glue are you?

Today is phase two of the fixup/workaround of the Colossal Screw Up of incorrectly specifying the dimensions of the island to the guys who made the mahogany veneer doors/trim pieces (phase one was the stainless face in the last entry). Since the sides and the back piece were all too small, I didn't use the side pieces, and essentially cut the big (but not big enough) front piece in half to use as sides. It just made it- I had about two inches to spare. The only problem with this idea was that the edges didn't have any veneer on them, they were just bare MDF. My fix for this was to take scrap pieces with the nice veneered edge, cut the edges off with the table saw and glue them to my new side pieces. The "edge trims" ended up being 3/16" thick, so I subtracted 3/8" (i.e. 3/16" x2 for front and back... stupid fractions!) from the total measurements of the side pieces (did all this cutting today too).

Knowing I was going to be doing this kind of madness, I picked up those nifty silver and blue three-foot clamps from Harbor Freight a couple weeks back for super cheap. They're actually surprisingly well made. What's going on in that mess above is the the front and back edge pieces are being clamped and glued. It's hard to tell in the pic, but the long narrow pieces of wood sticking off the edges aren't actually glued, they're just they're to distribute the pressure of the three-foot clamps (relatively) evenly across the entire surface. The orange clamps on either side have blocks on top and bottom for lateral alignment (so that the trim is even with the wood from side-to-side). This is the first mega glue-up I've done, and it's kinda hectic, because glue squeezes out all over the place, and since my surfaces are already finished, you gotta wipe it off quick if you don't want it to mess things up- have lots of wet paper towels handy! In any normal situation, you'd do all the gluing prior to applying a finish, so this would be a lot less critical. And while you're doing that, obviously you have to make sure everything's sitting in the right place. I actually did one side, let it set a bit, then loosened the clamps and added the other side. I still have to repeat the entire process for the other side piece, but I don't have enough clamps, so I'll wait 'til this one's dry. I probably won't be able to do it 'til next week b/c I'm doing day/night double gig duty tomorrow and Monday :(

Once these are done, I can screw them to the sides of the island. I still need to make some little trim pieces for the back side, but these should be real easy- I just need to rip down a couple of my unused mahogany toe-kicks to 3 1/2" wide to cover the 2x4' framing on either side. Forutnately the toe-kick pieces already have veneered edges on one side (and you won't be able to see the other edge), so I won't have to do any of the madness above.