Eastern Massachusetts Guild of Woodworkers Featured Piece of the Month Articles

Red Sox Hat by Rob McNeil

Sun, 30 Aug 2026 18:45:01 GMT

Go Sox!

With ‘The Curse’ long since lifted, these days the only thing that this Red Sox fan needs to get excited for another opening day is a warm spring day and a challenging woodturning project! Staying curious and pushing myself to try new things with wood has richly rewarded me with many amazing experiences and equally amazing people over the years. Over this past winter, I spent some time chatting with longtime local woodturner and artist Art Jalbert in Orleans, MA, about breaking down challenging projects into manageable pieces using a systems approach. I read articles and watched videos to learn about and prepare for my next project, which was going to really challenge me. And then in March 2026, fellow Cape Cod Woodturners (CCW) member Clarke Buchanan graciously loaned me his homemade lighted jam chuck and donated a freshly cut chunk of silver maple to get me going on the wild ride of turning my first baseball hat on my lathe!

Having completed many green wood turnings over the years, I was hopeful that I could somehow deftly cut a wearable hat from this gorgeous specimen. Experience with free water releasing from a large spinning block of fresh wood has taught me that it is important to trim the log on the bandsaw into a more manageable blank. At just over 9-inches tall and with a varying diameter of approximately 14-inches, the rough blank was heavy and took some effort getting between centers.

Initially, since the log was quite unbalanced, and with the speed down low, I used a Lyle Jamieson 5/8" Bowl Gouge with 16-inch Thompson handle with short peeling cuts to produce a round, balanced cylinder. My goal was to establish a refined outside profile shape first, which I could then flip around and hollow out while remaining perfectly centered. To do that, I established tenons on both ends and secured the refined piece using a One Way Stronghold Chuck with #3 profiled jaw set on each end.

Once secured in chucks and now in round, I safely raised the speed for the subsequent steps. For this project, I donned my 3M half-face respirator with particle pre-filters over organic vapors cartridges, noise-reducing headphones, safety glasses, and a face shield. Being comfortable wearing appropriately fitted personal protective equipment for long periods of time is important to my health. I recommend taking the time to invest in a healthy you for your long-term enjoyment of woodturning. [Safety note: Keeping the lathe on/off switch nearby is important as well, so I always locate the magnetic control box within my immediate reach.]

For this project, I focused on developing the final outside shape of the hat based on measurements from my favorite fitting snapback (e.g., brim length and width, as well as angles and radii from the center) and some confirmatory head measurements taken with a flexible ruler.

Basically, I took the average of the length and width of my head, plus a bit more to account for the thickness of the wood, to establish the hat’s outside profile. The novel part of turning a hat is that you take advantage of the wood’s natural tendency to shrink differently across the grain versus along the grain as it loses both free and bound moisture content and dries. Establishing the final outside shape, including sanding (up to 500-grit) (and except for the very top section, still secure in the chuck), is critical as changing the outside shape is not easy or recommended once you start hollowing because you are dealing with very thin tolerances.

Once I flipped the hat around and checked that it was perfectly centered and spinning true, I created the brim, removed the live center, and hollowed the inside of the hat. While the speed of the lathe is up pretty high, progress is slow as I methodically make short push cuts with the flute closed. This technique prevents catches, reduces tool marks, and ensures a safe, shearing bevel-riding cut, particularly on challenging rim cuts.

I stop the lathe often and use calipers to check thickness. For the brim, I am trying for a fat sixteenth (+1/16”), which is what caused my heart to race for the first time on this project. I then use an inertial sander that I made on an earlier project to sand the underside of the brim (up to 500-grit) before hollowing the inside of the hat. [Safety note: Your lathe’s auxiliary light can also offer an opinion as to the thickness of your piece while the wood is still wet.] With the light directed behind the piece, as I continue to cut, I watch the color of the wood change from red to orange to yellow, and stop and check before it is white! Once I established the brim, including sanding, I stretched clear packing tape across the end-grain areas of the brim to help prevent cracks, as very thin wet wood can start to shrink and warp (and potentially crack) while still spinning on the lathe. On other thin projects like this one, I have had success preventing cracks and excessive warping by keeping the piece wet and spraying water onto it every time I stop the lathe to check the width.

Next comes the actual hollowing of the inside of the hat and establishing the final inside profile. Again, the speed of the lathe is up pretty high, and progress is slow as I methodically make short push cuts and stop the lathe often and use calipers to check the thickness. For the hat itself, I am trying for an eighth (1/8”), which will allow me a bit of wiggle room when I need to remove the hat from the chuck and complete the outside shape of the top. Stopping to check your thickness also provides time to clear any accumulated wet wood shavings, and for this piece, there were a lot of shavings. This project, for instance, created wood shavings that almost filled an entire 30-gallon trash barrel!

