More Progress on the Stand
More Progress on the Stand
My dad and I have made a good amount of progress on the stand and canopy this weekend. We have decided to pack it in to prepare for the Colts game coming up this evening.
We picked up the trim this past week, and we are getting close to being able to sand and stain some of he different pieces and put them together. It is sort of a pain, since we went with birch plywood and with poplar trim and 1 x material, we are going to use two different stains so that they match as closely as possible. We are going to stain all of the pieces separately for the first coat, then put the trim on, and use blue tape and a lot of caution to apply the second coat of stain. The poly shouldn't be too big of a deal after that.
We have gotten the frames for the doors put together with a biscuit joiner. I have mentioned the biscuit joiner in this thread before, but some people aren't familiar with them. That group would have included me a few months ago. It's really a pretty nifty tool, and gives a much cleaner finish compared to lap joints. There are table biscuit joiners, but we used a handheld version for our purposes.
Basically, you mark the two pieces of wood that you want to join in the center of the overlap. you the press the biscuit joiner up to the mark, and it has a circular blade that you press into the wood and it makes a slot, like this:
Once you have the slots in each piece of wood, you put wood glue and a biscuit into the slot and use a bar clamp to keep the frame together until the glue dries.
A biscuit:
Base door frame in bar clamps:
The biscuit actually expands as it absorbs the wood glue and makes a really firm union between the two pieces of wood. One reccommendation is to have a wet paper or shop towel towel handy to wipe off any excess glue that squeezes out when you tighten the clamps. The wood glue is water soluable, and will make things much easier when you want to stain or paint the wood.
Canopy doors in clamps:
More on the way!
