Kitchen Cabinets #2: Working on a countertop

This weekend’s goal is getting the cabinet beside the stove to at least have a usable counter-top. We picked up a beaten up 10’x2’ glued up piece of maple countertop off of Craigslist for $50, and that’s becoming the surface for beside the stoive, and the narrow counter for under the window, with a backsplash cut from the scraps. Today I took a deep breath and cut the first pieces.

As I said, the counter-top was pretty beat up with a few gaps, so as I sanded it down I filled the gaps with cyanoacrylate, hoping that the sawdust would bond with the glue and create a decent filler. The Festool ETS 150/5 EQ Sander is not the best sander to be doing this with, I should have gotten the noisy shakey Craftsman out for this, because even with the vacuum unplugged on the Festool it still didn’t leave a whole lot of sawdust lying around, but we seem to have gotten a fairly smooth surface out off the process. I am, however, going to have to do a little bit more after the rest of the glue-up, because my work surface wasn’t as clean as it should have been and I got a few grains of something embedded in there when I flipped this to do glue-up.

I was hoping to do both sides of the glue-up at once, but it’s hot and dry here today, and that glue was going solid really fast, so I did one, waited twenty minutes, took the squeeze out off with a chisel, waited another half an hour, then did the other side. The edges are held on with floating tenons cut with the Domino, I’m going to have to do a little clean-up with the hand plane before I get the back and partial front pieces on.

(Essentially the same content over at my personal blog)

-- Dan Lyke, Petaluma California, http://www.flutterby.net/User:DanLyke