Yesterday – Monday, September 21st, 2009 – was the 1-year anniversary of when I broke ground on this project. I rent a small house on a small lot (~0.18 acres) in the ‘burbs of LA, and only about 9/30ths of it is buildable outdoor space in which I can make and store things. My garage is a long-ish 1-car affair, better than the kind that just barely fit a truck, but once you pack in a large table saw (3’ fence to right of blade), 17” drill press, 6” jointer, 18” bandsaw, 32”x53” Woodpeckers router table, a dust collector with 30gal can separator, 2 2’x8’ worktables, and a 2-door floor cabinet I built, the space is pretty well depleted. I was starting to crowd into all of my work space with piles of wood, so I needed somewhere to store it all, and I wanted that to be outside the garage, yet safe from the pounding LA sun, spider and carpenter bee/ant infestations, smoggy/sooty air that makes everything dirty in about a week or two, and brief, yet often powerful rainy season.

I did up a shed design in my 3D program (Maya – I’d use SketchUp these days) designed specifically to store lumber. It’s free-standing, of course (have to move it somehow whenever I move to a new place), up on leveled cement pads with pressure treated 4x6 spacer blocks to keep it away from the yearly downpours. It has 3 shelves for 8’ long planks and a thin 8’ long section for several full sheets of plywood, with 2 doors allowing access to both of these areas from opposite sides (no losing short pieces in the back), and 4 separate stalls, each with their own doors for 2’x4’ sheet goods (available in several materials and thicknesses as ‘handy-panels’ from my local HD), cutoffs, shorts, rods, dowels, and other miscellany. It seemed like a great idea at the time. It would go near the garage wall in the backyard here:

Of course, it ballooned up into a huge project that took me months to complete, and cost a fortune, and then I stalled on it in January and didn’t finish up the last shingles and sealing the gables with Thompson’s until about a week ago. I snuck them in under the 1-year mark, though :) I would like to point out that as usual, I didn’t do any research, and I am not a home, nor even a shed builder. I ‘invented’ pretty much everything here, so there are things I’d do very differently, like how the doors work, though they do work. In fact, they look kinda cool with the sexy black locking T-handle knobs I installed with the twin lock rods behind each. I had to search all over creation for those things, almost made some myself after awhile, but finally found what I wanted in a single mom-and-pop shop online. They’re all keyed-alike so my keyring didn’t get huge. I also picked up a tube cutter and flanger and some brass tube and made my own brass inserts for the 2×4s to keep the rods from destroying them over time.

One limiter to this project was that I built it all while I still had my ‘00 Ford Focus hatchback, so I couldn’t pick up full sheets of ply. It was all done with handy panels shoved in over my folded-down back seats. You can fit 26 2×4s, 8’ long in the back of a 2000 Ford Focus hatchback, and absolutely not one more than that. I have proven this, almost mathematically ;)

In the end, I was able to take piles of wood from the garage like this:

And turn them into empty spaces like this:

This pile:

Also disappeared:

I used it as an opportunity to clean up other areas:

So where did all the wood go? Well, here’s how a lot of those boards fit into the shed, still with a good amount of room left over. Note that this is a January shot of the shed, pre A-frame roof. Also note the space to the left that can hold nearly 10 sheets of 3/4” 4’x8’ plywood:

Note there’s a door on the other side for easy access to shorter things that get pushed to the back:

As for the 4 doors, they hold the following…

2’x4’ sheets (this is now much more full, with a more random selection of materials):

small cutoff boards, with some foam insulation (overflowing with stuff these days :)

plank and 2x shorts, up to just over 4’ long (also severely overflowing now, especially with that alder haul):

The 4th stall isn’t really done yet. It is like this currently, but with more dowels and rods squished in, and a big stack of shorts of random things packed on top. The bins there fit, and this use got them out of my house, but they’re just full of small 2×4 cutoffs. That’s just my waning hoarder’s last cries.

