Building a mud kitchen

 I have two grandsons and decided to make a mud kitchen for them as a Christmas present. I toyed with the idea of taking a couple of pallets and cutting one down to make the top and sides and the other as the back. Instead of that I decided to make it from scratch using some pallet wood and some stud timber (CLS timber 63x38mm).

I started off with a simple drawing of what I thought it might look like and with some rough dimensions. 

The basic construction used butt joint reinforced with through dowels. The back splash was a separate piece to make getting into a car easier. Although the finished piece was only 1m tall and about 770mm wide.

I took the stud timber and cut the pieces to length before running them through the table saw to square them up. The off-cuts formed the bottom shelf.

The base was assembled sides first before adding the front and back rails. An off cut of the stud timber was used to set the height of the bottom rails and then the other off-cuts were used to make the bottom shelf. These were glued and pinned in place. The spacing was a bit of trial and error using pieces of MDF/ply until I found a good enough fit.

Once this was all dry it was sanded down and painted using a garden paint.

The top and backsplash were made from pallet wood. Several pieces were glued together to form the worktop. The backsplash was pinned and glued to the frame as individual strips.

A simple shelf was added with the "deliberate" mistake of putting the supports in the wrong place! Then more sanding and an exterior varnish to protect the wood.

Next I needed to make a sink and hob. The sink was made from a mixing bowl I picked up on Amazon. I drew round it then marked a line inset from the edge before cutting it out carefully with the jigsaw. The cut-out and a couple of other pieces of pallet wood were made into the hot plates. 

There are many ways to cut circles, but one of the quickest I've found is to use the table saw. A simple jig allows you to trim away the edges. You just need to go carefully. 

The control knobs were cut using a hole saw, a screw and washer allow them to turn freely. The finishing touch was to make the curved top and get a sign made. I used Etsy for the sign.

I'm really pleased with how this turned out. I ended up making a crate as storage space. I hope the boys enjoy playing with it as much as I enjoyed making it for them.

Disciplined Choices: The Search for Good Habits

 I seem the remember reading somewhere that it takes 3 months to build a new habit. I assume that was a good habit because a bad habit takes only a few seconds in my experience! And therein lies the problem. As far as I can tell, and from my own experience, some good habits don't just take time to become fixed, they take discipline. A lot of discipline, and quite a bit of failure too.

I'd argue that failure is possibly an intrinsic part of the process of learning the importance of discipline. You learn, through failure, that will power is the stuff of dreams whereas discipline belongs to the world of reality. Some people think that the two are synonymous, but I'm not convinced. 

When I changed my eating habits some years ago I was told I must have a lot of will power, but that simply wasn't true. In fact I'd say I had very little will power at all. What I did have was a goal, some data and the ability to make disciplined choices. Every day began with a disciplined choice and proceeded with a series of discipline choices. No magic bullet, no trying to suppress cravings. Just a series of choices.

Any good habits I now have are sustained by disciplined choices. That's the essential difference between good and bad habits. Bad habits take no discipline at all. Good habits demand continued vigilance. It's so easy to skip a day which then becomes two days and so on. Being lazy takes no effort, dragging yourself out of bed on a cold, wet, dark November morning to run or walk a few miles requires a massive effort for most of us. Who wouldn't rather curl up under a warn blanket than have freezing rain driving into your face? 

So how do you become a disciplined choice maker? At the risk of sounding trite or simplistic, you just do it. You set a goal, and then make decisions that support that goal. If you want to walk 10k steps a day, then make choices that help you achieve that goal. It might mean getting up 30 minutes earlier so you can walk to the station rather than catch the bus or get a lift. 

Being a disciplined choice maker goes beyond weight loss or exercise or giving up smoking etc. It can be about something as simple of developing a new skill, learning a language. Or it could be about becoming an encourager rather than a critic, reading 10 books a year, keeping a journal. Whatever it is I'm pretty sure that it will take discipline to achieve.

And when you fail? Well you just start over. Every day is a new opportunity to make new choices. If you make it all about will power it becomes easy to succumb to the idea that you just don't have enough of it to succeed. On the other hand everyone has the capacity to make disciplined choices. Even you. Even me.

