The magic number is 42.
So long, and thanks for all the fish.
I don't like to throw away anything that could potentially be reused, especially nowadays.
So when we had our water heater replaced recently....
"Hey, can I keep that stand? Awesome!
Put a piece of wood on it and call it a table.
Yes, I did have someone else do it for me.
I decided in a moment of presumed insanity
that I would make an octagon tabletop to go inside of that square rack.
On the surface, this is very straightforward.
Each of your side pieces needs to be cut at a 22.5 degree angle,
which is very easy to do on a miter saw.
The way to figure out the lengths of the outside sides of your octagon
is to multiply each of the sides of your square by 0.42
The problem that I ran into was measuring the proper square to begin with.
I assumed that each side of my square would be measured
from the inside of each of the legs.
But when I did that, and I applied the proper formula, and double checked
using my calculator, I realized that was going to be WAY too small.
So I thought "Maybe I need to measure from the outside of the legs?"
Went through the whole process again,
but again it wasn't quite right.
And after playing with it, and finagling it a little bit,
I realized that my square actually needed to be measured
at a 90 degree angle from the legs.
Then I started cutting the pieces based on that,
and then it worked perfectly.
(laughing) But I tell you, it took me a couple hours to figure that one out.
As I mentioned, I don't like to throw anything away if I think I can reuse it,
so what I'm using for this is some reclaimed balusters
from my deck renovation recently. Some of the old ones that I
was able to cut off the ends and still use some of the middle parts of them, as well as some of
the scraps from the new balusters that I added on. And unfortunately, what I discovered is that
the new balusters are actually about an eighth of an inch smaller, both length and width-wise.
Which made creating something like this octagon, that needs to fit perfectly
a little bit challenging. And I'm going to have to do a little bit of creative sanding
in order to make that fit properly and look nice.
Once I had them all glued together, they didn't all properly perfectly match up, so I did have
to do some trimming. But as long as you stick to that 22.5 degree angle when you're slicing
them down, and you make sure that each piece is the same size, we should be fine.
I'm hoping. (record scratch)
That didn't really work out the way I'd hoped.
By the time I trimmed down each of the pieces and
started putting the whole thing together, I realized I had removed a significant amount
of the surface area of the octagon
Ahhhh f*%#!
Making it too small to fit the way I wanted inside the rack.
Sh*t. What am I gonna do?
And thus began the improvisation.
I still had a few more balusters, so I cut eight more pieces
to add one more ring to the outside.
This of course made the octagon too big to fit inside the rack as I had originally planned.
So I cut the tips off of the rack using a multi-tool
to cut a groove as a guide for my reciprocating saw.
Since the balusters weren't all the same size, they didn't meet up exactly
perfect in the middle, so I ended up cutting a rather wonky octagon for the center piece.
I added some quarter inch strips of poplar to the bottom side for extra stability,
and I mixed up some wood filler using wood glue, sawdust, and some stain so that it would match nicely
to fill in the gaps.
With all of these improvisations, I had to sand the entire thing again
once it was all put together, which pretty much negated having stained it prior to assembly.
So I went back and stained it again.
My original plan was to use two different stains,
but I decided using one stain would hide the flaws a lot better.
The other day I got a comment on one of my YouTube videos that said
"That was so helpful. Thanks Wholesome Karen!"
I think I'll use that as my name on all my Google reviews from now on.
Wholesome Karen:
Saying nice things to managers across the U.S.