Once I completed the inside hollowing and sanded (up to 500-grit) it is time to remove the piece from the chuck and mount it onto a custom homemade lighted jam chuck. Basically, you secure a tapered (to accommodate various size hats) painter’s tape covered wooden jam chuck that is held with your regular chuck jaws which is also setup with a 100- watt lightbulb mount (to rotate freely inside the jam chuck). You guessed it, the power cord runs through the lathe’s spindle! Pretty slick setup. The purpose of the light inside the jam chuck is to provide you with the color indicator of the thickness of your wood hat as you sneak up on the final outside profile for the area on top of the hat which had been initially held in the chuck.

At this point, I had completed the turning, and the real nerve-wracking work could begin. To remove the majority of the brim before the drying process, I used the band saw. Since the outer rim is uniform, the hat sits solidly on the bandsaw table and remains surprisingly stable while cutting it. The entry and exit for each cut were equally stable due to the packing tape (I think). I left the front and back brims on to provide some uniformity during the drying and shaping step that comes next.

Extra Innings

The drying and shaping begin immediately after reducing the brim on the bandsaw. This is

done with another homemade hat press contraption that I made out of hard maple, some heavy-duty elastics, some curved brim blocks, small hand clamps, and a plywood oval disk in the shape of your head (previously measured with the flexible ruler). The newly turned wood hat is thin and wet enough to bend without breaking, and it will hold its new position after it dries with little rebound. The plywood oval disk allows the hat to shrink and warp to your preferred head shape (at least in theory).

Based on the experience of other makers who I have read online, I applied eight (8) full turns to the turnbuckle on the hat press once the jaws made solid contact, inserted the oval plywood piece, then held the body of the hat down and began curving the rear brim using the heavy-duty elastics. The front brim is squeezed into form using precut and sanded (to the brim shape that you prefer) curved maple blocks and some clamps. I left the whole assembly to sit overnight in a warm utility room and then tightened everything up again (another nerve-wracking effort) in the morning. After another day, I added a 100-watt light bulb under the clamped assembly to accelerate the drying and to bake-in the shape.

Once fully dry, I removed the hat from the clamps and tried it on. The moment of truth. It fit! I was very excited at this point in the project, but still had some finishing to do. I contemplated many options, including keeping a natural woodgrain look. In the end, I decided to go all in with a custom Green Monster motif that befits the name of the project, Go Sox! Once I removed the rear brim and gave the final shape to the brim, I used the jam chuck again and the indexing feature of my lathe to mark the vertical lines, snapback, and vent hole locations, then drilled them out and detailed the snapback using a Dremel tool. I then used the Razertip Wood Burning System to burn in the stitching around the vent holes, brim, vertical lines, snapback, and to sign the piece. I painted the outside with Benjamin Moore SC-12 Green Monster exterior soft gloss and One Shot red and white enamel sign paint. I sprayed the inside with Minwax Helmsman clear semi-gloss spar urethane, which allows the natural wood grain to be seen. And yes, I wear it in the rain!

As the calendar now turns from summer to fall, I encourage you to try something new and swing for the Green Monster! Making connections with other woodworkers is a rewarding experience. Support the home team! Reach out to a club member or a member of another club for inspiration or to discuss how to complete a project that you’ve always wanted to try. And appreciate the wisdom shared by others.

Thank you, Art and Clarke!

Splay-Legged Mahogany Table by Bob McKee

Tom Shirley — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 13:41:03 GMT

Building a new front entrance for my home required milling several 8/4 boards of sub-premium mahogany for the structure. Most of the cutoff pieces were about two feet long, which I gave to friends for small projects. But the grain pattern of one piece caught my eye so I resawed it. The book-matched pattern and chatoyance of the opened board were stunning. I decided they would make a great top for a small splay-legged table I’d seen in an article by Garrett Hack a few years ago. A 3-foot long 8/4 board of furniture grade mahogany provided the wood for the aprons and legs on the table.

This small table combines some uncommon features that make it interesting. The legs are tapered on all four sides rather than just two. Instead of being straight the legs splay outward a few degrees, giving the table a “stance” that adds visual interest. Finally, the apron has cock beading along the lower edge, a nice detail that also conceals any gap in the tenons.

I should have done a better job of photographing the process while building, but making splayed legs tapered on all four sides was a new challenge that kept me fully engaged. I will give an overview of the process here and would be happy to send a PDF of Garrett Hack’s original article to anyone who wants more details about the build.

