I worked with my wife on the design and material
selection. We like the simple clean
design, so we went with a mission style look.
There were aspects of the aesthetics that were not decided until we
started putting the parts together. My
wife liked the red-brown tone, so we went with cherry wood. Which I am grateful for, because walnut would
have been expensive. Some of the design
features I wanted to incorporate a couple of things. The first was putting in a USB outlet. The
second was open/slatted sides.
The slatted walls were done by grooving the rails and then
putting slats in the groove. It really
was not very difficult, and I simplified a lot of the details. There are small pieces that needed to be put
in the spaces between the slats. I cut
out the curves on the scroll saw so there was a top and bottom to the parts and
they were unique to each pair. I my try
to use the router and a template for the next time.
There was a fair amount of learning from this project
because this is not a type of woodworking that I do. Here are some of the key insights:
- The legs have dimension. When cutting all my rails I cut them to the width and depth of the nightstand. I am grateful I figured out the mistake before gluing it all together. It allowed me to practice forming my tenons again.
- Rough lumber is not as scary as I thought it would be. I could only get rough lumber and I have never worked with it. There are some things that I have had to take into consideration. The first is surfacing it then putting a straight edge on it. It is not as difficult as a thought it would be. It is not like the stuff I got from work a few years back.
- Tenons don’t need to be supper long. I made them one inch long. They were going into 1 ½” legs. I should have made them 5/8” long. The tenons were not that difficult; it was the mortises. They were a pain to clean out. I will also make them wider than 5/16” next time. The rails are ¾”+ thick.
- Epoxy: I don’t know. It is the first-time using epoxy and it does fill in gaps. It was a little messy and there was a fair amount of waste. I have to say the joints are strong.
- Dove tails are easier to cut on a scroll saw. I cut a couple of test ones out by hand. I learned quickly that a cheap coping saw is no good for cutting out waste. It was a pain and the blade moved everywhere. It was easy to set the angle and cut on a scroll saw. It is probably the same on a bandsaw. Now if I just put the pins and tails on the correct part.
- Rulers and tape measures become scales. I have known this for some time, but it really came out in this build. I needed to keep with in my constraints of height, width and depth. Thickness of the boards was when all the saw marks were removed with a planer. Groove thickness was based on what looked good. Parts changed as things were put together. The measuring devices were used more for consistency purposes rather than getting to a specific measurement. That being said, I still depend heavily on my tape measure.
- Good joinery makes the assembly a lot easier. The nightstands came out square and I did not have to worry about making sure all the parts were at the same spacing because all of that was planned for in the joinery.
Overall I am pleased with the look and design. My wife choose the hardware and it looks
better than the ones I was looking at.
Now onto the computer table.
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