DDK - Die Deutschen Klassiker

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Your 'barn'/workshop is beginning to look more like a Masterchef kitchen !!

It's going to be a fabulous place to work in ...

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sladey wrote:Overkill is my middle name

"If it's not too much then it's not enough!"

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So for fitting the worktops I wanted to do a proper job so I bought one of these jigs


In case you don't know the hockey-stick shape allows you to do nice 90 degree joints where the join is offset from the corner itself. You can also use the other cut-outs to let you attach brackets to the underside which pull two halves together on a butt joint.

It's good quality kit but it's also something that needs a lot of thought if you aren't used to using it - you can use either side of the jig, the hockey stick 'hook' can be at 5 different distances from the end of the board, and there are numerous holes that pegs go through for different purposes

Here's me cutting out the female part of the hockey-stick - this is on one of the longer pieces


And you're left with this - the holes are cut in the piece that butts up to it and you can put special bolts into the 'dog-bone' holes that result - and pull the two halves together

OK so then I had to do the corresponding hockey cuts and dog bone cuts in the end of the smaller piece.
Did the hockey cut - no problem
Did the dog bone - again no problem. As the wood is hard you had to do the cut in about 5 or 6 smaller passes so it's not a speedy job.

It was just as I finished the last of these 3 dog bones I realised I'd f*cked up.

I'd forgotten to turn the board over first so I'd put the dog bone holes in the top side of the worktop.

So I cut off about 8 inches and did it again - properly this time


F*ckup number 2
I went to bed that night quite pleased with myself. I'd cut the end piece properly this time and all perfectly square.
Then as I'm lying in bed I started to think that the walls of the barn aren't perfectly square.

The next morning I went back and checked

Oh Bugger.

I scribed a new line that would work with the walls, cut off another 8 inches and did all the cuts again.

Luckily the end piece was a bit on the long side so I'd got plenty of room to spare.
This is what it should have looked like (and now does)



And this is the finished article (prior to oiling it). You can also see the car lift control panel which now features slots for the rubber blocks
I did actually do one final f*ckup while rounding the corner and the router moved in a bit. I've filled the resulting indentation


And a view from the bottom end


It feels great to have all this worktop space

Lovely, very satisfying!
I have survived on just 2 13 amp sockets!
Be great when you do a mega rebuild on anything

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Very impressive Mark !!

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that last pic gives a real sense of how big it all is .. looking great

How long until every work surface is covered in car bits & other tat leaving a small 1m section of usable work top

Yep really looking forward to that stage but still a while to go yet - I want to make some nice drawers and cupboards (with slide-out shelves)

And I still need to do the electrics in the other (dirty) room. - the tannery. I’m running all my machinery in there from one double socket and two extension cables

I’m loving the journey but yes - can’t wait to get back onto cars


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Those router jigs are such fun!!! End result looks fab.

I struggle to keep 1m2 of worktop clear, good luck with that much space!

Clear worktop - is that the brief moment between moving one load of cr4p off so that you can put a new pile of things (that need attention) on ?

I’m thinking so - in the other room I’ve got 2 workbenches. Probably 4m by 1m.

Currently there is about 20 square centimetres of usable space (if that)



So yes, I’ve just created opportunity for much more mess.

OK so it’s probably time for another update. When I last left you I’d got worktops but nothing underneath.

From previous experience I knew I wanted lots of drawers and very few cupboards. I usually fill cupboards up with crap that you can’t get at. I do the same with drawers but you can get at it.

I planned it all out and decided I would have 3 cabinets with 6 drawers each (2 shallow and 4 deep), one with 4 deep drawers for all my cordless tools, and one cupboard - but that would have 3 shelves, each of which was actually a drawer.

So 25 drawers in all then.

I wanted each drawer to have bottom mountings not side mountings and I wanted them all to be soft close. Blum were what I decided on for the fixtures. I think the ones I actually bought were Blum knock-offs which look identical and work the same but are cheaper. They still seem very well made.

So first job was carcasses.

I found an amazing program online where you can feed it the dimensions of everything you want to cut and it will give you a cutting list of the best way of getting those pieces out of 8x4 sheets of plywood. It was brilliant and no doubt saved me money in wasted material.

So after a lot of cutting I ended up with this
And these were the drawer fronts - I left them as one piece for the whole of the front that I could cut down when the drawers were made and hopefully preserve the grain.




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After a bit of work I built the first carcass - held together using festoon dominos (fantastic bit of kit)

Here it is slotted into place - just trying it out for size



This one was an incredibly tight fit. Some of the others were even tighter. I then thought it through and realised I didn’t need them to be so tight so took a couple of mill off each of the sides (or tops - can’t remember now) and this meant they slotted in a lot better.

I chamfered the corners to allow a gap for the welds in the corners of the frame. I test fitted each one and then took them out and back to the woodworking stable - as I was making the drawers I needed to be fitting them there and then instead of carting them over to the barn each time


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Once I’d made all 5 carcasses I set about cutting all the drawer components



This was a long process. 25 drawers - each with 4 sides and a bottom = 125 pieces to cut.



Once they were all cut I then had to cut a groove near the bottom of each piece so the bottom of the drawer could slow in.

Ideally you’d have a spindle moulder or router table for this. I did’nt have either but I did have a router, and a table, so I made a temporary router table



It wasn’t brilliant but it did the job. The job, in this case was cutting a groove in 100 pieces of 18mm plywood.

Here you can see the grooves cut in some of the pieces


And here are all the carcasses with their drawer components set out inside them

(Oops that pic won’t upload for some reason)


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Then I started the loooooooooong process of making up all the drawers



For each one I had to cut the domino joints on the correct face and to the correct depth.

Cock ups I found along the way:-
- I’d made every drawer 18mm too short! (I’d misread the less than clear instructions that came with the drawer slides) Not a massive deal but I had to put blocks on the back of every drawer to make up for the gap
- As I was cutting the grooves I must had had the fence move on me as some of them were further away from the bottom
- when glueing up the first lot of drawers I didn’t spend enough time making sure they were square. The duly bit me on the arse when fitting the drawers and required a lot of fiddling and planing. I learned from that and made sure all the rest were square.

On reflection I should have made up one set of drawers totally before even cutting the rest - that would have saved a few problems.

But hey ho, it went pretty well, all thing considered


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