This is a scrap piece of maple held in the jaws of a large drill press vice, which has a cotton rag draped through the jaws to keep the dirt, and jaw marks off the scrap piece. I'm using this to see how good I am at hinge mortising with a chisel. I've never done it, but I've certainly seen it done often enough through my life. Seeing and doing are different things, of course...

The panels glued up quite well! I was very happy with how flat they were, and how strong. I had jointed them on my router table to ensure invisible seams, and that worked out really well, too.

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Here's the previous glue-up of scrap wood into a new, usable panel. It might look rough, and dusty, but that's only because it's all board-ends you're seeing, straight on. It's actually been sanded with 400 grit to a very smooth finish, and feels amazing. on all 6 sides, and edges. I want to take the long glue-up panel cut-offs in the background, cut them in half, and join them all into a longer, narrower panel, roughly like this one, but more detailed, as now it's pieces glued up in 2 dimensions. Because of the low points being so low, I'm only going to get maybe a 0.25" panel out of it, but I'm curious to see how it'll look, and to think up quirky, homey uses for it.

The legs

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I gave up on hinge-mortising with a chisel, as it's just too ugly when I do it. I decided to use the router table, and Incra LS Positioner as it's meant to be used, and incrementally move to rout out the door edges to sink the hinges properly. Here I'm using the right-angle attachment, with a wooden handscrew clamp to hold the two doors against the fence, with a fronter, and backer board to keep it from tearing out on either side of the doors. This worked beautifully, and the hinges fit *exactly.* Awesome.

Aniline dye is a very concentrated product. You can mix it with anything, including water, oil, mineral spirits, or alcohol. I used denatured alcohol from Home Depot, a pleasant smelling, and fast drying mild solvent often used as a marine cooking oil, or to clean brushes, glass, porcelain, and metal, or to thin shellac. The dyes I picked up at Rockler.

This is how big the knobs I bought as blanks to carve into shapes - before finally finding leaf pulls I liked just fine - would look. Too big. Interestingly, Rockler, where I finally found the leaf pulls, also had this style pull in a row of sizes. I could have actually gone with this style and found an appropriately sized knob just like this.

The side panels of the magazine box have been trimmed to size, after the glue-up work in the previous operation. The next step is to contour them to the right shape, and glue up the box.

I used one of the stakes from the foundation work on the wood storage project as a test piece. Earlier it had been used to test the Sheer Rustic Red Thompson's WaterSeal + stain on the wood storage shed project, which is why the end is orange-brown. The blue I chose looks great to me. That's pretty much exactly what I saw in my head. Let's get to painting!

To round over the corners, I simply taped the panels together, set my drill press up as a simple drum sander, and sanded them by eye to a nice roundness.

The original wall mount brackets are a cantilever design.

Mortise and through tenon and glue joinery connects the members together.

The sign appeared to be sitting lower on one side. Closer inspection of the wall mount brackets revealed a slight separation at the mortise and tenon joint.

First, some tests on scrap wood...

The iron is really burning my fingers here. It's tremendously hot, much moreso than even larger soldering irons I've used. A lot of heat rises up from it, and holding it like this, hands above, it's like putting your hands right over a clothing iron.

It occurred to me shortly before this, the packaging day, that the newly acquired band saw (thanks again, mom!) gave me an awesome new power: custom packaging. I picked up these 1.5" thick, 2'x4' slabs of Styrofoam™ from the insulation aisle at Home Depot, and broke in the new saw with almost the softest of materials. The dust collector kept it from making a complete mess.

This thing cuts styro like a laser.

After peeling off this wax paper, there was a lot of very thinly squeezed glue making the surface crusty, but this sanded off quite well, as expected.

This is prior to the roundover work I'm about to do along the outer edges. Normally this would be done before assembly, but I'm being weird :)

Here's a back side view of how the shelves came out. They're all flushed up. You can also see that old gouge error I made by moving the router positioning system the wrong direction. It's repaired with a piece of wood, sanded to fit. This won't be hidden by the light stain color, but it will be hidden by being at the back of the unit, behind the television.

Check out those sharp edges with their perfect 90° corners. I'm ready to turn these into a magazine box.

I will admit that it is a tad ridiculous to use a dedicated hole cutter to cut a hole in Styrofoam™. A steak knife would probably have worked as well. Still, how often does one get a chance to use one of these awesome contraptions?

Mom's TV is pretty gigantic on the back porch. I didn't realize quite how small the final TV stand would look underneath it, but it does its job. At least now from the couch they can see the TV properly over the corner of the desk, seen here intruding in the lower right corner.

I was very glad to see this technique work out so well on such thin stock, as I'm sure it will come in handy on many future projects.

The original wall mount brackets are a cantilever design.

Mortise and through tenon and glue joinery connects the members together.

The sign appeared to be sitting lower on one side. Closer inspection of the wall mount brackets revealed a slight separation at the mortise and tenon joint.

After sanding the panels up with multiple grits in a random orbit sander, trimming them to size in the circular saw, and jointing the edges again on the router (as seen set up here), the panels looked and felt factory-made.

I designed this longer section of the deeper drawer to handle a TV remote if she wanted to store one or two in here. It may or may not actually be used in that way.

You can't see from the front, but the left side cabinet has 2 shelves, just like the big one visible in the middle here, slid in from the back in rounded-front channels, routed with a 3/8" bit, cut 2x, 1/4" apart, for a 5/8" hole, with the 'widow's peak' at the front chiseled out manually. I'm using a board on the front to distribute clamp pressure to the top, bottom, and vertical panels around the cabinet on the front face, and the back face is just pushing the bottom shelf in here. I've already glued in the top of the two. This is the final gluing on this project. I left the shelves just a hair long, and will sand them flush to the back surfaces after the glue is all dry here.

I used my method of clamping on planed 2x2s as flat bars to make sure I was getting a nice, flat panel Two large Bessey K-Body parallel jaw clamps are drawing the pieces together to form a tight edge-bond.

I've decided to replace the hinges with new ones. I've stripped the screws pretty badly taking these hinges off and putting them back on a few times, and the hinges are scraped up quite a bit after having been moved around the shop for about a month while I was using all worksurfaces and shuffling things constantly.

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