Blog: Twas The Night Before Push Stick By: John Heisz

In this video, Kevin from the YouTube channel krtwood set up a secret Santa open to everyone in the woodworking community:

In it, he talked about how there seems to be less of a sense of community happening now, at least online. And I guess that’s just the natural progression of things – the woodworking and making topic was much hotter online three years ago than it is now, and most of us involved have settled into the business aspect of it, since many of us do this as a full time occupation. Less of the “we are all in this together” feeling now than there was back then. And “back then” sounds like I’m exaggerating the time frame, but online years are like dog years – they go faster.

Anyway, I’m (almost) always up for something different, so I joined in and the item I decided to make is a fancy push stick with spalted maple veneer. I cut the veneer last year at this time and it has been drying in my basement since then:

I used one of the plywood push sticks I made to bring to the only “meetup” that I’ve ever been to (appropriate, I think). I still have a number of these and I send one out occasionally to a special viewer. The plywood one acts as the core for the maple veneer.

To apply even pressure to the veneer, I used pieces of foam and 3/4″ plywood cauls clamped around it:

Then left that to dry overnight.

The next day, I trimmed off the excess veneer and did some final sanding:

Looked like something was missing, so I used the toner transfer method to add my logo to the side:

I then finished the stick with linseed oil to bring out the rich colour of the spalted maple.

Not long after I had it made, Kevin sent me the name and address of the person that would be getting it, and I had it in the mail the next day. I hope he likes it and my thanks goes out again to Kevin for putting this together.