My First from Scratch Project!

The time has come to introduce my first from scratch project. Now don’t judge me to hard, it had some rough edges… But like all of my projects, I learned an extraordinary amount of new things I would utilize for future works!
This project takes little bit of back story, I’m a bit of an amateur astronomer, so this project was based on a template a fellow astronomer gave me to store all of my astronomy odds and ends. Now the first part of my astronomy case was fairly simple…make a box. 

Make a box….check!

Now you’ll notice some notches in the above picture. I have to say, making those notches took a long time. I definitely went through some scrap wood before I finally figured out how to make sure every side piece had a notch that was perfectly aligned using my table saw and dado blade. These notches would ultimately hold shelves for storage as we will see soon.
After the painstaking process of perfecting my dado cuts, I was ready to move onto making my shelving units. First I needed to draw out a template that would hold my eyepieces which measure 1.25 inches and 2 inches in diameter at the base.

I don’t have pictures of it, but my first template didn’t turn out well, remember, having the right tools is important. I started trying to use a spade drill bit, which really didn’t turn out great, so ultimately I went and bought hole saw bits, and what do you know, they come in the exact sizes I needed. Once I got my hole drill bits and a new template, I had my first shelf done. The other side was easy, just a smaller box for storage.

The last piece of the puzzle was a storage unit similar to my 1.25 inches template, but 2 inches instead for larger eyepieces and accessories. Followed up by a nice dark walnut stain (if you’re reading my other posts you know this is my favorite). It’s kind of dark in the picture, but you can see the storage box in the middle.

The nice thing about this setup is I had a lot of room for storage, and the two inch storage unit on the bottom is removable and adjustable (fits under either shelf). Obviously I needed a lid, which required…. ANOTHER BOX! So by this point it wasn’t to difficult to finish this one up. You’ll see in my final pictures that I added some handles to the shelving units, and handle for the lid, I put a coat of polyurethane on her, and she was all ready to go!
Big lessons for this project, don’t rush when using a dado set (because you’ll misalign your cuts), and USE THE RIGHT TOOLS! I’ll admit I went through a decent amount of wood before I got things right, but hey, I learned a lot, and my astronomy box works really well!

Give me some comments! I’d love to hear what you think!