I’m losing more and more the love of saving every last little scrap, so I’ll probably burn these small pieces at my next pit bbq, remove the drawers, and do what I wanted to do with these from the start, which is to put in adjustable shelving. All of the stall walls and the side walls of the stalls had tracks routed into them for adjustable shelving standards before I installed any of them into the shed proper. You can see in this earlier shot that I have the rails. I will take some ply from the first stall and cut shelves for the 4th one, freeing up room in the 1st, and allowing more efficient packing of the 4th:

The shed holds a lot of wood, really, in a small space, but it’s also acting as a kind of ‘stomach.’ I don’t want to pack it completely (though I am!) so it’s actually kept me from buying wood I wanted, because I didn’t want to pack in the last spaces. I want to use the wood in there now. It sort of forces me to want to use the wood I have, instead of just piling more on top of it… or at least, that’s the story I’m sticking to ;)

I have some crazy ideas for the gables. I at first wanted to cut rectangles out and put in doors to allow storage in the ‘attic’ space. Now I’m actually considering cutting the triangular shapes out entirely and putting in long, bottom-mount, full-extension drawer rails so I can ‘pull’ the gables out to reveal something like a rail of boxes or short stacks of shelving, maybe with bins for even more insane, tucked-away, hyper space-efficient storage. It would certainly be fun and unique. Who knows if I’ll ever get to it.

Meanwhile, you’re free to look through about 630 photos in the 46 sets of the Wood Storage Shed Collection over at flickr, but it’s a lot easier to see them all in this 10-minute, fast-paced slide show. It’s a nostalgic trip for me that reminds me of how much work this darn thing was:

As a final note, when I’d all but completed this post, and was checking the links to the Flickr images in Preview mode to make sure I had them right, my mouse gesture for ‘open in background tab’ ended with a little flick to the right, which is the gesture for ‘close current tab.’ I closed the whole post. I’m happy to report that reopening the tab and choosing “Post New Project” brought the whole thing back, sans the 6 uploaded images, but it only took a minute to reupload them. Hooray LJs!

I guess this is my first finished turning that came out okay. It’s a chunk of Eucalyptus, from the same euc I previously turned into a pen holder cup here (at the bottom). That seemed like a finished piece, too, but it was more an experiment I kept going with until it suddenly seemed like a finished piece, whatever that means.

I turned this between centers to cylindrical, then in the chuck with first some tailstock support while I made the cup down to the stem, stem not included, then removed the tailstock to do the interior of the cup, then went back and did the stem and base. Finish is 3 coats of Minwax water-based wipe-on-poly (that stuff is waaay more runny than I thought, poured it right past the rag and all over my hand), followed by Hut PPP satin, then gloss polishing wax compound.

This one has been an inspiration to keep honing my skills. It’s a decent finished piece, but I can objectively see that it doesn’t really have that sharpness of a professional turning, and I’m not entirely sure why yet. I think this is where it gets into details, and tightening up the lines and curves – always a difficult thing for me. I’m very technical, and tend to see things in right angles :)

My planer weighs roughly a metric ton, and is a real pain to move and use on the floor. I built a ~10” tall rolling base for it so I could position it where I need it, and the whole thing tucks perfectly under one end of one of my work tables. I got a little bit fancy with the coloring, but I’m just a little tired of all the browns and yellows of shop stuff, and wanted a little splash of color in there – something that matched the planer, so I chose colors found in it. There are almost no exposed horizontal surfaces, with the top just fitting around the edge of the bolted-on planer, so it shouldn’t get obscenely dusty. Just ‘very’ :)

The sides, face frame, back, and drawer front are all 3/4” poplar. The top is 3/4” baltic birch. The drawer walls are somewhere around 1/2” ply. The drawer bottom is 1/4” hardboard. The wheels are 2.5” tall swivel casters. All of these things – including the drawer slides – were scrap, or unused parts left over from other projects. The only new things, outside of Minwax stain stuff and flat black latex paint, with which I covered the Minwax Ebony stain (looked bad), are the pull, about $7 from Home Depot, and 4 carriage bolts long enough to mount the planer to the base. It was great to spend so little on this. Joinery included rabbeted sides for the drawer walls, pocket hole screws via the Kreg K3 Master System for the carcase and face frame, and a few wood screws to hold the drawer front onto the drawer box.

