Knife block as practise

[Atso_J]

Without much experience and actually sucking at crafts in school back in the day I'm now trying to get into making stuff. To avoid blowing all my money on failures with serious quality wood I'm trying to scavenge suitable material whenever I hit the outdoors. Today I started putting together a knife block with two slots out of a piece of alder that had come down during a storm.

The first "error" I made was with the bandsaw when splitting the wood as the guide only guided the piece but somehow the blade went its own way. Nothing too serious that would affect the functionality.

So here's the progress so far:

Pieces cut and roughly sanded

Split, pinholes drilled and angle determined (=winged it)

All pieces bundled to wait for the next session

Next up: Carving of the slots and gluing the pieces together.

It's most likely not gonna be pretty, but if it stands and holds two knives I've reached my goal!

 

[Pie]

This looks like fun! Sounds like you have some tools at your disposal, which is always nice.

Did you make the pins?

 

[Atso_J]

This looks like fun! Sounds like you have some tools at your disposal, which is always nice.

Did you make the pins?

We have a kind of a hobby room in the building and one neighbor has almost a full shop set up there (he's an avid geocacher and makes some serious contraptions for that!) and everyone's welcome to use them. I recently bought a belt sander to broaden the selection of equipment there. The pins came from the 1000mm brass rod seen in the first picture.

 

[Atso_J]

Slots carved

One half is waiting for glue to cure now. The other half mayhaps tomorrow. More updates when both are done.

 

[Atso_J]

Today's progress.

I had glued something of a base earlier and it was now cured

Used a reamer to make the ends of the holes conical

As the wood is really soft the holes had widened on their own already so I had to patch things up a bit

The bottom left actually turned out to be close to what it was supposed to be (on this side). Anyways this was not expected to be pretty as it's practice work but I think it'll be functional at least. Planning to get a kit for stabilizing materials for any future projects. Should improve results considerably.

At the moment there's some more glue waiting to cure as I chipped a little piece off the other side. Big enough to make sense sticking it back in there

 

[Ericfg]

Looks great! I love these sort of posts.

 

[Atso_J]

It stands up with the knives in place

I'm gonna widen the base a bit and then finish it off with sanding by hand and maybe some oil.

 

[Atso_J]

I decided to leave the base as it was as it fits easily into a snug kitchen. I might try to figure out how to add some weight to it later to make it a bit more stable. It's not tipping over or anything on its own not anyways.

So, here's the final version (while I oiled the block I decided to touch up the handles of the knives too and the santoku really benefited from it!)

 

[tostadas]

Nice

 

[Simon082]

Bloody brilliant.