hey there everyone my son asked me to make him this perpetual calendar and I thought I'd show you how I did it there are two big blocks on top for showing the day of the month and underneath that are three skinny blocks which are labeled with the different months of the year and the whole thing fits into this simple cherry wood stand so I have this piece of cherry it is 29 inches long and four and a half inches wide that's certainly enough to get the blocks I might be able to get the entire calendar out of this now I need to inch cubes for the day blocks but I don't have two inch thick cherry so I first had to cut off a piece of the cherry and rip it down to a bit over two inches in width and then I would cut it in thirds so that I could glue it up into a blank that was thick enough to provide two cubes that were each two inches in all dimensions so all the big blocks are glued and drying I will take this and will rip this down to make the day blocks the month clocks need to be about 2/3 of an inch in cross-section so that three of them can fit neatly under the day blocks I have a 14 inch piece left and I need a piece that is six inches by four inches for the base and that should leave me just enough to make the wall that goes around the calendar box the base is full-thickness but i resaw the rest in half as the wall doesn't need to be thick at all so then here I'm planing it down to make it smooth after Reece on so this is my blank where I need to get two inch cubes on it this is getting a little bit small to safely put through the fence on my table saw or at least it's a little bit small for my comfort level so what I'm gonna do is I'm going to set up a stop block here on my crosscut sled at the two inch mark and I will do all the cuts there and hopefully that should work just fine okay so here we are so far this piece is going to be the base these are the two day blocks that I just cut out on the side this is going to give us the months and I have not cut this into strips yet because I want to get it to fit there will be three of these that fit under the blocks then these pieces are going to be the back and the sides again okay off to the saw after ripping - width I cut out the three pieces I needed to make the wall off-camera I also cut the top corners off of the two side pieces and then sanded it all smooth of course a butt joint is not particularly strong however a this is going to be a very light duty project and be this is gonna be glued down like that and that's going to be a longer angel long that's going to be a long grain joint which should be pretty strong portable router table I use the router table to make a simple decorative Cove on three sides of the base the front and the two sides we take this out of the clamps and then we can glue it into position here that's a ridiculous amount of clamping pressure I'm not tightening these things tightly just trying to get the coverage over the whole thing so for the numbers on the blocks we're gonna use the x-carve to carve them in and of course watching the CNC machine is not really exciting so I'm not really gonna have much of that in the video I've got a little l-shaped clamp here where I can just clamp each block and I just have to do one number after the other now now this step is of course strictly optional you could just paint numbers on or stencil them or use some other non CNC method now unfortunately the writing on the month blocks was just too small for my ex carb I did not have a bit that was small enough that could clearly write it I tried so I could not carve them as I did this so for the month blocks I used the toner transfer method where you print backwards with the laser printer then use acetone to transfer that and that worked fairly well for finishing I'm going to run it to the garage and hit them with a bit of lacquer I can't do that in here because I don't have the ventilation so there's the finished product and I think it turned out great so how does this work the way it works is you have the numbers written on these blocks the numbers of the day so as you know we're the 27th today so 27th and then tomorrow is gonna be the 28th so you would just turn the block and there's the 28th and so on and so forth well now there are six sides to a block so that gives you 12 total faces with the two blocks and we count with ten digits you know one through ten and so on and so forth well so how do you do this with the numbers well the way it works is on the one block you have one two three and then four and then five and then on the next block you have six seven eight and then you go back to the six and you turn it over for the nine and then you also need 1 2 and 0 well why do you need 1 2 and 0 on both blocks that's because you need to be able to do 13 14 15 and 16 so for any number on this block for example the 3 you need a 1 on the other block so you can make 13 and for any number on this block which is the 7 and the 8 and the 9 you need a 1 and a 2 on this block so you can have the 29th up to 28th and I wanted to try to find a way where you could just have a blank on one of the block so that you could just have you know blank 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 but we just don't have enough faces because either you need a zero on both blocks you need the 1 and the 2 on both blocks and then you know using the 6 twice already at our limit there's just not enough other spaces in order to do so you have to live with you know 0-7 for the 7th so underneath the number blocks you have the month blocks and here there are three skinny blocks so there's four sides and you can have a month written on each and three times four is twelve and there are twelve months of the year so that works great so that brings us to the end of this project as always I'd like to thank you for coming by and spending some time in my shop I hope you enjoyed yourself I hope you learn something that maybe you can try in your shop and we look forward to seeing you next time what next