Thursday – Installing Hardware

Today’s tasks are to get Dan’s Pirate Chest sanded and install the hardware… temporarily.

Sanding the lid took most of the morning. I started by filling nail holes and any cracks that were left between the slats. In a perfect world where everything is straight and even there would be no cracks to deal with, but we don’t live in that world… yet.

Now, there’s a trick to using wood filler. First off, forget what it says on the label and look at the color. This chest is made of red oak, but in filling the cracks I used red oak, white oak and walnut fillers, sometimes straight, sometimes blended, and sometimes just folded together so they produced streaks of color in each other. Wood is not one uniform color, so to make fillers work properly you have to match the colors.

While the filler dried I installed the handles on the sides of the base box. Then I got busy working down the ridges where the slats in the lid came together and smoothing the whole thing out as much as possible. I did use a power sander to quickly fair off the majority of the ridges where the slats run over the steeper curves at the top, but where the lower parts go concave and the final work along the top was all done by hand.

That done, I laid out and installed the hinges, hasp and lid support chain.

And that, dear readers, completes the construction phase of this project. The rest of today will be spent removing the hardware again and finish sanding the chest in preparation for staining. Because Dan has already sent me his pre-stain progress payment there will be no delay in the work so I may even get that done today. The stain will have to set up for at least eight hours before we can finish, and I’ll be in Treasures tomorrow, so it will be Saturday before I can go any further.

See you then!

Doug


P.S. Blogger SAYS it now supports video clips, so I shot a brief clip of the chest on a turntable and tried to upload it here three times, it crashed every time even though it was only 3.1 MB (100 MB max allowed) and it was in Quicktime format which is one of the allowed formats. Oh, well, now I know not to try that again.

Dan, if you want to see it (and have software that will play a QuickTime (*.MOV) file installed on your computer) I can e-mail the clip to you.


DB