leg reconstruction

Hey! It's been a while, so I'm here with a different kind of post. It's now been 5 months since my surgery and 10 months since I wrecked my leg (8/18 accident, 10/6 first surgery, 1/23 final reconstruction), and this post is on how a bunch of doctors (and my biology!) made me a new leg.

Calipers Box round 2 (post 2/2)

Hinge detail. I messed up a bit with the mortise widths, so I cut shims from scrap walnut and sanded them flat. The hinges for this one also open 180deg per giftee's request (they turned out so nice I'm thinking of modifying mine to open flat too)

Putting finish on the inside. I masked the pockets because I'm putting felt in this box (glue doesn't stick well to polyurethane.) I'm using satin polyurethane because it offers a marginally better protective layer than oil finishes, and it keeps enough of the grain texture to avoid looking awfully glassy.

Farmhouse Table

We needed a dining table, so I made a table! I bought wood from a lumberyard, then spent two months in the HobbyShop trying to finish this in time to put food on it for Thanksgiving (spoiler: just barely did it in time)

Art and Pickles

Made some art for a friend, made some pickles for me (and roommates!)
Art is chalk pastel on scrap matboard.

This one is derived from some panels of Saga, an excellent (but super NSFW) comic series.

Pickles are various kinds of fermented or refrigerator pickles.
(avoiding botulism in canned pickles is too much effort to bother with)

I cut the radishes into flowers for one of the carrot-radish jars, but the small red radishes were a little too delicate and most of the slices lost their petals in the process.

Calipers Box round 2 (post 1/2)

Still working on box#2! (I borked my leg and picked up a dining-table project, so this is still ongoing)

This means I have the opportunity to take more photos of the steps I missed last time.

After milling out the calipers profile, etch-a-sketch style and seating the tool in the bottom half, I traced out the remainder on the top blank. This one needed a void for the round bezel-dial and not much else.

Here I'm also matching up the ends to mark where the hinges go.

Milling out the bezel void with a ball endmill for extra aesthetics. Hinge and magnet mortises happened afterwards.

I was lazy and decided to lasercut all my inlay pieces. They are 3/32" thick and would've been a pain.

2015 EC Rollercoaster Construction

Calipers Box

Finished pictures first. I completed the first of my set of calipers boxes (this one was the guinea pig version) and learned a lot about RealPersonWoodworking! The wood is domestic walnut, with cedar inserts on the inside.