My finger is in the last pic to show that it fits by about 1/2” under the long work table. That’s about as tall as I could reasonably make it. I’m excited to start using the planer again in future projects. It’s been too hard to get to for me to bother with it for too long now. It always wanted to become a surface to store things on and around. No more! I can already move around the shop with greater ease just having this one bulky item tucked out of the way. So many more shop aids left to build now.

The build is documented in this blog series.

All of the photos (a few not in the blog) are in this flickr set.

Thanks for looking!

I finished! The few posts in the brief series are here.

I also put together a video of how the finish looks rotated around in some various lighting. I’d like to do that with write-ups on how I’ve finished things from now on to build up a helpful library of how particular finish schedules on particular wood species look ‘live.’

Full set of pictures and some writeup here at Flickr

These shots show the holographic depth I got from the finish as I turn it under fluorescent lamps:

And now for reference, here’s the finishing procedure, the first part of which is from the blog posts…

1) sand lightly to about 220-grit, and tack away dust
2) pad coat with Zinsser® Bulls Eye® SealCoat™, a dewaxed shellac (from Home Depot)
3) wait 45 minutes
4) repeat steps 1 and 2
5) sand again w/ 220 to remove glossiness/even out coat, then tack off dust
6) spray a light coat of Helmsman spar urethane (bottom, then sides, then top – also from Home Depot)
7) let dry for more than 4 hours (overnight for me here)
8) repeat 5-7 (very light sanding for 5)
9) one final, light spray with spar urethane, no sanding beforehand
10) after drying thoroughly, went over it very lightly with very fine steel wool to smooth it out
11) polished it up with some citrus wood polish
12) let dry for 24 hours before using (it’ll be tacky (less and less so) for the first 10-15)

I’m not sure I’d recommend steps 10 or 11. There’s a little bit of a matte finish to the semi-gloss spar urethane, almost like tiny raised bumps everywhere. I was trying to smooth that out a bit without leaving any marks. I managed not to leave marks, and to even out some areas that were slightly off from others, but it still felt like I should have simply upped the number of coats and sandings to really get a pro-level look. I was out of time, and wanted to get the project to my client (office manager) by Friday morning (this morning), so I’d be done, and on to other things.

It being my first project finished of ‘09, I got to update the year on my electric brand (from Rockler) and stamp it, which is always fun. The test scrap is the same maple, and I did several tests – as always – until I could get all of it to burn to the same level. It can be tricky:

The finish looked way better than pretty much any finish I’ve managed so far, so that was great. I hope the video helps. I had tried rubbing teak oil into a scrap piece of the same maple – from the same plank – and it just killed the grain. It evened it all out, and made it look dull, and soggy. I don’t think teak oil is right for maple at all, unless it’s used over other things, like maybe a watered-down dye burnished in to first make the grain pop, then the teak oil, but I don’t know why it would be necessary at all at that point, plus it takes 3+ days to dry before you can topcoat.

Speaking of top coats… that’s why I used dewaxed shellac – Zinsser® (available at Home Depot) sells this as SealCoat™. If it has wax, topcoats don’t stick well, so regular old shellac is a bad idea under them.

I hope this helps anyone wanting to finish something made of hard maple quickly by presenting a nice alternative that can be done in about 2 days, total. You only need 45 minutes between SealCoat™ layers, and 4 hours between spar urethane layers. I did 2 of each, for about 10 hours worth of finishing, almost all of that drying time. Oh, and I used painter's pyramids from Rockler, which made things a lot easier.

It’s hard to believe I did this just about exactly one year ago. I can’t believe how much I’ve learned about in that time. Were I to start over, I would do almost everything quite differently, especially the choices of woods, and the finishing thereof. Even the cubbies grain direction I’d switch to vertical on the sides. I had a lot less in the way of tools and techniques then, too. It’s kind of exciting, really, to see how far I’ve progressed in just a year, and now that I joined this site in the last week, I can’t imagine how much more I’ll know 365 days from now!

