Oval-Cutting Mechanism
A while back, I cut a round offcut from a hole saw in half and accidentally ended up with a strangely shaped dish. I'd been wanting to try that on purpose ever since.
This time I used the router table. I cut a cross-shaped slot and guided a base plate along it as I moved it — and just like that, you get a clean oval. Change the distance between the two pivot holes and you can adjust the ratio of the oval however you like.
It's surprisingly hard to picture how a nice oval cut will turn out before you try it. It's one of those little tricks that's worth keeping in mind.
A Unique Way to Make It Look Better
I just wasn't happy with the walnut grain on the lid. So I decided to inlay some nicer-figured maple instead — and while I was at it, I drilled straight through the whole lid with a Forstner bit.
The bit and the pipe I used to cut the round maple plug were supposed to be the same diameter. In practice the hole came out just slightly bigger than expected, so I wrapped a thin strip of tape around the pipe to fine-tune the fit.
Things rarely go exactly as planned, but figuring out these little corrections on the fly is one of my favorite parts of making things.
Book-Shaped Tissue Box
I made a book-shaped storage box a while back, and it occurred to me the same idea could work as a tissue box. So I reused the basic structure, but this time added a narrow slot in the "cover" and gave it the thickness of a real hardback.
Open the cover and swapping the tissue is easy — and it works standing up or lying flat. At a glance it's just a book on the shelf, until you open it and tissues pop out.
I Made a Drill Bit Just for This
When making a wooden hinge out of a dowel, you need to drill the hole for the metal pin dead-center through the round stock. There are plenty of ways to do this, but I figured making a dedicated drill bit might be the easiest route, so I gave it a shot.
It worked well enough, but I'm still a little uneasy about heat building up in the sleeve at high speed, and the strength of the glued joint. There's room to improve it.
The key to this jig is that everything — mounting the drill in the vise, then mounting the dowel — happens through the same one-chuck setup. Keeping that one reference point is really what keeps the center accurate.
Why Do End Grain Cutting Boards Take So Much Work?
End grain cutting boards are notoriously expensive. I already knew that, but making one myself for the first time made it click — they're an enormous amount of work.
What I built here is on the simpler, more approachable end of end grain designs. Even so, all that effort pays off: it's genuinely nice to use, and the way a knife edge sinks softly into the end grain is addictive. The knife I used, by the way, was a gift from Ryota, who I collaborated with a while back.
The Strangest Ring Hinge
I saw a post on Instagram from @werksatelier with a genuinely unique hinge, and it hit me hard. I wanted to try it myself, but I couldn't get my hands on the thick-walled metal pipe the original used — so I decided to build it out of the PVC pipe I already reach for all the time.
It took a fair bit of trial and error to work out the machining, but I finally landed on a method that felt like my own. Where the original used the hinge on a box, I applied it to a phone stand instead. The hinge itself becomes part of the design — such a fun structure to work with.
Huge thanks to Tobias for the inspiration.
A Note from Taku
Looking back at this week's builds, the theme that jumps out is "borrow the shape, change what's inside." A book-shaped storage idea became a tissue box. A hinge I saw on Instagram went from metal to PVC, and from a box to a phone stand. Even the oval-cutting jig and the custom drill bit come from the same instinct: take a structure or tool that already exists and reshape it just enough for the problem in front of you.
New ideas do come from a blank page sometimes, but looking at this week as a whole, it felt much more like "borrowing" — from someone else's structure, from my own past work, from whatever material happened to be on hand — and recombining it a little at a time to land on today's answer. It's not flashy, but it might be the most honest description of how I actually make things.