How to Make a Wood Hair Brush

The idea behind the wood hair brush project was to give Amy a place to store her hair ties and maybe some other small items. The bulk of the hair brush is made of walnut and the “bristles” are made from a dowel. This is a fairly easy project and would be great for a beginner and actually quite fun for the more experienced woodworker as well.

You can get the free template from our website and make your own.

What you'll need

Materials

• Walnut - used for the base piece
• Dowel - used for the bristles
• Wood glue
• Finish (we used tung oil)

Tools

• Band saw
• Sander
• Router
• Drill or Drill press
• Forstner and Regular Drill Bits

If you'd rather watch a video, here is an overview video of how we made it from start to finish. If not, the following steps have all the images and information. Enjoy.

We always use the blue painter's tape when applying a pattern. It helps with removing the pattern later on. It was layered onto the piece of walnut and then a healthy coat of spray adhesive was added. Next, the pattern was applied.

Rough Cutting

After the pattern was secure, we rough cut the shape on the band saw. There was no need to get this precisely on the line since we will clean it up on the sander.

Sanding

To get the final shape we wanted, we shaped the wood hair brush on the strip sander. A belt or disc sander would work as well for this.

Once we had the shape that we wanted we moved on to drilling all the holes. The pattern has a grid on it that can be used for the placement of these holes. For some reason our printer didn't print that grid, so we just added them on to the template in the shop. The small holes were drilled to receive a 1/8" dowel. The handle received a larger hole. This was accomplished with a forstner bit.

Once we finalized all of the holes and we were satisfied, we moved on to smoothing over all the edges. We did this with a roundover bit in the router table.

Before adding in the bristles we added a coat of tung oil. We did this early on because we figured it would be difficult to get the finish down between the bristles once they were in place.

We setup a tape line on the bandsaw and then cut 1/8" dowels to our desired length. Having the tape in place allowed us to replicate the same length multiple times. After making enough to fill all the holes, we finished those in tung oil as well, leaving a little area unfinished. This end will be glued into the hole.

We put a little would glue in each hole and tapped them in gently using a block of wood. Some of them did break, so make sure you make a few extras.

The large hole in the brush allows for easy hanging and the bristles are great for storing hair ties or any other small objects. The coolest thing about this project is that it only took an hour or so to make.

We hope you enjoyed this DIY project and the video that goes along with it. If you have any questions or comments please let us know, we'd be more than happy to help you out. Thanks for checking out this Instructable.