Lots to update.
The biggest remaining challenge on the project has been creating a number of curved panels… for the coin door/kick plate panel and for the top and back of the cabinet. Originally I thought a sheet of thin cherry plywood could be kerfed and bent, but the curves turned out to be too tight to bend plywood. Even a sheet of kerfed 1/8" masonite split when bending to make one of the forms.
So I decided to bend and laminate 3 sheets of 1/8" bendable poplar together and then veneer them with cherry. After months of hesitation and reading about veneering online I finally caved to the pressure to build a vacuum press to properly, accurately, and evenly bend, glue, and veneer the different shapes. There may have been ways to accomplish this without the press but I didn't trust myself improvising so I went with what seemed like the closest thing to a standard procedure.
So figure 1 is the recently completed vacuum press. Initially it felt like overkill going through so much work just to finish one aspect of the cabinet, but since seeing OND's scratch built
Ionic Velvetizing Wand I felt better. Thanks and props to OND for putting my obsession in perspective
Building the vacuum pressHere's how the vacuum press works….
You connect a (surprisingly large capacity) air compressor to the device on one end and a vacuum bag to the other. The compressor blows air through a restricted opening which creates a vacuum in an attached hose. The air gets sucked out of the PVC tubes through this hose and they become negatively pressurized (?) as all the air is sucked out of the attached bag. At least I think that's how it works. The system creates an insanely strong vacuum in the bag pulling down with a pressure of almost 1500 lbs. per square foot.
"21 inches of mercury" was the magic number for the press to work...
So I think it's equivalent to parking your car on top of whatever you are pressing in the bag. And then another car on top of that. Unless your car is a Hummer.
I got the plans and most of the parts to build the press from
veneersupplies.com. This site was the storefront for the educational/how to veneering site
joewoodworker.com which was absolutely indispensable in learning how to do this since I had never touched veneer, much less bent lamination before.
Over memorial day weekend my wife took the kids to the inlaws so considering the kit is buildable in 2-3 hrs, I figured I'd make some huge progress while home alone. It's a good thing I don't make these for a living because I started buying the parts not included in the kit at about 10am and was done with the final kit at about 1AM. I was done with the first panel by 5am! WOOT!!! It was the first non-professional all nighter I've pulled since college.
The following is a breakdown of the vacuum press build. Scroll to my next post if you'd like to skip the details of the press construction and get to the actual bending.
This is the manifold assembly. Nothing tricky here, just wrapping threads with tape and following the kit instructions.
Lots of time was spent dealing with drilling the holes for the manifold to attach to the PVC tubes. I wasted lots of time trying to figure out the best way to approach this without a drill press (since the holes have to be absolutely straight to be threaded and seal the vacuum pressure)… I finally hacked my own drill press thingy together from MDF and 2x4's with a cheap-o drill guide I had pretty much discarded years ago. Not sure if this contraption helped or not. Probably not.
I didn't have a tap kit to thread the holes either. I took a shot at threading them with the brass fittings themselves which was unnerving but worked. The only tricky part was getting the fitting to start straight which I just couldn't get right by hand or with a ratchet. Someone online threaded theirs using their drill press which was genius. In that regard my ghetto drill assembly did help.
Here's the pipe cap all threaded and ready to be glued onto the pipe.
From there it was just wiring the thing according to the step by step instructions, building a wooden frame for it (according to the directions) and then testing it.
This is the completed press.
I was convinced the thing wouldn't work since I didn't use the recommended drill press or tap kit. Considering that the brass fittings screwed in like hot bolts into cold butter I was sure I had messed up the threading and they'd leak under pressure. But the thing held and after a few test runs I had my first panel completed.
The actual bendingSo each of the curved panels in the project will be laminated together from 3 sheets of bendable poplar plus a layer of cherry veneer on the top and bottom. Essentially it makes a custom piece of plywood in whatever shape you bend it to while gluing. The resulting arc is remarkably strong and light.
