Greene and Greene Stereo Cabinet - The Back Panel and the Shelves

With the front and sides all put together, it's time to measure the as-built cabinet width and make the back and the two internal shelves to fit.

The back panel looks suspiciously like the side panels.  In fact, it's the same, except a little bit wider.  Like the side panels, it's just a piece of plywood with the faux rails glued on.  The shelves are even simpler; they're just rectangular chunks of plywood.

The two shelves and the back are all attached to the sides with screws that run through little wooden ears glued to the plywood panels.  This makes them easy to remove and replace as needed during construction and especially later when it's time to stain and varnish the remaining parts.

Greene and Greene Stereo Cabinet - First Assembly

On a project like this, it's really hard to get into all the corners and whatnot with sandpaper after it's put together.  So to make things easier, I installed the decorative ebony plugs in the legs and then pre-finished all the parts before gluing them together.  The finish is some water-based dye stain followed by multiple coats of wipe-on polyurethane.  I may or may not stain the inside later, depending on whether I have any stain left after doing the back, top, doors, and drawers.

Greene and Greene Stereo Cabinet - The Front Frame

The next big step is to build the assembly that includes the two front legs and the horizontal pieces that connect them together.  Then when that's done, I'll measure its as-built width and make the internal shelves and back panel to fit.

The front horizontal pieces all have tenons on the ends that fit into mortises cut into the front legs.  Because it's a lot easier to trim a tenon to fit an existing mortise than the other way around, it makes sense to work on the legs first.

 Each front leg has six mortises for the front horizontal pieces, five more for some decorative ebony plugs on the front face of the leg, and five round holes for the dowels that align it with the side panel.  The rear legs only have the dowel holes.

I tried a new trick to lay out the mortises.  Rather than marking their locations one at a time directly on the wood, I used a CAD program to make some little paper templates.  Each template has the outline of a mortise, along with its center line and a second reference line that represents the edge of the board.  After folding each template along that second line and hooking the fold over the edge of the board, it was easy to align the center line on the template with a mark on the board to precisely establish the mortise position.

Once all the mortises were cut, I was then able to make the horizontal pieces with their tenons to match.  I cut the tenons slightly oversize on the table saw and then trimmed them to fit with a chisel.

Here's a dry fit of the front assembly, before cutting the curved edge on the lower skirt:

Greene and Greene Stereo Cabinet - The Side Panels

With a design in hand, I hitched up my trailer for a trip to the lumber store.  Although Spellman Hardwoods is the biggest hardwood dealer in Phoenix, they've always been more than accommodating to me and my tiny (by their standards) little orders.  This time was no exception.  I came home with a stack of rough-cut African mahogany for the solid parts of the cabinet, and a sheet of mahogany veneer plywood for the side and rear panels.

Given the difficulty of storing and handling full sheets of plywood, I decided to chop the plywood into bite-sized chunks and work on the side panels first.  Each of them is just a piece of plywood with three faux rails glued on.  Instead of trying to cut the rails to exactly match the size of the panels, I took a page from my own playbook by making the panels and rails slightly oversize, gluing the rails to the panels, and then trimming each edge of the assembly with a single cut.

The legs will eventually be glued to the front and back edges of the side panels.  Here you can see one of the holes for a dowel that will help align one of the legs with the panel during assembly.  You can also see a little channel I cut into the back of the faux rail to keep glue from squeezing out onto the face of the panel.

The back panel is almost the same as the side panels, but I'll wait to make it until I can measure the as-built front of the cabinet to see exactly how wide the back panel should be.

Greene and Greene Stereo Cabinet - Genesis

For some time I've been wanting a dictionary stand of some sort to keep my big unabridged dictionary handy for occasional use.  At the same time, I've been needing to replace an old stereo cabinet that was originally built to store a bunch of vinyl LPs that have long since been replaced by CDs and digital music files.

My first thought was to combine the book stand and the stereo cabinet into a single unit, but I couldn't come up with a good way to integrate a tilting support for the dictionary with the rest of the cabinet.  So I decided to punt by making the stereo cabinet about the right height to support a separate book rack (to be built later) that will just sit on top.

Having built a copy of Darrel Peart's Aurora Nightstand and an almost-copy of his Rafter Tail Table, I wanted to make the stereo cabinet in the Greene and Greene style.  After way too much time fooling around with SketchUp, I settled on this:

 

The three drawers at the bottom are for CDs and miscellaneous junk.  The two doors at the top open to reveal the stereo itself: a CD player that sits on the shelf immediately above the topmost drawer, and a receiver that sits on its own shelf above the CD player.  The tray at the very top holds a laptop computer for playing digital audio files.  I'll normally operate the laptop remotely from a separate computer, but its tray slides out in case I need to access it directly.

You may grab a copy of the SketchUp file here if you're so inclined.

Rolling Stool - Free Plan

I always wanted one of those five-legged stools like the doctor scoots around on when he has you trapped in his little examination room.  So I built one, using some beetle kill pine from the rack at Home Depot and some swivel casters from Harbor Freight.  It looked like this:

I figured from the beginning that sitting on it would tend to pry the legs loose from the little hub-like piece near the bottom, so I was very careful to attach the legs firmly to the hub.  So far, so good.  So far, so good, that is, until one day the hub itself split in two as I sat down on the stool.  Oops.  Butt, meet floor!

