I made a knife box as a 75th birthday gift for Brian, through Whatsit Manufacturing Co.. It's a two-piece set – a spalted maple bed and a mulberry cover – sized to a specific Japanese chef knife and its tooled leather sheath. The cover has a traditional Asanoha pattern routed into the top face and filled with white dyed epoxy. A brass disc engraved with "75" sits in a pocket in the bed. The cover doubles as a display frame when flipped upside-down, with the mulberry border framing the spalted maple.

I race on a sailboat called Scuttlebutt at Cedar Island Yacht Club. In 2025 we had a good season – first in spring, summer, fall, overall, and line honours. I wanted to make something for the crew to mark it, so I designed and made a set of custom brass awards through my manufacturing business Whatsit Manufacturing Co..

The result is a 48mm brass award with a spinnaker pattern on the front and a compass rose on the back, filled with colored epoxy to match the actual sail colors, mounted in an engraved spalted maple plate. I made eight in total – five for the crew and three that ended up as test pieces.

I've been working on a side project for a while now: Whatsit Manufacturing Co. is my small custom manufacturing business, specializing in custom-designed handmade products and made-to-order items.

The tagline is "fine dohickies and thingamabobs." Someone comes to me with an idea - a specialized tool, a unique gift, a one-of-a-kind solution to a problem - and I design and build it from scratch. I also have a small catalog of stock products that can be customized.