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Pretty nice. Blue and orange are compliments, and the TV stand itself is a bit on the orange side, though it's a bit less orange in real life. My camera seems to add a bit of orange to fluorescent pics. I suppose it's simply not balanced in the fluo setting to my particular blend of fluo lights. I can correct it by taking something as purely white as possible and training it, and I have, but often I'm just too busy/lazy to bother :)
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.
Aside from a rivet in the handles that cut my hand while tightening, and later while loosening the Pony bar clamps, and their wish to spin around with the handle, and the need to spin them about 10-15 times once they engage the piece to get them fully tight, the Ponies leave awful marks in the wood. The rubber pieces meant to protect from marring the surface seem to leech some kind of oil into the wood. This is nearly impossible to sand out. Hopefully the final sanding, and stain will cover over it. As I've said, I'm not impressed with the Pony clamps one bit.
Taking a break here, I picked up a small block plane from Home Depot. I wanted to see if it would make a good solution for trimming up the edges of the vertical panels, as they were cut just a hair wide, to allow for sanding them flush. Some areas are a bit wider than a hair, but all of my mess here, and the tests that created it proved for me that planing, or at least the work of this particular cheap block plane are terrible choices. I was leaving the nastiest edge. I think birch is too hard, and the planer was too rickety, and the blade was too dull. I tried honing it up, but it didn't help. I cleaned this up, and abandoned the idea.
I also picked up new hinges for this thing. In the last couple of months the hinges I had removed after the first test of the doors were moved around the garage countless times, jostled, sometimes knocked to the floor, and they were pretty beat-up and very loose. Also, the screw heads were all stripped.
Getting closer to the end, and it's time to think about finishing the project... with wood finish. I'm going by my client's (mom's) request here. She wants it to match our barn back home. This is lighter than the barn, though the barn has darkened with age. She did also say "not dark - keep it light," and I'm pretty sure this is about what she's hoping for. There are actually 2 different stains here, half on the left, and half on the right, but they look identical. I'm a little disappointed that even after properly mixing up the pre-stain, and wood finish ("Colonial Maple"), and following the directions, and wait times, I'm getting a blotchy look. Of course, this is scrap that hasn't been sanded ever. I'm pretty sure the finely sanded (400 grit) TV stand will accept the stain far better.
After extensive reading as to the uses, pros, and cons of everything here, and other things recommended in the instructions not shown here, I have decided to go pick up spar varnish, instead of using either Polycrylicā¢, or Polyurethane, as spar varnish is good for lots of sunlight, and will keep the wood from graying over time. The TV stand will be in a room with huge glass doors and windows on 3 sides, and 2 large skylights overhead. It gets very bright in there. I don't want it to gray in the areas around the TV's shadow.
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.
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.