Hello from South Africa

[Toxxyc]

Hello everyone! Name's Toxxyc, and I'm a very very new woodworker from South Africa.

I started working with wood around a year or so ago, when someone posted on a local chat group asking if there's someone who can perhaps assist them with building a small side-table or stand for their computer next to their office desk. At the time I was trying to teach myself welding, so I offered to build it for the guy if he paid for the materials and stuff I used.

He did that, and I built him a computer stand that he was very happy with. It then had this idea that this could be a small side-income stream for myself, so I decided to ask around if others would be interested in stuff like this as well. And people did.

Since then I've built a few small stands and stuff for people, always exclusively with steel used for the bases and wood used for the top. I've also done a patio table using railway sleepers that's been cut into long, 25mm thick boards that I mounted into a steel frame, and most recently I also built an office desk for a guy who had a run-in with a terrible DIY builder himself.

I'm still very new, and I have very, very few tools and my skills are VERY limited, but I love this stuff and it's currently turning out to be an actual small source of income for me at a time where we REALLY need it, so it's awesome. I have no space to work, no space to store my tools and no time, but I still do it, so here we are!

Thanks for having me and I hope to be an active, contributing member here.

[A Duke]

Welkom!

Regards

[rwbuild]

Welcome, looks like you have found your addiction, enjoy and we all like WIP photos

[crowie]

G'Day & Welcome to a top forum "Toxxyc".
There are quite a few members from South Africa and cross the rest of this country and the world.....
You'll find a heap of helpful & knowledgeable blokes & ladies on the forum and for most very willing to assist.
Make sure you show off your handiwork as everyone loves a photo, especially WIP [Work In Progress] photos with build notes.
Enjoy the forum.
Enjoy your woodwork......
Cheers from the great Southern Land crowie

[old1955]

Welcome to the forum.

[Toxxyc]

Thanks guys, it's nice to find an active woodworker's forum, to be honest. When I try to chat to family and friends, they just get bored after a minute because it's not something they enjoy.

I don't have WIP pics right now, but I have a few completed projects I can post. A small writeup with my two latest ones!

A guy sent me a message with a picture containing 4 boards, cut from old railway sleepers. At the time I wasn't clued up and had no experience working with hardwood, but I still stupidly told him "yes it'll be easy", so I took the job. He wanted an "imperfect perfect" rustic look patio table.

When the boards arrived, they weren't the same thickness or even the same wood on all 4. To boot, the rough edges made it impossible to get a neat tabletop made. I thus took them to a gent who said he'll run them over his tablesaw, which he did for me. The outside two boards' outside edges I left rough. But because of a slight deviation from straight, the now cut edges of the inside boards were not straight, so I could not glue them up. To boot, the thicknesses of the boards differed, so gluing would be be impossible with my skillset.

I decided to put the problem to the back of my mind and plugged the holes from the bolts in the boards first, and then worked on the steel frame. All the boards had some form of cupping, twisting and warping in some way or another, but it wasn't too bad. I either way took good thick steel and built a frame for the boards to sit on so they would be forced straight and flat once bolted down. I cut them to length, spent A LOT of time sanding out most of the deep saw marks, sunk wood inserts for bolts and got everything perfect. To get the skew sides on the two boards that bugged me most, a little more straight, I ran my router with a flush trim bit against a straight edge to make the edges meet almost perfectly, and it worked very well.

I then bolted the boards to the frame, using spacers between the frame and the boards to make them level on the top, taped off the top of the boards and all the remaining gaps I filled with epoxy (you can see some of it between some of the boards). After curing I fixed the legs (an angled U-shape steel leg on each side), flipped it right way up, sanded everything smooth and applied a few coats of Woodoc 30. After the final coat I went at it with a fine sanding foam block (learned from this mistake) to scuff the gloss to a satin finish, applied a wax to clean off the marks and everything and the customer collected. He was very happy, and so am I:

https://i.imgur.com/TSIJSyg.jpg

The other project was a client who spent good money on getting an office desk built by a guy from somewhere, I don't know where. He paid a tidy sum of money and he wasn't happy. I re-built the thing for him, and now he is. The short and long of it is that the guy who built him the desk literally used a hammer and nails to nail together a bunch of boards to create a "tabletop". The result was a warped, cupped and twisted monstrosity that didn't even fit the steel frame it was sitting on. The steel frame itself was welded together using offcuts of steel the guy had lying around - different dimensions, pieces too short, etc. etc. and finally it looks like it was enamel painted straight over the uncleaned, unprimed steel. In places the paint came off and the frame was rusty. I won't even begin about the "drawers" the guy built...

Anyway, he pulled off the top, and on my recommendation took it to a joinery that planed off the horrible varnish the guy used, squared up the boards, did a really neat tongue and groove joint and managed to produce a very nice tabletop which he brought to me to put on his office desk. So I built the set of drawers, using soft-close runners, built some modern-industrial steel legs, painted satin black, and then got to work on the top. Legs can be bolted on and off for easy transport if need be, as can the drawers and cable tray.


The holes where the nails were pulled out were very obvious and all through the wood. I drilled them all bigger to 6mm and started plugging the holes with hardwood Meranti dowels. Glue in the hole, dowel in, hammer it in, wait for the glue to dry and cut flush with a flushcut saw. Something like 40 times. In the bigger holes I couldn't plug, as well as the imperfections and knot holes in the wood, I poured epoxy with a shimmering black powder dye added. Finally, because the wood wasn't completely dry, the top presented with a tiny bit of a cup, so I built a support section for it that bolted to the bottom to keep it straight and flat (C-channels here are rare and very expensive).


I then sanded. And sanded. And sanded. Up to 150 grit, sprayed the top with water to raise the grain, then 180 grit, and then back to 150 grit. I then added a 45° chamfer to the bottom edge of the top like I do with most of the tables I build (it looks great) to protect the legs. Then I applied a Walnut stain that actually turned out lighter than we wanted, but he was OK with it. 3 Coats of stain later, it got treated with Woodoc 30 for 3 layers, before being scuffed up with very fine steel wool to give it a shimmering sheen, without gloss. A wax polish finished it off and this thing felt smooth as velvet on pickup. Happy client!


Oh yes, the monitor stand on top was a freebie I did for him, as was the cable tray at the bottom. He wanted it initially but shied away from the quote. I had some offcuts lying around so I built it for him anyway:

https://i.imgur.com/a73ojzE.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/XV01dHE.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/poj7tcP.jpg

[JJF]

Welcome to a forum