I’ve had the base done for a while now. It was made by trimming 2×4s to square up the edges, notching the legs to put supports acrss and then screwing the two sides together with some other supports. It’s pretty sturdy. I had started a top before, but used plywood and 1/4″ hardboard. That combination ended up warping on me. In one of the other magazines there was a plan for a much fancier router table and his top was made of two glued up 3/4″ MDF pieces. I’m sticking with my original plan, but using the MDF as the base for the top.

I wrestle the MDF sheet (and wrestle is the word – 3/4″ MDF is a heavy item to move around) and get my measurements done, grab a straight edge and some clamps, cut them out. Still enough left over to make some jigs and it’s much easier to handle now.

I grab my can of contact cement, which isn’t as full as I thought it was. I was pretty sure I had already bought another can, but you can only spend so much daylight trying to find that stuff. Off to Lowes it is to buy more cement and some cheap paintbrushes for spreading it. Back home again, finish getting it glued up and stuck together. A bit harder to put the pieces together than other contact cement work I’ve done as the pieces are so stiff. Because of that I’m off just a little, so it’s clamp and saw time again to straighten it all out.

I’m back inside now to get cleaned up and do some web work as we’re going out later this afternoon. Now I just need to put the hardwood edge on it and stick the formica on top and bottom. After that it’s the slots for the t-track and the opening for the router.

Since I’ve two pieces of MDF glued together I don’t think I’ll be having the warp issue this time.

Hmmm, since all I cut today was MDF, is it more proper to say I made some sawdust or that I redistributed some sawdust?

A bit of background – I had to give up flying after I had the two discs in my neck fused as I no longer had the range and motion I needed to be safe flying. I was about one flight away from soloing and it was a dream I had had for years.  Well, I needed something else to fill my time and I’d always had an interest in woodworking, but not much interest in doing big projects.

I’ve always been fascinated by puzzles. I used to be able to solve a Rubic’s Cube, but I haven’t done that for years. I decided to start working on puzzles and somewhere in the search for information I ran across this Charles Neil guy and he made the mistake of being helpful so I decided to stick around for a while.

When Sherri published up their problems with Brightcove dropping the free video hosting I sort of volunteered to look into hosting the videos and things sort of grew from there.  I’m a programmer by trade, but I usually work on the behind-the-scenes software. I’ve been doing this programming thing a long time (my first computer was programmed by flipping toggle switches on the front panel) so I’m much more comfortable with doing things from the command line and not from a fancy interface.  The original site that Sherri worked on was all done in FrontPage and I just couldn’t see myself working there, so when we got into talking about separating the education part of their current (old?) site from the furniture side of things, it grew into a whole new site.

Since I’m a Linux and open source sort of person and web sites that require you to have a certain browser to run I decided to write the new site using standard web protocols, like CSS and XHTML. Yeah, I know, technical details that no one else really cares about. I’m proud of the fact though that there’s not one table on the site.  Content is done in HTML and making it pretty is all done in CSS. It does explain why a couple people had problems at first as they use IE6 which has only a passing knowledge of standards. I found some code that translates between web standards and what IE6 understands and I think most, if not all, of those issues have been resolved.

The new site should make things easier for Sherri to manage as it’s written to run against a database and to automatically change things when they should be changed. You’ll note, for example, that the video normally changes every day, but when Sherri uploads a new one she can set in the database how long she wants it to display. It will run that long and then automatically go back to changing every day. Same thing for the quotes and contests.

Right now I’m working on a Video Jukebox to replace the Brightcove player. It won’t look the same but hopefully things will be easier to find. They should really be easier to find once the keywords and search features are implemented. We went live when we did because of a couple of reasons: first, it makes it easier for Sherri to manage things and second, because she could start putting up new videos on the front page again.

The links point back to the old pages for now because it allows us to continue with development and get the new features up and running without having to wait for the entire site to be complete.

Finally, I asked Sherri if it would be OK if I added a ‘Site design by…’ thing to the Contact Us page or some such. I didn’t want to impose, as I did this as a friend, not in order to capitalize on the experience. I guess my timing was bad because I ended up in the newsletter this month :) That being said, if you like what you see and you have a need for some design work for a web site, let me know and we can look at the details.

Thanks.