A Cookbook Stand, part I

Recently, you know, I had surgery (I still don't know how to say that without it sounding like "darling, I simply had to do something about these wrinkles!"  It was actually a benign nerve sheathe tumor near the base of my neck that they removed, btw).  As I got to the end of my official convalescence (which was about 3 weeks long), I was super antsy.  I'd go to the store and just wander around.  I pulled a lot of daylilies.  I started cooking more.  I started cooking out of cookbooks more.  And what does a cookbook want?

A stand, of course!  

So I hunted around and found a cheap-ish one on Amazon.  But the reviews said that it was...well....cheap.  I figured my options were to buy the cheap thing, replace the hinge, and possibly beef up the joints, or dig into my pile of scrap wood and make some sawdust.  Guess which one I chose.  You know, given that I obviously drew up plans to build my own.

The plan here is basically a knock-off of the cheap stand I didn't want to buy, except that I'm pretty sure the cheap version is made of 1/2" thick stock (or thinner), while mine is 3/4" stock out of my scrap pile.  With a maple header and kick stand.  And it's such a piece of cake, right?  I mean, how could this project take more than a couple of hours, right?  I cut all the pieces to length within about 20 minutes, no sweat  :)  :)  :)  :D

That's my fancy-schmancy Kreg jig, but I still sometimes use my old stand-by, the $20 version:

The nice thing about the fancy Kreg is that you don't have to change your set-up in order to drill two holes.

My wonderful drill that I love took both hands to maneuver during this project.  While the spirit was willing, the poor right arm could barely lift, let alone aim and steady that big drill (it's not that big, I was just really weak still).

Here's the pre-drilled pocket holes, all of the pieces set to be assembled.  The the group on the right makes up the base, the group on the left is the riser plus the stop that the cookbook will rest on and the little kick stand.

The book rest is a bit of scrap left from the mystery wood from the Habitat for Humanity ReStore that I used on Dave's dumbbell table.  The maple is leftover from Kathy's cabinet.  I love that this book stand already has history to it!

These bits went together pretty easily.  You just line up the edges and clamp the joint flat, then drive the screws.  I was able to use my little cordless drill for this...much easier on my arm.

But I didn't want to have big Kreg holes on the bottom of the book support, so I glued that piece into place...

...and countersunk screws from the back.  And then all that remains is to paint and attach a couple of hinges!

Now, at this point you're going, "So easy! I could totally whip this baby out in an hour or two!"  Yeah...so I thought, too.  But the reality is, at least when you're ME, you take f o r e v e r to do projects like this.  Especially when your right arm is pretending it's never lifted more than 10 pounds at a time before.  And then it gets to be 10pm the night before you have to be up at 4:30am, and you're looking at your 1-2 hour project that has already taken the entire day to get to this point and "just one more half hour and it'll be finished!", and you simply must listen to that still, small voice at the back of your conscience.

Honey.  Put the drill down.  The day is over, the project can wait, it's not like you're gonna need it while you're at work.

And so I had to walk away from it for a week.  Luckily, it was a very busy week, and I didn't have much time to pine for my stalled project (get it? get it? hehehee, pine!).  And as it turns out, the time remaining on this project was a bit more than I had bargained for.