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Instead of taking the doors off and using the drill press, I used my General marking ruler to figure out where to put the knobs, drilled a through-hole by hand with a cordless drill, and counterbored the back carefully with the same drill and a Forstner bit. This isn't ideal, but it worked fine.
A simple cantilevered shelf for lighting and other uses, made of birch plywood and solid cherry. Light fixture is from Ikea.
This is how the top of the bottom panel turned out. The grains are matched up on this side, so it's prettier than its bottom side. This is also pre-sanding, and it, too, looked, and felt great once run through 3 grits with the random-orbit sander.
To get the panels trimmed the same - more important than getting them trimmed to any particular shape - I taped down some guides on my sliding Incra Miter 3000 miter sled. This worked out just fine, especially with the built-in clamping provided by the T track, and the movable clamp.
Making progress on the basement bar finishing project. These are shots of the bar top as of August 9.
August 9, 2019.
iMG_1181
This project has given me a lot of long, thin shim-like pieces of wood to use for other things. The alternating colors of the birch in the many strips I'm holding would probably look interesting glued up, and turned in my mini lathe into something like a pen. Note between my fingers in each hand that there are thin slivers of air between the boars. This is the very light snipe encountered at the leading, and trailing edges of the wood going through my planer. There's simply nothing I can do about it with small boards, as they're completely in the planer, past any adjusting steps, when they're cut.
The larger strips in the back - nice, square rips from the longer top and bottom panel glue-ups of this TV stand project - are going to be put to use as stops at the back of the small shelves, and bracing along the undersides of the long shelf, and top panel, to help strengthen it up against tilting over to the side. I don't think it's at all necessary, but I'll feel a little bit better with some nice-looking cross-bracing, even though it won't look like that's what it is.
A double-spiral soft-tone wind chime made of copper pipe, wood and fishing supplies. Traceable templates. Clear instructions. A great gift.
I wanted nice Bessey K-Body clamps, but they were too pricey, and delivery would take too long, so I had to run to Home Depot, and pick up a handful of these long Pony bar clamps. I have not liked them very much so far. Here I'm using them to hold the panels together while I get a sense of how things are fitting. Nothing is attached yet.
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The knobs are all comically oversized, but as they are "solid" brass (or bronze for the other two, possibly), I can really whittle them away in the mini lathe, at the grinding wheel, with my Dremel multitool, and its cut-off wheels, and grinding bits. I have some ideas of what I want to make. This will certainly be an adventure. I've not done anything like this before. Don't you just love how willing I am to jump into these things head-first? (I don't)
The back stops are glued in place. All of this is the same wood - birch - but there's such tonal variation. It won't matter how this looks, being in the back, but it's both fascinating, and annoying to have so much variance, especially when it's so solid. It's not like 3 colors interwoven over all pieces. Each piece seems a wholly different color. I do like the concept of cutting up birch into different colors and gluing it back into geometric patterns, however, which I've done, and have further plans of doing.
Staining is a messy business, so I didn't bother taking shots along the way. This is a completed first coat, and I think that's all it's getting. It's pretty dark already. The wood had so many textures and qualities to it, despite being all the same kind - birch from Home Depot - that everywhere took the stain in a different way. The shelves went dark in the left side cabinet. The bottom panel's front edge has white bands that absolutely could not be gotten rid of. I tried sanding them, roughing them up, spot staining, sponge applications, brushing. It was very dense in those spots, and just wouldn't accept the stain the way the rest of the locations would. You can see the cathedral grain running across it. I'm going to look out for this kind of pattern in the future where edges will be prominent. It would look fine in the middle of a door, or bench, but for this, it was a little frustrating to see those whiter bands along the front edge.
TADA. This is the best shot I've had of this thing in awhile. It's fairly close to the actual color, the doors are on, the knobs are on them, and there's a towel for some reason.
Actually, the ancient towel is just protecting my table and the stand from each other.
I took 2 of the spikes from my wood shed project, routed the ends thinner, and fit them into the hinge mortises, screwing them in with the hinges' own screws. Now I could hold them out away from me to spray all sides of them, and let them hang as seen here to dry.
The big red clamps in the middle - Bessey K-Body parallel clamps - helped me get things tightly held together, and quickly. The glue was already getting very tacky, and I had to clamp hard to press the glue bead out the sides. I never got the crappy Pony bar clamps (orange) at the 4 corners as tight, and couldn't achieve total squeeze-out, but I got it close enough that you can't really see it. I just know that it isn't quite right. You can get in very close, and see the tiniest sliver of space. I have 2 more K-Body clamps on the way, but would really liked to have at least 8. At $40US/ea., it's a lot of money for a hobbyist like me, though. I'm amazed I have 2, and 2 more on the way!
The little cabinet doors are just set in place so I could see how they looked at this point in the build.
I did some tests with wood stains I picked up that I thought would work, but they were terrible. This is the same kind of poplar 1/4" panel that the boxes in the side cabinets are made of, but the color imparted by these stains clashes with the main TV stand unit.
This was an attempt at using my toggle clamps in the Woodpeckers drill press table system to create an adjustable vertical rest for holding work on edge like this. The rubber stop allowed too much play, so I abandoned the idea. I have to test all the possibilities out, though, or I'll never know all the cool ways to cheat on each project :)
Final sanding (barring some more after I glue in the back bracing/stops) took about 2 hours, and was done manually, with about 3 or 4 grits of sand paper, down to 400 grit by the end. The entire outside of the unit is silky smooth. Some of the interior is still a bit rough, but I'm okay with that. A lot of the interior will be completely obscured by equipment, or cabinet stuff.
This looks far more orange and saturated ere than it is in real life. My camera was having a hard time balancing for the lights in here.
Sanding down panels makes a mess of my shop. You can see the airborne dust in this picture, especially in front of the pegboard. Note that it coats everything in the room evenly. You can really see it on the black vertical support rail above and left of the panels stacked on my router table. I'm really anxious for the large, centralized dust collector that should be in shipment now to arrive. I don't think it'll be in before the weekend, but it'll be in soon. Most of my sanding on this project is over anyway.
Clamped in a 3-jaw chuck, and I'm going to use the cut off tool to part the pull's standoff a bit closer to the leaf. I knocked down the lathe for the first time since adding a ~1.235" riser to the motor/spindle assembly so I could use my short parting tool holder. I don't have a tall one, and I guess I haven't done any parting in ages.