Working with Wood...

Everytime one of my skateboards dies, I always store it somewhere for no other reason than wanting to try and use them to make something else.

I've only really dabbled in the past, replacing key parts of dining chair or trying to glue several sections of skateboard together to make other wee, more solid shapes. I think I've been inspired on this path by Daryl from Dundee. A man of amazing talents who is responsible for this

I've now dived headlong into it and given myself another wee project to fill up the times between kids bedtime and my own. It involves a lot of fiddley wood cutting and shaping and I don't own any purpose built fiddly wood working tools so I kind of have a 'bull in china shop' approach. Imagine it as setting up pieces of wood in a vice and trying to shave millimetre slices off it with a full size tenon saw.

To say there is a fair bit of sanding involved is a bit of an understatement.

This has given me a real appreciation of wood and especially skateboard wood. Skateboards are made from 7-ply canadian maple and in a lot of cases, individual layers of ply are stained to produce the board of a skateboard. If you could take a closer look at Daryl's Claymore in the link above, you find that it hasn't been painted at all. All the colour comes from stained layers of ply within the boards.

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Notes on the Picture
This isn't the main project but I found out that Dave 'Stud' Allan at my work collects dice so as a wee inbetween I fashioned this from the skateboard wood I'm working with now.