Mike builds a teardrop (coopered shelf unit, door surrounds)

[Mike G]

When you're out and about with it I'd put money on someone asking where you got the wood effect plastic or has it had a vynil wrap.

Blimey, really? I hadn't thought of that. You may well be right.

 

[Mike G]

Having finished the cedar strips on the main body of the teardrop, I thought I would play about a bit in the workshop for a while. On my list are an overhead shelf, and the planted-on door surrounds for the 2 side doors. I cut up some sapele:





The overhead shelf has two functions. Firstly, it is a shelf for nick-nacks...glasses, wallet, keys etc. Secondly it is a mounting point for our reading lights, and a place to hide the wiring. I've always had it in mind to make it with a curved face. I set the bandsaw to 18 degrees:



Of course, it was only when I had ripped all the strips that I realised I should have set it to 9 degrees. So I did a lot of careful planing:



Because I had no good way of clamping, I did a 3 stage glue-up. Stage one was 3 lots of 2 strakes:









When that was dry, I glued 2 of those pieces together:



When that dried, I checked out the angles and adjusted with a plane. I wasn't particularly careful because getting to 90 degrees at this point wasn't critical. I then glued up again:



When I de-clamped (ie took off the tape) I roughed it to shape with a variety of bench planes:




I then had to make a decision about whether I would continue the Gaudi-esque theme, or go for something more uniform:



I eventually decided on the latter. I screwed on an extended-height fence, and used the planer to bring the 2 faces to right angles:



Note the gaps in the coopering. This was the result of not being able to clamp, and some of the staves springing to a bit of a curve when I cut them originally. I decided to fill them with thickened epoxy, which is great at gap filling, and great at flowing into thin gaps. I taped up to stop it just running through:



I collected some sawdust from the bandsaw, and used it to thicken up some epoxy. I pushed this around internally (this won't be seen):



In amongst all that, I also cut some half-laps for the door surrounds, and glued them together. Note the pinch sticks for checking diagonals:



The funny thing about those corner joints is that they are temporary. They won't exist in the final piece. Take a look at the drawing of the doors from my first post:

The door surrounds have rounded corners, which means these square corners will be cut off. I am doing it this way because I remember the difficulty of gluing up all 8 pieces of the frame at the same time when I did the internal versions, months back.

Whilst the glue was drying on the door surrounds, I carried on shaping the shelf:



I took a pattern, and went and offered it in place:



This allowed my to get the shaping for the edges of the shelf:

 

[Mike G]

I took some pinch sticks across to the teardrop, and measured the gap. This enabled me to cut the shelf to length:



I settled on an elliptical shape for the shelf openings, and cut a template from cardboard:



Marking it was easy. Cutting it wasn't. I had to do it with a jigsaw, and I had to do a rolling bevel. Where the curve of the ellipse went around the curve of the shelf it burnt, and it cost me a couple of blades. I cut with the pendulum motion at its lowest setting, and went very slowly and carefully, but still left myself with a lot of cleaning up to do:



I tend to only use sandpaper for shaping, not finishing. There was quite a lot of shaping to do here, though, and I went through a bit of 60 grit:



I offered it into place:



As I said, this shelf acts as conduit for some wiring, so I cut all 4 corners off to allow for the cables:



After lots of work with finer grades of sandpaper, I finished off with a card scraper, then cleaned up the workshop. After wiping off the dust with some white spirit, I mixed up a lot of 1:1:1 mixture, then slapped it on and wiped it off in the normal way:



Thanks to @Dr.Al I had recently bought some sealable plastic bags for storing paints and varnishes, which is why I made up an excess of mix:



I'll give this 4 or 5 coats in total, by which time I should be able to start coating the door surrounds.

 

[Cabinetman]

That’s really cool Mike. A lot of work but totally worthwhile.

 

[Dr.Al]

That looks amazing Mike