Plywood Desk In Progress

[JohnnyEgo]

So day 5, we cut a bunch of drawer parts.





And then my son went to bed and I recut every one of them out of Baltic Birch after reaching my absolute limit with this excremental Ecuadorian ply.




Which in light of Erni's recent post asking about materials for a 3D printer stand, gives me the opportunity to rant for the benefit of anyone new to the many variations of plywood:

Two pieces of plywood of the same thickness, approximately .40 inches and marketed as 1/2" ply. The top one is the Ecuadorian Sandeply, and the bottom is the Baltic Birch. The top piece consists of 5 layers laminated together. Two paper-thin veneers, two layers of some sort of combo of softwood and filler, and a center ply of indeterminant origin, but probably pine. The Baltic Birch on the bottom consists of 13 layers of all Baltic Birch, all the same size. Some of them are ugly. The two faces are nice, and considerably thicker than the Sandeply face veneers.


If you aren't routing grooves in it, and you don't sand through the paper thin veneers, the Sandeply is good enough for things like the carcass construction of the pedestals. But it was a nightmare when it came time to route anything in it. Like the drawer runner grooves, for instance.


The Baltic Birch veneer exposed when I routed this dado is ugly. But it's all one piece and consistent in character.


The Sandeply, on the other hand, is fill of fun voids between the cruddy softwood plies and whatever binder they used to fill it.


It also would not hold a clean routed edge. Every piece had some sort of nasty little surprise.


So moral of the story is if you are going to butt joint everything and then use a pair of metal drawer slides, the cheap ply will do the job. But if you are going to route anything, you definitely want to spring for something better than the cheap stuff at Home Depot.

[buffalobo]

When using the cheapo PIA plywood, I run dados/rabbets on table saw with stack dado.

Great project, minions love learning with dad.

[Gman]

Quality matters and you rarely get something for nothing.

[JohnnyEgo]

When using the cheapo PIA plywood, I run dados/rabbets on table saw with stack dado.

Great project, minions love learning with dad.

Yeah, I got lazy in not wanting to change my dado blade and cartridge back and forth. Should have, though. More on that in a subsequent post when I complain about the router being the most dangerous tool in my shop, and probably the fact that no project I've ever worked on can truly be considered complete until I've bled all over it.

But until then, Day 6:

The very easy way to make drawers would have been to simply butt-joint all the boards together with glue, and possibly pocket screws, and then stick a false front on it. But we designed this around the idea that we would use every inch of the 4x8 sheet, and while I secretly replaced half of it with better ply, I wanted to keep the math illusion going. So I decided to go with a lock miter over other options, mostly to maintain some degree of uniformity while also not using any extra wood. The only problem is that it is a fiddly joint that requires an annoying degree of precision to be effective.



I've always found lock miters to be better in theory than in my actual execution, but I have picked up a few good tips here on how to do a better job. One of the most useful has been to carpet tape a piece of MDF to ride the fence and support the material, particularly when all but a very thin 45? outer edge gets routed away.


Drawer face gets routed flat on the table, drawer sides get routed vertically.


Not bad for a first try. Only issue is that the drawer side miter is fractionally taller than the face miter. Should be an easy adjustment. One in which I will spend the next two hours and convert all of my remaining stock to scrap trying to perfect. Only to end up back where I started.



The good news is that the punch list is getting much smaller. Pretty much just final trim for the table top and pedestals, possibly a stretcher between the pedestals, and then disassembly, final sand and paint. Depending on how much time I get in the next two days, would like to have it in primer by Saturday.

[newracer]

Love it!!!! He might not understand now but he will cherish what you teach him later.

[JohnnyEgo]

Got a lot of work done in a few concentrated hours between yesterday and this morning, but unfortunately I haven't had time to move the pics over to my website. So as a placeholder, I give you a cautionary tale as alluded to in my prior post about bleeding on things:

I was doing something that was both risky and repetitive a couple nights ago, which was climb cutting the sides of some drawer dadoes by shimming the fence so I wouldn't have to adjust it. I was tired and grumpy and should have taken a break, but instead I said "I'll just plow through this last batch." I was running the boards through with a gripper, which is a plastic pad with some grippy material, designed to keep hands well away from sharp cutting things moving at high speed. But I put it down for a moment to do something else, and didn't pick it back up. Was pushing a piece through with my bare hand when it caught, shot forward, and I drove my pinky into the 3/4" bit.

I cut the top half of my left thumb off about 18 years ago, when I learned why one doesn't use a fence and a miter gauge at the same time, so I have some experience in these things. Grabbed my pinky tight with good pressure and went running into the house. Wife was making spaghetti, ironically enough. I shouted "something bad happened, turn the water to cold, quick."

