Legerdemain and PFM – 1

“The definition of mastery is knowing how to disguise your mistakes.”

Another day, another puzzle.  The drawer in this cabinet will not stay in the rails.  The width is off by a full 1/2″, which makes me wonder how anyone used it at all in the past.

A closer inspection reveals that the center support, to which the drawer rails are screwed, has come undone from the underside of the counter top, and has dropped half an inch.  The 15 gauge brads that were used, coiled into uselessness upon impact, making me wonder how this held together, ever, at all.

The primary difference between a puzzle and a mystery is that a puzzle is something that awaits a part in order to be complete, whereas a mystery has an unknown number of working components and forces, and might never be solved.

This cabinet is a mystery.   How to repair it is not.

This is a pipe clamp.  It is a fixture you can buy at a hardware store that screws on to ordinary black pipe, and enables you to apply pressure (by using the thumbscrew) to whatever you are building.  While glue dries, or while you pre-drill screw holes, for instance.

The red arrows show the direction of force when the screw is tightened. (Click on the images to see them full size.)

By taking the clamp pieces off and reversing them, you can reverse the direction of force, so the clamp pushes things apart instead of holding them together.

In this application, it was just what the doctor ordered to lift and support the center strut while I drilled and screwed two steel support brackets into place.

I put the clamp against the bottom shelf and aligned the thumbscrew with the workpiece and turned the thumbscrew until the center strut was lifted back home.

It also helps to have an angle attachment for my drill, so I did not need to “angle in” to the workpiece because the drill would not fit into the space where the drawer normally goes.

Lastly, the brackets are in place, and the cabinet is saved, and Camille is happy… for now.