Area51 - Bassan's 2016 Projects:

 

Although I've been very busy with my own projects, I'm never too busy to lend a hand with lots of other projects. First on the list was painting the entire main floor of Bassan's house.

 

 

 

I handled the cutting in while Andrea was on roller duty. Since its an open concept we painted the kitchen, living room, entry way and hallway, which took the whole day to cut in for two coats of paint!

 

 

 

 

 

 

The next project was to build Andrea's dream shotgun cabinet. Not able to find anything he really liked he designed a cabinet to spec and set to work.

 

 

 

He picked solid Birch doors locally and we built the cabinet to fit. The cabinet was cut from 3/4" Birch laminated plywood which is strong and looks beautiful when finished.

 

 

 

The cabinet was assembled using a pocket hole jig which provides a clean, hidden faster, very strong joint.

 

 

 

 

Since it was still cold and Bassan's garage unheated, we moved the cabinet to my Garage for staining, which was completed with an oil based clear product.

 

 

The cabinet finished with handles and lock. The lower section is a pull out drawer for shooting accessories.

 

 

Andrea made the barrel support from a piece of solid walnut for a nice finished product.

 

 

The building of the shotgun cabinet spawned another much larger project, completely renovating Andrea's gun room. Additional pot lights were installed, all new paint, trim, and vinyl plank flooring. The last cabinet built was a workbench. Birch doors were used along with a double finished edge vanity top to create a great bench for cleaning and working on firearms.

 

 

One of the first projects on the new Bench was fitting an adjustable butt pad on my Citori 725 Over Under Shotgun. These aluminum adjuster plates arrive square and have to be custom fitted to the stock.

 

 

My stock was shortened about 1/2" so the finished length of pull was correct for me. The plates and kick eze butt pad were milled to shape on Andrea's new belt sander and a special jig. The new set up work very well and makes the gun fit me much better than before.

 

 

In September we stared preparing for winter and tackled painting Andrea's winter rims. At 5 years old they needed to be freshened up. We sanded and cleaned the rims and coated them with etching primer.

 

 

We finished the rims with a couple coats of silver wheel paint and two coats of clear coat for a durable finish.

 

 

Recently Bassan began another shotgun project, fitting an older Browning for one of the lady's at the gun club. The stock had to be shortened to fit the shooter, and adjustable plates milled to fit.

 

 

This is one of the jigs used for milling the adjustable butt plates.

 

 

Almost there.

 

 

Project complete!

 

 

 

 

 

Cheers, MIKE

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Copyright © 2011 Michael Smith