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Desk Shelf / Finishing / Woodworking — No Comments
06
Oct 19

Final stretch…

Few hours in the shed this Saturday. Put the inlaid desk to one side, got out the hated router and set it up and dug a shallow trench along the underside of the first shelf.

Next, had to cut the length of aluminium extrusion I had to length, so spent a few fiddly minutes getting the right length including the end caps, and then discovered I didn’t have a hacksaw to hand. The bandsaw might be able to cut aluminium in a pinch, but the throat’s not deep enough to get to where the cut had to be made, so… angle grinder?

Angle grinder. Fiddly to set up, very fast cut.

Almost too fast really. And of course, messy. So time for hand filing. Out with imp to hold it and the files to clean up the cut and deburr everything.

And then test fit. The extrusion has small ribs to act as barbs when you drive it into the slot so I’ve not seated it home yet (plus I need to drill in from the back of the shelf to run the cord in for power and I don’t yet have the LED strip to go into the extrusion, so this is as far as we go with this step for now).

I’ll drill in from here in the middle of this marked channel back to a slightly deeper part of the trench that I’ll cut before drilling and then it’s a wiring job. I was wondering about chasing the cord down the leg of the shelf and having the plug emerge at the base, but I might just have a 12V DC socket at this point and let the plug go directly to it. We’ll see.

Next, planed the surfaces at the rear of the top of the uprights which will actually contact the wall. This is a straightforward, if slightly exact, chamfer with a handplane. 

Before and after. Not much to see, but it’s the difference between leaning against the wall and being driven into it like a chisel. I’ll put a leather pad on these surfaces as well (and maybe the back of the top shelf too) after finishing is done. 

And now shaping and finish planing. The #04 and my favourite spokeshave come out and all the sharp corners that have been left alone till now go away so every edge is rounded and safe, and the surfaces all get a final planing to take all the pencil lines and dust off, though with this board (you can just about see the worst of it in the photo), there’s been some damage where things have just been banged off the board throughout the last year. Consequences of too large a project in too small a space – it’s not just working on a component that gets affected, storing a component is just as difficult and stuff gets damaged. All the ironing in the world wasn’t making any odds here. Moral of the story: work on smaller projects.

A quick run-over with 240 grit sandpaper later and it’s the last coat of Danish oil (and the first for the uprights). This is the last application of Danish oil for this project, but not the end of the finishing process. 

I don’t know why one of these boards is darker than the other. I’m guessing one was on the top of the pack when it was in the timber yard, hence the pale stripe near the top where the strap held the pack together while the UV in daylight tanned the rest of the board. I’m hoping that’s it because if so the wood will naturally equalise in colour over a few months or so. 

Next morning rolls around and it’s time for the poly part of the finishing. None of the US brands of wipe-on poly I would know are available here, but Osmo Polyx gets recommended a lot and I used another Osmo finish for other projects before with good results, so we’ll spin the wheel on this one. Instructions are simple: open tin, stir well, apply a very very thin coat, repeat coats after 24 hours, 2-3 coats is all that’s needed.

Cue re-watching several videos on polyx wondering if some joker snuck white paint into my transparent poly finish, but no, it’s just that colour (apparently it’s the waxes in the finish – polyx isn’t exactly a liquid polyurethane finish, it’s a blend of oils, waxes and eleven secret herbs and spices that’s allegedly as durable as wipe-on poly but without looking like you sprayed plastic on wood. I’m dubious, but we’ll see). Okay. Now cue a lot of trial to get that thin coat just right. In the end, I apply a thin but still very white-looking coat with a brush and don’t coat everything; then I use a white scotchbrite pad to rub it smooth over the whole surface by which time it’s pretty thin; and then I give it a last wipe-down with a paper towel to get any excess and ensure the layer is nice and thin (if the layer’s thick, it won’t cure right and now you have a gummy tacky layer of oil and wax that’s hard to remove for a retry). 

