Day Seven-forty-eight: more hamper fun

With sour weather it seemed to be a good day to spend in the workshop making some progress on the laundry hamper.

With the stiles figured out last time we turned our attention to the eight cross beams to which the stiles will attach. Here are the four that will go around the bottom of the hamper. We chose the four nicer pieces to be the top cross beams.

Step one was to mark where we wanted to router out the holes for the dowel rods. We knew we wanted a stile in the middle (at the 7.5-inch mark) with an inch in between. That translated into a 2-inch gap between marks (1 inch plus 1/2 an inch for each stile). Like so.

Then we clamped the piece in tight against our brace and went slowly through the seven spots on each cross piece.

Lather, rinse, repeat three more times and we had the entire bottom done.

We sanded what will be the front of the top pieces a bit more to make them smoother and nicer and then repeated the steps above to dig out the 7 holes per board. Here are the eight pieces ready for the next steps--routering a channel on the lower beams to hold the bottom of the hamper and making dowel holes in the ends to attach everything to the legs. On the top photo you have to use your imagination and picture 16-inch stiles between the upper and lower halves.