Happy Monday! Before getting to work I had a minor repair job. The roll-around work table that I bought in 1999 at an IKEA in Venlo, The Netherlands, needed a re-wheeling job. It was rolling terribly and I thought it was because the wheels were binding on little bits of model making debris on the floor. What it actually was is this...
The tires on the front two casters were disintegrating. And therefore were rolling very badly. I ordered four replacements from The Home Depot on-line and picked them up at the store today. and installed them. Now it rolls as it should. It's also over-balanced with the front edge of the table extending out over the wheels quite a bit to provide knee room and I have a heavy, cast iron woodworker's bench vise attached on the front also. I think that's why the front wheels did this and the back two were still intact. I replaced all four.
I finished building the counter, using a combination of Aleen's reinforced with thin CA. I then stained all the stool parts by just dipping the entire fret into the stain and blotting off the excess.
I removed all the parts I was going to use from the fret and here they are. In this image I already started gluing the seat bases to the seat tops.
I "attempted" to glue the first one together and immediately found that, since these are cut out of solid wood, not ply, the cross-braces are extremely fragile and I already broke more than I'd like to admit. I also found that gluing them together was as challenging as I imagined. The tooth pick gives a sense of scale… they're really tiny.
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I did get the second attempt built and put it next to the completed counter and quickly discovered that the stools are too tall! About 8 scale inches too tall. Sitting that high would be uncomfortable and ridiculous.
I attempted to modify the stool height by removing material from the top of the legs, but this drastically changed the angle of the leg and made the cross-braces no longer able to join one another. I then took off material from the bottom by cutting just above the bottom rung. This height looks about right with that large Artista engineer sitting on top. When I sculpt (Grandson may not be available if his social life continues next week as it has this past week), I'm going to manage the scale a little better since this figure seems a little bit oversized. The bar is a scale 36 inches high.
I'm going to put a brass foot rail on the counter panels to give them something to rest their feet on. Still have to do the gloss coating on the bar. I'll do that when the stools are all done. The cross-braces are so fragile, I'm wondering if I shouldn't harden them by soaking them in CA before attempting to assemble them. I may also glue some very thin styrene behind to reinforce the cross-grain braces. Should have been ply.
