Sawdust=manglitter
Established Member
After a manic few months of being the busiest i’ve ever been at work i’ve finally had a little over a week off work. So i decided to make myself a pair of computer monitor stands as both (non adjustable) monitors i use in work are too low and a stack of paper under each wasnt cutting it, so just before going on annual leave I measured the ideal height above desk level as being 120mm. It would also be a nice thing to be able to look at something i’ve made when work gets stressful, so i’ve tried to spend some time to make them nice.
Unfortunately i didn’t take any photos towards the start of sculpting the legs, but i took some inspiration from a previous project of mine, the long shoe rack thingy i made, this one...
So with the above leg shapes in mind I started off by sketching the shape of both front and back legs onto a scrap of mdf, cut them out on the bandsaw and refined the shape until i was happy. The project in the above photo was done by template routing to get them all as identical as possible, and also used a roundover bit to shape.
This time i decided to do the shaping by hand, so used the templates i cut to make sure i had enough wood from a scrap board of ABW that i intended to use. So i rough cut using the bandsaw, then used the bobbin sander to refine the outer shape of each. The main rounding/shaping was then done using a coarse rasp, fine fine rasp and spokeshaves. Here they are before sanding them by hand.
Once the the hand sanding was done i used a t-track screwed to my table saw cross cut sled to safely clamp the legs down and used a shaped piece of scrap to keep the legs supported during each cut to get the bottom of each leg both flat and at the correct angle. Unfortunately no photos of this.
I then attached a scrap of MDF to the bed of the table saw sled using the masking tape/superglue trick. This scrap of MDF was set as close to parallel to the blade as possible at the set distance I wanted the legs to be to keep the bottom of each leg as close to parallel to the transition into the top board as possible, only to both side faces of each leg as they had parallel reference faces to both side faces. I then cut the remainder of the mortise to the top of each leg with saws and chisels. Although each leg is somewhat unique when looked at closely, I was quite pleased by how similar the legs look to each other. Again, unfortunately no photos of this, but these are the legs after the tenons are cut out and after the first coat of oil...
I decided to use the same combination of wood as my previous project and decided to use a lovely board of yew for the tops. As both stands will be next to each other I just cut the board in half to try to maintain the continuous look of the grain. These are the two boards after planing, cutting in half, sanding and oiling...
But before I did the oiling I cut out the mortises to the base. Just in case these monitor stands would ever need to be flat against a wall in future I tried to place the rear legs as close to the back edge as possible by using an engineers square. I also tried to angle each leg outwards by approx 2 degrees to give it a more organic look.
Due to the lack of clearance/access to mark the exact location of each mortise, I find a great trick is to gently lay out masking tape to provide the exact size of the mortise.
Once marked up with masking tape I used a scalpel along a ruler to carefully mark out each mortise, also ensuring the fibres are sufficiently cut around each mortise. I then used a 1/4” spiral bit in a router to rough out the mortise as close as I can get before cleaning up with chisels.
Today being my last day of annual leave before back to reality tomorrow I managed to finish the monitor stands. Final thing to do was to brand both stands with my ‘makers mark’.
So after the last coat of oil I finished buffing each part and finally glued it all together. So this is the final product...
I’ll take a photo of them once at their new home when I’m back in work tomorrow.
Unfortunately i didn’t take any photos towards the start of sculpting the legs, but i took some inspiration from a previous project of mine, the long shoe rack thingy i made, this one...
So with the above leg shapes in mind I started off by sketching the shape of both front and back legs onto a scrap of mdf, cut them out on the bandsaw and refined the shape until i was happy. The project in the above photo was done by template routing to get them all as identical as possible, and also used a roundover bit to shape.
This time i decided to do the shaping by hand, so used the templates i cut to make sure i had enough wood from a scrap board of ABW that i intended to use. So i rough cut using the bandsaw, then used the bobbin sander to refine the outer shape of each. The main rounding/shaping was then done using a coarse rasp, fine fine rasp and spokeshaves. Here they are before sanding them by hand.
Once the the hand sanding was done i used a t-track screwed to my table saw cross cut sled to safely clamp the legs down and used a shaped piece of scrap to keep the legs supported during each cut to get the bottom of each leg both flat and at the correct angle. Unfortunately no photos of this.
I then attached a scrap of MDF to the bed of the table saw sled using the masking tape/superglue trick. This scrap of MDF was set as close to parallel to the blade as possible at the set distance I wanted the legs to be to keep the bottom of each leg as close to parallel to the transition into the top board as possible, only to both side faces of each leg as they had parallel reference faces to both side faces. I then cut the remainder of the mortise to the top of each leg with saws and chisels. Although each leg is somewhat unique when looked at closely, I was quite pleased by how similar the legs look to each other. Again, unfortunately no photos of this, but these are the legs after the tenons are cut out and after the first coat of oil...
I decided to use the same combination of wood as my previous project and decided to use a lovely board of yew for the tops. As both stands will be next to each other I just cut the board in half to try to maintain the continuous look of the grain. These are the two boards after planing, cutting in half, sanding and oiling...
But before I did the oiling I cut out the mortises to the base. Just in case these monitor stands would ever need to be flat against a wall in future I tried to place the rear legs as close to the back edge as possible by using an engineers square. I also tried to angle each leg outwards by approx 2 degrees to give it a more organic look.
Due to the lack of clearance/access to mark the exact location of each mortise, I find a great trick is to gently lay out masking tape to provide the exact size of the mortise.
Once marked up with masking tape I used a scalpel along a ruler to carefully mark out each mortise, also ensuring the fibres are sufficiently cut around each mortise. I then used a 1/4” spiral bit in a router to rough out the mortise as close as I can get before cleaning up with chisels.
Today being my last day of annual leave before back to reality tomorrow I managed to finish the monitor stands. Final thing to do was to brand both stands with my ‘makers mark’.
So after the last coat of oil I finished buffing each part and finally glued it all together. So this is the final product...
I’ll take a photo of them once at their new home when I’m back in work tomorrow.
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. Does help having nice wood though
