Woodworking - car table, needle holder etc
I've been a bit quiet about woodwork recently...not sure why, but it's not for lack of Doing Stuff...
Needle Holder
Just after we moved in I started working on a needle holder for K's vast collection of knitting needles. Bought some jarrah for it, drilled a lot of holes, then it sat on my workbench saying "Finish me!" plaintively for a couple of months. Eventually I dug out the router and cleaned up the top section, sanded it down and gave it a coat of some extreeeeemely aromatic stuff called Danish Oil. The finished article is sitting behind me now, and I can still smell it a month after I oiled it.
Needle holder, populated with needles!
Not my greatest work ever, but it's clean and tidy and gets lots of appreciative comments from people who knit. :) A couple of K's friends/workmates have already dropped hints that if I ever felt like making another one....with 238 holes drilled in this prototype I'm not overly eager to ruin my back, hunched over the drill press again. Maybe I should make a smaller one...
Car Table
I went camping a few weeks ago, with all my gear piled into the back of the Impreza. While down there it occurred to me that I have no table to put things like gas stoves on. Since the Impreza is too small to fit a generic card table in, I thought I'd make one instead. Came up with a plan to make one that would fold in half and fit in the boot of the car.
Of course the boot is a strange wide "T" shape thanks to the wheel arches, so half of it would be an "L" shape. The head of the L could rest on the lip of the boot and hold things like gas stoves, while the tail of the L is a good spot for eating.
A couple of days abusing the hell out of my router to make half-lap joints and I came up with this framework:
Framework, stained and hinged
Made out of 42x42 pine (to save weight), stained to somewhat resemble jarrah. I'm not entirely impressed with the staining thing, it comes up looking....cheap. Which it is, since it's actually pine. The weight saving is pretty considerable though.
For the decking I raided the pile of jarrah fence pickets I've previously raved about, that I rescued when we tore down the side fence. Cleaned up a pile of them on the jointer, cut to size and oiled:
Pieces of decking
For 40-year-old wood that's been out in the weather, they come up pretty well. I need to investigate some finishes that don't darken them so much though - danish oil looks very nice on fresh jarrah (the needle holder) but it turns weathered stuff very dark. A fair bit of drilling & screwing later, and we have a table:
The finished table, using a handy kayak as a stand-in for a currently dead car.
Close-up of the decking. I got a few splits before I worked out the right way to screw them down, but nothing serious.
Table, folded up. The legs fold up towards the middle, then the whole thing folds in half. You can see the notches in the legs where they meet the framework in the first pic.
(Incidentally, the gap you can see running down the centre is there on purpose - otherwise there's a high chance of pinching a finger between the pieces of decking when you unfold it. A 2-3mm gap makes it mildly painful rather than finger-crushing. :) )
In theory this should fit nicely in half the boot of the car, meaning I can put eskies etc in the other half and not have to remove them to get the table out. Not sure what I'll do with this if I sell the Impreza...either include it with the car or keep it and hope it fits the next car.
Under-bench tool storage
This is still in progress, but it's something that came out of a discussion on a woodworking forum about how everyone stores their tools. I had an idea for doing vertical drawers: most people have their tools on a board above their workbench, and you have a place for each tool. The wall behind my bench is full of windows and cupboards, so I thought why not have drawers mounted vertically, so I can have bits of tool board sliding out?
My bench is notoriously high - I made it about 1.1m high, whereas most people have them at about 0.9m. This was another reason why not to use the wall behind - with the bench 0.9m deep as well, it's actually quite hard even for me to reach the wall. What it give me is a lot of room underneath...so why not mount drawers vertically under the bench?
Google Sketchup is quite possibly the greatest CAD program ever for roughing out plans. I did one for the car bench, and referred to it constantly - as a result, I didn't make a single mistake making the framework. Back to Sketchup for this idea and came up with this in about an hour:
Google Sketchup diagram of the racking system.
The longest drawer sliders Bunnings had were 600mm, single extension - not as long as you can get (somewhere!) but they're rated for 25kg and I'm using two sets (top and bottom) for this one. After a lot of thinking, a couple of wrong screw holes, some more thinking and an extra pair of hands from K, I've got the top bar for the drawer in place under the bench:
Drawer in progress...
...which slides in and out quite nicely. I figure the easiest way to do this one and get it to fit properly is to install the top and bottom bars on the sliders, then make the back, front and MDF insert to fit the racks, rather than try to get the racks to fit the drawer.
