I really do love it when a plan comes together!

We’ve been blathering on about woodworking for a while, now, and I’d been meaning to get some projects done but not succeeding very much. You’ll be happy to know that has changed, and I’m going to go ahead and throw the next art into the mix, since it’s so simple (I don’t know why I didn’t post ’em both together to begin with).

36 Carpentry

Sawing planks to make seats and beds.

In the mind of the list originators, woodworking was the fancy, artisan-level stuff and carpentry the more functional. It’s not a seat or a bed, but I do have a functional carpentry project to share with you today that solves a need as well as gave Todd and I a chance to work together on a project.

Of course, when I say work together I mean I dreamt it up, he did most of the carpentry work while I took pictures, and then I added a few details.

First, let’s start with the problem:

I often use liquid adhesives (as opposed to tapes, etc.) and once the bottle starts to approach the half-full point, it seems like it takes forever to get the glue to start to flow–especially when I’m mid project and impatient.

From time to time I’ve stuck the glue upside down in a cup to keep it ready-to-go, but that’s cumbersome and the cup (unless very heavy itself) would tip over if the glue wasn’t put in just right. Annoying.

Then I found that I could sort of wedge some glues more or less up in this tray I’d picked up years ago, probably at the Dollar Tree, but it was still a clumsy, klugy work around.

And then I found my inspiration:

Image via Amazon.com

We have a plastic test tube rack like the one above that I got from American Science and Surplus several years ago to use in our Halloween decorations (gotta have that mad scientists lab, doncha know). What if we made something like this to hold my glue bottles upside down and ready to roll, whenever I needed them?!

So we did:

Because I have a combination of tall and short glue bottles, we designed the stand to nave two levels. The base is a 6″ x 18″ piece of 1/2-inch solid wood from the hardware store (pine or some other solid wood would do), the legs are 4″ and 3″ cuts from a 3/4″ dowel rod. The top levels are 3″ strips cut from a 1/4″-thick piece of 6″ x 18″ plywood we picked up at Hobby Lobby, and the whole thing is held together with 8 wood screws.

The holes were cut using a hole saw, which is actually just a special drill-bit that works on any power drill. We Todd used 2 different sizes, one for each level, though admits the one saw of his set that was missing would have been a better size for the lower level. The holes drilled are 2 1/8″ on the upper level and 2″ on the lower level. We could have gone much smaller on the lower level, but this way I can actually store more larger bottles on both level, should the need arise.

One of the great features of the test tube rack was that there was a little bowl or divot underneath that kept the tubes from slipping around. While I suppose we could have sanded out a similar feature using a Dremel, I decided to use bottle caps, adhered with a 2-part epoxy, to act as stops to keep the tips of the bottles from sliding around too much.

Now, you might wonder, as I did just before we finished this project, if something already existed that would have saved us the trouble of making our own. Surprisingly, not really. I found some bendable metal stands that would work well for super-glue and other small-nozzled bottles, but not for the types of glue I use. Then I found a couple of 2-bottle glue stands, meant for 2-part epoxy but they would have worked for me, if I only had a couple of glues to concern myself with.

And how many crafters do you know who only use 2 glues?

Finally, when we were deciding just how long to make the stand, we took into account that I won’t always need this stand out on my worktable all the time. Since the shelving units I have in The Abyss are 18″ deep, that became our maximum length so I could easily slip the stand onto the shelf when not needed.

It’s still bare wood right now because I haven’t decided how exactly I want to finish it. Right now I’m leaning towards decoupage–that seems somewhat fitting!

And some process pics for the curious (click on any of the thumbnails below to enlarge).

Have you made anything interesting lately?

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And with that, we’re back to our regular blogging schedule. Thank you for your patience while I took January off to work on various behind-the-scenes projects (one of which was the look of this site). I’ll have a new post up on Thursday, too, so make sure to come back then to see something else I was up to in the off-season!