Trinkets for a Neighbor

[gee-dub]

I have a great neighbor who is a pastor at his church. I am not a big church goer but we tend to go when he is at the pulpit. He is the kind of guy that will, at the drop of a hat, load up his excavator, trailer it to your property, and help you dig trenches, move rocks, level ground, whatever.

I try to be that same kind of guy. Anyway, I am suffering the tortures of the damned otherwise known as waiting for finish to cure. We have had unusually chilly weather here lately . . . I mean some days it barely gets out of the 60s . This has led to a slow cure on the current project. As I often mention, this means it is time to go to the scrap barrel and make some "stuff". My neighbors church runs a program where they provide food for those in need, visit those who cannot get out, and all that kind of wonderful stuff. I thought (or didn't) that I would take some stuff out of the burn barrel and make up a batch of small crosses that he could do with as he pleases amongst his many service programs.

My evil plan involved some small, simple, inlaid crosses. I milled some scrap cherry to 1/4" thickness.

I cut some other scrap to about 1/2" x 1/2". I milled a 1/4" x 1/8" groove at the router table.

This oughta do it.

I glue in the inlay and surface the blanks.

I have a router sled that I have shown before so I won't go too much into that in this thread. Essentially it lets me do accurate, repeatable cuts on multiples of the same item.

I rigged up this cam-action hold down since I have a lot of these to do.

Here is the final "dummy" made out of extra stock; no inlay. I just feel better going in to a run of multiples when I am confident I have the dimensions right.

The blanks will be cut into 2" and 3" pieces. I use my shop made flip stops for this.



You have probably seen people use these spindly sticks to hold small items near the whirling death machines we so dearly love. I use a couple of caps off some fiber optic connectors on the end of a piece of white oak.

This lets you hold down small parts that have a habit of becoming projectiles.

Some people use a pencil. I just like a bit larger thing in my hand when I am that close . . . wait, I just realized that sounded kind of creepy.

I guess I made more blanks than I thought. Wait "I thought?" I don't think I thought at all! What was I thinking !?!

Now I have to half-lap all of these. I will probably do some sort of edge treatment. I guess in my haste to do something nice I failed to realize the volume

 

[gee-dub]

Here we go. I wanted to walk through the whole process once before I batched out a couple of dozen. There's nothing like doing step three of something 24 times only to find out at step five you made a boo-boo.

3" x 2". Now I just have to do the others.

[fcschoenthal]

Glenn, it looks great. I guess that I don't know what mistake you made.

[gee-dub]

On 1/15/2026 at 1:08 PM, fcschoenthal said:

Glenn, it looks great. I guess that I don't know what mistake you made.

That statement was just as an example.  When we get to batching out parts we can get lost in the task and make errors.  In my current vanity project I rabbeted a leg that did not need it.  I was able to fill the void and dress it in.  Once was bad enough.  My example is about when you miscalculate and do something wrong 24 times.  Going through the whole process once before starting to batch things out is one of the ways I protect myself from myself.