When learning a new skill, like woodworking, it’s always nice if those first few projects produce practical, everyday things that become part of your daily life. Seeing them, using them, taking pride in them, inspires you to delve deeper into the skill and its greater rewards.
Here’s a basic woodworking project that can be completed in an afternoon. The skills involved are rudimentary, but there’s enough challenge and complexity here to make you feel like you’ve really accomplished something.
And what could be more useful than a central, visible battery organizer in your garage, basement, kitchen, or closet? We burn through batteries around here. Having a way of seeing what’s in stock at a glance could be very useful. And if you use rechargeables, it’s especially useful to know what’s charged, what’s in use, and whether it’s time to start rustling up batteries and firing up the charger.
This project involves little more than making a wooden (and Plexiglas) box with some spacers in it. In the project video, Daris of WoodLogger uses some scrap pine and a piece of hardwood. Pretty much anything will do. For a beginner, softwoods are always easier to work with.
The front window of the organizer is a piece of Plexi. You can get that at a craft or hardware store. For tools, Daris uses a table saw, drill press, nail gun, and bar clamps. If you don’t have these tools, you’ll have to be a little more resourceful, but you could do this project with a hand saw, a hammer, and a power drill, if that’s what you have.
For more information on this project and a link to the original Wood magazine project post (with a larger version of the above exploded view drawing), visit WoodLogger.
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