Archives

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 / Resin / Tools / Woodworking — 2 Comments
11
Aug 19

Pouring the sea

So the next step was to even out the bottom of the sea a bit with the router. That took about five minutes and was mostly making light cuts here and there rather than any systematic grid pattern thing. 

Then time to seal the grain; I don’t really want the resin leeching out through the grain. I mean, it’s walnut, it’s not very porous but still. 

This stuff isn’t wood filler, that kind of putty I use to cover my mistakes, this is much much finer grain material that is supposed to get into the pores and block them up. It’s a pretty thick mix in the tin, almost at a putty consistency, but you dilute it to a thin slurry with white spirit and then rub that into the wood with a rag, and clean it off when you’ve gotten as much in as will go.

With that done, it has to dry overnight. Oh well. Next morning, out with the reflective window film, and a fiddly job getting it to sit into a very irregular shape…

Looks fine so long as you don’t look too close…

But who’d ever do that? 😀 
Also, that film is self-adhesive on clean surfaces like glass, but forget about it being adhesive enough to stick to wood, especially if there are any irregularities. It’s being held here with a judicious application of CA glue. 
Then I started worrying about the resin adhering to the film and the film not adhering to very much at all…

So to let the resin seep into the walnut enough to get a grip, I drilled through the film with a 1.5mm drill bit all across the sea bed.

And I figured that was the ready-to-pour state. So I fetched a helper and we mixed up the first layer. Like we’ve been learning in Octonauts, the sea has three layers, starting with the midnight layer which is not only very dark but also hides the holes and gives a nice appearance of depth…

A bit of paint managed to not get mixed in the container so it got mixed on site…

Not too shabby. Left it for an hour, then came back to pour the Twilight Zone…

Not too bad, I’m liking how the layering is giving that differing depths look. The last layer was the Sunlight zone but that was after my helper’s bedtime so I had to pour it solo (I want the layers to bind as they set).

It’s almost deep enough here. One side was flush…

But one side was slightly shallow.

There followed fifteen minutes of tilting the board back and forth as the resin started to cure, to get a more even depth. Final result is even but still not proud of the surface and I want the resin to be slightly proud of the surface so I can use my new toy to take the whole surface to one contiguous plane…

I think the last bit will go down tomorrow evening, and then sanding can happen over the next few days. Once that’s done, that’s the walnut part of the desk done I think. I’ll think about how to decorate the poplar bits or even if they need to be decorated, or if I should just do the final shaping (the edges are all square right now to allow for easier handling but the final shaping will take off all the sharp corners and round everything over). Thinking about stuff. That’s the easiest bit of this hobby 😀

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…

← Older Entries
Newer Entries →