digitalVinyl's DJ Table Build Thread

[Patch]

Do you mean "rebating"?

Looks bloody amazing, mate!

[trollis]

intresting job man, cant whait continue

[digitalvinyl]

Of course due to the nature of the rabbet bit the plexi wouldn't fit in each slot due to the rounded corners so...break out the chisel! This was a rather tedious portion of the job, as is most things that come after this point. Everything from here on out has to be done either 16 or 32 times...

Nice and squared up:


I also had to cut out the slot for the acrylic within the top stringer of the grating but I didn't take any pictures of me doing that.

On to finishing the walnut grating. I poured over the seemingly endless ways to finish a wood like walnut and settled on a pretty simple method and used Danish oil to bring out some of the color from this great looking wood. Lots of sanding, wet sanding, and steel wooling involved.

Here is the very first coat of oil, it gets progressively darker and richer looking as I go through the 3 applications of oil:

[Vandalus]

This looks like its going to be amazing. Can't wait to see the rest once it's done!

[djdunamis]

very nice! good job on the woodwork.

[digitalvinyl]

While the walnut oil experiment was soaking in, I figured it's time to get going on cutting up the IKEA Expedit Frankenstein unit. I used a Dremel cutoff wheel to mark where I wanted my cuts to be, and to allow the material to cut cleaner at the edges instead of chipping off.

That idea sounded good but what I didn't realize is that there is a pretty thick piece of plastic laminate used as edge trim on these things. One piece flew across the garage and a small piece hit me in the neck (did no harm). I figured I should get the chisel out and take care of that pesky edge trim before proceeding with the router.

A pic of the edge trim and the chunk that flew off:


Once I was happy with it all being removed I could start getting the cavity cut out for the acrylic laptop stand. To my surprise the router suddenly gave way and felt like I was cutting air....this was in fact IKEA's infamous carboard honeycomb structure.



The honeycomb itself:


I then promptly removed the honeycomb by pulling it out and had a nice spot to test fit the acrylic piece:


Like a glove:

[djdunamis]

how are you planning on securing that?

[digitalvinyl]

I drilled out 4 or 5 holes in the acrylic which was extremely stressful for me since I've heard horror stories about cracking the stuff. I have rubber washers to prevent any kind of localized stress on the acrylic itself around the screw heads. The beauty of the design is that the center of gravity of the laptop and the layout of the support under the acrylic translates to a very strong base without any fasteners at all; It of course helps the acrylic is 1/2" thick. The screws will pretty much serve to ensure it doesn't move around and is stable while moving it.

[digitalvinyl]

Here is a little bit of wiring. I needed to wire in resistors to the stereo jacks to reduce the incoming signal from stereo to mono for the light organ. Soldering is not my forte so excuse any sloppy work.

Resistor wired off the left channel input:


Both channels wired up and heat shrinked:


Cables all wrapped up and soldered into the control panel for the light organ:

[digitalvinyl]

I'll try and load up the first rope lighting test later tonight so I can show you guys some blinking lights