Anyway, that thing has been sitting in my closet ever since I brought it home from that class, waiting for me to get around to finishing it. I knew that I'd made a few mistakes during the build that would need fixing, but I figured that I'd learned enough since then that I could make a go of it.
Well, not so much. Turns out that the mistakes, while individually rather minor, added up to a real headache. You can see a fair number of them just in this shot of the front:
The main issues were:
- I'd left the top sitting too long in the corner of the closet, and it had developed a rather nasty cup. I'd have to remake it from scratch - but I didn't have enough alder left, so I would have had to use a different material.
- I had been a little bit off when I drilled the dowels to hold the top spacer (above the drawer), and as a result, it was twisted and slightly proud of the front. Flattening it woiuld have required a lot of sanding and chisel work, and I would never have gotten it quite right.
- The entire carcass was ever so slightly out of square, meaning that the drawer would have to be "fudged" to suit the carcass.
- I had messed up the drawer bottom the first time I made it, and had to drill a hole in it to pry it out of the drawer again. Meaning I would also have had to remake it.
- On closer inspection, my dovetails were TERRIBLE. Front and back.
The more I looked at it, the more I saw that just wasn't... good enough. I would have had to remake about half of the components, and spend even more time fixing the problems on the parts I would be keeping.
In the end, I chopped it all up for firewood. Which really, really, really hurt, but was strangely cathartic at the same time.
With the table now out of the running, I needed a new project for this month. Unfortunately, the weather (and therefore the shop) was really cold this month, so I didn't want to do anything that would require special finishing - or even any more glueing than necessary. So I turned my attention to a pair of shop projects that I'd been meaning to do for a while.
I'd made little shop cabinet a while ago to store my table saw blades and really liked the way it turned out. the only downside was that, because it was designed specifically for 10" table saw blades, it wouldn't hold the 12" blades for the miter saw. I decided to modify the original design (which I should mention wasn't mine - I got it from Jay Bates) and make a cabinet that would hold not only the 12" miter saw blades, but also the 7 1/4" blades for the circular saw.
Having already made one of these, it was a pretty straightforward build, with the sole exception of accidentally putting the bandsaw blade in backwards while cutting the profile for the sides. Works a lot better when the teeth are actually cutting!
In progress (you can see the original cabinet on the wall behind it):
Finished!
I should also mention that the reason I picked these projects is that I really wanted to get started actually USING the French cleat storage system we installed on the back wall of the shop.
That only took a couple of evenings out in the shop and was so much fun to build that I decided to follow it up immediately with another, similar project, and figure out a way to deal with the absolute chaos that was my sandpaper drawer:
To be fair, I did have a better system of organizing it than that depicts, but it wasn't exactly convenient to use, which meant that, well, I didn't use it. So I pulled out all the stuff I wanted to have handy while working at the bench:
Then I drew up some plans and started\making dust:
Finished!
As you can see, there's still lots of space left on the cleats:
Going to have to come up with some more storage plans - and decide what we're going to keep up there!
