Supporting Act

Managed to get out into the 'shop last night to do a bit more and got the final coat of Osmo-PolyX on the stand so it's waxing and finishing off tonight. I had a very sneaky feeling a long time ago that the tiniest bits of this project would cause me the most pain...and I wasn't wrong. I'm referring of course to the shelf supports which turned out last night to be the most fiddly, cantankerous and bloody awkward things to make. I've got a LN dowel plate which is a very nice bit of kit but what I needed to do was to hammer thru' some very small bits of ebony to make the 4mm supports. I'd previously had a go with beech which went thru' easily and produced quite good 6mm dowels...ebony though is just a tad harder, so when I made some 5mm square blanks, took off the corners and tried to tap it through the said 4mm hole the result was a lot of splintered ebony, never mind the bits that pinged of the plate when struck and disappeared into the rubbish on the floor! I eventually made the blanks 4.5mm square which don't leave a lot of margin for error and they seemed to go through with a lot less effort, even though one or two have flats on them where they didn't quite make contact with the plate. I ended up with 12 supports which need to be cut down to 12mm long and then given a bit of something to finish them with, maybe a couple of coats of linseed oil. The door pull will be finished off as well tonight and then all that remains is to make the infills to hold the glass in the door and the template for the shelves.