I recently had a milestone birthday and took a vacation day to do something fun. Nobody was home all day, so I could work without interruption. I hit Menards to grab a sheet of nice plywood and get the basic pieces for the final machine started.
For the top, I used two sheets of plywood glued together to create a 1″ top, which is the standard height. This is needed for the traditional t-molding but also for the proper height for the clips, which need 1″ at the top plus the height of the glass. This plywood was going to be covered by the top graphic, molding, etc., so it wasn’t a nice grade-just something that was very flat so the two pieces would stay together well. I used wood screws after gluing to ensure a good bond (which I removed prior to cutting out the hole for the monitor and the contours for the design).
The top was a challenge to cut out. I traced the glass onto the wood and used a circular saw to make a nice “square” and then used jigsaw to make the curve and interior cuts. I wasn’t real happy with my initial cuts as the jigsaw blade isn’t really great for 1″ no matter how slow you go. I used some rasps/files to get it to get it “good enough”. Most of the edges and top is covered by graphics and molding.
For the base, it’s essentially a box. Normally I’d just wood glue, nail, and clamp, but since I’d be adding t-molding I couldn’t use nails, so I used corner blocks, which helped keep everything square and I could nail in those to the face board and miss the edges.
I used a strap to let everything set and tested the router on some scrap for t-molding. Given how wide the bit is for this, you really need a variable speed router to do this safely (and use the lower speeds). For whatever reason, this step seemed like a hard one. I spent a lot of time thinking about it, I’m sure I spent a lot more time thinking than doing. I’ll be generous to myself and say it was all that thinking that paid off, but in reality, I think the routing part just wasn’t that hard.
It wasn’t a “lot” of time to do all this, as often in life it’s about making the time to get something done! I’m pretty happy with how this turned out overall and look forward to the next steps. Hopefully, the next steps aren’t going to require another milestone birthday.