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My psychological oddities include: A fear of being tackled by females in elf suits and enmity toward all birdhouses.
Perhaps my hostility to birdhouses springs from my days as a Cub Scout where I built too many of them. Heck, I’m also still haunted by visions of milking a plywood cow with an udder made from a rubber glove and learning to wring a chicken’s neck. (That is a great-looking merit badge, I tell you what.)
Yet thanks to some enormous sedation, I built a birdhouse during the weekend. Heck, I was inspired and compelled to build this birdhouse using cypress, stainless fasteners and waterproof glue.
The idea for this birdhouse came from an abortive trip to Liberty Tool in Maine in February. Attached to the shop’s building was an enormous birdhouse shaped like a jointer plane. Like the start of any great (read: totally obsessive) project, I knew at that instant that I had to build one.
My design is based off a Marples 14″ razee jack plane. I scaled the plane up to 35″ long so it would look good over the door to my shop at home. It took about three hours of gluing, screwing and nailing.
Plans for this will be featured in the August 2010 issue of Popular Woodworking Magazine. It might just be the first birdhouse plan we’ve published on my watch.
I expect to catch some teasing from the editors at our competing magazines. But I also bet they’ll secretly wish they had thought of it first.
– Christopher Schwarz
