Corona Virus Projects

[JohnnyEgo]

If you ever want to take the Domino for a spin, let me know. I seem to be the only one who dislikes it. I've got a lot of years and a lot of furniture held together with Kreg screws. It's a fast, inexpensive, and effective system. Give me a circular saw, a drill, and a Kreg jig, and I can knock together nearly any sort of cabinet in a Home Depot parking lot.

[JohnnyEgo]

There is the easy way to mount the dust panels, and the way I wanted to do it. The 'easy' way would be to use the Domino tool to stick loose tenons in, but it is not without it's challenges and I'd prefer to avoid them. I want to do a traditional dado, or cut channel, for the cross pieces to ride in. But I also want the decorative beads to be mitered. I had this all worked out for doing it with the Domino previously, and I will probably still do it for the less critical uprights. But there had to be another way.

It might not be readily apparent, but I am not much for planning things out. It is probably why no two pieces of furniture I've built have ever been at the same height. To date, the entirety of my plans for the individual drawers and the cabinet carcass have been as follows:


It is also the same scrap of paper where I wrote my shopping list. But to mess with the carcass, I put in a little more effort. In fact, quite possibly more effort than I have planned for anything in my life, including weddings and children.


Now that I had a plan, I spent the next day avoiding it. I sharpened all my chisels.


I mean all of my chisels.


On Sunday, I spent a day practicing with said chisels on a piece of scrap, until I came up with a way to have both dadoed shelves and mitered edge beading on the same board.



No more putting it off, I suppose. Made a story stick so that my lines would be the same height with respect to the base. More consistent than measuring with tape. I wondered how I was going to accurately going to measure to .2mm, which is about the thickness of two playing cards. Then I realized my mechanical pencil lead was .2mm, so all I had to do was route to the outside of the line.


Set up my fancy router on a rail, and then slowly and cautiously crept up on my bottom line. Stopped when I had two playing cards worth of clearance.



Clean up pass to the width of the panel. This was very scary for me. Now I got to do it again on the other one.

[JohnnyEgo]

Next came mitering the beads on the rail. Sharp chisel makes fairly short and clean work of this.





Chisel and this weird contraption seemed like the best way to carve out the miters on the case itself.


Next up, layout and mark-up of the dust panels.




Cut the grooves for the panels on the tablesaw.


Cut the tenons on my shorty sled on the tablesaw. These don't have to be pretty, just reasonably even and tight.

[JohnnyEgo]

Tenon fit came out decent.


I love it when a plan comes together.


Cut some panels out of my cherry veneer ply.


The grooves were a little tight in some places. I marked out where things got snug, and hit that spot with my much beloved rabbet edge plane.



Dry-fit went decent. There will be some trimming and adjusting, but no complaints.


Not a bad weekend's work.

[leightoncash]

I completely reframed and finished my deck with materials bought with my stimulus check. So my deck will be paid for by my future grandkids [and your too]. The railing is a mix of electrical superstrut, angle iron and cattle panel. Lots of welding and time but I'm really happy with the end result and that the top rails are one piece continuous from corner to corner.

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[Irving]

That looks great. Very nicely done. An actually hail proof deck railing.

[leightoncash]

I also just finished building new pantry cabinets. I might have $300 in materials here,, max. Just plywood, alder and lacquer. Free appliance from a client, cabinet hardware I cannibalized from another clients old cabinets (all soft close and undermount). I did the rest of the kitchen years ago and just recently got around to this last part. This is the last interior project for my house, I've now remodeled every square inch. I'm now mulling over building a master suite addition.

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[Irving]

Have you ever Christmas'd so hard that you never want to Christmas again?

Big thanks for JohnnyEgo for some important tips up front on how to get this project completed. I've been hanging Christmas lights for a friend that started a Christmas light hanging company last year. I thought I was just going to be one of the guys with ladders throwing stuff up onto the roofs while the ground crews decorated trees and bushes and stuff. Well, a few of the projects were pretty big and I spent a whole week in a man lift putting lights in trees down at Cherry Hills Community Church. After that, I ended up doing a more specialized project for the biggest residential job.

My instructions were more or less "We want four 5'x5'x5' boxes to look like wrapped Christmas gifts with one side clear so you can see inside the gift, and each box will have a different scene inside. Also, if you can have a train visiting each box, and if you could build a rickety looking train bridge. Oh yeah, we need eight 8-10' tall candy canes!" Well, I had to massage the idea and get it realistic, especially since the job was sold back in October, and I was now looking at something like 3 weeks to finish it. I took some video tonight of the mostly completed decorations and will post that once it finishes uploading.

I settled on two 4'x4' boxes and one that was 30"wx30"dx42"h.




Once I heard that the client signed a multi-year contract, and realized that this stuff was going to have to be stored, I was faced with the added complexity of having to build it so it could be repeatedly taken apart and broken down for storage/transport. I used these threaded inserts I got from Amazon. These were great. Home Depot sells a version of this that is MUCH more expensive and is complete garbage. Once they get close to being tight, instead of sinking in they just explode. Avoid the brass crap from Depot.



Here is the crap from Home Depot. Over $3.50 for each bag of two.


And here they've failed before they are even flush with the wood.


The painting was tedious. The spray paint wasn't laying down like I expected, but I still made it work. Each box has two coats of primer, at least one coat of spray paint (barely), and at least three coats of water based Urethane with a UV blocker so it won't yellow in the sun. Thanks to the awesome paint guy at my local Home Depot for the help.




