For me, the lamer, it was not. And last week, I FINALLY shipped off the present I made for my brother in law. In my defense, I hosted Christmas for John's family at the house, and I was DEAD sick the last week of Nov/early December with what I believe to be the swine flu, and then I was DEAD sick with food poisoning for several days leading up the Christmas. And then some personal ish happened at the beginning of the year, so all the creative gift things took a back burner.
There, now that I've made my excuses, this is what I made:
A Magnetic Knife Holder! See, my brother in law is an awesome chef, and awesome chefs need awesome places to store their awesome knives, where all can marvel at their awesomeness. It's true. And a knife drawer is a scary scary place, and a knife block takes up precious counter-top real estate. And John was lusting after these magnetic knife holders back when we first bought the house, so we thought (hah! as if we actually THOUGHT this project all the way through!!) we could EASILY make one of our own.
John originally bought a pretty piece of padauk for the project. But when we discovered just how HARD of a wood it is, the idea was scraped and I decided to use some hard maple shorts that we picked up at a local lumberyard. Rather than do the smart thing and hollow out holes using a forstner bit (ala this nice tutorial), I decided to use an Ikea Grundtal knife magnet as the base. Now, keep in mind that I think I know WAY more about wood working than I actually do, which proves that watching hours and hours and hours of The New Yankee Workshop on Sunday afternoons as a child and taking one wood working class through the local community college's continuing education program is MEANINGLESS in the real world.
So what I did was (and forgive the butchery of correct terminology used incorrectly) this:
First, I shaved about a piece of 3/4" x 2" x 3' maple into thin 1/8" strips using the table saw (I never said I was smart).
Then I took another 3/4" maple and cut the width/length down to accomodate the 20" x 5/8" Grundtal knife holder, adding about an inch on both sides and top and bottom (so the wood was roughly 22" x 3". Now for some reason, I thought this would be an EXCELLENT time to use a plunge router, which I had NEVER used before in my LIFE. So I haphazardly routered out a cavity in the maple block, roughly large enough to accomodate the Grundtal knife holder. After that, inserted the magnetic knife holder, added some extra nickle-sized magnets that were lying around (for extra magnetism), and laminated the 1/8" strips of maple on top of everything, using regular old wood glue. Now, if the 1/8" strips of maple were ever to come off to reveal what's underneath, it would look like a drunken termite had a heyday gnawing away the inside of the the wood. Seriously. Plunge routers are WAY harder to use than I had ever imagined, and I stupidly didn't set the depth stop correctly, so the depth of the cut changed frequently. And I didn't think to make some sort of JIG for the routing, so the inside edges are crazy crooked. So basically, it looks like an aerial photo of sand dunes--I'm not even kidding.
But anyway, I got it all laminate together. Only I didn't think that it'd be a super cool idea to make sure ONE edge of the lamination was flush. So instead I laminated the (2) 2" strips of maple to the 3" knife block holder, with roughly 1/2" hanging off either side. BRILLIANT. I thought I could just use the table saw to cut off the excess, which sounds perfectly reasonable. Except it isn't.
Oh no, it isn't.
See, something happened (still dunno what) and the table saw KICKED the knife block off to the side (into my side, actually--I got my first table saw injury!!) and gouged a HUGE hole in the side of the holder. At that point, I was ready to admit defeat.
But my brother in law (the awesome chef) is an awesome person (truly), and I didn't want to fess up to being retarded and not making him something for Christmas, especially since I'm the frigging idiot who decided to pressure my siblings into MAKING Christmas gifts. So I sucked it in (and bandaged my kick-back wound), and gave it another go. When I realized I didn't have enough maple left to start over, I decided to patch the gouge. So I laminated a new piece of wood to the side of the holder, waited for the glue to cure, covered all visible cracks with stainable wood filler, and properly cut it down to size. And it worked!
After several sandings with increasingly finer paper, the holder was ready to be stained. I chose a nice Red Mahogany stain (I wish I could say that I chose it because I thought my brother in law would dig it, but the truth is that it's the stain I had at hand...and I thought he'd like it?). Six coats of matte poly later, we have this:
Look, you can BARELY notice where I patched the kick-back gouge!
I was a little worried the holder wouldn't be able to actually hold knives, so I tried it out on some we had at home. It actually works quite well!
I got done with the knife holder sometime back in late March, but it took me until last week to finally mail the sucker. Part of the problem was that I couldn't find anything to mail it in (all the mailing tubes I had were too short or WAY too long). Part of it was that I'm incredibly lazy and forgetful. Regardless, I shipped it to him last week, and word is that he likes it.
I think in a year or two, when I've either forgotten how insanely hard the seemingly insanely simple project is or when I take some more woodworking classes, I just might make one for my knives--it might, however, be the death of me! Click for bigger/more pics, if you'd like (ignore the dirty counters and cabinets!!!)
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