Fussy Fitting the Grid

The electricity siphon I set up worked well enough to keep me going this morning by providing power to run a set of halogen work lights – it’s cloudy today and not much sunlight available, so these were essential. It is, however fairly warm (for February) which is a blessing since this place has electric heat – thus no heat until the power is restored. It also powered the router when I needed it, but the rest of what I’m doing this morning is hand work with chisel, mallet and a flush cut saw.

The morning was spent fussy fitting the front grid work then, when it’s completed, gluing it together. Just a few clamps were needed to hold key points together. I’ll sand it tomorrow after the glue has set up good and hard.

Ron Munn of Munn Electric and his guys showed up earlier than I had expected and got right to work replacing the broken pole and repairing the broken conduits and fixtures. The result looks better than it was before. I’m very grateful to them for coming out on a holiday to get this done. The electric company came later in the afternoon to put the wires back up. We were back to full functionality by around 3:00. Good job guys!

While I waited for them, I glued the drawer backs into the drawer sides and used the extension cord to power my router to round over the inside upper edges of the drawer box. Not a necessary step, but it looks nicer and helps your CDs to slide back into the drawer more easily instead of getting caught of the square edges that would otherwise be there. I install a temporary front piece on the box before routing.

A little more sanding to clean up the freshly routed edges and the box parts are ready to go into the finishing room for a coat of lacquer. I remove the bottoms and finish them separately so they can expand and contract without pulling a sliver of unfinished wood into view – they are finished full width.

Between lacquer shoots I started pressing the support pin sleeves into the holes on the drawer sides. I use a hard maple hand screw clamp for this to prevent marring the outside of the drawer and to get the pressure needed to seat the sleeves fully. If they aren’t pressed all the way in the protruding part will interfere with the CDs – there’s not a lot of extra width here.

And that is all for today. Tomorrow should be more normal, and I’ll get more woodworking accomplished.

See you then.
Doug