Time to make some furniture. I'm making a bench for the laundry room so people can have a seat when dealing with their shoes. The bench will also provide some storage for hats, gloves, and other accessories. When it came time to paint the bench the project somehow branched out into multiple other projects.
Supporting and gluing up the frame.
Attaching the legs.
Edge banding the plywood seat with solid material. Improvised to get a 'longer' clamp.
Made a custom router jig to plane the proud edges of the solid wood edge banding flush with the center plywood piece. This essentially floats the router bit only as high as the surface you place the thickest part on, which happens to be the plywood part of the seat.
Had to cut a hole in the back side of the bench to accommodate a wall outlet.
The next steps are to fill the grain, condition it with sanding sealer, sand, prime, and top coat with the HVLP gun. Since we had a number of doors and other things around the house to paint I decided to make a simple PVC paint booth in the basement.
The booth is about 10' X 13' and should allow work on multiple projects at once.
Everything is staged and ready to mix for spraying.
Here, we fit quite a few items inside the booth and painted 4 door sides, the bench top, parts of the bench, and a closet shelf at the same time. With the HVLP sprayer a coat was laid down on all of these in about 3 minutes, quite efficient.
While priming the back of the bench top I noticed two distinct areas of the surface where the wood had swelled and bubbled up significantly. I pushed on these spots and my finger when right through the veneer of the plywood. It turns out that this piece had a couple of voids in them from the manufacturing process. I had to fill them with a bondo type wood filler that uses a hardening agent, very stinky stuff.
I did find another void like the one above after another coat of primer and had to patch it as well. After the patches dried I had to sand and prime everything again, very frustrating.
