G'day, hope everyone's doing well. In today's video I'm going to be making a
display case for a very cute display and also I've done something a little bit
different in this video. See if you can pick it up but if not I'll let you know
at the end.
A friend asked if I'd make a display case for a bunch of her son's baby items
which she'd arranged on a board as a kind of keepsake, so I said sure.
To make the build quicker and easier I just used select pine boards and moulding bought
from the big green store. The boards were 89 by 19mm pine
and the moulding was 30 by 8mm square edge.
I started by cutting the boards to rough length for
the four sides just using a speed square and a circular saw
and I cut the moulding to rough length using a handsaw. The purpose of the
moulding is to create a lip at the front of the case to hold a piece of glass.
I glued a piece of moulding to each of the boards keeping one edge flush with the
outside face of the board.
Once they had set I cleaned off any glue squeeze out and gave them a quick sand
to flush everything up.
I cut a rebate on each board for the back panel that would hold the display
board by running them over the table saw a few times moving the fence over each
time until all the material was removed.
It was now time to cut the mitres on the end of each board bringing them down
to final length with the help of a stop block. Because of the lip on the front
edge of each board I used a piece of melamine to raise the board so they'd
sit flat and parallel to the sled.
Happy :-)
To glue the frame together I used the masking tape method
and I also used a board as a straight edge
just to make sure the joints were aligned as I taped them up.
I also added tape to the inside edges of the joints so I wouldn't have to struggle
with glue squeeze out which is always a struggle on internal corners.
To make sure the case glued up perfectly I added some tiny clamps at each corner
of the front lip to keep them aligned and also added clamping squares to each
corner of the case.
How good's that! Totally worth the effort.
A quick sand and everything was looking sweet.
The back panel of the case, which was 3mm ply, needed to be removable
which meant securing it with small screws.
The rebate at the back of the case was 10mm wide so I marked the screw holes 5mm
from the edge of the back panel to line up with the centre of the rebate.
I drilled the holes in the panel and then with the panel in place I drilled pilot holes into the rebate.
So it was at this point that I painted the case and the
back panel with a sealer undercoat even though it wasn't quite finished because
I still had to add splines to each of the corners to strengthen the mitre joints.
Not sure why I jumped ahead like that. Not to worry it wasn't the final paint finish anyway.
I made a very simple spline jig with a set distance from the clamping face to
the blade of roughly 1/3 of the width of the case,
that way I could cut one spline and then flip the case around and cut a second
spline making the two kerfs equidistant from the centre and the outside of the frame.
I cut the splines from some leftover 3mm ply from the backer board.
I got lucky here because this particular ply was the exact width of the kerf cuts.
I glued the splines in place making sure I had a good amount of squeeze out
so I got nice clean lines without any little voids when I cut them off with the flush trim saw.
A bit of a clean up with the sander before spraying on a final coat of paint
which I didn't record because it was just white going over white so there wasn't anything to see.
Once the paint was dry I applied a thin bead of silastic
to the inside corner of the front lip to fix the glass in place.
I thought it would be much easier to lay the frame over the glass
and it would use its own weight to keep things in place while the silastic cured.
I used construction adhesive to fix the display board to the back panel and when
that was set the back panel was screwed in place.
Last thing to do was to add the hanging hardware and to sign it off is done.
Well what can I say? My friend was very happy with the display case,
it turned out better than she expected.
So I mentioned at the beginning of the video that I'd done something different for this video
and for those of you who didn't pick it up, this entire video is in normal time,
there is no sped up footage whatsoever.
It's the first time I've done this in any of my videos and I've wanted to do it for a
If you want to know what I'm up to in between videos make sure you follow me
on Instagram but until the next one you guys all have a great day.