Big doin's here at the shop today. For a long time I've been wanting to build a cabinet to store my router bits in. I had built what you might loosely call a cabinet for them a long time ago, but it was extremely crappily contructed, was entirely too small, and just plain annoyed me when I looked at it. On top of all that, I only had made provisions for 1/4" bits, which was fine back in the day when all I had was a router capable of handling 1/4" bits, but as time has gone on and my router bit collection has grown with my collection of routers, my bits have either stayed in the cases I bought them in or been placed haphazardly in the cabinet under the router table. Not exactly the best way to keep up with things to say the least.
Needless to say, a new router bit cabinet was needed.
I decided to take things a step further on this project, however. I decided to try a bunch of things I had never tried before. For one, I decided that I would construct the sides of the cabinet using box joints, using a table saw box joint jig that I built myself. I also decided to try to do a raised panel door. Lastly, I decided that I would no longer be intimidated by hinges :)
Here's how it turned out...granted, it still needs sanding and finishing, but being impatient, I wanted to take pictures to post.
Now you may be wondering what's up with the big knots on the door and the goop on the back. Well, I saw David Marks (of Wood Works fame) taking knot-ridden wood that would have otherwise been fodder for the wood smoker and using epoxy to fill in the knots and using the knots to add character to the piece. Well, I happened to have several boards that have been sitting in the wood rack for a while and I decided to throw in an extra twist by trying to replicate his technique. It actually worked out fairly well with the exception of running out of epoxy. The knot in the center of the door was rather large and took quite a bit of epoxy to fill in. It should be interesting to see what the door looks like when I get some finish on it.
I put the door itself together with mortise and tenon joinery, which worked out pretty well. The raised panel isn't as raised as I wanted it to be, but the mini-panel raising bits I have will only do so much. At least I'll have room in the cabinet for a set of real panel-raisers.
The shelves have not had holes drilled for the bits yet. I need to figure out how I'm going to arrange them. The box shown in the bottom of the cabinet will hold miscellaneous pieces-parts like wrenches, collets and bushings. And yes, it is put together with dovetails...but you'll have to wait for the next post for details on that :)
Posted by Rob at July 31, 2004 10:01 PM