Hey everyone, this has been at least a month in the making just because of life being busy atm.
Without further ado, I give you my new spectacular and handmade Oak/Polycarbonate Lightsaber Wall Mount.
I wanted something that matched my desk and elegantly showed off my [growing] lightsaber collection.
Since I have an Oak desk, we decided that Oak would be good for the mount plaque.
We used a precut section of Oak, and routed the edges. Then to make the grooves, we lined up in a vice pieces of wood to keep the router straight and did that twice, you have to be careful that the bit doesn't jump, thus why you have the wood in the vice to keep the bit in the proper line.
Here's the oak once we were done with the router.
Then we had to collaborate to come up with a viable design for the polycarbonate cut out to hold the lightsabers without being a pain. So we ended up using a scotch tape machine and one of those instant coffee thingys for simplicity and easily repeated and even shaping. Left side was ideas, right side was final design layout.
The Polycarbonate was a little tricky. We found out that the Jigsaw cut it well, and then took a dremel to the edge to sand it down into the proper shape.
Here was the progress we made in one evening, only pieces cut out, no final sanding, etc:
A couple weeks later, when we finally had time, we began the final steps: sanding, staining, and polyurethane layers.
This is actually the back side of the plaque, you can see that we made mistakes even with the helper-woodblocks during the route'r'ing
Then we needed to sand down the rough edges of the polycarbonate "hooks" that the lightsabers actually rest on.
I used a fine, 400 grit sandpaper and just went lightly over the raw edge, careful not to sand the face of the poly - you will make it a cloudy surface if you sand the face.
Here were the final finished pieces before final assembly:
The poly is so beautiful and shiny! And the Oak wood grain really pops! So happy!
So the next step was to let the polyurethane layers that we sealed the Oak with to dry completely, sorry I skimmed over that process... paint with the grain, let dry, sand, repeat....
And then after it had finished drying and we did the last bits of sanding, it was ready to glue. Now, we used E6000, it's a heavy duty rubber cement type adhesive that comes in a tube - the company doesn't recommend using it with Poly-anything, but it has seated perfectly and securely and I've never had it behave badly with anything I've used it for.
So carefully drag the tip of the tube in the groove and fill it to about half way and then gently press the poly in to seat it well. We didn't have to support it with anything since the grooves were deep enough, and we didn't have any excess adhesive we had to wipe off, strings of E6000 dries quickly, so you'd have to wipe it off immediately or it'll be stuck to the wood.
Isn't it gorgeous??? I'm so impatient at this point! Hurry up and dry!
Then we let it dry for 24 hours, making sure that there was no movement at the insert of the poly - aka fully dry and secure.
And then today, we were able to hammer in a picture hanger on the back and mount it to the wall and here are the final results!!!
It's so perfect in my little workspace at home!!!
and a fun - half dead batteries pic:
I'm soooo happy and glad it's done. It was a fun project and the results were well worth the little bit of effort and time that it took!
