Television Stand - Part Quatre.....Beginning to take shape

I think it's starting to actually look somewhat like a stand of some sort. Still a lot of tweaking to do, but getting there.

After the last post, it was time to "set it up"....well, sort of.

Still wasn't sure at this point what kind of base to set this whole thing on when done, so router planed another slab of walnut to see how it might look. Also, found a piece of scrap juniper laying around to use as the "spacer" between the two shelves to try to get an idea of how high this thing was going to stand.

Front and back photos below (you get to decide for yourselves which is actually front and back).

The problem: way too high (38" - want it to be about 30" when finished) and didn't like the slab underneath the whole thing at all - made it look way too bulky.

 

So, back to the old drawing board. Because the slab underneath it all was too bulky, I decided to see how some crosspieces might work as stabilizers. Some scrap pieces of 2x6 cedar came in really handy for this part because they were long enough, square enough, and "red" enough to blend in with the foundation. At least that's the hope. I'll also be doing some sculpting to help them blend even a little bit more before starting the finishing process.

Laid it all out (photo below), and decided if this was the way to go, the cross pieces needed to be cut on the table saw to get them to a uniform width and thickness.

Once that was done, I realized they'd also need to be dado-ed into the bottom of the foundation piece. Otherwise, nothing was really gained by not using the slab concept.

This was the trickiest part of the process as far as I'm concerned. Getting everything set up to do the dadoes was time consuming because everything had to be on the level, and "guides" needed to be set up to keep the cuts very straight.

My first attempt at guides was to use a couple of pieces of scrap screwed into the bottom of the piece itself.

Still way too wobbly for my satisfaction. Looked around the shop for something else a little longer, and came up with a couple of shelf supports that I just screwed into the bottom. Had to make sure they were equidistant all the way along the cut, but these were VERY stable, and allowed repeated clean cuts to just the right depth.

When all was said and done, the crosspieces fit very snugly into the dadoes. They'll still get deck screws into the bottom to hold them even more securely, but that's just me....overkill.

Don't know if you can see it or not, but the crosspieces were still a little "proud" in the photo above. This required one more pass of the router planer to get them flush with the piece, itself (photo below). That's just another of the many reasons I really like this router planer setup - it allows for multiple, micro-adjusted cuts to get the right surface, no matter what and no matter the height of the piece itself up to 48".

Perfect! The only thing left on this part of the process is to sculpt the crosspieces a little so they actually blend into the overall "theme" of the stand - maybe in the next post......

The next step was to find a piece of juniper to serve as the spacer in between the two shelves. The first spacer I used for demonstration purposes was just too plain, and didn't speak to me at all. So, I went looking amongst my raw materials piles, and the piece below is the result. In order to secure this piece for planing both top and bottom, it had to be attached to a 2x6 first, and then the 2x6 had to be attached to the work surface, all by using deck screws. Otherwise, the first pass with the router would have sent this thing flying who knows where?

Made three passes with the router, and got it down to about 13" high. Didn't want to go too far on this side. Again, you can take stuff off, but once it's off it can't be put back.

Next step was to remove all the screws and re-secure the whole thing using the same process, but by flipping it upside down.

Took two passes to get it down to a height of 12" which was about all I wanted to take off at this point.

Once again, it's time to remove all the screws and see what this baby looks like set up sans connectors (hopefully, it won't fall over).

Wow, balances pretty well, I'd say! And, it's looking more and more like the TV stand it's supposed to be when done. Now I just need to see how high it stands.

Oops! It's still almost 8" too high at this point. Now it all boils down to whether to take all the extra from just one of the pedestal pieces or split the difference and take some from each in order to get down to the 30" height we want.

What do you think we should do?

Television Stand - Part Trois

Left off on my last post with sorta flattening the bottom of what will become the main pedestal for the unit by grinding it down and eye-balling it. Still not very good at that, so decided I'm going to have to plane it down using the router planer.

This is a really big piece, and it needed some work before planing, though. First of all, it sat kind of catty wompus after my eye-balling debacle:

Next step was to shim it up so it would at least balance for me to scribe a line all the way around the base. That really wasn't too difficult as all I needed to do was tilt it a little bit and put a block of wood underneath it to get the majority of the pedestal vertical (second, third, and fourth photos below). In the last photo, you can see how I used a black magic marker to scribe a line all the way around the base to be used as a guide when routing it down to level.

