This past weekend I finally got round to building a small cabinet to house my sandpaper in an orderly fashion. I used scrap “shutterboard”, which is some really nasty stuff they sell in this part of the world as so called “plywood”. It is more fond of warping than a pig’s tail. To stabilise the shutterboard sides I used Supawood (MDF) for the back, some scrap chipboard for the base and top, and 3 mm hardboard (Masonite) for the dividers.

In the pictures below you can see how I used my Festool QF1400 router with a 3 mm straight bit to cut the dados. Please note the jig resembling a woodworking square used to guide the router. These are very easy to build as you can see. I might do a quick post on how to build them in the near future. You can also see how my assembly table is assisting in holding the work pieces. You can see the F-style clamps and benchdogs both utilising conveniently located dogholes. If you are interested to see how I built this assembly table, find the posts under the category “Bench”.

Here you can see how I used the F-style clamps to fix one of the sides of the cabinet to the side of the table. The f-style clamps slide into the T-channel on the side of the table. I elevated the setup by using my Lie-Nielsen no. 4½ Smoother on it’s side. This is a very useful trick in lots of different situations. In this case I elevated the setup in order to get two scrap pieces of hardboard (Masonite) into the dados (as shown in the next set of pictures) to line the side and back up perfectly before screwing it together.

You can see the scrap piece of hardboard in the first picture and how it helped lining up the dados perfectly in the next picture.

Sliding the dividers in is easy if the dados are well lined up.

Next I glued some Ysterhout edging to hide the chipboard, plywood and dados. This is a point were I disagree with most of the authorities who suggest that one should chuck away every bit of scrap wood left over from previous projects. Maybe it is a cultural thing, being born and raised in Africa, but chucking good wood away is absolutely against my grain (if you excuse the pun). Most of the projects I have written about so far on this blogsite were done utilising cutoffs, including every single part of this sandpaper storage cabinet. The chipboard that was used for the top and bottom of the cabinet were recycled from the crates my father build to transport his woodworking tools over a distance of 1800 km to my current shop. Before that it did duty in umpteen other cameos.

Here you can see the cabinet in it’s final resting place. It sits under the so called “effulgent arm” in order for the mentioned lighting impedimenta to swing past it when necessary. I will write a post on the lighting arm in the near future. If you enlarge the last photo you can see how I indicated on the right hand side which grid of sandpaper goes where. On the top shelve (no unfortunately no booze) I keep the roles of 3M Adhesive-backed Sandpaper.