bah... let's go back to the drawing board...

so after glueing everything up for the last 48 hours, it turned out that there is some oddity and my joints are not tight enough. Which cause the shelf to break appart :(

Time for the 2nd try, to see if we can get it working this time and use this one as a model how not todo it...

starting with the glue-up of the stereo rack

Over the last couple of weeks I got so carried away with all these projects, which are going on that I slightly neglected my stereo shelf project and now finally found some time to work on it again.

It's basically the moment of truth now, were everything needs to be glued up and prepared for finishing it.

So this weekend I'm starting to glue the pieces together, after dry fitting everything again and to check that everything is somewhat square. Surprisingly enough, nearly everything seems to fit and is pretty square. Not perfect 90 degrees, but about 88-90 degrees mostly.

first side in clamps and wooden supports.

Now the main challenge is, to make 2 with only 2 parallelle clamps and to pray that the glue doesn't split the wood or that I get the glue all over the wood, since I still have to stain it and finish it somehow.

Speaking of finish?

The current idea is to have a couple of orange shellac coats over and than stain the sections dark mahogany and the boards for the components a light cherry.

Now I mentioned other projects. 

1.

We basically finally bought a hedge-trimmer and so I'm busy trimming all our hedges and trees. Sadly it can only cut 5/8th of an Inch, so I'm still stuck with using my 15$ crosscut handsaw to cut branches.

2.

we started taking out all the tiny and medium sized palm tree, which means Robin is digging a lot and I'm practicing with Axed and Machete quite a bit. It works, but it's slow going. Still refusing to buy a chainsaw.

3.

My neighbor cut down an old peach tree, so I rescued a couple of logs of peach. To cut them into boards on the bandsaw. Well free wood is never really free wood. Since so far I'm at -30$ for a broken bandsaw blade and the wood is to tough to be cut with my 1 1/2 hp bandsaw. Guess I have to build another plywood sled

4.

My little company is picking up right now a bit and so I have quite a lot of work todo in my spare time.

5.

we need to get started with replacing some Fence section, hence the additional income is right now really really helpful. Since fencing get pricey quite fast. But hey I get my first door to build and arbor. Since we hope to have some tomatos or so growing on it.

Something like this

without the flames obviously...

2 years are up time to upgrade the pc at home

Recently I noticed that my system is getting rather old and is becoming a touch slow for my software development needs and so it was time to upgrade a couple of components. Mostly the harddrives were exchanged for a couple of SSD's and my pair of 6950 graphic cards for a pair of 7970 graphic cards. After all the LCD displays like to be driven at full resolution and I do have the vise of playing to much skyrim and sim city. And my old cards did get a bit slow for my liking at 2500x1600.

Which I was not really prepared for was that I needed...

• a new case for more harddrives, since my VMWare images are now in the Terra-byt region
• a ridiculous 1200 Watt power supply, since my 750W is highly overloaded with running all the hardrives and graphic cards. I don't think it's good, if It keeps running at 820W. So for now disabled some harddrives again und drop the CPU to 3.2 GHz instead of 4.5GHz.
• how big 2x7970 graphic cards are, running each at 1GHz and having each 3GB Ram. This is combined more Ram than Robins and My laptop have together...

It does look nice and tidy in there. Now we just have to wait for my Power supply research to finish, pick one and install it.