 

The scribe line shows just how badly my eye-balling effort was. There's basically about four inches of a conical shape that had to be hogged off in order for it to be level.

 

To get better balance while planing, I decided to cut off part of the main pedestal first. That way, I could tip the whole thing upside down and work on it with little to no movement or even fear of movement as the router was run back and forth over the piece.

Now comes the fun part - setting up the planer, balancing the piece so it won't fall over during routing, and trying to get it as level as possible for the operation.

To start, I had to replace the shorter end pipes with 48" pipes to accommodate the height of the piece. Next step was to approximate the height of the rails so the planer would pass over the piece while still allowing the depth of the router to take some of the stock off in each pass.

 Balancing was accomplished by building up a stack of 2x6 pieces of scrap with the very last one being a piece only 3/4" thick. Voila! This thing balanced like a charm.

Got the final fine tuning done on the height adjustment and made the first three passes (only 1/4" or less per pass so as to minimize the possibility of taking too much off.....can take a bunch off, but can't put it back if too much goes).

Cut once but measure and check level at least twice before moving on to the next depth of cut adjustment in the router. Pretty level, but have to set the rails a little lower now.

You can see in the photo below, there's about 3/4" between the runner of the sled and the piece itself. Depth of cut is only 3/4" on this router, so had to once again fine tune the height adjustment of the rails.

Once all that was done, and I'd made what seemed like a hundred passes, the whole bottom was finally even.

Put the level on it, and you can see in the photo below, it's still off slightly but not all that much or that bad.

So, I flipped the whole thing over and it sat really nice and flat for the final routing on the top of the piece.

 

A few quick passes with the router (this was a breeze simply because it is much smaller than the bottom of the piece), and the level shows an almost perfect flat top on which to place the lower of the two shelves to come.

Television Stand - Part Deux...

Well, doggone it....finally decided to dedicate more time to this project and git er done! Figured I needed to be able to hog off some of the router marks left in the slabs after planing, and bought this heavy duty, magnesium 4"x24" belt sander from Harbor Freight. Suffice to say, it works (2nd photo).

Some of the gouges were also from my chainsaw. Those were a little hairier to get out, and the sander got shelved for that process. Instead, I used a 4 1/2" cup rasp wheel, also from Harbor Freight, that I was pretty impressed with (see previous post of my tool review on this product.

Anyway, I roughed each slab as flat as my eye could see - eyeballing isn't something I'm really too good at, but it got the job done.....Oooh, my aching back!

This is a lot harder than I thought it would be. I had to keep raising the slab up so my 6'4" frame wouldn't have to keep bending over so far. Even at that, the reach across the piece was far enough that the main pressure point was right square in the middle of my low back, and now I'm sitting here typing with a heat pack on and thinking about pouring a nice tall glass of wine to help drown my sorrows and to numb the pain.

The next step was a little more complicated. A lot of the finished appeal of a piece like this is in the actual arrangement of the separate components. Everyone has their own ideas on how things should ultimately look, and I knew what I thought was right might not be the same thing as what Katherine thought. So, I asked her to come on up to the shop and take a look-see and provide some feedback.

Before she came up, though, I "arranged" the components how I thought they might look best:


Try to imagine the pieces in this photo without the concrete blocks in between the shelves and with the shelves attached to the two end columns. I thought that would be pretty appealing.

Katherine took one look and told me to get the column on the right out of there. Then she turned the other column piece completely upside down to try to take advantage of the twist in this piece of juniper.

 

I know the lighting isn't too good on the first photo above, but hopefully you get the idea.

The shelves will look almost like they are suspended when attached. I'll be cutting the top part of the anchor column off and leveling it to accommodate the lower shelf that'll be home to the electronic components like DVD player and sound bar. That's a whole nother process for the next blog post on this project.

Getting the bottom of the anchor post flat was achieved by using the angle grinder with the cup rasp wheel. Took awhile, again, simply because my eyeballing skills need to be honed a whole lot more before I'll consider them to be even close to kind of good.

  

This piece is so heavy, all I had to do to stabilize it while grinding was to lean it up against my sawhorses. It didn't move at all!

