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The Complete Noob's First Project Thread - (No Theme/Name yet...)
walterg74:
--- Quote from: wol-nz on May 27, 2012, 09:16:11 pm ---Off to a good start - I'm just wondering... steal shutters and iron bars covering that window...you would hope that isn't an exit point in an emergency :laugh:
--- End quote ---
Yeah well, sadly every house has them here... better safe than sorry, as we can't have the luxury of not having them as in most of the civilized world... :angry:
walterg74:
--- Quote from: Ond on May 27, 2012, 09:19:25 pm ---That's some clean router work for a "noob" you might want to reassess that title :)
--- End quote ---
Thanks! :) Maybe beginner's luck? I guess after the questions I asked, the time I spent investigating on the net how the bits work, and the tests I made on those rounded pieces you see in the pics, seems it was enough to get it right ;)
walterg74:
When last we posted, we were left with two pieces of (fairly) identical wood, that are the sides of the cabinet. Now while these were in fact very alike, it still didn't take from the fact that the jigsaw cuts left a bit to be desired in the overall smoothness of the shapes, and specially on some curves.
What I did then was to put some more clamps around them, to keep them together evenly all around, and then I proceeded to do some sanding, not with a sander (which I don't have yet) but with "elbow grease" as Woodshop Flunky had suggested...
Being this was just for some rough sanding/shaving some material off, I decided to make a judgement call and I used some 60 grit sandpaper. I then just sanded all around, just to get a nice evenness to the whole thing, and also to get the top and bottom rounded parts to be really rounded instead of the residual bit of jaggedness that the jigsaw had left behind (and having done the routing meant that while now both pieces were the same, they both had the mild jaggedness ::) ).
Here are the results after sanding (not too long mind you):
And after that, I decided to call it quits on the side panels. I think I got a pretty decent result for the first time, and I didn't think I could find a way to improve it anway (or even wanted to spend more time on it for this first try).
My next steps were to cut the inside moldings out of the 1"x1" stick... On one hand, to get the length of them, I simply looked at the plans, and subtracted the width of the wood in the places that had them on the plans, to determine the length of the moldings. That part was easy enough. The difficult part was to determine what angles were used at joining these together, as sadly there are no indications on the plans. The only one I knew was of course the bottom + back, since they make a 90š angle, so 45š on each piece. But the rest, no clue... I simply kept cutting at some angle that *looked* more or less ok to me, and I guess I'll have to see how it turns out and make adjustments later on (hope not too many...).
Here are some pics of how they came out, where they are just placed on top of the side panel to get an idea of how I was going to attach them. As you can see, you can appreciate what I mentioned in the first post happening: I ran out of this type of wood and was left without the piece that holds the monitor panel ::)
As you can tell from the last pic, it had already started to get dark, so I decided to call it quits for the day, and that my friends, was Saturday!
:cheers:
walterg74:
The arrival of Sunday came with the chance of doing some more work on this...
Instead of continuing with the moldings, I chose to start with the cutting of the other panels (don't know why, free will I guess ::))
What I had was one big ass piece of wood that was 1830mm x 65mm x 12mm. All the panels in the VertiCade were exactly 370mm wide, so I started out by tracing this width along the length of the piece of wood:
Now as you can see from the picture, I don't exactly have the Woodmaster's tables/benches there (oh and funny story, if you look at one of the previous pics you'll find traces of my first use of the circular saw, which is why I now owe my wife a new table... ::) ), so that meant I had to find some workaround to hold the wood relatively firmly and in a way it didnīt fall to the ground, which I did using a couple of extra chairs. I also took the precaution of making sure the line of cut was away from the table, so that it wasn't just that I owed my wife a new table but that I would also be able to keep using this one whole instead of settling for half :laugh:
Happily the circular saw did it's thing kinda the way I wanted to, with a little un-neatness at the end of the piece which I wasn't using anyway, but good enough:
Next was to cut up all the panels. Since all were the same 370mm wide, it was just a matter of following the measurements to draw those lengths onto the wood, and do all these cuts. Long story short, here are the panels:
Now one thing I will say, and here I make a pause for the experienced folks to tell me why, is that most cuts did not come out good at the end. I know I don't have the best (or even the most basic) way of holding the wood properly to cut it with the circular saw, and all my cuts consisted in placing the long end of the wood on the table and the short end (closest to the cut) onto a chair, and eveytime I would make a cut for each panel I would get something like this:
It's not *that* big of a deal since it's really a very tiny thing that I sanded off, and on the remaining piece it just goes on the inside anyway, so can't be seen (and again it's really small), but why does this happen, and how can I avoud it? (and also what is the best way to cut panels like this with a circular saw? (since I only have one table and don't know what the *right* way to give the wood support is)
Most other cuts did come out fairly ok like so:
Next up, last part of Sunday, and closing for the weekend.
