Forwarded from a private conversation with Dave Leader. I've gotten my trumpet back out. All kinds of long story there, but the relevant bit is that I made a shop built music stand out of junk. I recently decided to improve upon the original by replacing the "music rack" portion with a new one that's not as tall, and is much wider. It's 36" wide and 12" tall, made out of 3/4" oak plywood from a gigantic 8'x 7'x 18"ish library magazine rack I picked up for $2.50 and whacked apart to yield a supply of
18" wide, 8' long chunks of plywood.The music stand is a good use for the stuff. It's grafted onto the top of an old, broken coat rack through a bastardized combination of angle iron, walnut scraps, pop rivets and bolts. Uglier'n a dog's rear end, but it works, and it's the biggest ass bigass music stand this side of the Pecos. Wherever the Pecos is. I have a math retard question later on down.
(Dave said:)
No, it's glued. This is a more representative piece of ASCII art. (To the Wreck, what kind of joint is this anyway? Lapped dooflatchie, rabid rabbit, half rabbited rabbet or rabbeted rabbit or rebated rabeted rabbit with a half lapped dooflatchie, or what? I lost my encyclopedia of joinery.)
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Making it expandable would actually be rather involved. I've been thinking about cutting out the middle 24" and using dowels or something to reattach the "wings" but it's probably not worth it.
I'm trying to come up with something like that, yup. I'm thinking instead of legs going to the floor, which presents all kinds of bracing problems, I might just do something like this:
[][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][] [][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][] [][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][] [][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][] [][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][] [][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][] [][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][] ]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]] \ | / \ | / make the ends closer.Yeah. Wrap 3/4" oak plywood. That ought to be easy to bend. :)
Nah, I'll just have to wear my glasses. This thing is already a done deal, and it's fine. Actually, it's boingy, but it doesn't seem in any danger of falling over under its own weight, and it's not tippy. I have the top part leaned back at the shallowest angle I could cut without resorting to doing it freehand, which wasn't the same as the original angle at all.
Reminds me. Math retard here. The interface between the back of the stand and the coat rack portion is something like this:
(Part A is the piece of walnut with a slant on top that's bolted to the rest of the contraption that transitions from the lug on top of the coat rack onto the huge L shaped piece of plywood that holds the music.)
\\\ \\\ \ \\\ |\ \\\ | \ \\\ | \ \\\ | \ \\\ | | \\\ | A | \\\
I used my sliding bevel thing to measure the angle of the original piece, and it was 155 degrees outside, 25 degrees inside. Something close to that. Miter gauge does 25, but I couldn't figure out how to cut something at 25 to make it work for part A. Seems I ought to have been able to do some kind of inverted angle inverse tangent cosine cubed square root of Pi thing to make that come out right. The miter gauge doesn't do 155 obviously.
I settled for 60, which put quite a lot more leanback on the "music rack" part of the stand than I intended. Although, as it turns out, that was probably not a bad thing, as at least stuff has much less of a tendency to fall forward off of the thing now.
(I should post this to the Wreck.)
So where's the question buried in there? How do I cut a 155 degree angle on top of the pointy piece of wood without rigging up some contraption? Or do I need to rig up some contraption?
And heck, now that I've posted about this thing, now I feel like I oughta go make a prettier one. This one really is an ugly conglomeration of random pieces of junk, and no two pieces have the same finish (or lack thereof.) OTOH, it works, and it's already in service, and I'm brooooooooooooooooooooooooooke, and I don't have any wood anyway. This would be hard to make out of plywood (the legs and stuff).