I've begun to cut the biscuit slots for the top and bottom panels, and the 4 vertical supports. This was quite tricky. The wood is 5/8" thick (after planing from 3/4"), and the biscuit cutter cannot be lowered that much from a dead surface, leaving me to either deal with off-center biscuits, or rigging up some kind of very thin shims to lift the plate joiner off the keying surface on which both vertical supports, and joiner sit. Also, for the top and bottom panels, I had to mark everything off precisely, and then clamp flat bars to the wood. Then I would rest the joiner against those, and plunge straight down. It worked out well, but was a bit tense. I didn't want to ruin all of this work. The top and bottom panels are each made of 5 cut, planed, jointed, glued-up, recut, and sanded planks. That's a lot of work to redo.

Finally getting a sense (outside my 3D mockup on my computer) of how this thing is going to look. The shelf there needs its front edges rounded over whenever I get the right bit. In that the radius is created by routing the channel in the side panels with a 3/8" bit, I need a 3/16" roundover bit to properly round the front of the shelf top and bottom. I have a 1/8", 1/4", and 3/4", naturally :)

Shorter screw on the left, original length on the right, before turning it down in the mini lathe, too.

I pressed this front piece against the cabinet to make impressions of the leaf pulls, then outlined them to give me an idea where to center the holes in this sheet. I wanted the pulls on this thing so mom didn't have to set them up when it arrived, and so for the big reveal, when she opened it up. I didn't want it to arrive "some assembly required." This meant I needed to really pad around the leaves so they wouldn't break in shipment.

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For precision on this delicate little door (poking through to the front is NOT an option here), I used a needle drill. I love these things. They're useful everywhere from delicate wood projects to electronics PCB work, and even work in aluminum. I can get a better lined-up hole than I can with my drill press, or hand drill, too, in shorter time. It gives me back the dexterity I lose with those things.

Had to extend the connectors between LED strips. Cut the original connectors and extended them with 22 gauge wire. All connections soldered and shrink wrapped for durability.

My new project "Bruce Lee,the little dragon" Chest i built for my room. .

No time to show the clamping in progress. This was a bit of frantic work to get things perfectly aligned while tightening everything up, but it worked.

The shelves are all glued in, and I can check them off my dwindling to-do list of items for this project. The two clamping procedures did a number on the vertical bar on the side here, but sanding will clean all of that up.

I cut all the strips to the same length with the Incra Mter 5000 on my table saw. Then I worked for awhile to line them up in a way that matched up the colors and textures as well as I could. These are intended to be the outsides of the panels.

I clamped a piece of scrap (from my wood stain test) in the drill press vice (hidden under the cotton rag), and planed for awhile, trying to get perfectly smooth curls. I managed it, but not without chatter, even when pulling the blade up so high, I couldn't see it poking out the bottom. It felt like a really crappy plane, though it was my first, so I've nothing with which to compare it.

A 6" Bessey Tradesmen bar clamp, 4 Small Irwin Quick-Grip bar clamps, and 2 small spring clamps hold the back stops in place as their glue dries.

So I went and bought a cheap ($45ish) Ryobi belt sander. It was by far the cheapest model (some went up to $300+), and it was the only one with a nice flat top, which was what I wanted. This let me flip it over, clamp it to my workbench, and use it like a benchtop belt sander. This made it pretty easy to flush up all the edges of the boxes by running them around the belt's flattened region.

Looks okay. Not too bad.

And just to get a sense of the last knob. It matches the hinges a bit, though the first does a lot moreso. We'll have to see what happens. I have little idea where this part of the project is leading me.

The catch for the door catches the magazine box, unfortunately, I could shorten up the box, but that also means rounding over the front edge again, sanding it to smootheness, tacking off the dust, repainting, and resealing. You can just tip it back a little to get around this instead :)

There have to be some little quirks in a one-off, homemade design like this, no?

Time to glue these up into panels.

Shorter pull at left, with shortened screw. The removed chunk of the left pull's standoff is in the foreground. Original screw and pull pair on the left. Note the difference in the screws I received in these packages. Even the head sizes don't match up. I had to go up a Forstner bit size to drill the counterbore for the brassy one on the left.

Here's where I'm wishing for way more of these 4" Woodpecker's box clamps. On the right, you can see how they clamp things at right angles with their wedge-based system.

Here's the first major concession of the project. I did not think here, and simply made the shelf grooves go as far forward from the back as the big shelf in the middle. This conflicted with the door. My options were to try to fill in the grooves with wood strips, and rerout, or just rout two grooves in the door. Ah well. I rounded them a bit with sand paper to smooth them out a bit so they wouldn't be so sharply noticeable, and they can't be seen when the door is shut.

Hand-sanding the corners worked out great. My "eyeballing" is better than it used to be. I tried to make a corner like this back somewhere in high school, but it came out poorly.

I've attached the doors. I need to mark where the pulls will go, drill through holes, counterbore the backs to recess the screw heads, and mount the knobs finally.

I headed out and managed to ship this on a Sunday, shortly before they closed at 4:30PM. I put it in the mail for 2 day delivery. It was about $120 to ship, I think. That's pricey, for sure, but after working on this thing so much for several months, I just wanted it out and on its way, and didn't mind.

A couple days later mom received the package, and I talked to her on my lunch break. I called back at the end of the lunch break, and she was still unwrapping it, and exhausted from preparing for a large party (the one for which I rushed this delivery). It took her an hour to get through all of my defenses, but she loved it, and so did the guests!

AWESOME. I'm going to be able to make completely custom packaging for this thing. I've been anxious about how to ship it for weeks and weeks.

Suddenly, I want meringue.

I'm using Titebond III to glue up the panels in 2 4" box clamps from Woodpeckers. I love these things for this tiny detail work. It makes it so easy to get the thin strips lined up perfectly, with about 3 paper's thickness overlap for later sanding of the edges flush with the panel faces. It also lets me really press things tightly together, wipe out excess glue, and holds the thin, warpy wood flat. My only lament was that I didn't have about 10 of these things so I could do a lot more simultaneously.

Laying out some ideas for dividers.

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.

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.

These are the two types of small clamps I like most. Both have strengths and weaknesses. The Jorgensen's - at left - have nice flat edges, and stand up easily, supporting small work well. They're lighter, but still strong, and the sliding part slides a bit more easily, but their handles are tiny, rickety, and hard to grip, with fastening rivets that often scrape up my hand ,smaller threads that can take 10-15 twists (not full revolutions) to tighten fully, and the pads leave dark, ugly, deep, oily marks in wood that are hard to sand out.

The Bessey Tradesmen - at right - are much stockier, stronger, clamp with more power (600lbs, IIRC), have very strong, easy to grab handles that don't scrape me up, and tighten up in 2 or 3 twists (not full revolutions), but can't stand up on their own, and can be quite heavy for lighter operations, as with these boxes, which I would consider at the lower limit for Tradesman work.

In short, despite the dark oily marks, and uncomfortable grips, I sort of prefer a stack of Jorgensens for little box work like this, but definitely want the Bessey's for larger projects that stand up on their own, supporting the clamps with their own weight.

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.

Custom extended LED strip connectors

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.