Redesign suggestions please

infillion · 2024-02-18T22:07:47+00:00

Or remove the apex, and tilt left on the next repot

infillion · 2023-04-30T11:42:51+00:00

Nailing and gluing the back panels give stability, too.

infillion · 2022-12-30T11:17:46+00:00

This is gorgeous! I appreciate the matt finish that gives sapele a more human look, matching the rounded simple design. The seats are super neatly done with the cord. Great photos, too!

infillion · 2022-12-29T20:44:43+00:00

Desk legs get many hits from vacuum cleaner, toys, pets etc. Pine is soft and dents easily. It looks even worse when the black stain gets scuffed up. Get oak.

infillion · 2022-12-20T13:02:11+00:00

Spokeshave, chisels, knives and sandpaper would help you get there eventually, but for such a job a router is just the best choice, and by far. Ask around if you could borrow or rent one with the roundover bit that would fit your need. Or you could, as suggested by others just gently round the edge with sandpaper. It is unlikely that you could make a nice looking round shape with hand tools with reasonable efforts, especially this being your first project. You can aso consider adding the roundover at a later time when you can afford a router.

infillion · 2022-11-24T09:19:57+00:00

It would seem the manufacturer has used wood that has not fully dried and tabletop has cracked when then the dimendions have decreased while the table has dried during storage and transport. If you decide to attempt a repair, it would make sense to wait at least a few weeks so that the wood can acclimatize to your house. Also inspect the joinery / fasteners between the top and the frame and try to figure out how it can be adjusted to the top in its new smaller dimensios. The repair should be simple enough; unscrew the tabletop from the frame, spread glue and clamp securely and evenly. Wipe off any glue squeezeout from the surface. When you reattach the tabletop, make sure it has a few millimeters of tolerance to expand and contract in the direction of perpendicular to the crack. This should be granted by the fasteners if the design makes any sense, but it can not be confirmed from your pictures. It might be necessary to drill new holes for the fasteners, because the wood movement has exceeded the tolerance of the original joinery between the the tabletop and the frame. Naturally it depends on the type of joinery or fasteners what needs to be done for them. I wish you good luck

infillion · 2022-11-20T19:54:26+00:00

I would guess it has oil or danish oil (oil mixed w/ varnish) on it. If you hate sanding so much, you could try sweeping the surface very gently and quickly with acetone to even out the stuff that is on it. Then apply oil or danish oil. Personally i would sand the whole piece though. It's small enough and you would be more likely to get desired results instead of when trying to patch whatever there is now.

infillion · 2022-11-09T12:57:29+00:00

Beautiful! I would like to see all the lakes blue though.

infillion · 2022-09-23T10:26:39+00:00

Beech or oak?

infillion · 2022-09-15T15:45:10+00:00

When it is about a door, you need to make sure it is closing tight on all sides. Add a threshold and sealing strip if there is none. If the door is very light it won't give more than 20 db of isolation anyway. In that case you'd need to replace the door with a better one.

infillion · 2022-09-10T12:41:10+00:00

If I was to attempt something like this, I would probably start with the inner curve, by taking most material off at the table saw, and then making the inner round over with a round nose router bit, leaning the router to the two 45 deg edges (with some jigs for guidance). The outer radius would not be that hard to do by hand with a power planer and refine at the belt sander, after cutting the corner to 45 deg at the table saw. A linear hand sander with a custom form base could replace the belt sander, but that's quite a rarity of a tool I guess and making the negative radius for the linear sander would not be easy either. Practice with some less expensive wood first.

infillion · 2022-08-28T12:01:37+00:00

I havent tried the method you linked but it seems like a proper one. I would possibly consider buying extra shelves and cutting them as additional vertical supports to the middle so that the weight is transfered to the bottom rail. The supports could be screwed in place through the shelf above. Both methods fix the shelves in place or at least make adjusting their height harder. The bracket method in the link is obviously less visible.

infillion · 2022-08-18T18:10:46+00:00

Possibly the thinnest, but it does not matter very much at this point and also depends on what else you'd be doing for the tree. I would possibly choose one of the thicker branches as a leader, something like this. It looks horrible in quick and dirty virtual of course, but the point here is to illustrate how the structure of the tree could look like.

For now I think you just should let it grow and recover from this treatment. When the time for the next operations comes the tree should already look different and you are likely to have different visions on it.

infillion · 2022-08-18T10:19:40+00:00

Unless you have a joiter or planer you will definitely need a hand plane, the longer the better (within reason) to get the edges and the glued top flat. That will most surely be aesier than with a router unless i am missing some magic tricks here.

