Entertainment ctr. finishing touches

Today was a fairly productive day in the shop. It's just after 11pm and I'm finally calling it quits for the day. I'll try to get this published before I fall asleep on the keyboard...

This is how the other day started. I went to the table saw to make a quick cutoff as I had any other time, only when I hit the switch, nothing happened. No motor tuning on, no whirr of the blade as it fires up, nothing. After trouble shooting the cords, plug ins and switches, I found the saboteur- a cord had welded itself to the plug in! I'm no electrical genius or anything, but I'm sure this is not so good.

Ran over to Ace hardware to get the replacement and some additional advice. Turns out the wires were crossed over to the wrong terminals when it was originally done by the previous owner.

Aso, realized the saw pulls 17-20 amps on startup, but was wired with only 15a plugs.

Back to the hardware store for the appropriate wall plugs. Then I remembered the cord was only 10 long, and I needed a 20' run straight to the plug so we could bypass the whole trouble next time. Since one end of the extension cord was fried in the meltdown, I just cut off the offending piece and chucked it aside, then replaced with the leftover heavy duty extension cord. Wired hot right to the saw! It hasn't caught on fire yet!!!

The west end of the cabinet, log work jointed, sawn, dadoed, sanded, nailed in, and casework completed! Looking good. Tomorrow it's breaking out the spray equipment for 3-6 final protective coats.

Not too fast though, because the plug through caps arent quite done. They just need a little more sanding in the morning, some glue and they slide right in. I left the heater going all night in the shop so we'll have a nice even temperature for spray application.

The new hollow chisel mortiser in action already. I love it!

This thing does some pretty amazing stuff. The mortiser hollws out all the square holes as shown here. Next I'll finish chopping out the middle 'rails' to form the hole in the cabinet back to pass cords through.

Sanding out the holes that'll be seen from the front- for all of probably 30 seconds before a playstation gets set in front of it.

WOOD AS ART!

This was my backer piece for mortising out all the holes, mainly just to keep from drilling down into the base of the machine. Kinda looks cool.

Closing in!

We got tons done today, and it's starting to look like a real piece of furniture as opposed to just a few hunks of plywood stacked up together!

I got the dado all set up on the table saw, and after 2 days of staring at the wood trying to figure out how to cut the corner pieces, I simplified my jig to make it as easy as possible. The log rides on this plywood sled, secured with just a couple screws through the back.

A corner log, ready for the final pass.

Top going on!!

Mixing up a little pixie dust- lots of glue and some sawdust from the sander, mixed up and used to fill in wood defects as needed...

...then you just work it into the grain.

 

Starting to look pretty good.

 

A cool little detail- another great reason to buy local- you don't get this stuff too often in commercially built furniture- especially for any resemblance of fair price.