The first step was making a full sized three-dimensional pattern from which to lay out the legs. I cut it a little oversize on the bandsaw, then jointed two adjacent sides and finished the other two sides with a hand plane.

The leg pattern made it easy to lay out the four tapered legs adjacent to one another, alternating tops and bottoms of the legs on a single board to save wood. (Actually, I cut five legs anticipating errors which for once did not materialize. So now I have an extra leg hanging on the wall like real cabinetmakers!)After cutting the marked legs on my bandsaw and then jointing the cuts, I used the pattern leg again as a tapering jig for the other two sides of each leg, which made the time spent making the pattern seem very worthwhile.

Mr. Hack used a four degree splay (94 degree angle), which I reduced to 93 degrees, even though my table is wider than his original. This makes the splay somewhat subtle, which is how I like to go the first time. If I did another table the legs would have more splay.

Naturally the aprons and their tenons had to be cut at the same angle, which I did on the table saw with my seldom-used tenoning jig. The mortices were mainly cut with the dado cutter on the table saw with the bottom edges squared up by hand.

This was a fun project that included some learning and proved to me that using scrap does not mean the final product has to look like…scrap.

Storage Ottoman by James Goodwin

Tom Shirley — Thu, 07 May 2026 19:06:54 GMT

Storage Ottoman

Featured Piece of the Month May 2026

James Goodwin

Back in 2022 I built a blanket rack to store and display the lovely blankets my beautiful and talented wife had spun and woven. We don’t super heat our house and so in the winter I like to have a blanket while we’re watching TV. The rack worked fine for making them available and displaying them.

However, we have two evil tabby cats who think that nice woolen blankets are something that they should claw and eat. This is not good. Finally, we had to hide the blankets away in a closet to prevent further damage to them or the cats. Shortly after that we came up with an idea for a storage ottoman that would keep them handy and safe. Also, my wife uses the ottoman to sit on when she is threading her loom and so something that moved around easily would also be great. I also wanted to make the ottoman only partly upholstered to limit evil tabby claw damage.

This is the design I came up with:

I designed a 19” x 24” x 24” ottoman on casters. It would be slightly larger than the original ottoman and use fabric that was left over from when we had our couch re-upholstered. I had a bunch of left over Sapele lumber from the new Fire Table Chairs so I only had to pick up some nice 1/4” Sapele veneer plywood that was veneered on both sides since I would be finishing the inside as well as the outside.

Because this would be seating as well as storage, I made the corner posts actual 2” x 2” wide and all of the frame members were 1” x 2”. I used my new jointer/planer to dimension all of the parts exactly and to remove all of the saw marks.

Once I milled all of the frame and seat frame parts to size I cut all of the mortices in the corner posts. I deliberately offset the tenons so that there would be extra material at the top and bottom of the posts to help give the frame extra support. I also centered them in the posts for the same reason. I made them 1” deep which would require notching the tenons so they wouldn’t collide.

Then I switched my SawStop table saw to dado mode, the first time I’ve done this, it turned out to be much faster and easier than I imagined. I used the dado stack and my table saw sled (modified for dado usage) to cut all of the tenons.

After that I cleaned up and dry fitted all of the mortices and tenons.

Then I reset the dado stack to 1/4” and cut the panel grooves in the corner posts. I cut the panels to size and did a dry fit of the whole body of the ottoman.

I also made up the frame for the seat which was also joined by mortice and tenon and fitted that to the body. I added an inside cleat to support the seat and a 1/8” alignment edge that extended below the seat to make sure the top lid wouldn’t shift around when someone sat on it.

I then sanded everything from 120 grit to 220 grit (trying something new to see if it had a good effect on the Hard Wax Oil finish with hardener).

I suspended my sander and vacuum hose from the ceiling with a bungee to reduce sanding fatigue.

Then I glued everything up and installed the bottom of the box on cleats that I attached around the inside of the bottom frame. I countersunk and pre-drilled all the holes from the bottom of the seat to attach the seat to the top frame and mounted the heavy-duty hinges (really passage door hinges) and chains to hold the top open when getting things in and out of the interior.

At the next step I took all the hardware off and put finish on everything including the interior.

Finally, I upholstered the lid gluing two layers of high quality 1 1/2” furniture foam onto a 3/8” thick plywood backing. After shaping the top so it had a curved profile around the top, I covered the seat with upholstery fabric which matches our couch. My wife kindly helped by stitching a large remnant into a square that was just the right size to cover the seat cushion.

Then it was just the final assembly and adding the casters and it was ready to deploy.