Quick update on the table

 Here's a photo of the table with the finish applied and the "Egg" installed!

BBQ Table Completed

To be honest it's not really a BBQ table, it's actually for one of those outdoor oven/grill things that look like a rather large egg as I said before, but I'm not sure what else to call it.

In the end I made it from reject scaffold boards, some of which had some significant splits in them. I managed to get everything I needed cut from 5 boards (3900mm long). 

I cut the hole using a jigsaw in the end. Making a circle cutting jig for the router would have given a neater result, but it will be covered by a lip on the oven and any unevenness in the cut adds to the rustic charm!

I filled some of the cracks with hot melt glue, which worked ok, but it needs some slower curing glue if that's possible. The glue sticks I've got set very quickly and it left a lot of clean-up work to be done. I've seen a hot melt system for repairs and filling, so I might look at getting one of those to try for the next project. 

The client is applying the finish and it will be interesting to see how it looks after that has been done and the oven is in place. 

A BBQ Table: The design stage

 I've been asked to design and build a specialised table for a BBQ. Well actually it's more like an outdoor oven in the shape of a rather large egg. You can buy these things with a table, but my client has a very specific space so they need something made-to-measure.

I'm going to try something different and use some scaffold boards to build it. Here's the basic plan:

I'm still working on checking all the dimensions, but the basic idea is a rustic looking, sturdy table into which the "egg" sits. 

Cutting the hole will be interesting. I'll probably make a jig for my router and get a kitchen worktop router cutter and then just take it steady. 

It will need to be made in sections that can be put together on site because I don't have a truck to transport it and anyway I suspect it's going to quite heavy once assembled!

A couple of ideas for simple projects that I might try making to sell

 I'm not sure if, or even whether, I want to try and make money from woodwork. I'm certainly not going to pretend to be a master cabinet maker, but the more you do the better you get. So while watching a few videos recently, I thought I'd have a go at making a couple of things that might have a market if I can find it.

The first is a reproduction of a traditional wine crate. It's approximately 400mm square and it was quite simple to make. I bought a 2.4m board 18mmx144mm for there side panels and cut down some leftover cladding to make the slats. The slats are 40mm wide and about 7 or 8mm thick. 

The hand slots are cut using a template and a router fitted with a bushing. You can of course make them using a forester bit or a flat blade bit or even a hole saw and the use a jigsaw or coping saw to cut out the centre section. 

The second pice I made was a reproduction of an old rustic tool tote. Very simple to make from more of the 2.4m board. 

It's about 430mm long and 140mm wide. The end panels have a corner cut off. The panel is 300mm tall and the cut-off is 40mm in from the top edge and 140mm up from the bottom edge. I set up my tapering jig on the table saw and simple ran the pieces throng on both sides. The handle is 400mm wide and the whole thing is assembled using glue and brads. The end panels are actually screwed and glued to the base panel because they were a little bit cupped and I thought screws would give a more secure fixing for this prototype.

The finish is an "Antique Pine" wax.

The minimum I would want to sell something like this is probably around the £15 mark. I think I could produce them at around 4/hr if I batch processed them. I reckon each one has about £7-£8 worth of materials, so £15 would cover the costs and the time spent making them. I'm guessing the cost of materials would come down a little bit if I were to buy the wood to make say 10 of each in one go. But I'm not sure how fast I could batch them out!

A simple cupboard/enclosure for a hallway

 A friend asked me to build a simple cabinet for them to replace one the was falling apart. They delivered the old cabinet for me to use as a template and I started by doing a simple drawing using Graphic. I've tried Sketchup but never really got on with it for some reason.

Here's the basic idea I developed.

As you can see it's a simple double door cabinet. The challenge was to make it to the same dimensions as the original but because I was using 18mm MDF, the internal dimensions were the critical ones as long as there was space around the outside.

I decided to follow the original as closely as I could because I didn't know what it was covering (some electrical stuff I was told).

The cupboard was only 65mm deep.

I didn't want the rails and stiles on the doors to be too wide because I thought that would make the panel too narrow so I decided on 40mm and that seemed teamwork out okay.

Here's a picture of the cupboard with the doors clamped in place as a test fit before painting.

