Angle Madness! - Finishing the Burl Panels

The burl panels for the Angle Madness project need to be pre-finished before gluing them into the drawer tiers.  I did a number of color experiments before picking a color for the panels then shot them with Polyacrylic before wet sanding to a high gloss finish.  If you've already wet sanded a hard film finish, this video won't have much for you.  If not, hopefully the process, the experiments, the repair, and all that will be interesting enough even though "it's finishing" :)

Next episode, which starts recording as soon as I hit post on this, will make trap doors in the back of these pre-finished panels for pushing cables into the back column. I may do the special episode on wire inlay first since it will cover more of how the wire for those doors will be attached.  Not sure yet!

And, yes, the past couple weeks with highs over 113ºF have been really draining! I want a ride inside a Zamboni!

Foredom Inlay Router Guide Ring Base Adapter

I've been playing with wire inlay recently as there's 35 feet of it for the Angle Madness project. Along the way, I had to make some new base adapters for the Foredom inlay router base.  Mine is the William Ng version; it is based on an earlier version of the Stewart-MacDonald base that has since had some nice improvements (link is to the new one).  Both are fantastic.  William also sells the Foredom kit.

Also, the small router bits mentioned in the video are also from William's store; I prefer these to others because of collar on them is precisely placed the same distance from the tip. Once you set a routing depth, you can swap bits by dropping them to the collar and you don't need to adjust the routing depth with the different bit... saves a lot of hassle with inlay routing.

In this video, I just walk you through how I made a simple base adapter to act like a router guide ring (or bushing or copy ring or likely a dozen other names :)

This adapter will get used to route a nice curved opening in the back of each drawer tier for getting all the equipment wires into the back column, but also look good when there's no equipment on the surface as would be the case if it weren't used as an entertainment center.

There are some unique problems to solve for the Angle Madness wire inlay as there are for a table I made in a class with Michael Fortune. I'll be gathering up what I learned about it in a special episode outside the Angle Madness series since it'll cover more than I need for that project.