L8r!
walterg74:
Ok, here we go...
Last post of the weekend covering up Sunday's last things...
As you may recall, I had cut the inside moldings but done only that. Looking at the examples, I saw that the way to attach them was using both glue and screws. The glue part was easy enough (although even now I'm not sure of the right quantities or if you have to apply it/spread it a cretain way, feel free to comment on it if you know), but regarding the screws I had some doubts.
While these are for the insides anyway, and not seen at all, when I bought the screws I luckily chose (by making assumptions) more or less the correct length, since I was using 12mm MDF, and I learned later about the 1/3-2/3 rule, were 1/3 goes into the material where you first drive the screw through. In my case, I wanted to to the whole countersink thing, so I had first calculated for some reason for the 15mm MDF, and since I thought about doing it roughly 5mm in, that left 10mm of material for the screw, and the rest would be driven into the other part, and since the screws I bought are actually 32mm, that seemed extremely close to the rule.
Turns out after looking that the screws actually hold the 12mm pieces onto the moldings, not the 15mm ones, *but* as fate would have it, 5mm is way too big anyway for the countersink part, so it turned out that *aproximately* 2mm was more than enough for the screw's head to get under the wood, so that still leaves about 10mm of material, so we're good to go anyway. I'll put a pic of the screws for you to see later on.
So anyway, all this was nice and dandy, *but* there was one small problem... The isn't a single store here in my country that actually sells countesink bits... :( Much less those 1-step coubtersink+drill bits.
What I did was order some from Amazon, that a friend will receive and take over to Europe for me, where I'll be heading to next month for work. So those I'll have for NEXT project, since of course I wasn't going to wait a month to conitnue this, specially since these go on the inside anyway... (and while I was at it, I also ordered those slot cutting bits for the outside t-molding, and some bullnose bits that could work for this maybe later on, to give it that rounded finish Koenings did on it with the milling machine).
I decided to improvise, and got some scrap wood again to do some tests...
First was the screw by itself to see how if worked on MDF, *just* using the screwdriver (they're "auto drilling" screws -or whatever they're called in the US). That worked in the sense that it did go through the material, *but* the wood started splitting as you drove the screw...
Next was the screw by itself but with a pilot hole, to see if the 3.25mm drill bit I bought was good enough (not too big not too small). Drilled a hole through the MDF, and only then I placed a screw on it and drove it through the wood. Results were as expected, with the screw "biting" at the wood (the hole was in fact not too big, so great) and also the wood did not split.
Last step was to simulate the countersink, so adding to the previous step (and before inserting the screw) I used an 8mm drill bit to start a shallow hole at the same place. After that I drove the screw in again. Might not be perfect, and surely takes longer, but I got the desired results (and again, for insides, it will do just fine).
I present you the scrap:
So after that I said "What the hell, let's do this", and went on screwing/gluing the moldings, starting as so:
The glue I got said "Extra strenght" and that it needed only 15 minutes of press. I did leave it longer anyway, just in case, and I managed to do up to this:
before it got too dark and had to call it quits....
And that's all for now...
Don't know if I can get any more done during the week, if not, I'll have to continue next Saturday.
See you guys soon, and of course, all your comments, questions and suggestions are more than welcome!
L8r! :cheers:
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