I think the proportions look okay. 

The next stage was sanding everything down and then preparing it all for painting.

I used a water based primer/undercoat, lightly sanded between coats. The client was doing the final painting, so I did there coats to get it to a reasonable finish. 

Once I was happy with the finish I added the hinges and door knobs. The hinges are simple flush hinges, but that's not the whole story. Initially I went to my local DIY store and got some hinges. Ther problem with them is that they are not that well made and some of the screws do not sit fully into the countersink. In fact so poorly made were these hinges that some of the countersinks barely cut the surface. 

The upshot of which is that the doors don't close properly.

The solution was to buy better quality hinges, sourced from a company specialising in ironmongery. Theres were thicker and far superior quality that the ones from the DIY store.

The inside of the original doors had hooks for keys. This posed a little bit of a problem because the inner panel was only 6mm thick and I had planned to put in some extra pieces into which the hooks could be mounted. Unfortunately 12mm wasn't quite enough to ensure the hooks didn't come through the other side, so I had to add an extra layer. In hindsight I could have designed this better, but I'm not sure how.

The final touch was to add a magnetic catch for each door and the job was done.

The panel doors came out okay. I cut the rebate for them on the table saw rather than setting up the router table. I think next time I'll probably use the router, the table saw was ok but it's a bit fiddly to to get the set-up correct. Still, it worked and the client is happy. 

Simple Storage for the Utility Room

 Our utility room is a mess. We have loads of stuff that needs sorting and the storage is a mixture of old bits of furniture that was in the garage already and shelves that we brought with us or bought to try and make better use of the space. 

The first step was to improve the storage around the washing machine and freezer. This was going to take the shape of some custom made shelves the would store basic item including the cat baskets!

I made this is two parts, a deeper section with two fixed shelves and a shallower version with one fixed shelf and two adjustable shelves (I decided not to have the three I initially put in the drawing). 

In case you're interested the drawing software is Graphic for Mac. It's very useful for creating simple 2D drawings for this sort of project.

The units were built using pocket holes which presented a challenge in the narrow unit because I didn't think about the drill/driver being too big to get inside the unit with the pocket hole driver bit in it. 

I got there in the end, but it was a real faff. The shelf pin holes were made using a Kreg jig. This is a very useful tool. A simple spacer (a piece of ply cut to size) helps to position the jig at its starting point and then you can drill a series of holes equally spaced. If you need more there's a locating pin to reposition the jig. You just need to take your time setting things up properly. I got my jig for about £35.

We've recently bought a battery powered lawn mower so I've attached the charger to the end panel of the unit and the batteries live on the shelf with the charger and battery for the trimmer we were given years ago. This gives us a nice, convenient way to store and charge the batteries.

The next thing we decided to make was a storage unit to fit between the freezer and washing machine.

Nothing too complicated, just a pull-out unit with storage for washing powder, water softener etc. Again pocket holes were used to secure the bottom to the front and back panels, and 30mm brad nails for the rails. 

I found some old castors from a previous project and a handle from a wardrobe I dismantled 8 years ago. The wood from the wardrobe was used to build a cupboard to hide some pipes and to construct one of my benches, so nothing goes to waste if we can help it!

Once finished, the unit slides nicely between the two appliances.

The next job will be to sort out the rest of the storage, making better use of the space. We might even be able to get into the cupboards currently buried behind the stuff we haven't sorted out yet!!

 

Making routed panels for drawer cabinets without a router!

I wanted to do a quick post about making panels with rebates in them without using a router. You still need at least a circular saw, but if you don't have a router you can make these panels using two layers of material. 

I chose 9mm and 6mm MDF because I had some in the workshop. 12 and 6 or two pieces of 9mm would give you an 18mm thick panel which would be the standard thickness I use to build cabinets.

I cut my base layer (9mm board) to the height of the finished panel (800mm) and to the width of two panels plus a bit of waste (1200mm). The 6mm sheet was cut into 1200mm by 74mm strips. I've posted before about how I used a saw board with a circular saw to make treatable cuts.

You need to make some spacers for assembly and I made mine 14mm wide. Just cut one piece long enough to split into three. Oh and I cut a 20mm wide strip to go on the bottom of the panel as a starting point. This also allows me to use an 18mm thick base or stretcher at the bottom and it leaves a 2mm gap to the bottom runner.