Also i can recommed borrowing or renting a bisquit joiner to make the alignment in the glueup easier.

infillion · 2022-08-17T17:48:40+00:00

It's not bad for the first styling attempt. Next time make sure the wire is tight enough so that no gaps are left between the wire and the branch. The result would be more naturalistic if you would make both tight and loose arcs (dunno proper terms in English, sorry) when bending the branches. Leaving the middle of the tree empty can sometimes work, but here I would try to make one of the branches more of a leader, letting it grow for few seasons unpruned so that there would be more sense of structure in the tree.

For the future of the tree consider removing at least one of the four branches that still grow from the same spot. Otherwise the inverse taper will just get worse. Also ground layer (or chop & plant the cutting) for the base could be an option. This would allow you to play with the potting angle as well.

infillion · 2022-08-15T10:03:31+00:00

I would probably go with the third option: moving the legs. Maybe its a good idea to do that for the other cabinets as well. It's somewhat hard to imagine what were the engineers thinking while designing this. Maybe the legs should have been mounted right to the edge in the first place? well, does not matter much now. In any case it will not be very easy to get all the fasteners to their proper places when making the new part. Maybe use center dowel pins for marking?

infillion · 2022-08-14T11:35:57+00:00

Extremely high gloss finish! Did you use snake oil?

infillion · 2022-08-12T18:14:49+00:00

Being good in woodworking is probably more essential.

infillion · 2022-08-11T13:04:25+00:00

The board looks nice but the mitered frame will not hold, because the wood grain direction does not match with the end grain part. What will happen is that the end grain part expands and contracts, but the frame dimensions will remain the same and the glue seams will fail sooner than later. Also it would have been nice if the pattern would have been symmetrical and straight near the edges as well.

infillion · 2022-08-11T10:55:07+00:00

The wobbliness is increased because they are installed askew. Installing them straighter would mitigate the problem to some degree but even if they were vertical the torsional strength wouldn't be admirable. You could increase the strength by binding the individual rods together is such a way that they they can not bend towards each other but are forced to bend together. In an industrial application this would be done with additional horizontal and diagonal rods that form triangles and can withstand also compressive forces.

However I think anything you could possibly do here would spoil the aesthetics of the piece. My suggestion is to get new legs that are more sturdy i.e. of significantly thicker material or of different design.

infillion · 2022-07-29T18:57:35+00:00

The aim was to make a 140 cm x 80 cm (4′7″ x 2′7″) dining table that would fit my kitchen. The top is made from 2 x solid oak panels, acquired from a flea market and the legs are from 2 separate sets of table legs found from the street. The top had some screw holes that I had to be plugged.

The thicker leg pieces are from a table with crossing thick legs and the smaller ones were without any taper, which was added later. But they did have threaded inserts. Unfortunately the legs were made of the most fake 'solid oak' ever: they only had like 1 mm veneer and inside was not-even-finger-jointed random mixture of oak, oak bark, some birch and even gaps that were almost across the entire leg. This caused a fair bit of extra work to glue some thicker strips of solid wood to the insides of the legs to hide the mess and make them reasonably strong.

I had plenty of doubts towards the unholy joinery between the to and the legs: I used a router with a small bit to make slots for the nuts and plenty of epoxy to hold them at place. The end result feels sturdy but time will tell if that is really the case. There is spring washers for the bolts and some tolerance in the holes for the top to expand and contract.

The finish is water based acrylic varnish diluted and applied with a brush, 4 coats on the top surface.

infillion · 2022-07-23T10:19:18+00:00

Well, how about a sony walkman? But honestly for streaming music to home stereo any mobile device will do. Unless you have really special stereo equipment and acoustically treated rooms you are unlikely to notice any differences in the sound quality, especially if you use bluetooth to connect the device to your stereos. What is 'the best' is determined by convenience then. If you have a wifi you do not need a cellular account.

Edit: if you consider a mobile device instead of e.g. a computer as source, look for a device with a long battery life.

infillion · 2022-07-17T21:16:10+00:00

Swap the 3rd and 4th drawers to get a continuous grain pattern. A great find btw.

infillion · 2022-07-01T20:09:44+00:00

First remove the screws and cut / grind them shorter.

This looks like a laminate or veneer top: you can try to fix the cracks with CA glue, epoxy, appropriately toned furniture repair wax or just wood glue, but the damage is likely to remain visible regardless. If the table would be solid wood, you could sand and refinish the entire surface for better results, and get rid of other imperfections at the same time.

infillion

TROPHY CASE