I bought a few file cabinets from a local shop that salvaged them from cubicle assemblies. As such they have no top to them, but the metal is bent and there are holes pre drilled where you are meant to attach the mdf cubicle top. I put several of them all in a row below my wood rack in essentially dead floor space and now it houses sanders and such. Thought I had a photo but maybe not. That top is just resting on them.
I have one cabinet left to do, currently it's at the bottom of a clutter pile but its day is coming. I got the jointer dialed in after much tinkering and it's so much better than previous glue ups I've done before I had one. Using a planer sled for flattening is nice but it's not a real jointer.
I bought a bunch of cherry stain since HD is changing brands it was cheap. Means most of my shop stuff that gets stained will probably be cherry. Good thing I like it! So this is the first coat using the minwax pre-stain about 10 mins prior, my basement is bare concrete floor so its basically whatever humidity is outside +/- 5%
And a second coat. I really liked the contrast here
Third coat. I had decided at this point I was done...
When I looked at the sides, I decided the nicer looking one was what I had originally wanted to be the back, which meant filling in the knot that was originally going to be at the back. So this photo is actually after a coat of poly, epoxy in the biggest knots, and then some spot sanding. I decided I liked the lighter patterns and where the poly wasn't sanded off, so I decided to do another coat of stain to see if I could get an uneven 'antiqued' look. So this is a photo after the fourth application of stain was no longer tacky but still drying.
It's now drying from a fifth coat, I decided on this coat not to wipe off the excess as it's (wet) a really dark rich red unlike my scrap of relatively dark brown cherry floor I have been comparing, and different from mahogany or other red woods. Granted it's still got to dry but think of a dark red dyed guitar body where you can still see the grain clearly. If it stays this way it's going to be amazing. I'll get a photo of it later.
Once this cabinet goes in place, nobody including me will ever see the top again it's getting a pretty tall computer to sit right on top of it. This was more just an exercise in building skill and getting back into having nice tools to do real work instead of 'good enough' like a lot of my pre-jointer projects have been.
Next up is a 12ft maple butcher block counter top I need to put on top of my general purpose workbench. It's getting cherry also because I have gallons of it; Probably not 5 coats though. Maple and pine are often listed together as woods that spotch when stained, should I expect about the same results as the pine here or is maple even more difficult? This isn't furniture grade work but I don't want to make it look like garbage either.
So the idea is buy one of
these and sand (what grit would you start sanding, I don't have much experience with butcher block or this company) up to 320 then stain, then (how many?) coats of poly. This bench might get used for general purpose 'stuff' be overflow storage for heavy stuff like my planer that still doesn't have a permanent home, might be used to maintain & take apart lawn tools or any manner of other things.