Anyway, I got a Yamaha DGX-620 on a big sale at Sam’s Club for my birthday 2 years ago (thanks mom!). Half a year later, I reorganized my office, and thought it would be really cool to set a computer up at the piano so I could surf the net right from there, and play sheet music online (for example, and here’s me trying to play the LoZ:Labyrinth theme from there).

The idea for a kind of standing chalkboard with cubbies for sheet music and accessories, and a flat panel monitor mounted on an Ergotron LX arm in the middle of it sprang into my mind, so I modeled it out around a low-res mockup of the piano's basic primitive shape in Maya, then set to work making it from my loose, 3D plan, modifying the design as I went. It’s very simple, but very sturdy, and quite functional. My office is dark, so the simplicity of the joinery and finish fade away, especially when there’s stuff happening on-screen. It’s really convenient, and it simulates for me having a cool studio, though I don’t have even the basics, like a small, physical mixer. And that’s fine, because I’m a really bad musician :)

I designed the cubbies to each fit around all the [severely outdated] sheet music I’ve acquired in my life, so I’d finally have a real place to put them, instead of stacked wherever. With 2x the storage needed, the other cubby would be for guitar pics, banjo finger pics, pitch pipe, bamboo flutes, harmonicas, strings, guitar polish, metronome, tuner, and all the other little junk that follows an instrument collection around. I never did get back around to fitting shelving or cubbies into the other one, nor doors or nice edge banding on both, though I might still like to.

The 2 outjutting shelves and narrow cross-shelf-like-thing are poplar, joined with my then-new Kreg K3 Master System pocket holing jig. The feet are joined on that way, too. The K3 was the coolest thing ever when I got it, and I wanted to join everything that way. it’s so fast and easy, and strong. The little shelves are designed around the footprint of the small-form-factor Shuttle PC that was to go on top of one of them, though when I couldn’t revive the old broken beast, I got a much smaller, brand new one. It still looks like it was made to fit up there, albeit with more breathing room. If I upgrade it one day to a bigger Shuttle again, it should still fit nicely.

For some reason I joined all the cross pieces to the legs via insert nuts and antique finish bolts. I think I presumed I’d be moving a lot, perhaps by camel, and would need to knock this down and tie the flat pieces firmly together for transport. I don’t know. There’s also a trough at the bottom of the backboard across the whole width. This now has some longer flutes in it, keyboard and mouse cables (it retains them nicely), and tiny computer speakers that came with the KPC that I’d later like to build little quarter-circle shelves for between the cubbies and back wall to the sides of the monitor, to get them up to the right height finally.

The screen extends far enough for even the most blind of pianists.

The keyboard is MIDI, and hooked to the computer – a ~$450 Shuttle KPC, I can not only surf for music, and use the 19” widescreen as a 2-page sheet music stand to display virtual pages, but I can also use the free/open source Ubuntu Studio OS with all its included packages to record, mix, edit, and play things back through the piano, using its bank of instruments. It’s pretty neat. Also, I found some really simple, free/open apps that can communicate with MIDI instruments for training purposes, kind of like the old Miracle Piano Teaching System of the early 90s (my buddy’s mom had one – used to tinker on it). It gives me hope that a project may pick up that makes a lot better of a system, with interactive flash cards (pop up chords, I have a fraction of a second to hit it) and so on.

Everything is Home Depot poplar planks, cheap plywood (I didn’t even know the difference between construction grade and birch ply back then!), and my then-usual rampant guesswork. This was my first bigger project since college (loft bed, darkroom), and the first big one in my rental house’s 1-car garage workshop. It was a lot of fun, and kickstarted up my dormant, inner woodworker again. Now there’s just no stopping :)

You can view a lot more build pics in the 6 sets in their collection at Flickr. Unfortunately, the piano has sat unused for most of a year now, as has the electronics bench I put together well before that, and the machine bench setup I made somewhere between the two, which is probably the biggest travesty (mini mill, mini lathe, CNC’d with another small shuttle and monitor setup). I have used the mini lathe more recently for wood turning, though. Setting up CNC stuff is such a huge chore, but hand-turning things like handles, and candlestick holders is so much faster, freer, and fun. Oy… Too much to do, too little time. You know how it is.

Thanks for looking!