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

 

[Mike G]

Back to the door surrounds. You may recall that I'd built the basic frames. Now it was time to do the corners, so I built a jig:



This produced most of one side of a half-lap joint:



I don't know if I've ever mentioned it, but I hate routers:



That meant cutting out, grain matching, and gluing in a piece:





Most of the corner piece gets cut away, so I'll get away with it even with the most discerning inspection.

I had to fix the template with some filler:



Then after completing the routing phase of the job, there was a bit of tidying up to be done:





I then offered the corner pieces in place, one at a time, and used them to locate a piece of ply to act as a router guide. I also hot-melt glued a scrap on the other side of the joint so that the router base didn't tip:



After doing all the routing for the other side of the half-lap joints, I could then glue the corner pieces in place:





I carefully made yet another template:



I roughed the waste away with a jigsaw:



......and followed up by clamping the template in place and using a trimming router to get the final corner shape:



For some reason, I had done these door liners differently from those on the inside of the door. The other way was better. I took them to the bench for a tidy-up (workholding was a challenge):



The issue with the subtly different corner design showed itself on the other side. The grooves for the seal ran out of the edge:



You can see that I scratched the groove around the curved corners. You can also see that I had a problem with some unwanted grooves. I blocked up, and filled the offending grooves (x16) with epoxy thickened with sapele dust:



I've got away with it, because all that will be entirely hidden by the seals. Still, mistakes like that shouldn't happen.

In the meantime, I'd applied sufficient 1:1:1 to the overhead shelf, put in a central divider to help with fixing it, and fixed it in place:

 

[AndyT]

Well, it looks pretty clear that your accident hasn't affected your level of patience and your appetite for getting on with things!

But I did find myself wondering why you'd started building your own Scalextric track...

 

[Mike G]

Back to the door surrounds. I rounded over the inside and outside edges of the outer face:



Believe it or not, that will eventually be the same colour as the overhead shelf, but as it will be covered in epoxy to make it waterproof, that's not happening just yet.

I'm still only able to stand for an hour or two at a time, so I'm really fiddling about with little jobs until I am fit enough to tackle some of the more important stuff. Next, I thought I would make a corner detail which hides some wiring in the sleeping area. I have lots of cedar strips left over, so instead of cutting this from solid, I thought I would laminate it. First, I made a template:



Then I made up a pattern board to that shape:



And finally, I mixed up some thickened epoxy and glued the laminates together before clamping them to the former:



Whilst that was drying, I found another small job: the tongue box. I wanted to make this with curved front corner, and laminated from the left over cedar strips. I did an experiment to see how tightly it could be bent:



That's a 150 radius. It wasn't without its failures, though:



......and the steam pipe clearly needs better support:



Meanwhile, the laminated corner pieces popped off the former, with no spring-back:



Finally, I spent rather a while making up a former to bend the cedar for the tongue box:



You'll note that I supported the steaming pipe a little better. After firing up the wall paper stripper, I started steaming pieces around the former:



Unfortunately, 2 successes and 6 failures is an unsustainable rate of attrition:



...........so I am going to have to come up with another plan.

 

[AndyT]

As we haven't had 6.40 pm yet today, I deduce that you're not a big fan of having a leisurely lie-in, Mike?!

 

[Mike G]

That's a compilation of 2 or 3 days work, Andy. I'm always up by 6.40am......but never in the workshop.

That clock helps sum up my current limitations. It normally hangs on the wall. It stopped. I managed to nudge it off its screw and replace the battery, but I can't get up to put it back. I think ladders are going to be off the agenda for a month or two yet.