Wooden Tape Dispenser

One night a couple months ago, I was surfing Amazon looking for a birthday gift to get my girlfriend. She doesn't know this, but I pretty much forgot to get her something (sorry dear) and was panicking. Then I remembered that she showed me a picture of a wooden tape dispenser that she thought was cool. In my mind, girlfriend-that-loves-crafts + full-of-love-homemade-gift = happy girlfriend. A couple hours later, I had this in my hands:

I started out with a single block of wood that I cut in half (so the grain would match), mounted it on my lathe with a 4 jaw independent chuck, and turned out the circular cuts in the wood. I sanded down the corners and edges to give it a rounded, smooth appearance and cutout one quadrant of it using a coping saw. The black dots are magnets I salvaged from a broken hard drive that are superglued into small holes I routed out using a Dremel.

The tape cutting teeth was taken from a plastic saran wrap box (does a surprisingly good job of cutting tape too) and glued into slots that were cut out of each half using a Dremel with a cutting disc. The job was finished with some light sanding and light oiling (using olive oil...yes yes, it may go rancid, but it's all I had at the moment) to bring out the grain and wood color.

Unfortunately, this was a product of procrastination so I never took pictures for a DIY post. Check out more pictures in a blogpost my girlfriend wrote about it.

I've also opened up comments on all my posts in case people have questions. Feel free to comment!