Noah B Woodworks

A woodworking page for the free time foot soldier

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Hello there! My name is Noah Budd and I am a woodworker from southeast Michigan. I hail from a small set of towns in the Upper Peninsula called Houghton/Hancock. I lived there for 24 of my 31 years, and graduated from Michigan Tech in 2019 in audio production.

In my free time I am a dad first and hobbyist second. I make music, read books, smoke pipes, and kayak fish. I am a broadcast engineer in my professional life, working an early morning 3:30 – 11:30 am shift. The early bird has most definitely gotten a worm or two.

Thanks for stopping by my site and feel free to reach out to me on Instagram @noahbwoodworks or via the email found on the contact page

-Noah

    Bad Habits

    I have a nasty habit of seeing what I can get away with when I’m woodworking. It usually happens when I’m trying to save time. Can I do it this way, save some time but run the risk of messing the whole thing up? If I do take the risk, sometimes it works out and I save time, encouraging me to do it again in the future, but sometimes I ruin the whole project. If the whole project does get ruined, I question, “why in the world did I do it that way?” as I start over.

    The wood I buy is fairly expensive ($4-10 per board foot) I have ruined enough of it to question my methods. A lot of the pain of starting over can be remedied by performing small tests. Instead of making the object and discovering it doesn’t work, discover it doesn’t work before you make the object. I tend to skip these small tests because they take time, but what I am realizing is that they actually save time. If it works the way you think it will, then proceed to the making. If it doesn’t, though, it is always worth discovering before committing your valuable resources.

    I made a neat little bottle opener this weekend. The opener is screwed to a flat surface, and then magnets stick the surface to a fridge, and another magnet catches the bottle tops. I purchased a really cool bottle opener, in the shape of a bears head. It is very rugged looking and sturdy, which fit the qualities of the person I’m making the bottle opener for. What I didn’t realize was that the bears head protrudes out too far so that the magnet doesn’t catch the bottle tops.

    I went ahead and spent a bunch of time making a fancy backing piece, with a V carved image and routed edges, installed the magnets, only to find out that it doesn’t work. Used a fairly large piece of quartersawn white oak. I probably wasted a good hour on the piece that ended up not working, and could have done a 15 minute test to avoid wasting that hour. The failed piece is on my shop wall as a reminder to do tests, and to open bottles from time to time. You just have to catch them before they fall onto the ground.

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