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Tinker Tuesday for November 11, 2025

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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Did cloudflare take down the weekly tinker threads too?

Maybe I'll move this if it ever shows up.

When last I left you I had the cases made for my bookshelves out of birch plywood.

It's been a hectic two weeks, but I managed to mill the soft maple for the faces. A two, a three, four. Also drilled all the holes for the adjustable shelf pins. Using a jig and getting those done was the most economical method over trying to install six foot rails. I couldn't find a local supplier for them, and having them shipped incured freight charges on account of their size. Plus this saves me having to route out channels for them.

I am noticing more that almost none of the pieces I cut are perfectly square. Not massively so, and you really can't tell. There is maybe a 16th an inch of wobble that some shims will take out. The floor of my basement isn't exactly perfectly flat either. But in the future, if I ever redo the cabinets in my kitchen, I think I need to invest in a tracksaw to break down the sheet goods. Also the pocket screws, despite copious clamping and jigs, still walked on me when I drilled them in, pulling the whole box slightly out of square. Once again, maybe a 32nd of an inch, but it's every joint, and those errors compound. I think in the future I'm just going to suck it up and route rabbet joints. Should invest in some route bits that are perfectly sized for plywood thicknesses.

I did a test stain of the black, and I think I hate it. Tried out a black walnut stain I have, and I like the warmness of the brown tones a lot more. Think I'm going to go with that instead. Probably also worth doing a prestain treatment because the plywood was a pretty blotchy. Probably from the manufacturing process. I swear you can see where the rollers didn't apply preasure evenly across the sheet how the stain absorbs. I also got my last sheet of plywood mostly broken down into the widths I'll need for the shelves. The side cases get 4 shelves each, the top middle gets 2 and the bottom center gets 1.

The next week I aim to get sanding done, headers and footers, and if I'm lucky all the shelves and trim pieces. I doubt I will be lucky.

Did cloudflare take down the weekly tinker threads too?

I posted it, but it's still filtered. @netstack (hoping you'll be first to see since you posted recently) can you approve the thread.

Thy will be done.