The end result (I still have a little more work to do on the bottom to get the angle it sits at just right, but I'm getting pretty close) should be a very stable, anchor column for the two very heavy shelves.

The lower shelf will be about where you see the branch sticking out from the trunk about 2/3 of the way up in the photo below, and the top shelf just attached to the spacer column in between the two shelves (pictures to come in the next blog post).

I sure do hope my idea is a good one when this all gets put together. Balance and stability are key elements, and I'm just not sure yet whether I have both in what I'm doing so far. Guess the proof will be in the pudding as a wise old man (my Dad) once told me.

Tool Review - 4 1/2" Carbide Cup Wheel (Harbor Freight)

If I only had the money, I'd buy a Lancelot "Holey Galahad", but I don't have the money. Went to Harbor Freight and found this kind of a sort of a "knock-off".

To be honest, I was really, really skeptical how this would work. The first time I tried it was on some end grain cottonwood, and I thought "oh, crap, this was a waste of money". After all, cottonwood is soft and should be really easy to hog off. But then I figured what the heck....I'll try it for hogging off some of the chainsaw marks left when I slabbed some walnut, and was actually pretty impressed. End grain removal, even on cottonwood, mustn't be it's strong suit. With the grain, though, is something else altogether.

As you can see from the photo below, it definitely leaves marks in the wood which is to be expected given this is a very coarse grit of 24.

As a knock-off, I'd rate this product an 8 out of 10 with 10 being the highest. I've seen some videos of the "Holey Galahad" in action, and this one doesn't come close to the same amount of sawdust being made, but, for the work I do, this is good enough.

Plus, the price is right at a modest $9.99. I can go through a lot of these before I get to the price of a "Holy Galahad" at $79 each. That makes this product even more attractive from my perspective. Might take a bit more to "finish" grind the surface (essentially two more steps using router planer and belt sander, and another step for finish sanding) because of the relatively deep gouges made by the grinding wheel, but not all THAT much.

I even used this grinding wheel to take down a surface on a pedestal I'm working on that'll ultimately wind up being a television stand (looks kind of off kilter in the photo, but is actually pretty level all things considered):

I'll ultimately wind up using my router planer on this surface, as well, and on the other end of it (upside down in this photo) so they are parallel to each other.

This grinding wheel is an in-store purchase only. If you'd like more specs on it, go to the Harbor Freight page here.

It doesn't say if it's to be used with wood or not, but I did it anyway, and I'll say I'm satisfied so far. Still don't know how long it'll last, but hopefully long enough to make it cost effective. Labor intensity I'd be rating at a 5 simply because I'm old!

Bench - MUST...MAKE...BENCH

Awhile back, I saw a post on a friend's Facebook page, Knock on Wood, that bout knocked my socks off! This guy does some simply amazing stuff, but this particular work of art inspired me to try the style myself:

 

 

My first thought was "I need a 3D printer". Problem is I doubt there's one big enough to handle a project like this, plus making it out of plastic isn't something that really appealed to me being a woodsy kind of guy, ya know.

So, I went to my raw materials pile, and this is what I came up with:

 

Mind you, this was a gnarly old Ponderosa Pine that was fixin to fall over in the next windstorm because of pine beetle infestation, so we decided to take her down last year and let her dry and cure the old fashioned way - solar.

Went up to see how she was doing this morning, and decided to cut the main piece out of the tree itself.

 

That's a Stihl 440 Magnum with a 20" bar in front of the bench seat to help give a better perspective of the size of this thing.

The first photo is of the bench on its side cuz it kind of fell over after I cut it. The second is of it propped up temporarily using a couple of blanks I had laying around to support it. Man, that thing is still heavy. Wondering if one year is actually enough drying/curing time.

The last thing I looked at today (all this work really took the wind right outta my sails) was the rest of the tree and other raw materials that might work for some legs and a seat back. Ya'll gotta help me here and tell me which you think might work the best:

 

I'm kind of thinking maybe shaping the one in the photo to the left to contour to the shape and curve of the bench seat and the one in the photo on the right cut and shaped to support the seat from the back almost where the blank is positioned under the seat in the photo above to support it. Almost like a tripod kind of.

Time to go get Bobby and have him help me move this monster closer to the shop so I can get to work on it.