It was then a matter of using the spacers to position the 6mm strip, check it for square and glue and pin it in position. Move the spacers and repeat all the way up. Before you start pinning, mark up where you are going to cut the assembled panel into two pieces. I did this on the first 6mm board. This is where you don't want to put any pins! Saw blades don't like nails or screws.

Once the glue is dry you can cut the panels to width and make your cabinet.

So why 74mm? It just so happens that the cabinets I make to go under the benches work on an 88mm spacing so 74mm with a 14mm gap gives me 88mm. Of course it doesn't work with the 800mm panels, but they were made to fit into a different bench. 

If you don't want to use that much 6mm board, you could rip it to say 20mm wide and then use a wider spacer to position it. The starting point is to work out the internal height of the cabinet and then work out how many drawers you can fit in the space. I make my drawers from 12mm material, so I use a runner width of 14mm. 

Say I was building a cabinet with internal dimensions of 722mm, and I want to have space for 6 single height drawers in it. I subtract 2mm for the clearance at the bottom of the cabinet and divide 720 by 6. The gives me 120mm for each drawer space. A 14mm space for the runner leaves 106mm for the drawer. Then it's just a matter of cutting the runners and spacer to watch those measurements. Depending on how you make the drawer, you need to leave 2mm at the top so it doesn't bind on the drawer above.

These are trays rather than drawers but the principle is the same. It's basically a box with a base that runs in the slots in the side panel. Because these slots are made with a router they're a bit deeper than 6mm, but only by a 1-2mm. By sheer chance that meant the the sides of the drawers were 9mm in from the edge, so I cut a couple of 9mm spaces so I could position the sides in from the edge and then squaring it up to the front and back, I glued and pinned the base in place. 

I might take some better photos of a drawer and see if I can explain it better, but it's essentially the same process that I used in an earlier post but without the rebates to square it all up.

Over-engineering a hinge for a boom arm

 Everyone who uses power tools to sand wood and uses some form of hose attachment  for dust collection, knows what a pain it is dragging the hose and cable across the bench. It often catches and pulls off the tool or gets twisted up. Far better to have the power and use dropping from above.

There are lots of ways to do this. My solution was to build a boom arm that swings out across the work space. I thought this would be the easiest and neatest solution, but I didn't figure with the issues I'd face with the hinge system that allows the arm to swing. The weight of the arm and hose produces quite a force on the hinge, pulling it down and away. 

I tired an ordinary butt hinge and a gate hinge, but neither worked well. I then made my own from threaded rod and 18mm ply, but that too wasn't able to support the arm as well as I wanted.

So I went for this:

This is it clamped together for a test fit. It's made from 18mm ply and rotates on a 20mm Aluminium tube shaft. The boom arm (made from 12mm and 6mm MDF in the arm of an I-beam) fits into a couple of slots.

The hope is that the central shaft and the shape of the hinge will offer better support.

I made a wall plate from more 18mm ply along with with a base and top plate for the shaft.

I bolted the whole thing together with M6 bolts. 

In order to make sure everything lined up, I used double-sided tape to assemble the hinge block with a piece of scrap where the boom would be fixed in place. I then counter-bored a 10mm hole in one side before drilling all the way through with a 7mm bit.

The 10mm hole is just the right side to allow the head of an M6 bolt to be driven in and head tight without splitting the ply. It's neater if you line the head uo with the grain, but it doesn't seem to make a big difference.

Once all the holes were drilled I separated the parts and then reassembled it with the boom arm in place and carefully drilled through the arm.

You'll see in the pictures that there are grooves. These are to take top the shape of the beam. To make it easy I added shims to the inner part of the beam so that everything clamped together nice an tightly.

The wall plate and other part of the hinge was again made from 18mm ply. This is all scrap wood I had around the place by the way.

20mm holes bored out using a spade bit and than all screws together with the bottom section glued in place but the top only screwed in to make dismantling a little easier if I every need to do that.

