Posts from — June 2009

So, I finally made it down to Paxton Woods this afternoon.

Amazing experience.

I’d been in a hardwood store before when we were buying oak for our banisters and such and they had a small area up front for woodworkers, so to speak. They’ve now moved and now only do commercial wood.

Paxton also does major commercial work, large quantities of wood, custom mouldings, etc but their “Woodworker’s Store” is *much*  better than Centennial’s was.
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Well, I was out in the garage cutting up the remainder of our prepared wood. About time to go out and pick up some more material. I cut up some walnut, a stick of maple, and a little bit of cherry.

I also worked out how to make the boxes. The 45 degree router bit makes the edges really clean and all I need is a bit of blue tape to “clamp” it all together until it dries. Currently we’re having a discussion on how to finish the boxes – whether to do something wild and crazy, make a signature box or to be more sedate. Stay tuned for that one.
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Well, it’s not actually an order, but it is our first big job.

I’m friends with a former morning show host here in Denver. Last fall one of those “radio things” happened and she’s moved on to other things. One of those things is appearing in a movie called Section B. Well, a bit more than appearing, but that’s her story to tell (you can find out more about the movie and Jennifer, by checking out IMDB.)

We’ve kept in touch and when I saw that Section B was looking for Colorado items for the wrap party gift bags, I sent her an email to find out how all this stuff worked. I thought that if it did work out we’d be able to show off some of our craftsmanship and get some practice making our puzzles.

Obviously I’d not be posting this if things hadn’t worked out. Right now we have 6 Soma Cubes cut, assembled, and finished. There are another 25 that are cut an assembled, not yet finished. There are a few more cherry ones and even a walnut one or two.

I still have to make the boxes for them, but we’re well on our way and should have them finished in plenty of time. We’ll be adding some pictures later on just so you can see what a stack of 50 Soma Cubes looks like (hmmm, that’s almost enough enough to make 6 Super Soma Cubes, soma cubes made of soma cubes i

Last night I cut up the last of the prepared maple I have.

You can tell that I’m a programmer by trade. I ended up with two blisters from about 90 minutes of cutting.  One I can sort of understand, it’s on the pad of my right index finger. That’s where I was using a piece of wood to hold down the cutoff cube so it didn’t spin back into the blade.

The other I didn’t discover until I took a closer look to see why my finger was hurting. Somehow I managed to create and pop a blister on the knuckle closest to the end of my finger on that same finger. [Read more →]

We’ve decided to try and make a go of this puzzle business.

We build wooden puzzles from domestic and exotic hardwoods. At the moment we’re concentrating on building puzzles like Soma Cubes and Pentominos. Those puzzles that are created from cubes. [Read more →]