Woodworking

29 Apr 2021

Like carpentry but less structurally secure

Woodworking has long been a hobby of mine to varying degrees of success. Although lots of success is possible with great patience and careful thought, lots of success is also possible with very expensive tools that I don't have access to.

I've done my best over the past few months to make some furniture and instrument modifications while I've had access to a full-fledged garage, unbound by the earthly tether of a studio apartment. Here's a bit of what I've done

Bed

The coolest thing I've built is a floating bed!

I planned it out a bit before working on it.

I started out with one layer,

added on the bottom,

stained it,

added slats,

and then I was pretty much done!

I just had to move it into my room,

add lights,

and eventually add a guitar stand.

Which brings us to our next woodworking adventure:

The Kalimbatar

I tacked on a kalimba onto the face of my sorta broken Yamaha FG-800, as pictured above.

This project had some tight tolerances in some fun places, and was a difficult project to complete in a shop like the one I had. I luckily had access to some of my bud Peter's clamps that allowed me to glue the project together.

Unluckily, I also made lots of mistakes along the way. But on the bright side that means I have more broken kalimbas to photograph, and that's an opportunity I just wouldn't have if everything had worked out one of the first one or two times I tried to build this project.

Here you can see a side-by-side of an unassembled kalimba I partially manufactured (on the right, somewhat in a ziploc), a kalimba I manufactured until the base plate cracked (bottom left), and my Moozica kalimba which helped inspire this project (top left).

Guitar stand (v0, RIP 2020-2020)

Now although the guitar modifications may seem a bit daunting, I felt alright messing with my yamaha because it was already partially broken. Why was that? Indeed a good question, and sadly another perfect segue into one of my woodworking projects. I've built a couple guitar stands. You've already seen one, partially attached to my old bed, as pictured above ^

Before it was on my bed, it was its own guitar stand!

And it held up its own guitars!

Sadly. That did not hold true forever and so good ol' kalimbatar has had a superglued neck since about december 2020, a couple weeks after the stand immediately fell over. It was a great 8 months of learning guitar without messing it up. A bit after that, in January 2021, was when I built the bed and went from owning one guitar to three. I finished the current iteration of the kalimbatar in late March 2021, but I'm still working on tweaks to improve its sound.

Hammock Stand

A bit later in the winter of 2021, around february, my (previously mentioned) roommate and good friend Peter got me to help him build a hammock stand.

It kept breaking because, despite a combined 6 bachelors degrees (and boy am I not carrying my weight on that one), neither of us are real capital-E Engineers. We forgot some key physics about how hammocks work and kept trying to bug fix

though none of the bug fixing worked until we consulted external help (s/o Peter's family)

After a while in our living area, the stand found a home on our upstairs deck

Here's me with it once it was warm enough to move some of the plants outside!

Guitar Stand (Lower Center of Mass)

With my newfound experience in how not to build guitar stands, in April 2021 I set out to build a guitar stand for a guitar I no longer had any monetary stake in (a gift, for my friend Christy)

The design on the side is a woodburning and mixed media (nail, guitar string) rendition of the major chord shapes on the neck of a guitar (the CAGED system, if that's more familiar terminology). Here's what it looks like with a guitar on it

And I can state with near certainty that this guitar stand itself has never tipped over :4) which is really good and pretty indicative of a complete success on this one. Yay!