This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.
Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.
If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service
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Notes -
The wife wanted me to take a break from my chairs to put up some wall shelves for her real quick. Now sure I could have gotten some cheap particle board wall shelves with a cheap veneer, from an unpronounceable Chinese brand name that will cease to exist in 3 weeks just to be replaced by another amalgamation of letters that mean nothing. But damnit, what's the fun in that?!
It took some doing, but eventually we agreed on some nice steel J Brackets as the hangers. Then the family headed out to the lumber yard 2 weeks ago to pick out some rustic walnut at roughly $5.50 a board foot. If you've read any of my post by now, it's a fairly straight forward process from there. Mill, cut, glue up panels, sand, finish. Although I was especially proud of the panel glue ups this time, as I did my best job yet matching grain and wood color such that they are barely perceptible. Also, to add just a smidgen of craftsmanship, I took out a slot in the back of edge of each shelf out for the back of the J-Bracket to sit in, and rounded the front edge where the J-Bracket comes up so that it sits perfectly flush. This brings the shelf about a 1/4" closer to the wall, and looks quite nice IMHO. I just finished with a plain danish oil, and gave it a light once over with some #0000 steel wool after letting it cure for a week.
Finished product. Not bad for 2 weeks. We're thinking of maybe adding a few more around the room.
It's too late now but it would look extra nice if they had slots all round so that the bracket fitted seamlessly into the shelf. Could still do the undersides.
You know, I floated that by the wife, and she wasn't a fan. These were really for her, so she gets them how she wants them.
But man, it was fun flexing some craftmanship on those back slots. Used a spacer to make sure they were exactly 24" on center apart to match the studs they'd attach to. Outlined the brackets with a marking knife, hogged out the middle with a router, and then finished up with a freshly sharpened chisel. Was a perfect fit. Probably couldn't slide a playing card in there.
Fair play, I can see the appeal of honesty over artifice.
I'm almost ready to start activating the glue on the replacement headphone band I've been making out of built up layers of edge banding I had leftover from my shelves that I've boiled and clamped on a form. It's only taken me... ohhh, four months. Lol. Gardening takes priority in the growing season.
If that doesn't work out I'll have to buy some solid oak stripwood and try plan B. Getting pretty tired of these dinky earbuds.
Fascinating. Are you making a wooden headband to replace a busted old one, or did you grab some free range headphone electronics that need a housing?
They're expensive broken ones that snapped at the apex of the curve where it's not conducive to a satisfactory mending job.
The original band is nylon and after exhausting the possibility of finding official spares or eBay parts donors I initially started by looking at 3D printing. I found an stl for this model of headphones on Thingiverse and got some quotes for nylon prints (FJM process if I remember right) but while the quotes were reasonable I wasn't totally happy with the model. It wasn't a 1:1 identical match, and even if it had been the originals were a little tight fitting so I thought it would be a chance to modify the model to my own spec. Turns out that 3D modelling isn't like image editing and I would need the "step" file to edit it, like having the layers for editing a photoshop file instead of printing out a finished jpg. Sadly the Thingiverse model didn't include these. Okay, it's not a hugely complex shape. Maybe this is my motivation to finally learn a bit of 3D modelling.
So after installing FreeCAD, uninstalling and writing it off as a nonstarter I got an account on SketchUp and started drilling the same YouTube tutorial each evening for a week until I could replicate the example bedside drawers without needing to follow the video. Equiped with the basics I started on modelling the headphone band, building up the shape as a flat linear form that I would then curve into shape as the final step. Turns out the curving function is locked behind a premium plugin. Sigh. I could pirate the software but that's a whole other tangent of a tangent.
Anyway, I was sitting here thinking about how I could DIY it when I remembered I have about 10m of beech veneer edge banding gathering dust. It's flexible, it's easy to work, it's near enough the right width, it's preglued and I can build it up to achieve the right amount of flex to rigidity. I had all the measurements I'd taken from the original product that I was going to use for the 3D model so I marked out a form on some crappy old pine board from the scraps box and got the jigsaw out. After that I looked up soaking and boiling times for bending wood (only 2 minutes for material this thin) and progressively clamped more strips to the form after allowing the previous one to dry and set. The strips needed softening with heat and water because the inside half of them have to bend counter to the way they'd been stored rolled up, and all of the layers have a tight dog-leg bend at the ears to accommodate the drivers.
Now I have six layers clamped in the form and I'm ready to heat the glue and stick them together. After that if the flex feels right there's only a little cutting and drilling to do. I have a feeling I'll have mixed results at best, but I'll be content just to have made something usable while I work on a better solution. Apparently oak is one of the woods that is both amenable to bending and also widely available here and reasonably affordable meaning I can buy a 3' strip of suitable dimensions for a little over £10 in town without having to mail order from a specialist supplier or buy a large board that I only need a fraction of.
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