Finished

My mom just bought a house out-of-state, and found herself with quite a few things she wanted to clear out of storage. Among them was this awesome brass sculpture my dad did when he was in college. Over the years, the pine base has started to give way, and on carpet doesn’t quite have large enough of a footprint to be stable (and stand up in the face of curious animals).

So I set out to make a new base.

Before, and the rough sketch I based my design on.

The above picture also shows the pretty big piece of maple I had left over from building a desk earlier this year. My goal was to make the base entirely out of the one maple block. I also had a few leftover black angle brackets from shelving I recently put up, so I could use those to frame the base and further highlight the contrast.

With a few tricky cuts, everything came out of the one block with the grain running in directions I thought would look nice and give good surface area for glue-ups not on end-grain.

	<p>
		It doesn't look as drastic in the photo, but I'm somehow always
		surprised how much of a difference sanding makes. With just a few
		quick passes on the belt sander, it looked like an entirely
		different piece of wood.

	</p>
	<p>
		Next up, a dry fit of all the pieces and figuring out where to put
		the hole in the base. The brass sculpture has a threaded rod
		sticking out of the bottom, which is how it attached to the old
		base. For the new base I just took the old base, centered it on the
		new block, then drilled a hole in the same spot. That way, all the
		relative offsets were kept from the original mount.
	</p>
  </td>
</tr>

This is now coming together pretty nicely. All that’s left is some extra sanding to knock down sharp edges, and then a few coats of polyurethane.

And that’s it! Finished: