Do any of you remember what you were doing in the wee hours of Black Friday last fall? I was waiting in the freezing cold for a killer deal on a plasma TV along with about 300 of my newly found friends. Picked up a Panasonic 50" plasma for a great price. We had been looking at furniture catalogs and showrooms for ideas to house our new TV. I also scoured the internet looking for plans, but mostly found dated ideas for cabinets to hold 32" sets. I began mentally designing a cabinet to house the TV but waited until I had the unit home before I set out to formally design it. At about the same time I discovered Sketchup which helped greatly with rendering in 3D. While the TV sat on a table in the middle of the family room, I toiled with design after design trying to minimize the footprint while ensuring to capture all of the design elements needed: we wanted a center console that held TV, components and had media storage, plus 2 towers for speakers and display objects and a center arch for the center channel speaker and picture display.
Since this would be built in my basement shop, it had to be built in multiple pieces that would be put together to create a wall unit. With the amount of plywood required to build this (about 6 sheets) I realized that I needed some type of saw guide to knock the sheet goods down to a manageable size - it just too difficult working by myself to do this successfully on my table saw. I started looking for a saw guide for my circular saw and was dissatisfied by what was available - that's when I first found the TS-55 and down the slope I went, head first!
Over the next few posts, I will attach pictures that show some of the assembly. I wish I had captured more of the use of my Festools, but trust me, I could not have managed to do this without them. Here is a shot of the center cabinet base being layed up:
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This shot show the center cabinet with sides, movable shelves and top installed:
Here is one of the towers in final glue up. As they say, you can never have enough clamps - I even resorted to utilizing spring pressure against the ceiling and floor to clamp the areas where conventional clamps could not apply pressure:
This shot shows the unit with the 4 pieces temporarily joined, prior to crown molding installation:
OK, that's enough for tonight. I'll add more to the story soon.
Since this would be built in my basement shop, it had to be built in multiple pieces that would be put together to create a wall unit. With the amount of plywood required to build this (about 6 sheets) I realized that I needed some type of saw guide to knock the sheet goods down to a manageable size - it just too difficult working by myself to do this successfully on my table saw. I started looking for a saw guide for my circular saw and was dissatisfied by what was available - that's when I first found the TS-55 and down the slope I went, head first!
Over the next few posts, I will attach pictures that show some of the assembly. I wish I had captured more of the use of my Festools, but trust me, I could not have managed to do this without them. Here is a shot of the center cabinet base being layed up:
This shot show the center cabinet with sides, movable shelves and top installed:
Here is one of the towers in final glue up. As they say, you can never have enough clamps - I even resorted to utilizing spring pressure against the ceiling and floor to clamp the areas where conventional clamps could not apply pressure:
This shot shows the unit with the 4 pieces temporarily joined, prior to crown molding installation:
OK, that's enough for tonight. I'll add more to the story soon.