She said, "I'm cooking. Go use the other bathroom."
I said, "I just cut my (four tine'd eating utensil)ing hand. Turn on the sink!"
She said, "Not until you apologize for yelling and swearing!"
I held my blood-covered hand up and said "I am (synonym for procreation)ing bleeding, turn on the (one reason for an MPAA 'R' rating)ing sink!"
She said "You will bleed out before I turn on that sink if you don't apologize right now."
So I apologized, and she turned on the sink.

Anyways, I am 'fortunate' with respect to the fact that it looks like mostly superficial damage. Ate a couple chunks of flesh, bled everywhere, but I still have full movement. I sealed it up with some super glue and a couple of bandaids, and I am back in action. But if anyone can learn a lesson from my bad choices, I'd recommend not doing risky things, not getting sloppy over time if you choose to do them anyways, and not yelling at your wife, even when you are bleeding. This is also why I keep my son far away from the router table, which I believe to be the most dangerous tool in my shop.

This is why I keep a bottle of super glue (Cyano-Acrylate) in my first aid kit in the shop. Instant stitches.

[Irving]

I'd still be bleeding. I know that much.

[To Bear Arms]

Looks pretty good for a super glue stitch! Glad it is not to bad.

Many years ago I worked in a custom cabinet shop, myself and another guy was working late on personal projects. He was building his kitchen cabinets out of ash, I was building a computer corner desk system.
When you work in a cabinet shop, you know what all the "normal sounds" all the tooling makes, like you know when you hear a kick back on a table saw, or the sound of a shaper kicking back, the sound of a blade hitting a nail or rock.

I was working on a radial arm saw and the other guy (who is 6'7") was running a 3/4" dado blade on our large 15hp table saw. He was making a valance and was dadoing the back side out.
So you drop the valance down on the dado blade, push it through, then turn the saw off before you get to the end of the board. You do this so when you look at the ends of the valance you dont see the dado cut, anyways he is dropping his ash valance board down on the dado when I heard the table saw kick, I immediately look over at him and saw him flinging his arm through the air, which included a rainbow arch of blood, (remember, this dude is 6'7" and has gorilla arms) I shut my saw off, run over to him and grab his hand to look at the damage. He had dadoed the palm of his hand off. I ran to the spray room where we had nice cotton lint less rags to shove in his wound. I ended up shoving like 4 rags in his hand, It was disgusting, just chewed up hand everywhere. The saw had chunks of meat and flesh packed all up in the dust collector, dado blade cover, everywhere!

They ended up having to fold his hand together like a taco and sew it shut, because of the amount of material he lost. He went through years of rehab and to this day is still on desk duty and does not have full use of his hand.
Anyways, super glue would not have worked for this guy.

[JohnnyEgo]

TBA - Sounds pretty terrible. I ran the top half of my left thumb, just above the knuckle, through a table saw on Christmas Eve in 2003, resulting in a new classic holiday story in my family for the season. Part of the reason I now own a flesh-sensing saw. Or at least staple sensing, because it found one in my dado stack and fired off. Scared the hell out of me, and pissed me off to be out of an $80 cartridge and need three teeth soldered back on the blade, but it still sounds cheaper than having a taco hand for the rest of my life.
-
So a recap of a few stolen hours through the course of the week:

Put a round-over on most of the exterior surfaces.



Then started to trim everything out. The last 20% of all my projects always seems to take up 80% of the build time, and this was no exception. Anyways, rather than measure, I tend to fit my trim to the actual carcass. First, I mark the rough length:


Close, but not close enough.


So I move to the shooting board, where I start trimming a few thousandths at a time with my #5 1/2 jack plane.


This lets me fit the piece fairly well, and minimizes cutting it just a hair too short, which I have done plenty of times before. This is good enough that a little bit of filling and sanding should clean it up nicely:


But I still need clearance between the stile and the top of the drawer. This is where the playing cards come in. Normally, I'd use only one to space out the drawers, but I feel like a coat of primer and two coats of paint might eat into that space pretty quick, so I am using two cards as the standard for this one.


So off to the vice to plane down the bottom of the trim piece a couple of passes:


And we have the right clearance:


Will try to get the weekend's work up tomorrow, which features a little bit more of my shop helper. And maybe a short discourse on sharpening plane blades, since I did that this evening as well.

[buffalobo]

Signs hung in the break room and shop of first cab shop I worked in. The guy who ran the shop was older than Noah, scarred, gnarled and grisly, was more than happy to show new guys the results of lapses in safety or judgement. He had approx 7 1/2 fingers.

Never put your hands where you can't see them. - molder men, multi function machine operators

Watch your hands, they are doing the work. - operators on hand fed machines

Glad the knick was minor.

Full disclosure - SawStop is the bomb. 3 stitches instead of 2 missing fingers.