Thursday, July 7, 2011

Nice Little Vacation Project

I made reference to taking a few days vacation this week, and other than catching up on some reading, sleeping in, watching some TV, and generally being useless, I built a little set of wall-mounted shelves for most of my reloading gear. 
This is just about 30" tall overall, 22" wide shelves of 1x6 pine.  A couple of weeks ago, one of my favorite woodworking stores had the Kreg Jig master kit on sale, and since I had been thinking about getting one for a couple of years, I decided to grab it. 

The Kreg Jig is a well-thought out fixture for making pocket-screw holes.  It includes everything you need to start making nice projects almost immediately (although you'll run out of screws - not many in the kit).  With known square pieces of wood, either from purchasing S4S dimensional wood (hardwoods are typically sold this way) or by cutting your own wood to measure square, it literally takes minutes to build something like this.  I'll make the distinction between fine woodworking - think dovetails or other fancy joints and beautiful woods - and more casual carpentry.  This technique is more like B than A, but it works pretty darned well. 

The most time consuming part of making this project was driving over to the big box home improvement store (not the Borg), and getting the wood.  Cutting them to length and square took a few minutes.  I think it took about two minutes to drill two holes in each end of all four shelves, and another couple of minutes to assemble the whole thing.  A couple of coats of polyurethane, two screws into wall studs, and wah-lah (French for "whoomp - there it is").  A home for most of the reloading supplies except the press itself.  This stuff is no longer spread all over my woodworking supply bench.  The powders and primers are stored separately, in a controlled temperature environment, all separate from each other. 

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