Everyone who likes to work with wood, sooner or later has a small collection of scrap wood. Mostly they are beautifully grained pieces of wood or rare exotics that are simply too good to throw away. In this post, we will show you how you can quickly make small and practical gifts for different occasions from those strips, boards and blocks.
Bottle opener with surprise
For a bottle opener, wooden blocks and strips made of somewhat harder, long-fibred types of wood such as ash, walnut and larch are best. They should be at least 80 to 100 mm long and 30 to 40 mm wide. You also need two button head screws (e.g. 3.5 x 30 mm) and a small pinboard magnet (neodymium magnet) for each bottle opener.
Funny party gift
Pre-drill two holes for the screws at a distance of approx. 15 mm. The diameter of the drill bit should correspond to the core diameter of the screw so that the thread grips well (e.g. use a 3 mm drill bit for 3.5 mm screws). Screw the two screws into these holes, leaving a gap of 4 to 5 mm (about the height of a bottle cap) between the screw head and the surface of the wood. Tip: To prevent the screws from coming loose accidentally, you can secure them with superglue.
To hide the magnet in the bottle opener, carefully lift off a chip behind the screws with a chisel or gouge. Do not cut off the chip, just lift it carefully. The resulting notch should be slightly wider than the diameter of the magnet. Now drill a hole into the notch which can accommodate the magnet. Then insert the magnet into the hole and put a few drops of superglue on the magnet and into the hole. Now carefully place the chip back over the magnet and fix it with masking tape. To make the glue line tight and barely visible, you can press the workpiece briefly with a screw clamp.
Once the adhesive has hardened, sand the surface. The hidden magnet and the glue should not be visible afterwards. Now you can give the bottle opener an individual shape. This can be done very quickly with a rasp and file or a belt disc sander. You can make the bottle opener as a worry stone or carve a miniature from it, for example a small car for a tuning geek or a tennis racket for a club mate...
Wine butler for two glasses
You can turn a good bottle of wine into a very stylish gift with our wine butler. In addition to the wine, you will need two wine glasses (perhaps you have some leftovers from a former set of six?) and a wooden strip, approx. 220 mm long, 10 to 20 mm thick and at least 40 to 45 mm wide.
In the middle of the strip, drill a hole large enough to fit over the neck of the bottle (32 mm diameter in our example). To the right and left of it, drill two holes into which you can hang the stems of the glasses. The
Stylish wine presentation for your date
The diameter can be measured generously. With our glasses, the stems are 7 mm, and the holes are 12 mm in diameter. The distance between the holes depends on the shape of the bottle and the glasses. It should be large enough for the glasses to hang freely and not constantly hit the bottle (in our example it was 170 mm).
In order to give the glasses a better hold, you can countersink the holes on the top a little. Now saw two more slits into the strip that lead to the holes. The slits should be slightly wider than the diameter of the glass stems (8 mm in the example). Do not place the slits centrally to the holes but align one edge of the slot with the radius of the hole. The offset slits will prevent the glasses from slipping out of the wine butler on their own later on.
Smartphone holder
A smartphone is an expensive but rather impersonal gift. A self-made stand gives it a more personal charm. For the smartphone stand, you need two small boards with a thickness of approx. 10 to 15 mm; they can also be made of plywood. The boards should have a width of approx. 90 mm and a length of between 120 and 200 mm. You can adjust the dimensions to the size of the smartphone, and you can also build a stand for tablets in this way.
Individual add-on for high-tech gifts
The boards are joined with tenons. To do this, mark two slits on the long board in the thickness of the material, 30 mm from the bottom. The short board is given a 30 mm wide and 30 mm deep recess at one end. The slits and recesses are first sawn and then chiselled out. Then smooth the joint and especially the corners, sand everything well and try out whether the joint can be put together easily but not too loosely.
So that the smartphone stand is stable, and the charging cable can be routed centrally to the phone, you can cut out a small recess, e.g. a flat curve, on the lower edge of the long board. You can also round off the upper part or customise it, for example, with the fretsaw.
Design options
Depending on how much time you have, you can further embellish all three gift ideas. They can be very easily upgraded with a beautiful surface treatment. However, you still need to allow for the time it takes for the surface agent to dry. If you know how to carve, you can quickly make little works of art out of the bottle openers. If it is a gift for an anniversary, you can leave a dedication on the wine butler and the smartphone holder, e.g. with a branding tool. There are many ways to customise these gift ideas made of scrap wood – let your creativity run wild!
