Making the Things

Preparing the jig with cling film (few things stick to cling film, and if it does, well, it’s easier to sand off than the 20mm MDF the jig is made of...)

I had two types of epoxy, as I had to buy a lot and there wasn’t enough of the one brand. One is a 60 minute set, and one a 30 minute set. I started with the 60 minute, on the basis that it would hopefully still be movable when I finished and started to clamp.

Throughout this I had the help of my friend Rob, who helped to mix up batches of epoxy as I started to run out, so I could concentrate on the spreading and layering.

Keying up the shiny acrylic to ensure good adhesion with the epoxy.

This felt like sacrilege.

Jig making!

When making the smaller cube I lost a lot of time and material to the layers slipping against each other whilst clamping. On the small one this wasn’t too bad, as I could just blitz off the sides with a bandsaw, but given the size of this one, and the bandsaws I had at my disposal at the Hackspace I needed this one to be as close to square as possible to start with, before the endless sanding begins. 

A friend of mine saw the previous cube, and said that he reckoned that I wouldn’t make one “a foot square”.

He was right, this is only 250mmx250mmx260mm.

I initially intended to make this out of 20mm acrylic and 20mm oak, to form a cube 300mm square. The acrylic for that would have cost a small fortune, so I settled for 250mm square, in 20mm, as that is the acrylic I could get as offcuts for a reasonable price.

It turns out that getting the acrylic at 250mm was a good plan, because in Nottingham it is hard to get any nice hardwood boards cut more than about 240mm wide, and if you want them to be planed all round even harder than that. There would have been no way that I could have got 300mm square boards planed all round without ordering, costing me more time and more money.

After a fruitless search at Brooks Brothers, where all they had in the size I needed was poplar, which is a particularly dull wood in terms of figure and colour, I lucked out at Gibbs and Dandy, with a chap there spending far too much of his day helping me to sort through several large piles of hardwood to find a slab  that met my needs.

There was no oak, walnut, cherry or other wood that I had worked with before available in a size that I needed, but we opened up a fresh stack of sapele to get to a board that was aout perfect to plane and cut to the right dimensions. They even managed to get it cut and planed for me by the next afternoon.