The last couple of days have been very busy. We’ve been working on Christmas orders for Owl Boxes (the ideal gift for the husband who has everything!), prototyping of new finishes, figuring out Woodpecker house design, and more.

Let’s start outside. Here are three completed Eastern Screech Owl boxes. Once they are stained/finished they are placed outside. I hang them from part of our fence, behind the shed. This allows them to weather a bit (so I can see if any wood is going to crack) and helps to remove the stain & human scents on the wood.

These Leopold benches have been outside for a couple of months now. They are holding up well.

In the shop now. I’ve had to better organize a couple of things, and needed a couple of quick-fix solutions.

On the organization front, I set up a new storage area for my Speed Squares. The one on the left is my newest one. Since I do so many “free hand” 22.5 degree cuts (the angles of the bird box roofs), I have it fixed at that angle. The included rail makes it a lot easier. I LOVE the heft of this square. It’s worth the $20. (There’s a YouTube video up at SixtySecondShop.)

To the right is the 12″ plastic and the 6″ plastic. Bright orange is good in a crowded shop. Though, I did have to mark in the numbers myself using a fine tipped Sharpie. (The non-highlighted numbers are hard to read. Make them stand out with the black Sharpie. Five minutes of work that will pay off forever.)

Here’s my jury rigged router table fence. I still have a Incra on my wish list, but this will do for now.

It’s simply a straight 1×8 clamped to my large (36″ wide) homemade router table. Since I am only making some very simple dado (slot) cuts for the bottom of the Woodpecker boxes, I didn’t need anything fancy. Just something that will keep me at the correct distance. Running them on the table is faster than straight edges and free hand.

Notice that I did bolt on a piece of scrap acrylic as a guard. The table is a LOT safer with it in place. At the least, you never loose track of where the sharp bits are at.

Here are some of the Owl and Woodpecker boxes sitting in the shop. They are in various states of completion.

The labels on the ground help me to keep track of where in the process boxes are (“WIP”, “needs stain”, “needs silicon”, “complete”). The taller boxes are for the Eastern Screech Owls. The smaller ones are for common Woodpeckers. I need to complete their sliding bottoms and a protector around the entry hole (to stop squirrels).

Those funky colored ones are our newest invention. We call it Fire Polishing. It allows us to give the wood a natural dark finish with no stains. They are available as Limited Edition models (due to the labor involved).

They look even better in person. The wood has an iridescent quality. The boxes will weather to a gray / black color scheme. Almost exactly like “regular” tree bark.

We *try* and be considerate neighbors, so I drop the garage door whenever I’m doing a lot of cutting. Unfortunately this means I often don’t know if a customer is outside. Back in the day I made an ultra-loud door bell setup for my Dad’s repair business. I could do the same thing here!

So I put together a small wooden box, painted it red, and gave it a big arcade button. This box gets hung outside of the garage:

It’s about 7″ tall. Right now I’m putting in a flashing LED in the front (that white dot you see) so as to catch peoples’ eyes. I think it’s a neat use of the “One Player” arcade button, don’t you?