This post is about my gift to my girlfriend for Christmas, a headphone stand. The stand is made out of maple, and it was my first time cutting dados and mortises and tennons. I learned so much working on this project about both the joinery, sawing techniques, and general woodworking knowledge.


I finally passed on the pencil for marking where to cut in favor of a marking knife. I used an x-acto knife in the absence of a marking gauge. In the first few marks, I made mistakes I didn't even know were possible with it (marking at an angle, slightly moving the cut). With that being said, using the marking knife and then using a chisel to cut a little groove into the waste side of the cut to square the saw was a total game changer. I noticed a large difference in the squareness of my cuts (at the beginning, at least.. still practicing staying square all the way through).

The other big advancement I made was finally making a proper shooting board. This made finishing up my cuts with the plane really easy and I can't believe I waited this long.

This project has laid bare to me the urgent need to properly sharpen my tools. My chisels really struggled to cut end grain, which was really important for the joinery. My plane also seriously struggled. I've begun working out a real sharpening system to avoid these issues next time.

I'm pretty happy with the result! My joinery could definitely have been tighter. I had to make somewhat excessive use of the sawdust trick but I think I learned a lot on this project that my future projects will benefit from as well. As an aside, I wish companies gave better reference drawings for their products- I struggled to find the full dimensions of the Airpod Maxes (the published drawing only listed the total square overall dimensions which was sufficient, but it would have been nice to not have had to estimate the measurement of the headband). I was trying to minimize the footprint of the stand, but I wanted to make sure that it wouldn't tip forward under the weight (since the Maxes have really wide earpieces, which I didn't want bumping the arms) and that the center of mass was still above the base. It ended up being fine.