Friday, August 23, 2013

I am so excited! Somebody made a cooler box from my free plans!

The other day I got a message from Chris Dunn on Facebook.  He sent in a picture of a small foam cooler box that he made from my plans!  He is officially the first person to build one of my projects and share the picture with me!  Good job Chris!



James Smith made this larger one based off the plans from the prototype!


Wednesday, August 21, 2013

The Ice Chest/Cooler box is finished!

I finished up the cooler box!  It still needs some staining but I finished it enough for the video.  I'm almost done with the video as well.  It just needs the voice overs recorded and then it will be ready to post!








Saturday, August 17, 2013

The ice chest cooler box is almost done!


In the last post I had cut all the pieces to size and glued the legs and clamped the pieces up to dry.  I got pretty sick so they ended up in the clamps for about 5 days and dried out pretty good.  I took them out of the clamps and put a chamfer on all the sides that needed it.  I sanded everything to 60 grit to lessen the chance of splinters.  It was then just a matter of gluing and screwing everything together.
 
 
I love my new Craftsman router table.  I am so glad that I returned that Ryobi table.

These are for the bottom shelf so they got a chamfer all around.

Sanding is the bane of my existence....

All ready for assembly!

I started with the short end.


Then I put on the front and back.


I like this one much better with the bottom shelf.


The lid is all glued up and clamped overnight.


Thursday, August 8, 2013

Ice Chest/Cooler box update

Well, I've been under the weather for the last few days and haven't done much with the cooler box build.  I got all the pieces cut to length and then ripped to width last Friday.  While I was ripping them I noticed that they were still very wet so I clamped them together and left them on my workbench to dry.  I tried to go out once a day and rotate the middle boards to the outside.  2 days ago I went ahead and took them all out of the clamps and spread them across the bench to finish drying.  I went out last night and glued up the legs so that I could start sanding all the pieces today.  While I was laying out all the pieces for the legs I noticed that they were really rocking up and down on the bench but they didn't seem that warped. I took a closer look and discovered that the hardboard top of my bench seemed to have sucked up a bunch of that extra moisture and warped between all the screws holding it down!  This was totally unexpected!  I live in Southern California so I'm hoping that it will dry out in the next few days on it's own.  If not then I will just go down and buy another $5 piece of hardboard and replace it.

You can also watch my VLOGS about the project here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StK3Y8h38Kk&list=PLZxRiOuIAKbu6ZNDU0TkYm5WXTd4b3XdU

Here are all the pieces cut down to size but still very very wet

We sawdust went everywhere

I clamped them all together to try and avoid some of the warping and twisting

I unclamped them to let them finish drying out

The hardboard top on my workbench found some of that moisture!

It's hard to see in this pictures but it is pretty much warped between all the screws.