Ben Gin’s Blog
This is a blog of things that I like to do/make including:
- Learning new tie knots
- Building pallet furniture
- Making craft projects
Most of the pallet and craft posts will be retrospective, as they are completed projects from past years.
Pallet Furniture
In 2011 I helped a colleague make a mobile pallet kitchen table, and so found out that I could obtain pallets from my work place. Since then, I have obtained pallets from wherever I could find them (but no longer from work). I disassemble them and store the wood ready for any projects. To disassemble pallets, I use the no tools method first. If the configuration of the wood does not allow for this technique, I then resort to a crow bar and rubber mallet.
Craft Projects
I also like to try my hand at any other craft projects.
Tie Summary
I stumbled across a video on youtube showing two different ways of tying tie knots, and that led me to the discovery that there are 100+ ways to tie a tie. Starting from a work initiative to “suit up Tuesday” (March 2020), I decided to make it mean “Tie Tuesday”, and so have been doing one new tie knot a week.
Below is a summary table of the tie knots that I have tried. The “Name” column contains a hyperlink to the youtube video for that knot, or a photo on pinterest from which I have tried my best to replicate. If a “Name” does not have a link, then it is either a knot I have come up with myself, or it is a variation to an existing knot. The “Image” column contains the image which can be enlarged by clicking (or tapping) on the image. The “Difficulty” column is a calculated value (details of the calculation can be found in this post) and the numbers are relative with a maximum of 10 for what I consider the most difficult tie knot.
A more detailed table that is arrangeable and searchable can be found in this post.
Current tally of tie knots is: 82
Table updated: 2025-06-20