Design attempt #2 worked out much better.  It looks like this:

With the legs transmitting the load directly from the seat to the wheels, it's not trying to rend itself asunder when you sit on it.  Better materials (hardwood and metal tubing) didn't hurt, either.

Free Plan

This PDF file contains detailed drawings for all of the stool's parts as I built them.  There's also a SketchUp model here.  I made all of the wooden parts from oak, and the metal parts from 1/2" thin-wall electrical conduit.  I glued up some 3/4" boards to get the required thickness for the wooden parts.  I also had to glue together a couple of pieces edgewise to get a board wide enough for the seat.

Here are some hints that might be useful if you want to make one of these for yourself:

The Metal Parts

The metal parts are all straight sections of 1/2" thin-wall electrical conduit, so just cut them to length according to the plans.  If you want to paint the conduit, now is a good time so the paint can dry while you make the wooden parts.

The Seat

After you've cut out the seat, you'll want to put a slight round-over on at least the top edge so it doesn't cut into your leg when you sit on the stool.  Also, you'll need to accurately mark the center of the bottom surface for reference later when installing the legs.

The Other Wooden Parts

The hub, the feet, and the connectors are all drilled to accept parts made from conduit.  These holes need to fit the conduit fairly closely.  Since you probably don't have a 0.705" drill in your toolbox, make one by carefully grinding down both sides of an old 3/4" spade bit until a test hole in a scrap of wood fits the conduit.  Aim for a snug fit.

After cutting out the hub and the feet, carefully lay out the locations of the holes, then use a V-block for support while drilling with the modified spade bit.  Be careful to stop when you reach the depth indicated on the plans.

For the connectors, lay out the holes as before, then use the connector drilling fixture shown in the plans to hold the connectors at the proper angle for drilling.

Assembly

Start by gluing five of the connectors to the five feet, as shown in the plans.  Each connector should be centered on the top surface of a foot, with the hole in the connector aligned with the middle hole in the foot.

Next, insert the five spokes into the hub, as shown here.  (Click on any of the images for a larger view.)  Make sure the spokes are fully seated within the holes in the hub, then drill pilot holes halfway through the bottom of the hub and into each spoke.  Install a 1" sheet metal screw into each hole to keep the spokes from twisting or coming out of the hub.

Now assemble the feet and braces together with the hub and spokes as shown.  This may be kind of tricky because it all has to happen at once.  Start by positioning the parts so that all the braces and spokes extend just a short distance into the holes in the feet.  Then work your way slowly around the assembly from one foot to another, gradually pushing the metal parts into the holes until they are all fully seated.

Next, turn the entire assembly upside down on a flat surface so that the feet are all in the same plane.  Check one more time to make sure the braces and spokes are all fully seated within the holes in the feet, and use clamps and/or weights as needed to force the connectors against the flat surface.  With everything in position, drill pilot holes and pin the spokes into the feet using sheet metal screws as before.  Important: Here, the heads of the screws must be sunk into the bottom surfaces of the feet so they don't interfere with the installation of the casters later.  You don't need to pin the braces.

In the next step, you will complete the assembly and glue the five remaining connectors to the bottom of the seat.  To make this easy, it's helpful to install some temporary guides on the seat to help position the connectors correctly.  Starting from the center point you marked earlier, draw five radial lines, 72 degrees apart, on the bottom of the seat, as shown here:

Next, draw five 3" x 1-1/2" rectangles to represent the footprints of the five connectors.  These rectangles should be centered on the five radial lines, and positioned 1/4" in from the edge of the seat.  Finally, use hot glue or small brads to temporarily attach small strips of wood along two edges of each rectangle, as shown.  The connectors will register against these strips in the next step.

Now insert the legs into the connectors on the feet and slip the remaining connectors onto the top ends of the legs as shown.  As always, make sure the metal parts are fully seated into their respective holes.  Apply glue to the seat and the connectors, align the connectors with the temporary guides, and clamp the connectors to the seat.  Once the clamps are in place, remove the temporary guides and wait for the glue to dry before removing the clamps.

Install some casters to the bottom of the feet, and you're done!

Drill Press Table Counterweight

My drill press features the "lift it up and down with your hand" method for adjusting the table height.  This got old after a while, especially with a vise or a heavy workpiece on the table, so I started looking for a way to add a counterweight to make the process easier.

The best setup I found on the internet had a cable running up from the back of the table, over a pulley at the top of the column and then down inside the column to the counterweight itself.  Unfortunately, I couldn't make this work on my drill press because the motor mount was in the way of the cable.  There was also no really good way to attach a cable to the back of the table.

I eventually figured the next best thing would be to have pulleys just below the drill press head with the counterweight riding outside of the column.  The pictures show how I did it.

The bracket that holds the pulleys is made of red oak, and clamps to the drill press column with some long bolts.  The axles for the pulleys are 1/4-20 bolts that I just screwed into threaded holes tapped into the oak.

I machined the pulleys themselves from high density polyethylene (HDPE) scraps that I melted in an oven and then cast into a block under pressure in a wooden mold.  (That's another story altogether--this YouTube video and the very first part of this one show how to do it.) The HDPE plastic is kind of slippery, so I didn't need any fancy bearings or anything to make the pulleys work for this project.

The counterweights are simple wooden boxes with sand in them.  I adjusted the amount of sand in the boxes until the weight seemed about right.  In the end I think the whole assembly wound up about three pounds lighter than the table.