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Hi all,
I'd like to share a project that I'd been thinking about doing for ages, but always found an excuse not to. I was either too busy or too lazy, and somehow scrolling through Facebook was more important than cleaning up the growing record collection that my girlfriend was acquiring. This is also my first post on Workshop, so would be great to get your feedback.
About a year ago we went to a friend’s place and they had a cool retro vinyl turntable with inbuilt speakers. It filled the room with the dulcet tones of Rod Stewart and Nat King Cole that afternoon, and so a couple of weeks later we purchased one for ourselves and were now heading down to the local trash-and-treasure markets on a Sunday morning to find another 'gem'. Now that we have acquired around 15 or so records we don't really have a safe place to keep them in the bookcase the record player sits on.
I’ve finally got around to putting pen to paper and sketching out a few ideas on what it could look like. I've attached a pic below where it has evolved from a basic box, to one with a hinged lid, now to one with an angled lid to allow a quick flick through the housed records.
Next step was measuring up the materials that I’d need to put it together. A quick consultation with my Dad (who’s quite handy with these sort of things) lead to creating a wooden skeleton from Pine DAR and then wrap it in 7-9mm Plywood for the project, which I could then add a finish (paint or stain) after it’s all been put together – or what the girlfriend prefers!
QUICK TIP: Always measure outwards! It could have been very easy to get carried away and measure twice cut once, put it together and then realise that the inside is too small to fit anything because you haven’t accounted for the width of the material. I worked on having a bit of a buffer with the records (300mm to 330mm) and then adding the 12mm width of the Pine DAR for the skeleton to work out the overall width, which ended up at a width of 375mm edge to edge.
I already had a few items required for this project already in the shed, so headed off to the local Bunnings to pick up the materials required to build the skeleton. This included a new saw, clamps, nails, tape and the Pine DAR.
I split the build into three parts – front, back, and lid.
Measuring twice and cutting once didn’t take too long, and soon I had the pieces to build the front. Making sure I had a stable and firm grip on the timber allowed a quick and clean cut. Then it was time to assemble.
QUICK TIP: Use a nail as a tracer with a drill to make sure you don’t split the timber (Picked this up from Dad). This really helped with speed and accuracy when putting the frame together, especially when added with the wood glue to make a solid skeleton.
I put together the front and sides easily enough, along with the back which lined up nicely to the front elements which were built from the bottom up to make sure the pieces were lining up correctly. For structural support I also added some spacers on the bottom of the box, as this will also be what the records rest on.
Also using offcuts allowed the correct spacing to be applied when gluing and nailing the timber together, making a more effective join, and straighter!
See below an image of the main box without the lid, which I’ll be working on next weekend with a bit more time, and I'll post some pics shortly.
If anyone has some tips or feedback on what I’ve put together so far it would be great to hear them as I plan to make something similar to this again, and I’m sure there are better ways to cut, join and put together small items like this.
So I ended up having a spare weekend to finish off this project, and I'm pretty happy with the results.
Timber putty filler was used to clean up any of the edges, and I ended up choosing an interior stain (Merbau) for the marine plywood. Tested on some offcuts before applying (thanks for the tip @Johnnynl), which allowed me to see how much I should be applying.
I had purchased a leather pull from ebay since my last post, and added it onto the front, along with some gold hinges on the back.
A few learnings around the core frame and getting it 100% right would have saved some time with the outer timber shell, but otherwise overall pretty satisfied with the end result!
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