Scrap Wood Gifts: Wooden Hair Clips
Peter’s woodworker persona took time out of his dovetail Master Class with Roy Underhill to take over this project!
While this could result in any number of traditionalist fare, he is converting some of his coveted scrap wood into nice gifts.
He starts off by selecting a variety of woods and arranges them in an interesting pattern.
Peter then applies a generous helping of wood glue to fuse the scrap into one big mass.
After channeling his inner Izzy Swan, Peter begins construction on a special jig to allow cutting large wood blanks into swooping wooden arches, this time for making hair clips. This will help to ensure consistent pieces to use. It is indeed surprising that traditionalist Woodworker Peter would ever allow hot glue to be used in one of his projects!
The semicircle jig is affixed to the bandsaw and bolt adjusted. This allows the thickness of each piece to be changed with little effort. The bolt itself is the pivot point where the arm is simply placed on it.
After no time, many raw clips are produced. Then it is a matter of adding some nice gentle curves to the clips using the belt sander.
While the sander takes the bulk of the job, Peter just cannot help himself to manually sand each piece up to 400 grit sandpaper. At least the micromesh can get a well deserved break on this project!
Finally comes the finishing step which is always among the most exciting and satisfying for a woodworker.
Here, Peter is using some wipe on polyurethane to help protect and bring out the natural color of the wood. The contrast between the walnut banding and the plywood is really great and looks that much better with the poly!
Finally, the metal clips are attached to the wood with epoxy using band clamps. This will certainly hold better than hot glue has in the past.
So there it is, the wooden hair clip. This should help quench the thirst of Woodworking Peter until the next time!
Currently hailing from a basement shop somewhere in North Carolina, Wes, a.k.a. Geeksmithing, creates geek and nostalgia inspired projects of all kinds using any new material or technique he can get his hands on including anything from 3d printing, cnc, laser cutting, prop making, robotics, electronics to even a bit of woodworking.
