Shop update #375 (1-16-25) Weekend of forgotten projects
I’ve had a few projects that have been floating around in the shop for months and years. I decided this weekend to work on getting them finished.
I cut this mission style church out of 3 mm mdf back in October of 2024 and never got around to gluing on all of the trim and fence pieces. I glued everything on and gave it 3 coats of spray lacquer. I now have no idea what to do with it.
A coworker asked me to fix up his childhood chess set back in September of 2023. I put it in a safe place under a clean towel so that it wouldn’t get anything on it and then forgot it was there.
The hinges are banged up and missing some brad nails. The glue has also failed on the top of one side. I removed the hinges and finished separating the top so that I could clean up the old glue.
Once the top was removed, I also found that a glue plate was split and one of the corners was loose.
I put some PVA glue and clamps on the glue plate and started scraping the glue off of the other mating surfaces.
As I was scraping and cleaning the old glue, I discovered that it was held together with Hide Glue so I hopped on Amazon and ordered some Hide Glue for the box and small bronze brads for the hinges. The next night, I cleaned up that corner, added some hide glue and clamped it all up. I am definitely going to heat up the glue in a water bath first before I glue the lid back on.
I took this house apart in August of 2021, cleaned all the pieces, and painted them. It then sat around my shop for 3 years in different piles that kept getting moved. I got them all arranged and ready for assembly in September of 2024 and realized that I had no idea where the screws were to put it back together and kind of gave up. I was cleaning up today and took all the parts out to the trash bin to get them out of my way. I threw the 2 biggest pieces in the bin, stared at them for a minute and then took them right back out. I thought about the screws and figured that if I found them while cleaning, I would have put them in my pot luck storage. I dug through it and found a couple of dozen screws that might work. An hour and a half later, I once again have an assembled doll house. Hopefully, I can get all of the aging, detail painting, and decorations done by Halloween of 2025.