View allAll Photos Tagged WoodWorkingProjects
I'm already getting really weird results. Aniline dye is supposed to be very easy to use, as it's not based on coats, as with stain, but rather on the dilution ratio of your mixture. A second coat shouldn't darken things, but I found it very much did, and with the denatured alcohol drying up so fast, it was hard to tell where I'd properly coated. Swaths of each test section would dry out, looking much lighter, so I'd paint over them again, and I ended up chasing the dry spots around and around in this way, never getting the results I wanted.
I ran the edges through a 3/16" roundover bit on my router table, to relieve the inside vertical edges, opposite the hinges. This lets the doors swing out without scraping the inside of their openings, and matches visually with roundovers that will be found throughout the rest of the project when completed.
The band saw sure makes awesome work of Styrofoamâ„¢. It's sharp and perfect. I'm betting some more ideas pop into my head based on this new ability.
With the grooves relieving the back of the door, it shuts comfortably over the shelf fronts, and in fact, does so exactly, flushing itself up with the front of the stand in the process.
A closeup of the inside. To get the stain off, before realizing I was going to simply paint over all blemishes, I sanded it down with a more aggressive 120-150 grit combo. It turned out I preferred the countryish roughness of this finish, so I didn't take them back up to 400 grit. This level of roughness is a tad more protected against scrapes and bumps as well. Anything that rubs against a smooth, shiny finish shows up on the surface.
First roundover cut, down the long edge. It worked out pretty well. I was worried that the fence might prevent me pushing the entire thing in there, if everything wasn't extremely square, but it worked out well, for all sides.
Here's a view of the second panel before pulling off the wax paper. This was on both sides to protect the clamps from the glue, and to help squeeze glue back in as it tried to squeeze out.
Flipping the panels over, the textures don't match up as well, but these will be inside. There's a lot of color variation in poplar.
These were the colors I went through trying to find the blue that was in my mind. It turned out to be the third one down on the right card here, "Windsor Haze." The funny thing was that I started with the card on the left, liked the two middle ones, but they were too bright, and I wanted something between them, so I found the 3rd card here, third swatch down, which was between them, but it was still too bright, then after a wrong-turn with the 2nd card, found the 4th card, 3rd swatch, which was almost perfect, although I wished it was slightly closer to the swatch above it. It turned out that the paint dried a bit lighter and did look a bit between those two. Perfect! That worked out quite well.
👉 DIY Wooden Bar Stool with Backrest – Full Dimensions & Plan 🔗 linktr.ee/safranco2025
Looking to build your own furniture? This minimalist wooden bar stool comes with exact measurements – perfect for any DIYer or woodworker.
👉 Visit our link above for more free plans, creative woodworking projects, and building guides!
Tragedy! While screwing on one of the leaf pulls, the pressure of my hand squeezing the knob broke this pull's stem off. I didn't think this would work, but I was able to tape the leaf to the rounded melamine shelf here and balance the leaf stem on top with some epoxy mixed in between. All I can do now is wait, and come back tomorrow to see how it looks.
I had to get fancy here. The third box - for the bottom shelf slot - is taller, and needed some supports to get things at perfect right angles, and to pull faces flat, as the wider wood strips that formed the vertical bits were a tad warped.
I used a scrap piece of wood to clamp the two close panels together, making sure I set them up to have their bows facing away from each other. This way a single clamp would pull the bulges together against the flat edges of the scrap wood separator.
I really loved these strips. They're about 1/8" thick, maybe even thinner than that, and at least 12" long, probably longer. The pieces I had cut previously were just a bit too tall to fit in the spaces between shelves, so I shaved off exactly enough to make a perfect press-fit. That left me with these useless little flaps that I didn't want to throw out.
You can see the rounded-over vertical edge opposite the hinges on the inside of the left cabinet door here. That will allow it to swing open without scraping the inner vertical panel in the foreground. I believe pro woodworkers will often simply taper this, but the roundover matches several roundovers that will be found around the project by the end.
All attached. It's crooked, as the actual wheela assembly on the catch plate is crooked. Here is where I bow to mass production, and the crappiness of cheap hardware from Home Depot. It's crooked in real life, so the hidden catch plate behind the door will be exactly crooked in that way, as well. At least they'll work smoothly.
A double-spiral soft-tone wind chime made of copper pipe, wood and fishing supplies. Traceable templates. Clear instructions. A great gift
Handcrated by Malina. Thanks, Malina! This thing worked great. You did an awesome job. It cleaned up really well, too. I went at it with some plastic steel wool to get the handle and buckle back to somewhat clean (rubbed her name off, though), and the bristles are still silky smooth, with no fly-aways.
I slipped some pieces of blue painters tape through the holes to clean up the ratty edges imparted by the hole cutter.
In this rear view, you can see that the bottom pads between the boxes are exactly as long as the box is deep. The top ones are slightly shorter, owing to the reinforcement bar sticking down from the top, which must be cleared. Also, a back cap is in place to sandwich in the magazine box, keeping it from bumping around in shipment.
I'm setting up for the great glue-up here. I'll be doing so on the panel on the bench in the background. I've set the panels up here to mimic where they'll be, so I don't screw it up in the fury of getting biscuits lined up, glue painted on, and boards pressed in before the glue gets too dry on me.
Here's how magazines will fit in the box. They can't stand up, because the internal height of the cabinet is 10", by specification from the client (mom).
That's it. This is a square viewed edge-on, and that's what will fit in the box I got from the storage place.
I forgot to rout the channel for the other shelf, as indicated by the center line inside the left cabinet area here. It got too late to go back and do it. A job for tomorrow... I'm holding the cabinet door in my hand here.
Getting custom paint at Home Depot after work was a breeze. I had always thought this would be a chore, but <10 minutes of deciding on a color, and 10 minutes of mixing later, I was off with a $10 quart of exactly what I needed to finish up these darn boxes.
I was a little nervous at this point. All of this work in my free time here and there for the past couple of months, and now I was going to burn my name into it. I didn't want to screw it up.
This thing is a fortress against shipping disasters, and I fully expected at this point that it would survive a plane crash into the sea, whereupon it would be discovered and befriended by and island-bound Tom Hanks.
Note that I have written a stern warning about being careful with the piece that pads in the leaf pulls. I don't want mom to tear into this, pull on that piece too hard, and break off another of the stems, as I did when installing one of the knobs previously (I later bought a replacement).