Tropical Fish

For combination woodwork / tropical fish enthusiasts (now that won’t leave much time to watch TV!), my son’s tropical fish blog is here.

Aquarium Cabinet #3

Now home to a whole bunch of scaly creatures, the third aquarium cabinet is complete. As always a few challenges, not least that each aquarium weighs about 60 kg (130 lbs), so the construction needs to be quite strong. The three shelves holding the fish tanks are mortised into the uprights like this:

Aquarium shelves are supported on 45x30mm and 65x18mm ribs, morticed into the 45x45mm uprights.

The completed cabinet has three shelves for fish tanks (each holding 55 litres), with an additional shelf at the top for all the elctrics (air-pumps, power distribution etc). Fluorescent lighting is mounted on the underside of the three top shelves.

The completed aquarium cabinet.

This cabinet has few extras that the previous cabinets never had, including a slightly fancier crown piece, with simple inlays. The crown piece is constructed of standard clear pine, with a rimu decoration, and pine inlays into the rimu.

Crown

Close-up of inlay.

I tried something new on this cabinet, which was to make an inlay of an Amazon catfish (Corydoras, for the specialists!). I made this by painting a 6mm sheet of MDF with acrylic glazes, until the colour was nice and rich. I then cut out the shape of the fish with a fret-saw (by hand), using a template of a fish. The eye was added last.  I traced the outline of the fish onto the plywood of the door, and routed by hand (as far as possible) the shape of the fish. A small clean-up with a chisel, and them the fish was glued into place.

Inlaid Corydoras, made of MDF and decorated with acrylic glazes.

Finally, for a slightly different look, I found these door-knobs at a local importer of Indian crafts:

Ceramic door knobs from India.

Another Aquarium Cabinet in the Making!

This will be number 3 in the series, each one an improvement on the last (hopefully). Thus far, mainly shavings to show for it! I’ve been using the Scary Sharp method for sharpening my plane blades, and it works well. These shavings were made just as the current sharpening is coming to the end of it’s life – almost time to haul out the sandpaper again.

Night Stands

The first real project with the WoodRat – a pair of oak and … night stands (I have no idea what the darker wood is).

The WoodRat did the half-blind dovetails with almost no bother, and the night stands have now been in action for a few months. The drawers slide beautifully – there was a fair bit of design work on this project. The rendered design in TurboCad looks like this:

The night stand as rendered in Turbocad

With the roof and side panels removed, the runners and kicker are visible:

The runners and kicker allow the drawers to slide very accurately and smoothly.

The completed night stand is shown in the next few pics:

One of the night stands

Another View of the Night Stand

Unequally spaced dovetails are easy with the WoodRat

A desk

I came across the Cant-Desk in L.A. At Home in the Los Angeles Times, in an article entitled “Browsing: A Dozen Desks for the Home Office” . This, just as my daughter had decided that her current desk no longer suited her teenage requirements. The desk is a very simple design with good lines.

The Cant-Desk as featured in L.A. at Home.

The desk is available from Blu-Dot in the U.S. and Canada, which is a long way from New Zealand, so I thought I’d try to reproduce the design in my workshop, and here it is, as built:

Front view of the Reproduction Cant-Desk

… and a side view:

… and with chair:

The Reproduction Cant-Desk as it will never be seen again, just prior to moving into my daughter's room.

The legs and frame are made of Oak, and the rest is MDF and a bit of hardboard at the back. The only difficult parts in construction were the angle mortise-and-tenons on the front legs. The two shelves are screwed into the legs, so that the table can be taken apart if needed.

It’s probably not as sturdy as the shop-built desk (I wouldn’t sit on it!), but it does it’s job, and it really looks good in it’s new home!

Woodrats (and dogs…)

Finally, the Woodrat has arrived, and has been installed!

The Woodrat in place...

And with integrated dust-handling…

And, right at the end, my assistant showed up to give a helping hand…

The Workshop

This is it! Not that there’s too much of it… but it’s warm(ish), dry, and now that I have an iPod docking station in it, I can listen to all the stuff that’s not too welcome in the rest of the house (we have some divergent music tastes!)

The workbench.

Triton Table-Saw Table, with deWalt Circular Saw fitted.

Progress on the Dining Chairs

Three down, one to go!!! There just hasn’t been that much time to do anything these last 6 months or so (I think I counted a total of 35 international flights that I’ve been on since November…)

I’ve moved away from rounded mortices & tenons to square – actually a lot easier. Don’t know where I got talked into rounded ones – they fit poorly, are never square (no pun intended!)

Designing…

I design all my works on TurboCad Professional 15.2 – it’s easy to master, and good in 3-D for visualizing what the work will actually look like before I start buying wood. Quite a few projects have died on the “drawing board” – either because the design didn’t look good, or the design was just too difficult… If it’s difficult to draw, it’ll be difficult to build…

Here is the rendered version of the dining chair:

This detail shows more about the chair-back. Originally I was going to put a dovetail into the curved pieces at the back for more stability (they are 10 mm Rimu, and the wood has probably been overdried in the kiln, so its quite brittle), but eventually the chairs turned out fine without the dovetail.

TurboCad is also quite good for making sure there are no spatial conflicts in 3-D – this pic shows the tenons overlapping at the front of the chair:

Dining Chairs

Well, that was brave: Design and build 4 dining chairs to replace the current shop-bought junk (now falling apart at the rate of one every three months). Some pressure to complete the project, or we’d all be sitting on the floor. Started at Christmas, and delivered number 2 this week! And here it is:

The frame is made from White Oak and the back from Rimu. The White Oak was lightly stained and waxed, and the rimu was dyed and stained and waxed

Mortise-and-tenon construction throughout, with angled tenons (5 degrees) front-and-back.

Each piece of the Rimu back was made from two separate pieces glued together, and then routed into shape using a template. I find that a combination of dye and stain (applied in two steps) brings out the color of the rimu best.