just meant to be decorative, not played with, so there is no need to make them out of maple or anything.  I made them out of spruce.

We decided on a size of a 2 in cube.  I started with a construction grade spruce 2x4.  I joint one side flat and plane the other parallel in my thickness planer.



Then I cut the 2x4 in half lengthwise, and glue the two halves together to get the thickness I need.  


I don't have quite enough of that 2x4 on hand to make the number of cubes I need, so I also glued up 3 layers of scrap 3/4 inch spruce I had to make up the difference.


 Once this is done, I rip and plane all the stock down to the final width and thickness of 2 inches.  Then I set up a stop block and use my crosscut sled to make the repeated cuts to final length of 2 inches.  Note that the stop block does not extend between the blade and the fence.  This keeps the cutoff piece from potentially getting jammed between them.



Some final sanding, and these blocks are ready to send to the baby shower!



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