Home / Tag "dovetails"

Lights, corners, more oil…

Desk ShelfFinishingWoodworking

Got the LED strip during the week, cut a length off, soldered on the wire, tested it in the lab and it all lit up well, so I pulled off the paper on the back (the strip is self-adhesive) and stuck it in place inside the aluminium extrusion with some heatshrink around the cable end for strain relief and put the diffuser and endcaps in place…

The cable fits in the hole that I drilled for it, so that’s grand, but the connector for the 12V power supply on the other hand, is just a little too big so I’ll have to expand that hole, then cut the wire to length, solder the connector on and then install it. That’s going to be a bit fiddly and I might even wait till it’s indoors before doing that. … Read the rest

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Fettling

Baby blanket chestDesk ShelfTools
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WoodcarvingWoodworking

More shed time today, and I spent the first half of it fettling the middle shelf in the desk. Straightforward, if repetitive process – assemble, check what’s too tight and what’s too loose, cut or pare the shelf a little narrower with saw and chisel, reassemble, recheck, repeat until the dovetail joint that was horribly stressed by the shelf being too wide:

…is no longer stressed, but just snug:

And doublecheck all the other joints to be sure nothing else is opening up.

Okay, I’m happy with that.

I’m also happy because before assembling this, I marked out the back of the top of the sides to show which bits had to be cut off to give a straight line across the back (because the top goes up against the wall for support), and when I assembled it:

Nice straight line.… Read the rest

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Angled dovetails

Desk ShelfWoodworking

Some more – increasingly rare – time in the shed over the last week or so, and I started cutting the top shelf for the desk.

While I had the desk assembled to this stage the last day, I scribed the top shelf angles with pencil and set the board aside. Then this week, after thinking about it a bit, I double-checked the angles of the sides of the walnut board – because it’s the core around which all this is built – and then I used the angles of the walnut board, and the width from the scribe marks (and yes, I double-checked that the sides were plumb to the desk before scribing), and used those two to cut the top shelf.

I didn’t cut them according to the scribe marks’ angles because there’s a little bit of twist in the sides (not much, maybe 4-5mm over the full length of the sides, and the sides are poplar, not oak) so the top shelf should be pulling them back to the walnut board’s angles, not locking in their twist.… Read the rest

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