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I made an impossible thing!

I've got some sanding to do.

Hand made wooden banjo armrest, because the metal one was cold and uncomfy... Made of lacewood, finished with linseed oil. Man I love the belt sander.

Late night, last minute lightsabre making...

Shiny thing!

This is how you clamp when you haven’t got enough clamps...

Preparing the jig with cling film (few things stick to cling film, and if it does, well, it’s easier to sand off than the 20mm MDF the jig is made of...)

I had two types of epoxy, as I had to buy a lot and there wasn’t enough of the one brand. One is a 60 minute set, and one a 30 minute set. I started with the 60 minute, on the basis that it would hopefully still be movable when I finished and started to clamp.

Throughout this I had the help of my friend Rob, who helped to mix up batches of epoxy as I started to run out, so I could concentrate on the spreading and layering.

I got a bit too much into the epoxy set time panic, and should have really taken my time a bit but it all got glued up without any major disasters, other than me getting largely covered in epoxy.

#bigcube gluing epoxy

Keying up the shiny acrylic to ensure good adhesion with the epoxy.

This felt like sacrilege.

I started off by hand, with 120 grit, but this didn’t feel like it gave a rough enough surface, so I broke out the bench cookies and moved onto 40 grit on the sander. Seemed to do the job, no telling until the epoxy sets though...

#bigcube keying acrylic

Jig making!

When making the smaller cube I lost a lot of time and material to the layers slipping against each other whilst clamping. On the small one this wasn’t too bad, as I could just blitz off the sides with a bandsaw, but given the size of this one, and the bandsaws I had at my disposal at the Hackspace I needed this one to be as close to square as possible to start with, before the endless sanding begins.

Thus, I made the above jig, in the hopes of reducing the amount of sanding i would have to do. A faint hope perhaps, but worth a shot.

#bigcube jig

A friend of mine saw the previous cube, and said that he reckoned that I wouldn’t make one “a foot square”.

He was right, this is only 250mmx250mmx260mm.

I initially intended to make this out of 20mm acrylic and 20mm oak, to form a cube 300mm square. The acrylic for that would have cost a small fortune, so I settled for 250mm square, in 20mm, as that is the acrylic I could get as offcuts for a reasonable price.

It turns out that getting the acrylic at 250mm was a good plan, because in Nottingham it is hard to get any nice hardwood boards cut more than about 240mm wide, and if you want them to be planed all round even harder than that. There would have been no way that I could have got 300mm square boards planed all round without ordering, costing me more time and more money.

After a fruitless search at Brooks Brothers, where all they had in the size I needed was poplar, which is a particularly dull wood in terms of figure and colour, I lucked out at Gibbs and Dandy, with a chap there spending far too much of his day helping me to sort through several large piles of hardwood to find a slab that met my needs.

There was no oak, walnut, cherry or other wood that I had worked with before available in a size that I needed, but we opened up a fresh stack of sapele to get to a board that was aout perfect to plane and cut to the right dimensions. They even managed to get it cut and planed for me by the next afternoon.

So, sapele and clear acrylic at 250mmx250mmx20mm, plus an exorbitant amount of two part epoxy glue from Gee Dees model shop and we’re ready to start gluing..

#bigcube

Laminated oak and perspex, glued together with two part epoxy, sanded and polished to an absurd degree,

#smallcube

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