Down the rabbit hole

Down the Rabbit Hole: My Journey to becoming a true bore

By Bobby Neal Winters

When you get a doctorate, you learn enough about one tiny little thing to bore anyone who can understand you into a coma.  It was my good fortune to get a doctorate in math so that no one can understand me, and so my friends are all safe.

Then I started woodworking, and now no one is safe. Proceed at your own risk.  If you are reading this at the table with a bowl of cereal or soup in front of you, I ask you to move it.  I don’t want anyone to drown on my account.

I’ve been working on a cabinet-cart or a cart-cabinet.  I am at a loss for a single word or even a hyphenated word to describe it. (Maybe a cartbinet?)  It is for my shop to store my tools in.  I had some construction lumber two-by-fours that I had recovered from a previous shop project.  These are reasonably inexpensive to begin with, especially when you compare them to hardwood, when you recover them and reuse them, they are better than free.

I’ve got a basic design I use for my shop projects which I have borrowed (stolen, copied) from April Wilkerson on YouTube. It is simple, sturdy, and can be widely applied.  I’ve used it multiple times.  The defining characteristic is how the “legs” of the cart are made.  For each let, take a pair two-by-fours--of whatever length you need--and put them in an “L” shape.  (I look at that sentence and see there are a lot of ways to misinterpret it, so let me have another go.)  

By this I mean, you put glue along the length of the “two” face of one two-by-four. You then take that and glue it lengthwise to the “four” face of the other two-by-four. You then have a length of wood with an “L” shaped cross-section.  If you still don’t see it, search “April Wilkerson” on YouTube.  There is a reason they make the videos.

Anyway, you can take that basic corner and use it as the basis for a lot of projects. 

I took four of those corner pieces--each of which was about three feet long--and used other two-by-fours to join them into a rectangular parallelepiped (that’s a math teacher’s way of saying “box”). I put wheels on the box so that I will be able to roll it around my shop.  At that point, I had a sturdy but useless box with wheels on it.  (At this point, I need to say that I had recovered the wheels from yet another project I’d taken apart.)

I then began the leisurely process of putting drawers in the box.

At this point, someone reading this might summon to their mind an image of me buying and installing drawer slides.  To this I reply, “God forbid.”

Drawer slides are expensive.  While they do give a nice final product, I have a philosophy: If I can do something cheaply, that is the way I do it.

I didn’t buy any hardware.

I built a framework within my box wherein I could sit drawers, and then I began the process of making my drawers.

I was able to make the framework to house the drawers out of leftover lumber.  To make the drawers, I was forced to go up to the big orange-colored store and buy some of their $2 white pine pickets. They are cheap, but there is a reason for that: They are often warped.

Quite a few of these pieces were “cupped.”  To fix this, I cut them to length, ripped them to narrower pieces, and then reglued them to the width that I needed.  I then put them through my planer. This took care of the squeezed-out glue and made the pieces nice and smooth.

I did this for twelve drawers. In the course of my labors, I discovered some better ways to do things and some worse ones. I will spare you all of that.

I will say this. Many times I have used dovetail joints.  This was not one of those times.  I used rabbet joints. Why?  Life is short, and I had to make a dozen drawers along with a few Christmas presents along the way.

One thing I did do for these drawers was to put an appropriate finish on them. To be clear, no one but me is going to see the final product. The purpose of the finish is practical. For one thing, it will make the drawers last longer: The finish protects the wood. For another thing, it helps with the functionality. Let me explain.

I first apply a 50-50 mixture of boiled linseed oil and mineral spirits.  This sokes into the wood to protect it.  I then apply a mixture of beeswax and boiled linseed oil that I make myself.  This both protects the drawers and makes them easier to open and close.

I make this mixture of beeswax and oil myself because it is easy to do; if you can boil an egg, you can make this finish.  It is also much cheaper to make this than to buy it.  You can get 5 pounds of beeswax for a gallon of linseed oil much more cheaply than you can buy a brand name product that has the EXACT SAME stuff in it.

I had to spend some money to buy plywood for the top. 

That was painful, but I saved every scrap of it. 

I am taking my time finishing this cabinet because I’ve gotten some ideas of how I can use scrap wood to make it more functional.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.