Hello friends…
OK, you may think I’m bored, or being overly thrifty, or even trying to show off. The truth is that I have no idea what I am but this is the recent yield of idle hands in the workshop here.
So, I’m looking at the 4-drawer file cabinet in my office and there general filing in the top drawer, cars & taxes and some other stuff in the 2nd drawer, and then it starts to get a little muddled in the bottom 2 drawers. Ergo I decide I’ll buy some dividers and put things into categories that make it easier to find things. Office Depot, right? Wrong. Here’s what I wanted, but I only had the one single solitary green cardboard divider:
Not only do the office supply joints not have these, but they’re expensive to order and you have to get lots of them. I didn’t feel like spending $50 or $75, I just wanted a few measly dividers onto which I could stick a category label and have better organization. Figure $10 or so, right? Wasn’t going to happen, at least not commercially.
A few days go by and I decide that this must be a use for my woodshop and so I scrounged 3 different scraps of useless plywood, made a prototype modeled after the green divider shown above, and then cut out 12 more of them.
The 220 volt table saw makes quick work of little plywood scraps like these. These pics were taken after the job was partially completed, so you see the shellac finish on the boards.
After the table saw yielded the basic plan form of the new file dividers, I jigged up the router table to cut out the relieved areas on each side of the up-sticking tab on each panel. Rout one side, flip, rout the other. Every piece comes out symmetrical & identical.
A little sanding…I used mostly the belt sander (not shown here) and a little handheld knobby plastic thing that holds a round sheet via hook & loop, plus a little sandpaper held in the fingers magic. This gets rid of all the “feathers” left by the 2 power cutting tools.
Shellac is a great coating and we keep finding more applications for it. It’s available as a clear or amber-tinted finish, or as a white primer that can be tinted for easier coverage by your top coat. It dries fast. As you can see I used the amber, this writer’s usual choice due to the warmth of the wood’s color that is rendered along with exquisite grain emphasis. (Belt sander partially visible in corner.)
Each piece was shellacked, then sanded by use of the knobby hand sander and a little manual sanding for the curve by the tab. The first coat always raises fur, thus requiring the sanding exercise. I used the 220 grit recommended on the Zinsser Shellac can and it seemed to be a perfect choice, needing no further sanding after the 2nd coat. [For a thoroughly professional job, one would do a lot more sanding before, during & after the application of various coats of finishes, but c’mon, I mean…these are freakin’ FILE DIVIDERS, OK??!!] The various different woods–mahogany, oak & birch veneers–each create a unique look…
Stack ‘em up, outta the shop, take ‘em to the office…
What would we do without the Avery Label company?
Not being displeased with the results, the new file dividers were deployed into all 4 drawers:
Granted, this seems like low-level stuff, and it is. But it is satisfying to do this kind of thing, in one’s own shop, for almost no cost, and have a result that will be pleasing every single time the file drawers are opened, which is usually a few times each day. The total cost was about a nickel for the shellac and maybe a dime for the labels. It took a couple of hours and will save a little time and frustration at the file cabinet.
As I get older, I find that it is easier to achieve fulfillment.
Roger