My first woodworking project

Finally realized that I love woodworking (at least that's what it looks like for now :) ). This was ignited when I observed the carpenter working in our home during my last summer vacation. So why not give it a try ...

I thought of few things that I could make. I finally settled for a shoe rack. We had bought a cheap one few years ago and it's totally inadequate for our current needs :).

Started with the following book: Woodworking for Dummies. It is a nice read and of course, a lot of help from youtube and google. I am interested in working with only hand tools, until I felt helpless with the hand saw. Here are some of the tools that I bought:

and the master plan, sketched in my office :)

What better place than the empty room in our home to setup a workshop. I hope I didn't trouble my neighbors much. Such nice people, they never complained...

So here are the various stages:

What did I use: I wanted to go for the wood, but didn't find good sheets, and what ever I found was too expensive for a first project. So I went with a plywood sheet -18mm thickness. This one was bought from the Sahrjah industrial area for AED 115. I started initially with a hand saw, but then had to get the Makita jigsaw from Dragon Mart (AED 250).

Following are my polishing attempts:

I applied three coats of red oak: stain + polyurethane. And this is the final result:

Thoughts:

• Wasn't very happy with the final finish. It wasn't very smooth. Perhaps shouldn't have sanded.
• At the beginning I tried to create dovetail joints, but then moved to box-cut joint. But it didn't look good so I had to cover it up. I think these two joints are good and make sense only when you are working with the real wood.

Update [ August 2014]

Made a shelf for the local mosque in Karachi during the summer vacation. The design was adopted from the shelves in our local mosque here in UAE.

Turned out to be quite easy: made out of a veneered chipboard. The wood market is better and easier to find your way around. The materials were bought from the Gizri wood market.