Coffe cart still in limbo...

I posted a while back about the cart I was going to build for my espresso machine and a few have asked about its status.  I started it and in some sense did most of the hard work and then life took a turn for the busy and I have not made any progress since.  I have built the case (or as carpenters seem to call it the carcass – a term I love) and still need to build the drawers and doors and do a final sand and do the finishing.  


I love natural wood so it will just have a few coats of oil of some form on it.


One of the most important things on the todo list is figure out how to get a steal on a top for it.  I am hoping that some local granite company will have a 2 by 4 slab of granite they are not using that is left over from a kitchen and that is essentially garbage in their eyes, but gold in mine.  It seems like that is small enough that it would count as a remnant and might be left over just waiting to be claimed, but perhaps that is not how the granite world works.  


I did talk to the local sheet metal shop and they said they could make a stainless top for me for not too much, but I think even if it looked great (and I do not know what kind of stainless they had in mind) it might just be way too shiny when combined with the machine.


If all that fails I will make a butcher block top – something I have always wanted, and get a piece of plexiglass to put on top to keep it from getting ruined by the water, stained by the coffee,… but I am afraid it would get water under it anyway as water seems to find ways of getting places it does not belong.


Here are some photos.  For those who are wood workers, I am a advanced beginnerish type, but it is constructed with mortise and tennons in a fairly traditional way.


Here is the cabinet  The blotch on the leg should sand right off and be gone once finished...

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Here are the doors to be you can see the groove where the panel will go, but you can also see there is work to be done…

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And yes, that is right, here is the future of everything I own – ie it is claimed by my kids and lost to me!...(On the bright side I built my youngest daughter (2) a bed when she outgrew her crib and she recently told me she is going to build me a bed, too, and she says it will be purple!)

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