Noah B Woodworks

A woodworking page for the free time foot soldier

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about

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

    Last Weekends Projects

    I have a boys weekend in Chicago coming up this weekend, so I decided to make gifts for everyone. I spoke about it a few blog posts ago. Luckily, I already had a batch of whiskey smokers made up, so I was able to sand and finish those with no issues. I made a bottle opener for my buddy who recently broke up with his girlfriend; I spoke more about that one in my last post. I made a really cool little watch display and lidded box for the bride and groom. I engraved small cherry plaques with their names on them and glued them to the padouk. Those turned out really well. I made little ball bearing mazes for my buddies twins, and my other buddies newborn. They’re engraved with the kids’ names and should be a good gift for them.

    The ball bearing mazes were actually quite a challenge to make. I did a few MDF prototypes to make sure that they worked before cutting into the white oak. I ended up using a quarter inch end mill to make the maze and a 7/32″ ball bearing. Luckily, I purchased a set of ball bearings in different sizes because I had no idea which one would fit best into the routed grooves. I have a quarter inch and eighth inch end mill, and getting fancy with the tool path would have taken way too much time.

    My quarter inch router bit left a terrible finish, so there was quite a lot of cleanup work to do. On every corner of the maze it left little furry fibers that either needed to be sanded or cut away. If I didn’t, the ball wouldn’t progress through the maze. This was very tedious work and it took a very long time. I capped the mazes, which are circular in shape, with a thin piece of 8″ diameter acrylic sheets. The acrylic also proved to be tricky. I didn’t drill large enough pilot holes for the acrylic so on one of the mazes it cracked and looks unsightly. I purchased 2 new sheets and will be redoing the acrylic for the twins.

    All in all, it was a very successful weekend of woodworking. I was able to churn out a bunch of product which was a good testing experience I prototyped some new objects on the CNC and I’m planning on making a bunch more bottle openers because they’re so useful and easy to make. I’ll be engraving U of M, Michigan State and Lions decals onto them for football season. I had forgotten how beautiful exotic wood can be. The padouk, when finished, was gorgeous. I tend not to use exotic woods because I don’t support deforestation, but I can see why people like to use them.

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