Saturday, December 6, 2008

Present for Louis


Louis has been complaining for a while now. It all started after I replaced our carpet with bamboo flooring. The new floor is smooth and slippery, and has made one of his favorite activities much too hard. Here's a shot of the problem:



See how those scratchers aren't lined up properly? That will never do! Louis is a persnickity cat!


So finally, after months of protest, I have fixed the problem for him:



Does he approve? Yes!
Does he still complain? Yes! "What took you so long?"



It's just a simple tray with rabbeted and pegged corner joints, plywood bottom trapped in grooves, and mitered, applied moulding. The moulding was nailed and glued. After the glue dried I sunk the nails even further, drilled out the nail holes down to the heads, and then plugged the holes with dowels (bamboo skewers actually).


To hold things steady while I cleaned up the pegs I used a system of batten and wedges with my bench dogs. Here's a picture of the dog and batten on one side (other end of batten is clamped to back of bench with a hand clamp):



And here is the other side, with double wedges:



To adjust for the shorter dimension of the tray, I added a piece of scrap:



The only problem now, is that Louis is even less inclined to share with his brother Gerald...


3 comments:

  1. And what are you getting poor gerald for Christmas?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Louis appears to be comfortable on his new scratch pad platform, but he has an irritated look on his face.

    Perhaps he would like for you to add a nice cherry stain to it?

    Nice job, Dan. I hope my dogs don't see this and get any ideas....

    ReplyDelete
  3. RF - No problem - Gerald is VERY easy to please:

    Happy Gerald


    VC - Thanks! And don't worry about Louis, that's just his way of saying: "Look, I appreciate the work you've done here, really I do, but now you are invading my personal space and I will therefore refuse to acknowledge that you exist. What you're still there?"

    ReplyDelete

Comment Moderation has been turned on - too much spam! Bummer.

I will get an email notification and will approve any appropriate comments ASAP.