indiboi.com

I just completed project one of the effort to make back (that is… prove to myself by “saving money”) the money I spent on all of the power tools.

When I bought the Stolmen system from Ikea and put all of my non-hanging clothing into the drawers I noticed how absolutely huge they were. I then decided to spend a tiny fortune to buy these plastic-ish little divider boxes, but never quite got around to doing it.

The other night while in the lounge with Matthew the idea of actually just making some dividers popped into mind. We’d discussed using hardboard and wrapping them in fabric or felt, or something equally “soft” but I couldn’t quite get my mind around just how I’d do that without making a horrible mess of it all. The lengths required didn’t work for using that great stuff known as presto felt… and I worried some sort of spray or otherwise applied adhesive would squish through the fabric.

The idea is extremely simple — sometimes doing something the simple way is the best way (though, remember, I generally favor utter complication to simplicity, lol) — planks of wood with mating grooves so they interlock. As simple as it seems, it was quite the test of accuracy. If they grooves were off, even by a small margin, the boards would appear warped.

I set off to Lowes, bought a $20 sheet of oak veneered quarter inch (hah, yeah… it’s supposed to be 1/4″ but it’s quite a bit smaller, the fuckers). I had it cut into quarters (the wrong way I discovered, as I was almost always cross cutting and having the veneer splinter) and was able to make three drawer dividers out of half the sheet. I’d have just bought quarter sheets, but the cost of two of those exceeds just buying the whole damn 4×8′ sheet. Actually, I supposed you could say it was technically cut into quarters, but the saw blade Lowe’s has on the sheet cutter pretty much just mashed the wood apart… it must have a whopping two teeth or something. It’s probably more dull than a David Attenboro nature documentary.

Right now my table saw has a 25 tooth blade on it, not exactly desirable for cutting plywood, but it did do a decent job. I’ll probably be ‘upgrading’ it to a nice 50 tooth Freud thin kerf combo blade soon… expensive, but worth it.

Anyway… the whole point of this is to show this project, right? The entire thing was basically a functional experiment; I cut this drawer divider different from the other two, finished this one with some leftover polycrylic — ugh! I simply used the saw blade to ‘kerf’ the notches, whereas on the second two dividers I used the router to make nicely neat notches. I also lacquered the second and third divider sets. I much prefer the lacquer, brushed on, even if I did make a mess of it (as usual). This one has fifteen sections, whereas the other two have only six — different needs of course. All of them received one application of Olympic ‘Golden Pecan’ stain, just to highlight the nice grain that you can probably only barely see.

It fit almost too well, lol… I really should have shaved off that 1/16″ of an inch from the shorter pieces, but at least it fit!

Look, it’s my underwear! Hah….