To start I made a form for the kick panel/coin door area out of poplar and masonite. The poplar arcs were cut to a shape I drew and printed from Illustrator as seen earlier on this page. Unfortunately that all had to be scrapped and redone since the original arc, which matched the control panel, was basically imperceptible once I put the masonite on it. So I recut all the poplar and assembled the final jig.
To bend the panel I just rolled veneer glue over each piece of poplar and the two pieces of veneer, kept them aligned with a screw and stuck it in the vacuum bag with a sheet of mesh on top to keep air from getting trapped. A couple minutes later it was drawn to it's final shape and allowed to cure.
The coin door gets mounted to this arched panel. Since the door is flat I'm sandwiching a piece of walnut with a concave arch in the back between it and the curve to allow the coin door to lay flush. Wilno45's example pic above of what I needed to make explains the part far better than I ever could.
I traced the arch of the cherry panel onto a piece of MDF to make a template for cutting the concave arc into the walnut. I used a 3/4" top bearing trim bit in my router to cut the top and bottom edges of the walnut down to where the opening for the coin door would be. Before continuing I used an MDF template to trim the panel to the shape of the coin door (adding about 1/2" to use as trim) and then blulnosed that.
I tested the fit against the cherry and was super happy with the result.
So that gave me a nice flush fit between the walnut and the cherry for the top and bottom edges of the walnut "bezel" To trim the side edges I used a 45deg chamfer bit, making sure to set it just far enough back that it would cut right to the edge of the side.
To use the chamfer bit I first cut channels for it to ride in as a guide.
Then cut the 45 deg edges
Next I flipped the panel over and used the router and a small hand saw to cut out the opening for the coin door. I had also bullnosed the edges with the router.
The notches in the sides are for some tab thingies on the back of the coin door. Here's what the final part looks like. Very similar to Wilno's example seen here:
After trimming the cherry kick panel to the same angle as the cab (wider at top, narrower at base), I cut two poplar braces off the form I used to bend the panel since these would fit perfectly into the back. These are glued to the base of the panel and top of the panel to give it some attachment points to mount it, as well as to increase it's rigidity should any one actually *kick* the kick panel.
Next I cut some angled strips to place on the back of the arched panel to give the coin door brackets a flush surface to clamp to.
In order to reach the angled strips I replaced the bolts on the coin door and added some washers for the tabs to attach to.
The sides of the coin door panel/kick plate are trimmed in walnut made from a piece of hardwood t-molding like the front trim of the CP, glued to a piece of 3/4" walnut. These flank the sides of the curved cherry panel. The t-molding gets pretty thin towards it's edge so I epoxied a strip of 3/8 x 38" sanded plexi to the inside edge of each trim piece. I cut the edge of the plastic that faces the cherry at an angle so it sits flush. This plastic will act like a cleat to brace the edge of the walnut should anyone… again…. actually kick the kickpanel. In the space behind the plastic I'll mount a stip of white LEDs so the edges of the trim will give off a soft diffused glow across the curved cherry face of the kickpanel, which will hopefully accentuate it's curve.
Thin edge….
You can barely see the plastic in the upper left section of trim in this pic…
I cut the bottom of these trim pieces to allow them to sit at the same angle as the cab sides. Then I attached the walnut trim to the curved panel at the braces I had cut from the form earlier.
Once all that was assembled I traced the profile of it's base to a piece of MDF with about a 1/2" offset to use as a template for cutting a base for it to sit on.
Once the base was cut out I had to trim the edges at the same angle as the cabinet's sides. I used the "RBAAD" for this
Here's the base on the kick panel….
A while back I had cut two large trim panels to sit inset on either side of the cabinet.
These flank the coin door panel assembly. Once I aligned the base of the coin door between these I kerfed them to allow the installation of perf panel between them.
Some sanding, staining and perf panel cutting and the parts were assembled into their final positions.
Next it was on to the curved front panel of the CP….
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Topic: Mission Control Project: 5 years on, what to do with the leftovers? (Read 558547 times)
