Month: April 2018

Wood: First furniture project, a bed!

The Ikea bed (a queen-sized Malm), after being dutifully moved around over the last six or so years, had begun to display symptoms of the dreaded "wiggles". The slats had also picked up the bad habit of unceremoniously dropping between the (now distended) supports and causing all sorts of frustration, back pain, a mid-sleep surprises. I'd been tempted by the idea of trying to build a bed since I bought the table saw, and finally decided April was the month. The design was pretty constrained though; not only would it need to be easy to get up (and eventually down) a spiral staircase, it also had to be something that we could cut on our 4' x 6' balcony. The standard queen bed dimensions are 60" x 80", which astute observers will notice does not at all fit on the balcony. Thankfully, I came across a handful of designs that were essentially platform beds composed of boxes with drawers and supports added on. 

While it's true I did tweak some of the dimensions and details, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention this video, which not only provided the fundamental design, also helped me dodge some snags along the way. One of the first big learnings of this project: nicer plywood gets super expensive, and long drawers do too. The four 8' x 4' sheets this project required ran about $300, the drawer slides about another $100, and roughly another $100 for the miscellaneous bits (edge banding, dowel stock, drawer pulls, fasteners, etc). 

This was also my first project using pocket-hole screws, which, I know, some people view as cheating. Clearly this project wasn't meant to be fine woodworking, but rather functional furniture that I dearly wanted to have done within the time of a month (mostly evenings and weekend mornings). I did not, however, have a brad nailer / pin nailer, some glue and clamps ended up doing a lot more work than I anticipated. Rather than run through the entire process step-by-step, I'm just providing a few photos I snapped along the way (skip to the end to see the final result). For the finish we just sanded with 320 git with an orbital sander and put on two coats of wipe-on oil-based polyurethane, with a hand-sanding at 400 git in between coats. 

Gluing up the first box
Gluing up the first box
Living room overwhelmed
Living room overwhelmed
Gluing up one of the "foot boxes"
Gluing up one of the "foot boxes"
All the drawers finally done!
All the drawers finally done!
Ouliana adding edge banding
Ouliana adding edge banding
All lined up and ready to sand and finish
All lined up and ready to sand and finish
Finally in place!
Finally in place!

Clearly the next project is building a new headboard. It's been a few days already and I'm still incredibly stoked to have more storage as well as a better night's sleep! The biggest part of this for me has been getting a bit of practice on a larger-scale project; now basic furniture projects don't seem quite so intimidating!

Wood: Boxes for my two new Set Cubes!

It's been ages since I've posted an update, but not for lack of activity! These two boxes actually came together a couple weeks ago, but finding the time to photograph and post them was the hard part.

A while back it got into my head to build set cubes, that is a draftable set of cards that re-creates the retail draft experience for a given set of Magic. In addition to prolonging the useful life of cards, it also saves time on sleeving every draft deck. You can read an excellent article on set cubes here. The ratio I ended up using is four of each common, two of each uncommon, and one of each rare and mythic (often shorted to just) 4/2/1/1, with the knowledge that either shuffling up the whole pile, or intentionally building packs, would result in reasonable versions of the experience. The cards themselves were double-sleeved in KMC perfect fits and KMC hyper mattes (a bit overkill, but I like having my cubes match so the lands can be used with any of them, and I wasn't about to single sleeve MM17).

The design for the boxes came about from a couple constraints. We've got two Ikea KALLAX shelves that are super convenient, and I wanted to make sure that the boxes would be able to fit side-by-side in a single Kallax cube, as well as made good use of the depth of the shelf. Next, the nicest dimesnional lumber I can easily get my hands on comes in 5" x 24" x 1/4" boards, so I wanted to limit each box to two of those. The lid and floor are retained by rabets, and the dividers by dadoes. All the corners are 45-degree miters done right on the saw. The poorly-drawn but accurate plans are in the first photo below, along with the cut-down and mitre'd panels. 

Plans and panels for both boxes
Plans and panels for both boxes

As for materials, the Unstable box is curly maple with a sapele pommele inlay, while the Kaladesh box is walnut with a quilted maple inlay. For the lids and floors I used some oak plywood I got on discount, the dividers in both are aromatic cedar. The veneer was incredibly thin, but the grain pattern was really striking. Both the inlay and the panels were laser cut to fit, but the wavy nature of the veneer made both of these tricker than usual. After the glue-up they got a couple coats of natural-tone Danish oil.

First coat of oil
First coat of oil

I'm really happy with how these turned out! They have a bit more space than I need for just the double-sleeved cards, but it means I can store the tokens, dice, and any other extras as well.

Having cracked out two of the same design in the same weekend, I'm comfortable saying I've got this design down. Now on to bigger and better things, new techniques and interesting challenges!