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 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!

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.

The band saw sure makes awesome work of Styrofoam™. 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.

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

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.

Exactly the same. Drum sanding is pretty cool stuff. I want a real drum sander one of these days.

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Well, I'm done that step. We're getting pretty close to being done the entire project now.

I'm really lingering on staining these little boxes. I'm nervous.

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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.

Here's how the boxes fit in the side cabinets. Nice.

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.

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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.

The strips to the left are for the other 3 boxes I will be making next.