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Desk Shelf / Woodworking — No Comments
12
Oct 19

Drilling and Glue-up

So routed down another 8-9mm in the groove for the LED at one end to give a target zone to aim for.

Now to drill in from the back of the shelf to meet that point. None of my drill bits are really long enough bar some of my auger bits, but I’m not hugely confident of my ability to drill straight-on with the bit and brace when I can’t drill downwards which I thought would be awkward here, so I went off and bought a long drill bit from FAMAG (who got recommended by Crimson Guitars a while back, and I thought for long drill bits, well, they’d know). 

Ever feel like you’ve over-spec’d a tool for a job? Oh well. A few minutes of very careful drilling later, and…

And that’s the last bit to do before the glue-up. I’d fit the LED, but, well, the LEDs didn’t arrive (or rather, the wrong ones did – but I’ll take a look later and see if I couldn’t modify them. Might not do so though because the socket meant to go in that countersunk hole in the back of the shelf has not arrived either.

So, I can’t glue-up in the shed, it’s not big enough. There’s a small deck outside the shed I use for this sort of thing.

That reminds me, there’s a rather large cleanup due once this is finished. But for now, out with the hide glue, the clamps, the cauls, and the hammers. 20 minutes of cursing, belting, giving up and getting more clamps and sticky tape and a lot of confused staring at joints that were no longer as snug as they used to be later and…

It’s not… terrible. Though that was one of the more annoying glue-ups I’ve ever done.

I mean, I knew before day one of this project that this clamping setup would be terrible, but still, this was painful. Also, I really need to spend some time reviving those clamps, they’re fantastic things but they’ve been in the elements unprotected for too long and they’ve rusted.

Having six hands would have been useful too…

Somehow those dovetails are now less well-fitting than when last fettled. It has been some time, there would have been some wood movement but it’s still surprising. Oh well.

This one’s the worse of the two, but even at that, it looks worse than it really is because of the shadowlines – I need to spend a while rounding this corner off and fettling the flow from upright to shelf. Glue should be cured by tomorrow, I can take a stab at it then.

Six or seven hours in the clamps later, I removed the clamps and let the shelf sit in the shed to cure fully. It doesn’t look terrible yet.

Looks even enough…

Definitely too big for my shed though. Yikes.
So, still needs to cure off overnight, then shape the top corners, glue some leather to the contact points where it leans against the wall, add another coat or two of polyx (the one coat on it so far is actually quite nice-looking), polish the resin a bit, fit the LED lights… but those are mostly small jobs compared to this. We’re easily more 95% of the way there. Of course, that last 5% can ruin everything still…

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 — 3 Comments
29
Sep 19

Scraping resin

I don’t know why I had it in my head that you couldn’t scrape resin and you had to sand it, but I did. And it’s not a great approach. I poured a little extra over the last day’s resin pour to get it proud of the surface, and ran both packing tape and a hot glue dam around the edge to let it get proud without spilling all over the place.  

Pour, let it cure, remove hot glue with ease, curse and swear for half an hour or more while removing the packing tape because it doesn’t want to remove cleanly. Scrape with the plastic razor blades to get the last of it up. 

Total pain. Worse yet, you get a perfect surface when you pour it but you know you’ll have to destroy that to get a single flat plane for the tabletop 🙁

Oh well. 
I don’t have many photos of the next step which was to take my new sander and try sanding all of that down to flush with the surface starting at 180 grit and progressing up to 500, 2000 and 2500 wet&dry, which took forever, only to misalign a sheet of paper near the end and not cover the velcro hooks on the bottom of the sander and grinding these small circular paths into the surface that I couldn’t polish out. I resorted to pouring even more resin to fill them in, and then trying to sand that back down again and finally just losing patience completely and taking a card scraper and a #080 to the thing.

I don’t know why I didn’t do the scraper first. It was far more effective than sanding. I mean, I still have to sand after scraping because that surface isn’t great, but the problem with sanding is that resin dust is white. That’s why the walnut looks like someone spilled talc over it there. I tried flushing it out with white spirits, pulling it out with tack cloths, nothing worked. Rather depressing. What I’m hoping is that the finish will “wet” the dust and keep it that way. When it’s wet from white spirits, it looks fine. 

So while I’m going to put a poly surface on as the final coat, I grabbed some danish oil and thinned it with white spirits and hopefully that will penetrate down into the pores and cover up the mess.

Not bad. It cured slightly lighter, so I put another coat on it but it looks pretty okay. I mean, I’m not done with this yet, I need to either sand or scrape the entire top again to clear up some small defects and I still haven’t shaped the edges – those sharp edges can’t stay, they’re only there so I could manage it better while doing joinery and inlay and so on. But that’ll be one of the last steps. I’m done with this board for now, I’ll put a towel on it to protect it and set it aside.

The next job is going to be routing the next shelf up so I can have an LED light recessed into the underneath of it to light the desk. I’ll have to order an extra-long drill bit to get the cable to the recess from the rear, and then I can use the router to chase the cable through the back of the shelf and the uprights so there aren’t any dangling cables.

And I’ll think about putting some inlay on those boards and the sides as well. And I’ll have to take the sharp edges off too. And then I can assemble and finish. 

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