Doing It For Myself

First, whip out the jigsaw and cut a pair of feet from a piece of oak.

Then cut some sticks, drill some holes for pegs to connect everything.

Then build a back section, and bang it all together to make sure everything fits.

Stain it all dark walnut.

Glue the pieces together.

Attach the back with some black carriage bolts. Six of them, because four wouldn't look serious enough. Maybe there are some gaps that could use a little putty.

Give it a few coats of varnish (the application of which will take off a lot of stain that was just sitting on the surface). Add some nonslip strips.

Accept the mistakes and should-have-dones.

And, there you have it.

A DIY version of this guitar amplifier stand to replace this. And it will sit on the scrap wood table that I made last week, which itself makes a nice hiding spot for this.

I spent maybe $35 in wood and $5 for the carriage bolts. But I also spent a lot on tools. This was my first attempt at doing dowel joinery, and I had to buy a dowel jig, and some better drill bits, etc.. It will be a long time before I try dowel joints again. It's a PITA with just hand tools.

4 thoughts on “Doing It For Myself

  1. ChrisR

    Nice work! That looks really cool and useful and looks like a great addition to your setup. I also recently did some dowel joints with a little dowel jig and a regular old handheld drill, and it was pretty difficult to line everything up exactly perfect on my bench, so everything went together and actually lined up where it was supposed to. I went into that thinking it was going to be so much easier.

    1. cleek Post author

      seemed like doing one joint wasn’t bad – the two sides usually lined up pretty well. but there were ten dowel joints on this thing, on boards that weren’t perfectly square on their ends. since ‘pretty well’ really means ‘not actually perfect’, there were ten not quite perfect joints, and all the errors added up to kindof a mess. none of it is square in any dimension and there were some ugly gaps on some of the joints (now full of putty).

      makes me want a drill press. and a miter saw.

      1. ChrisR

        Well you done good, ’cause I can’t see any of those flaws here. Looking again at all the boards you had to line up it looks much more difficult than what I was doing (4 joints/8 dowels) and I gotta say that looks like a real lot of effort. I just tell myself half the fun of not having a drill press or (power) miter saw is that I get to do everything the tedious way, and my reward is getting to keep all my fingers so I can still work.

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