At the end I should be able to put things on both faces of the drawer - I'm thinking drill bits and router bits on one side, and saws/planes/chisels on the other. The beauty of this design is that if it works I can simply put another one beside it, and keep going until I've got about 10 in that section of bench....if I ever get that many tools. :D
Needle Holder
Just after we moved in I started working on a needle holder for K's vast collection of knitting needles. Bought some jarrah for it, drilled a lot of holes, then it sat on my workbench saying "Finish me!" plaintively for a couple of months. Eventually I dug out the router and cleaned up the top section, sanded it down and gave it a coat of some extreeeeemely aromatic stuff called Danish Oil. The finished article is sitting behind me now, and I can still smell it a month after I oiled it.
Needle holder, populated with needles!
Not my greatest work ever, but it's clean and tidy and gets lots of appreciative comments from people who knit. :) A couple of K's friends/workmates have already dropped hints that if I ever felt like making another one....with 238 holes drilled in this prototype I'm not overly eager to ruin my back, hunched over the drill press again. Maybe I should make a smaller one...
Car Table
I went camping a few weeks ago, with all my gear piled into the back of the Impreza. While down there it occurred to me that I have no table to put things like gas stoves on. Since the Impreza is too small to fit a generic card table in, I thought I'd make one instead. Came up with a plan to make one that would fold in half and fit in the boot of the car.
Of course the boot is a strange wide "T" shape thanks to the wheel arches, so half of it would be an "L" shape. The head of the L could rest on the lip of the boot and hold things like gas stoves, while the tail of the L is a good spot for eating.
A couple of days abusing the hell out of my router to make half-lap joints and I came up with this framework:
Framework, stained and hinged
Made out of 42x42 pine (to save weight), stained to somewhat resemble jarrah. I'm not entirely impressed with the staining thing, it comes up looking....cheap. Which it is, since it's actually pine. The weight saving is pretty considerable though.
For the decking I raided the pile of jarrah fence pickets I've previously raved about, that I rescued when we tore down the side fence. Cleaned up a pile of them on the jointer, cut to size and oiled:
Pieces of decking
For 40-year-old wood that's been out in the weather, they come up pretty well. I need to investigate some finishes that don't darken them so much though - danish oil looks very nice on fresh jarrah (the needle holder) but it turns weathered stuff very dark. A fair bit of drilling & screwing later, and we have a table:
The finished table, using a handy kayak as a stand-in for a currently dead car.
Close-up of the decking. I got a few splits before I worked out the right way to screw them down, but nothing serious.
Table, folded up. The legs fold up towards the middle, then the whole thing folds in half. You can see the notches in the legs where they meet the framework in the first pic.
(Incidentally, the gap you can see running down the centre is there on purpose - otherwise there's a high chance of pinching a finger between the pieces of decking when you unfold it. A 2-3mm gap makes it mildly painful rather than finger-crushing. :) )
In theory this should fit nicely in half the boot of the car, meaning I can put eskies etc in the other half and not have to remove them to get the table out. Not sure what I'll do with this if I sell the Impreza...either include it with the car or keep it and hope it fits the next car.
Under-bench tool storage
This is still in progress, but it's something that came out of a discussion on a woodworking forum about how everyone stores their tools. I had an idea for doing vertical drawers: most people have their tools on a board above their workbench, and you have a place for each tool. The wall behind my bench is full of windows and cupboards, so I thought why not have drawers mounted vertically, so I can have bits of tool board sliding out?
My bench is notoriously high - I made it about 1.1m high, whereas most people have them at about 0.9m. This was another reason why not to use the wall behind - with the bench 0.9m deep as well, it's actually quite hard even for me to reach the wall. What it give me is a lot of room underneath...so why not mount drawers vertically under the bench?
Google Sketchup is quite possibly the greatest CAD program ever for roughing out plans. I did one for the car bench, and referred to it constantly - as a result, I didn't make a single mistake making the framework. Back to Sketchup for this idea and came up with this in about an hour:
Google Sketchup diagram of the racking system.
The longest drawer sliders Bunnings had were 600mm, single extension - not as long as you can get (somewhere!) but they're rated for 25kg and I'm using two sets (top and bottom) for this one. After a lot of thinking, a couple of wrong screw holes, some more thinking and an extra pair of hands from K, I've got the top bar for the drawer in place under the bench:
Drawer in progress...
...which slides in and out quite nicely. I figure the easiest way to do this one and get it to fit properly is to install the top and bottom bars on the sliders, then make the back, front and MDF insert to fit the racks, rather than try to get the racks to fit the drawer.
At the end I should be able to put things on both faces of the drawer - I'm thinking drill bits and router bits on one side, and saws/planes/chisels on the other. The beauty of this design is that if it works I can simply put another one beside it, and keep going until I've got about 10 in that section of bench....if I ever get that many tools. :D