It's Wanderful: Part 7

When everything was sanded flat, I checked the bottoms on my tablesaw and joined them as necessary in order to eliminate wobble. Then it was time to sand. All four (4) wand stands were hand sanded from 80 grit to 220 grit.

As I wasn’t concerned with the walnut blotching, and shellac is a resonable blotch control in it’s own rite, I skipped the blotch control and went right to shellacing the bases.

The wands, mid-finishing.

2 coats of ½ lb and 4 coats of 1 lb clear shellac were applied, using rags. Once the shellac was dry, I buffed it with synthetic steel wool. 

I had originally intended to add glue on plastic feet to the bottom of the want stands. As I played with the stands in my hands, I couldn’t bring myself to add plastic feet. Instead I decided I should make my own feet, out of brass.

Ripping the brass by hand.

I started with a ⅛” x 1½” brass bar from work. Then I used a hack saw to rip and cut it to pieces about ¾” x 2” (I say about, because I used relative dimensioning and my eye to make them, I never actually measured them). Once the were cut, I used a bastard file against the edge of my workbench to square the edges and clean the faces.

Two (2) sets of finished feet.

Then I tried to polish them using buffing wheels on a 6” bench grinder. This didn’t go so well, and after the first 3 or 4 feet I left them as the filed faces.

Ready to mix the epoxy.

I cut out for the feet using one (1) of the full blades from my dado set for an ⅛” wide, flat bottomed cerf. Unfortunately, all of the filing left the feet less then ⅛” thick. The gap was barely visible, but the fit was also less than snug. In order to secure the feet I used a two part epoxy paste. So far, it’s doing a fine job at holding the feet in. Hopefully it continues to.

The finished wand stands.

Now that the wand project is finally done, it’s finally time to again return to the  shop renovation. Thankfully, I not only created four (4) nice and appreciated wand and wand stands, I also learned a bunch of new techniques and expanded my woodworking horizons along the way.

A finished want stand, armed with my wife's wand.

What have you done to push the boundaries of how you work?