I kea mara mei kya kea. Fixita..

A few weeks back, or maybe even a month, the lovely ikea made bedside stand decided to give up its tenuous hold on the bed and crashed spectacularly. The spectacle was helped by the somewhat full water-heater-for-tea thing I have there for the dw to use. The little metal plate you see in the image is what connected the bed-frame and the side table together. One nail each in the back. There is also a small support at the bottom of the frame but I don't have any photos of it. The support lasted several years so I should not really complain I guess.

At this point, I had three options. Replace with the same item, replace with different thing not attached to the bed or repair what I have. The design of the current sidetable is unsound but I really liked how it paired with the bedframe, so naturally, I chose repair with option to strengthen. Now the fun began and I began procuring material for my first carpentry project. Really small project, but still, I was a carpentry virgin and was getting unreasonably excited at the prospect of buying more power tools :-).

It is amazing how utterly foolish you sound when you go to homedepot and start waving your hands around drawing imaginary pictures. One session of that and I found myself at wikipedia. God bless the thing. I now knew the difference between doweling, miter cuts, drill guides, forstner bits and a whole lot of stuff. The story behind how drill bits were initially created is quite fascinating.

Anyhow, after a whole bunch of preparations, this is the list of tools I ended up having to use. Some of these I already had, the rest were purchased from amazon (my fav place) or from OSH locally (Which surprisingly was cheaper than amazon for the jawhorse)

Supplies

• Metal plates to join different things. These are generally called mending braces and they come in various shapes and sizes. I chose two T shaped ones with two holes on each of the branches. The plan was to cut the T into two segments so I get a total of four plates with two holes each. Each pair of these plates would form one join between the bed frame and the sidetable.
• Nuts and bolts (to connect plates across the thickness of the bedframe)

Drill ToolsA basic drill is important. I had a basic battery powered Ryobi from homedept that was purchased a few years back. Not sure what I used it for, but the time had come for it to be useful. Luckily, I also realized that when trying to drill though a 2 inch thick bed frame, such that multiple drill holes are parallel, I need some way of ensuring that the drilling is perpendicular to the surface of the wood. A little bit of research introduced me to the Drill guide. I already had a bunch of other stuff that I purchased for other purposes.

• Cheap drill from homedepot (which I already had)
• Proxxon 38481 IB/E Professional Rotary Tool (already had this)
• Proxxon 28132 Machine Vise MS 4 (already had this)
• Proxxon 28606 MICROMOT Drill Stand MB 140/ S (already had this)
• Proxxon MICROMOT Flexishaft 110/P - Converts your Proxxon Rotary Tool into a Flexible Shaft Machine (already had this)
• Precision drill guide (bought new from homedepot)
• Dremel 426D 1 1/4-Inch Fiberglass Reinforced Cut-Off Wheel 5/Pack) (bought a single disk from OSH)

I have never had trouble spending good money on high quaity tools. Initially, I had purchased a dremel from amazon. As is my wont, a few days later, after the item is sitting in my house, I proceed to re-read the reviews. A few references in the comments caught my eye
:  a few days later, I had returned the unopened dremel and got myself the German made proxxon, very similarly priced and if reports are true, much better made. You can see that I went on a binge here. First I got the drill. Once the drill was home, I thought that a flexible shaft will make a nice addition as it will allow me to wield a polisher bit like a pen (The motivation at that time was to clear out the rust from a air-pump Acura had provided me for topping off the spare. The trunk in which the pump was housed was flooded because the car's trunk seals were bad and yada yada it ended up with some corrosion. I naturally needed a power tool to get some of the rust off). A few days later, I wondered about the safety implciations of having a drill lying around and powered on (even if attached to a shaft) and so wanted a clamp for the drill itself so it'd be prevented from jumping around. The best option turned out to be a small drill press :-). So. you see, good reasons all in all.


Safety Equipment

• Goggles
• Mask

Additional HelpersWhile searching for reviews of tools, I came across people recommending the Black and Decker worktable as a means of holding/clamping/placing work items. I nearly one-clicked the item as it looked ideal for my needs. Luckly, I found this other fellow, the Rockwell RK9000 Jawhorse. It seemed ideal, tons of features, packs small, very strong and reasonably priced. Plenty of review videos for this fella online. I found it in OSH and got it from there the day of the procedure (on the bed i.e) as I did not plan well enough to buy it from amazon. The intension here was to have the jawhorse hold the sidetable while I measure and drill it. I did not want the drill bit hitting the concrete of my backyard and wanted the whole table raised up. This looked ideal and would be useful for lots of other things later on (or so I convinced myself)

Continued..