Puckdropper wrote:

Here's a thread for those who just want to talk about their most
recent woodworking project. There's only two guidelines: It must be
a woodworking project and recent means the saw dust is still fresh.

My recent project is benchwork for my model railroad. The basic
frame went together quickly, but the legs are taking some time.
Nothing really special about thier construction, it's just two 1x2s
glued together for stability and cut/sanded/trimmed smooth.

Puckdropper

I just built a bookcase out of poplar, the smell of the polyurethane has
just faded away and some of the sawdust is still on the garage floor. It's
18" wide by 7' tall, built for a narrow space between two pieces of
furniture in our office/library. It was supposed to relieve the pressure on
the bookcases that wrap around two other walls, but naturally it instantly
filled up with books without making much of a dent in the overflow. There
was one major error in construction, and although SWMBO said to just go get
another piece of poplar and redo the screwed-up side I decided to fix the
major blunder in such a way as to be a permanent reminder to me of what not
to do in similar situations. Measure twice, cut once only works if you're
measuring from the correct %*$#! line in the first place.

As always with a new project I used it as an opportunity to buy a new tool,
in this case a Bosch ROS20VSK sander. I was a bit surprised to discover
this sander was made in Malaysia, first time I've seen that from Bosch. But
it works fine, and the dust collection is amazing. I ended up connecting it
to a shop vac since emptying the built-in filter got stale in a hurry.
Either way there was almost no dust left on the work, Bosch really got that
right. I also like the low profile, seems like it's easier to keep the
sander dead-flat as opposed to "pagoda" designs.

I sanded from 80 up to 220 with the ROS, then sanded by hand with 320, left
it natural and put on a few coats of Lawrence McFadden clear gel (I love
that stuff) sanded with a 320 sponge between coats. It looks pretty good if
you ignore where I forgot to use a backing block to prevent tear-out (why
couldn't that have happened on the back where it wouldn't matter?) and the
little (ahem) layout error that I fixed with strips from a piece of cutoff.
Materials were 25' of 11-1/4" poplar, some cutoffs of 1/4" ply for the back
which the local hardware store provided for a couple of bucks, LM clear gel
poly, four screws and a couple of dozen itty bitty finishing nails to hold
the back on. If mistakes are how we learn then I guess I'm smarter now than
before I started this project, but it hasn't fallen over and people I'm not
married to say it looks good, so maybe it isn't so bad.