Well, no sense sighing over cut wood. Let's take this little project to completion. As a refresher, this was the target. We'd seen this some time ago at Crate and Barrel and liked the style and its little design elements.
We have a need for a couple full-size cases but wanted to practice techniques and such on a smaller, lower stakes version. We cut all the pieces back in January and in the past couple months cleaned and sanded them...
and stained and sealed them...
and began final assembly. We had drilled pilot holes for pocket screws (thanks to the Kreg jig) and wanted to see how it would all work out. Here's one of the sides as seen from the inside and with the two legs next to it.
With everything tightly clamped we could put in the screws.
An empty pilot hole:
became this (repeat about 30 times):
Here's the case coming together, as seen from the back. There's a temporary spacer at the top to ensure that the sides are the same distance apart (18 inches) at the top and bottom. It wouldn't do to make a trapezoid.
And voila!
We're pretty pleased with the result. It'll serve its purpose, and we learned a lot that we can apply to the bigger versions:
- make sure you stain inside the pilot holes
- see how few pilot holes you can get away with
- recess the side panel somewhat inside the legs to further obscure the pilot holes
- make sure to include a cross bar at the top for symmetry and generally to avoid looking incomplete