And there it is. It seems to work okay, although I might need to shim the wall plate because the wall in a little uneven. The hose and power cable is simply cable-tied to the arm and I can make connections as I need them. It works really well for both routing and sanding, so I'm pleased with the eventual outcome.

The new thing I didn't take into account is that the roof slopes from to back which means that long ladder you can see is lower at the from of the photo than at the back. The arm just clears the front, but had I set it 5-10mm higher wouldn't have cleared the ladder and I would have had to take it off the wall and repositioned it. 

Thankfully I got away with it, but only just!

Building a flip-top tool cart

 I've seen plenty of examples of flip-top carts and have thought about building one for a long time. I have a disc/belt sander that could do with a more permanent home and I have and simple drill press stand for my old Black and Decker Mains power drill bought back in 19879/80. I made a bigger table stand for the drill years ago, but that could do with improving.

So I did a quick drawing in Graphic of my design. I'm quite tall (1.90m) so I like my tools and benched to be a bit higher than most people. My benches are 90cm tall, so I designed this flip cart to be about the same.

The body is made from 18mm ply with space for a drawer. The top is made from two pieces of 18mm ply  separated by 25mm, the diameter of the aluminium tube on which the top rotates.

The tube was more like 26mm or the drill bit was more like 24, either way it was too tight and needed adjusting. Not easy once the initial hole had been prepared. The moral of the story being don't drill the hole until you've got the tube!

Apart from that it all came together nicely. I used 50mm bolt catches on the four corners to lock the top in place. 

In order to get them lined up I installed the catches on one face then flipped the top and added the bit that receives the the bolt on the other side. I then added the other catches using the receiving bit to set the position of the bolt.

I didn't bother with any fancy drawer slides, just waxed the bottom of the drawer itself.

The belt sander is bolted to the top. I used M6 bolts. I counter-bored from the inside just enough to be able to hammer the bolts in. The drill press was just screwed down.

The top rotates easily and it's already been put to use. There drill press was tucked away in ne corner of the bench and often had accumulated bits and pieces on it, making it a pain to get out and set up. Now four bolts, a quick spin, and it's already for use. 

More storage and workshop projects

 SoI've busy in the workshop. I usually do a few things over Christmas, but we're also in lockdown again so there are more things I can work on. Using the same approach as I did for the storage unit I built a second but this time to had trays rather than drawers in it. 

The plastic box in the bottom was replace with two more trays and then I made boxes for nuts, bolts, hinges etc. Although these units are made from MDF, they slide really easily after an application of wax to the runners and slides. 

The boxes were made from 6mm MDF and hardboard simply glued together and held in shape with some tape while the glue dried. No pins. 

I made different sizes but always in multiples of a basic square. That way they can be rearranged within the tray.

The next problem I wanted to try and solve was dust collection from tools used on the bench. Think sanders and track saw.

I watched a few videos of folk making boom arms and some using hooks, rings and string lines. All of them worked and I decided on an arm.

I thought it would be interesting to make my own I-beam from 6 & 12mm MDF that's lying around the place. 

The length was simply the longest pieces I had available, about 1200mm. Having cut some grooved using the table saw it was just a matter of glue and clamps to put it together. A bit of on-the-fly design and I had a hinge bracket and wall mount. 

A piece of hose and a power cable were simply cable tied to the arm and it was ready to go. It works quite well, although the hinge could be better. I might redesign that later. I don't have any photos of the boom arm.

I came across Woby Design and downloaded the plans for his camera mount. Working in metric measurements meant a few adjustments to drill sizes to use metric bolts rather than imperial. Plus a camera mount is a 1/4" thread, but I found a ball head mount that had two M4 threaded inserts.

My workshop is in a garage. It's about 5mx3m with a concrete floor that's cold and hard on the knees when you've been standing for a long time. I didn't want to move everything out so I laid a rubber mat-like tiled floor. I used something called Assemblemat. It's a bit soft for a workshop floor even though they say it can be used in a garage. If  have to do it again I'll use something like Duramat. 

Star decorations from oak flooring

In the run up to Christmas I came across some designs for star decorations. Using some scrap oak flooring and some scrap from a shed I built, this is what I made. There are more!

I used three basic designs. An overlap style, an open star and a smaller closed version made from the offcuts of the open design.