Now it’s back to the last (I hope) dye test piece. With the last coat of finish on the sample I
took it into the room where the lamp will sit to see if the color went well
with everything in the room and it looked good.
With that decision made I mixed up ¼ of a cup of the dye
and applied it to the spacers and all the surfaces of the boxes except for the
outside face plus the top and bottom edges.
After the dye dried I gave the inside face of the boxes 2 coats of finish. That should be enough to seal the wood and
allow for easy glue cleanup.
Next is to start assembling the boxes. To make sure everything was going to go
together correctly I did a dry run with the biscuits and clamps. Everything went together just fine so I
applied the glue and clamped everything in place. To make sure the parts were going together
square I set the clamped assembly on a flat surface and made any slight
adjustments to get all the pieces aligned in the same plane. The prefinished surfaces worked out great all
I had to do was use a damp rag and the glue came right off the finished
surface. Here are all three boxes glued
and clamped.
After the glue had set up as I was removing the clamps I
noticed that one was hanging down a bit below the edge of the box. Normally this would not be a problem but in
this case the clamp was at the joint where I was checking to see if the pieces
lined up. That meant that when the piece
laid flat on my reference surface the clamp was holding the one corner up a
little. End result is that this assembly
has a twist to it. In the photo below
you can see how the left corner is not setting flat. It’s not twisted a huge amount but enough
that I was unhappy.
Fortunately, when I looked closely at the box it ended up
not being as bad as I thought. The
corner at the other end of the board that looked twisted was setting a little
high compared to the end piece. This
meant that by using a full sanding sheet on granite tile to flatten the joint
I got rid of most of the twist. This is that setup.
With that out of the way I finish sanded the outside of
the boxes and applied some tape to the areas that will get glued to keep the
finish off. It’s easy to do, I just
marked the tape length on a scrap, then cut the end square with a small square
and knife.
There are three locations that get tape: the inside of the boxes where the spacers go,
that I had just done. the corresponding place on the spacers and last where the spacers get glued to
the central column. Below are the last two.
I can now get on with dying the rest of the box faces and
the baffles to complete that work. Once
the dye has dried I can start with the finishing in earnest. It’s going to take a while because I will be
using a wipe-on poly that I have to let dry overnight between coats. Well, really it only takes about 3 or 4 hours
to dry here but then it’s the afternoon and that’s when I do other things, like work on this blog. Besides, I am retired and don’t have to rush
to make a deadline!
After the dye had dried I notices some scattered places
where the dye had taken either blotchy or just did not look right. You can just see it in the lower right of the baffle.
Looking closer at those areas I noticed it looked like
the dye had soaked into the maple then later oozed back out and left tiny rings
of concentrated dye on the surface. 
When
I felt the surface the blotchy areas also felt rougher. I tried using just some alcohol to remove the
excess dye and blend it but all that did was to lighten the color, soak in then
ooze out again which left me with two problems a light area that was also
splotched. After lightly applying the
full strength dye I was back at the beginning.
Trying a different approach, I took some 400-grit
sandpaper and very lightly sanded the affected areas feathering it out into the
surrounding. That worked and I got a
uniform unblotched surface ready to apply the wipe-on polyurethane finish.
As I have said on this project there is nothing on this
project to hide any errors or gaps in the joints. So far, all the joints have come out good and
tight with few exceptions. Inside the
boxes there are a couple miter joints that did not exactly match up. Yes, they are on the inside where you would
really have to work to even see them but I know they would be there. I tried some different ways to fill the gaps
and here is a sample piece with two methods.
They both start with the sample piece stained and with one coat of the
wipe-on ploy finish. The dark line is
where I mixed fine sanding dust with stain then after it dried mixed it with
the poly finish and packed it in a thin saw kerf. The method I used is in a similar saw
kerf that runs parallel to the first line. The pencil it pointed right where I made that patch. For it I mixed the fine sanding dust with the poly finish to a thick paste
and packed it in the cut. I am really
happy with the match.
Here are all the pieces except the base with the wipe-on
poly finish in progress. From here I
would apply a coat of finish, let it dry overnight, sand lightly with 400 grit
sandpaper then repeat. Once I had three
coats on I wet sanded the last coat with a 3,200-grit pad just to get the dust
nibs off.
Last bit of work on the spacers is to set up a couple of
stop blocks on the drill press so I could add the pilot holes and countersink for the
screws that will attach the spacers to the boxes. Here is the pilot hole setup.
This is for the countersink, same setup except for the bit.
Once the holes had been drilled and countersunk I put the
bit in a hand drill to cut a slight relief cut on the underside. That is to allow a little relief when I drive
the screw in. As a screw exits the back
side of a piece and enters the face of the next one it often creates a little
mound that will keep the piece from screwing down tight. I could have drilled a larger pilot hole but
did not want any clearance around the screw.
That’s because the screw needs to hold the spacer tight to the box in
two directions. Below on the left shows the little relief cut while the red arrows in the right drawing shows the two directions the piece needs to be constrained to.
Next Up – Wiring, Assembly & Final Photos
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