Not an ideal drying setup, but the best I can manage for now with the size of the shed. It’ll have cured in 24 hours and that’ll be all that I do with it for this stage; next will be drilling the cable route for the light, fitting the LEDs, and when all of that is done, the final assembly and glue-up; and then I’ll do the final two coats of polyx to finish. I might even give an extra coat on top of that to the top of the desk, as it’ll see the most abuse. Hell, I may need to refinish that in a year or two, but I’ll drown that in resin when I get there…

Desk Shelf / Resin / Woodworking — 2 Comments
28
Jul 19

Adding the sea

So when the client for the desk likes racing cars and the Titanic, what do you do? You inlay a racetrack with stringing and banding and you add in a piece of the north Atlantic using resin 😀 
Step one: that router base will not let you get an even depth across that wide a hole, so unscrew it (mangling a screw in the process and having to use a left-hand screw removal bit to dig it out) and add on a much wider shop-made wooden base:

I’m willing to bet nobody else is dumb enough to use sapele for something like this (especially since plywood would be a better, flatter choice). 

Step two: strap on the respirator, the goggles, the ear defenders and make sure you’re good and uncomfortable from all the PPE even before you turn on the dust collector and the router and grit your teeth against the entire process and cut down about 8mm into walnut over a good third of the surface area of the desk, staying within the lines. Which takes a good hour to do because (a) this tool terrifies me and (b) everything is sooooooo slow in case it bites, digs in and pulls the bit through several weeks of work in the blink of an eye. Or, y’know, through me.

This still needs another last pass to even the sea bed out, by which time I think it’ll be 9mm down into a 21/22mm thick slab so it should still be stable, especially when the resin goes in. 

Before adding the resin though, I want to seal the bed and the sides with grain filler — not the wood putty type stuff, the much much finer stuff used to seal the pores (usually in oak) to stop finishes (or in this case resin) wicking through the pores in the wood and looking bad. Once that’s done, I’m going to add reflective film on the bottom of the sea bed. I tested this a while ago, if you do this and have a light source overhead, it lightens up the resin really nicely:

I may need to clean up the shed a bit before that though, every time I do any routing the shed looks like a small bomb went off in it and working there gets less pleasant.

Mind you, it can’t be all that bad, it passed the customer’s testing with flying colours…

Desk Shelf / Woodworking — 1 Comment
13
Oct 18

Still have ten…

So after weeks of not getting to the shed at all because of work and feeling pretty guilty for that, I finally got out there for a few hours today. The next step in the project is the sliding dovetails – the main desk surface shelf has been cut to the right angle, the sides are both shaped, the top shelf and middle shelf are both ready to have the angles cut but I want to get the sliding dovetail for the desk surface done first. And since I’ve been away and am now rusty, out with a bit of beech scrap to try to cut sliding dovetails in for practice.

On go the layout lines, out comes a scrap to run the router along to cut out the female part of the dovetail, I hog out the main part of the waste with a straight cutter and then cut the dovetail edges with the dovetail cutter I bought for this (it’s my only good router bit) I cut the female part out and then checked the board that I hadn’t yet cut the male part of the dovetail into and the whole board went into the female part leaving a gap.

Right. One of *those* days, is it?

Do the whole thing again, this time being extra careful on the cut lines, hog out the central waste as before, set up for the first cut of the dovetail edges, turned on the router, started running it along the fence and while taking hold of the router base, stuck my finger into the running router and caught the locking nut on the collet with the end of the finger. I think I missed the blade by about a centimeter, or as sane people measure it, way too fecking little.

Happily, nothing came off, bar perhaps a high pitched girly scream of panic, and I now have feeling back in the finger again, but I think it goes without saying that I downed tools at that point and went off for a few minutes to have a somewhat shaken cup of tea.

Have I mentioned lately that I dislike power tools somewhat and that routers scare the absolute living shit out of me?

Anyway, after a cup of tea and a change of shorts, I went back out and tried cutting the sliding dovetail by hand by cutting the male part of the dovetail first and marking it off against the edge of the board and then cut out the waste like it was a housing joint which I kindof can do, and then pared to the line for the dovetail – for the actual thing, yes, I’ll use the router, but I’m not touching that daemon-possessed finger eater for a day or two, okay?

Anyway, got the joint to work on the first go with the hand-cut approach, but obviously that includes the usual “doesn’t fit, pare the fecker” steps until it worked. So I think the design will probably have to be slightly adjusted to allow for blind panic and to hide the gap as much as possible by letting the shelves come out a bit to the sides to act as endcaps for the joint. I was seriously impressed with the strength of that joint against pulling out though, I thought it’d be a bit squidgier than it is. It’ll definitely do the job, assuming I cut it right.

And, obviously, don’t remove a finger or two in the process…

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