2. Workshop

The Bus

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Gluing up went well, but as the top got wider I had less and less clamps that would reach. I just made it using my longest two.
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Gluing up went well, but as the top got wider I had less and less clamps that would reach. I just made it using my longest two.

  • I threw together a nice looking windowsill in the bathroom starting with shaving off the tongue and groove on one of my flooring pieces. Gotta love the curls!
  • With the windowsill installed I moved on to the vertical column on the bathroom wall.
  • Here's the finished bathroom wall and windowsill, with a shelf up top that I intend to add a back to at some point.
  • For our bathroom curtain we custom ordered this shade, which is pretty nice for the purpose.
  • With a surplus of flooring just lying around, I repurposed some to make my closet cupboard faces. Here's the drawer face sets lined up and ready for grooving.
  • I used a router table to cut the grooves in the cabinet face frames.
  • Here's the finished closet drawers complete with paint and handles. Most everything to the rear of here is finished, with the exception of a little trim (and replacing that bed strut with something prettier).
  • When I set out to build my desk I went to work under a couple of constraints: First off, where does one put a desk in a bus? I went with building a top that would mount onto my steering wheel, making that space into a usable part of our home and giving a double purpose to the best chair in the house. Second is cost; at this point we're not spending as freely as we were previously, so I gathered up all the nice wood in my scrap pile and set out to build using only those materials. This pile contains a little oak, maple, bubinga, walnut, purple heart, teak, sapele, wenge, padouk, and lacewood, and I used most of it.
  • I took a couple days at figuring out a layout and then shaping the boards to fit tightly and be as flat as I reasonably could achieve. To get these butt joints to come together I planed one edge of each board, and then cut them on opposite sides of the same chop saw, so any blade misalignment would match up perfectly. For the horizontal seams I just planed them flat and tweaked minor adjustments until they were perfect.
  • Gluing up went well, but as the top got wider I had less and less clamps that would reach. I just made it using my longest two.
  • Teak is just a pleasure to work with and currently my favorite wood. Throwing a bunch of curls together of all different colors was also very pleasing.
  • With the desk top assembled I hit the ends with a belt sander to straighten them out, and then since I didn't want to go that aggressive on the top itself I spent a few hours on that with the orbital sander. I did a reasonably decent job on the glue-up, so I didn't have any crazy corrections to do here and it went well. I also went around all the edges with a roundover bit on the router to make those nice and soft.
  • I finished the desk top with my current favorite finish, Osmo Polyx, which is an oil-based wax. All these woods are awesome and really popped with the finish, and I think the patchwork nature of the piece is pretty fun.
  • To test the desk strength I actually got up and stood on the steering wheel and I found it to be super solid. The desk top here is just sitting on the wheel, but I will be mounting it rigidly to the wheel itself and butting the corners up against the window frame to eliminate wiggling. The height and angle are adjustable with the steering wheel, but this is a comfortable position so it may just stay here. When not in place it will slide under the couch or workbench, and I'll be building a separate set of legs to allow it to stand freely as a dining table in front of the couch too.
  • Starting out on my permanent workbench build, I first built out the corners of the wheel wells to make usable spaces in the areas around the wells and then cut my corner posts to fit the space I had in mind.
  • I just really enjoy this clean kerf through my maple bench leg in the window light.
  • I framed up the workbench with maple and used mortise and tenon joinery for the members. This piece is one of the horizontal members.
  • The mortises for my bench frame were hand cut using chisels, although as you can see here I did use a router to cut a dado to hold the panels in the sides. The bolt hole visible here is to hold it to the tracks in the bus wall.
  • Nothing in this bus is straight or square, so each piece is custom cut for length and angles, including the angles on top. I also wanted a little thicker leg to support my bench vise, so I doubled up the top portion of that leg. The sides have dados to accept 3/4in floorboards as side panels, with a little wiggle room there for seasonal expansion.
  • The mortises for the leg vise took me a few days to get right. This is the first time I've installed a vise like this, and there was quite a bit of testing and tweaking before I finally got it flowing smoothly, but once everything was right it became instantly amazing and might be my favorite thing about the whole bus.
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