I spent a couple hours tonight making a few additions to my blog. Wait, I can explain…
It has struck me how ephemeral blog posts are. I build stuff because I like to build stuff, and I blog about it because I like to do that too. I like to get feedback on what I’m doing, whether the feedback is good, bad or indifferent. But at the end of the day. most blog posts have a relatively short shelf life. That’s OK generally, because most of the drivel I generate isn’t something that folks should spend a lot of time reading anyway.
But if anything is worth preserving or revisiting it’s the projects themselves. With each one I’ve learned something new, and no matter how many issues I ran into along the way I got the project finished. So, I decided to see if I could update my blog to celebrate some of the projects that I’ve finished.
If you look at the top right corner of my blog you will see a link now to “Favorite Projects”, on that page I’m planning to add thumbnail pictures of each of my projects (at least the ones that are done and I’m not trying to forget). That picture links to a short writeup on the project, and a link to all of the individual log posts I wrote about it. It’s an experiment, maybe it’s conceit.
Anyway, the first five recap articles are posted. I’ll add the rest over the next few days. These aren’t my overall favorite projects, the more recent projects that combine stained glass and woodworking are my current faves. These five are special because each of the surprised me that they came out as well as they did. I’m still stunned that I could hand plane those knotty, crusty doug fir timbers into a flat, square bench top. Each was a tiny little victory, and a stepping stone to the next project.
Click on any of these pictures to go to the recap articles.
 Roubo Workbench |
 Roy Underhill’s Nail Cabinet |
 Hand Tool Cabinet |
 Mahogany milking stool |
 Tool Chest |
McGlynn on Making 
Interesting idea Joe. How long did it take to do these first ones?
Hi Ralph! It didn’t take long once I figured out how to do the first one. In wordpress there is an “add pages” capability, so basically I’m adding a new page for each project. The only tricky bit was getting the main project page to display projects as a grid, which involves setting the display size for the pictures to be “thumbnail” and manually formatting the page by editing the HTML and using an HTML table layout.
It was fun to revisit some of these older projects. I’d mostly forgotten how uncomfortable it was to work in a corner of my metalshop when there was an ongoing manufacturing operation there, working on the awful Sears Craftsman bench that wiggled around.
An excellent idea! There are a few projects that you’ve done that I want to do as well (e.g. nail cabinet). Now there’s on stop shopping! 😉