My original paint idea for the small box wasn't going to work out so I settled for some Christmas stars. Half way through taping the first one I considered scraping the whole idea, but it turned out to be worth it in the end.



The theme of the small box was Rudolph and his girlfriend on a date. I was given the painted template and a general idea of the final, and I made it happen.

[Irving]

The theme of the second box was some gnomes having a poker party. This was my favorite box to do as I got to be the most creative. I was given this photo to go off of along with, "maybe one of the gnomes can be hanging from the light!" I really liked the idea and worked hard to make it happen.


I was excited to make a chandelier. A few years ago I removed my front storm door (pretty sure it has been around since the '80's, if not the '50's when the house was built), and kept the panel because it felt like I could use it for something. After failed use as a tomato support in my garden for a few years, I eventually broke all the pieces down and it's been sitting around my house in one spot or another since. Earlier this year I decided that I needed to learn to weld aluminum when one of my ladders broke. For this project I got the spool gun back out and went to town. I didn't use any of the bends on the door as those pieces were too short, but I replicated them out of two of the long flat sections.



After blasting apart each of the rings I made as the support base, each several times, I remembered that you always have to push when you use a spool gun. Things went way better after that point.




Some parts of this are pretty rough and I'm glad this is just decoration.


All my time spent watching MyMechanics on YouTube and other restoration videos kicked in and I rounded every sharp corner off with a file, and started sanding with 220 grit sand paper.


It was really cleaning up nice when I realized that 1) no one was going to notice, or care that I spent something like 8 hours building this from scratch, and 2) I still needed to paint it anyway to match the lights I was going to build for it. Oh well. I decided to paint only half so I could still have some shiny parts.


Looking pretty good, but pretty bare, I'd have to come up with something more.



I had this broken hammer floating around in my tool box for years. I used a sawzall to chop the handle down and make it fit back on the hammer. I sanded down some parts of the steel, and all of the wood, then stained the handle with motor oil. I probably could have just left the original finish on the handle, but it only took me a few minutes. One gnome hammer.


Skip ahead to the finished room. Using a sponge to create the fireplace worked out fantastic. I didn't have the time or confidence to try and paint the roaring fire that I wanted. I sketched out a door on the wall and was going to paint it, when I realized I could throw together a "real" door in half the time. I glued the door on and was using brackets to hold it to the wall. Those have since been removed, and the actual keys to that door knob are now hanging on the stud next to it. I really love how well this turned out.

[Irving]

Here is everything taking over my entire garage.


The theme of the gold box was a Christmas town and several hundred dollars worth of stuff from Michaels was dropped off at my house. My wife mocked this up on our kitchen table for me.


I moved everything to the garage and tweaked the mock up. With a 4' tall box, it doesn't make sense to have everything flat, so I was trying to get some elevation. I was running short on time, and creativity by this point. Frankly, the store bought stuff doesn't excite me as much and I was getting burned out. This was as far as I mocked up before I packed everything up to be delivered. I don't even have a final picture of how the town turned out, but it will be in the video later.


I delivered the boxes, and as I alluded to in the Post Whore Thread, thought I'd have a little laugh since I was driving down I-25 during morning traffic.


Here they are more or less in place.


I had one day (that turned into two) left to start and finish the candy canes. A few days before I had called around to the guys at DBC to get some sewer pipe. They have helped me in the past when I built my chicken coop. Sewer pipe is generally larger in diameter, and WAY cheaper than schedule 40, 80, whatever PVC. I sent a runner and had the stuff dropped off at my house.
Once I got the design down, I was able to knock out each piece is just over 2.5 minutes, including sanding the letters off. A much needed relief to have something actually go smoothly.


I struggled with the shape because they are so tall. I tried to make the "hoop" match the diameter of the pipe, rather than the height. They look a little square, but I didn't have time to bend each piece myself. They look better with lights.


I ran to K&K Surplus and picked up some T-posts to make stands. I got to use my new portaband, but broke my vise and couldn't handle the portaband bouncing around without the guard installed. It was back to the angle grinder. I also forgot to tighten the hose when I switched back from the spool gun so I did the first two or three with no gas, swearing the whole time because I didn't know what was wrong.


I have no idea where any sprinklers were, so I only had the end protrude about 5-6" below grade. I also lobbed off the lugs so they'd be easier to pound in. The idea was to use the holes in the legs to stake down, but we didn't bother in the end.


Making sure the bases worked in my front yard.


I handed my daughter my drill with a 4" hole saw and the glue gun and had her make these guides so everything would be centered and the canes wouldn't be flopping around on the poles.


Speaking of my daughter, I was also instructed to make a 20' tall ladder that could be strung with lights. One of my first ideas for the boxes was to make them out of 3/4" pvc and sew sil-nylon covers (tent material) so they'd look like presents. I quickly abandoned that idea, but still had all the pvc left over. I made my daughter create the ladder out of that PVC. Now she has something like 55 chop saw cuts under her belt. I delivered the ladder as requested, but it got cut down to two 7' tall ladders.



I spent about 10-14 hours a day for 14 days straight making this project. A true wood worker could have done it way better, and quicker, but in the end I got it done. I have to thank my wife and daughter for all the help they gave me, which mostly consisted of doing what I told them for as long as they could until I yelled at them enough that they'd cry and run away. It's been a rough two weeks at our house.