…I’d spend my time working on projects like this.

This weekend, I started work on The Great Summer Mystery Project". I’ve been working on the dinning room shelves for a few months now, so cool personal projects like this have had to wait. Now, I’m not going to tell you what I’m making, so you’ll have to make your best guess based on what you see.

What you see:

All good projects start at either Lowes or Home Depot. So, I went to Home Depot (I had a 10% off coupon) and bought some hardware, 2 tubes of glue, and five sheets of luan plywood (essentially a plywood sheet made of a single ply).

The first step in building this mystery project is to rip the luan into 3 inch strips. (For those of you who went to public school, that’s 16 strips per sheet, times 5 sheets; which equals 80 strips.) To speed things up, I stacked the sheets and made each rip-cut through all five sheets. Now’s a great time to allude to: "Damon’s fool-proof method for making accurate rip-cuts with a circular saw”.

Fifteen cuts later, and I have my slats. You’re probably asking yourself, “What would make a man seemingly ruin 5 sheets of plywood by cutting them into three inch slats?” Keep reading.

Now that I've got the slats cut, I need to build a template for project assembly. I use an 2’ X 8’ piece of 3/4" plywood for the template base. I then tape down a series of ten pieces of paper I printed out a giant curve on.

Next, I whip-up eleven little wooden do-dads and screw them to the plywood along the inside of the curve.

Now comes the fun part. I group the slats into groups of sixteen and start spreading glue on one side of each slat. Then, I clamp the group of slats to the template creating a laminated curve of three inch slats.

Once the glue sets up (polyurethane glue sets up in about 4 hours – much slower than normal wood glue) I remove the laminated curve and begin the process again with another group of slats.

There’s something quite artistic about twenty four clamps lined up along a gentle curve like this.

So, at this point, I’ve only made three of the five curves I’ll need for this project. I’ll post more information as the mystery project continues, but I’d be interested to read guesses about what I’m building.