Lazy Man's Entertainment Tower

Boys and Girls,

 

Another project I drafted up a while back from my LJ past life, that was posted in March,2017 and somehow managed to slip through the cracks

of my Churchill workshop foundation and missed gracing the pages of Craftisian.

I’m surprised I have coloured photos as it was built in my old workshop, before I was extradited to downtown Churchill way back in 2010.

I used my Frontline panel clamps to make the wide sides/shelves.  They were expensive, however, it is one set of jigs that have returned their cost many fold... there was a time when I sub-contracted to woodies in making panels up to 1m wide... at a fair cost, but had heaps of production lines.

Hell, I still have a VCR and a double tape deck in that tower,

 

Again, I’m trying to break up my flow of puzzles, so I don’t mind if you eagerly skip over this in anticipation of the next puzzle installment…. but for all you masochists, the following is “the skinny”.

 

----------------------------------------- ooooOOOO From LJ OOOOooooo --------------------------------------------- 

 

Having just expanded my home entertainment system prompted me to pen this article.  The build may not be inspirational but I thought the concept may be worth an honorary mention.

Do you remember when you wanted to swoon to the dulcet tones of Glen Miller or shock the kids with a dose of Tom Lehrer or imbibe in something more up tempo like Arlo Guthrie's tale of Alice's Restaurant back in the days when Dr. Pepper was still a Sargent administering to Lonely Hearts before it was Clubbed by a Band of political correctionists.  You suddenly discover that one of the wires has come adrift somewhere at the back of your stereo system preventing you from giving your beloved neighbours another reason for noise complaint.  Did you find you were faced with one of those tight manoeuvres that even an anorexic mouse has to breathe in to get through?

 

You spend an hour tracking down that loose wire only to find that it originally wasn't loose at all and you now have two loose ends that now somehow need to be reconnected. Reminds me of those adds on TV where the little lady of the house struggles up some stairs with a recalcitrant garden hose tangled around her ankles.   We don't have that trouble at our house as I got my builder to move the upstairs downstairs and now the missus just struggles in a horizontal plane.

 

Anyway back to my story.  In the days when a decent entertainment  system consisted of a turntable, a tape deck, a tuner and an amplifier with two front speakers and if you won a lottery third division could afford rear speakers, with second division front speakers and if you hit the jackpot of first div. a sub-woofer.  To further complicate things some jerk invented a video player and all us other jerks had to add that to our system.  Well back in those days Wi-Fi was something that you smoked and its smokeless trail was jet to be discovered, so all these components had to speak to each other through some sort of cabled umbilical cords that was discretely hidden behind the electronic boxes to stop the kids and visitors from tripping over them (litigation was unheard of in those days… even from belligerent neighbours).  Then when one cable came lose you practically had to knock out the back wall to get to the rear of the system… or... spend the next week rearranging the components to permit front access to the back panels.  I'm sure there's an "I remember" thought bubble over most of us mere males' heads as we reminisce.

 

Being a lazy Alex, I resorted to another namesake called a lazy Susan.  I built this tower and mounted it on the aforementioned turntable.

 

It was only made out of pine, but lovingly with staggered dovetails and sliding dovetailed shelves.

 

Hadn’t graduated to a range of long reach clamps at the time, so I had to improvise,

 

Drowned in five coats black stain and finished off with water based satin varnish.

Ok, I was a tad mean with the stain but only the spiders and cockroaches can dob me in to the rabbi,

 

But it left the TV stand sort of "clutter free"... 

and room for plenty of puzzles,

 

Once the tower was dutifully placed in a corner of the room (as I didn't have a round Colosseum), I could slip all my electronics onto the shelves and then with a dexterous twist of my muscular wrist, turned it around to so I can readily tackle the chore of cable crossovers upon the back panels whenever I wanted, without the complimentary access hassles.

 

The wiring at the back (and surroundings) is still like a dog's breakfast, however, now it's easy to get to and more resembles a generous canine serving out of a can.

 

All I can say is that for a Wi-Fi house, all this cabling is pretty sick… and I don't mean that, in yuppie speak.

 

Nevertheless,  the other day (or the other month… if you read this in a month's time), it was a breeze to add a new TV set top box to my existing system by the simple access to the back of the units to tackle the wiring without too many blown circuits and frizzy hair-do's.… between the occasional casks of vino of course.

 

And to think… now days with Wi-Fi, all one really needs is a 140mm x 70mm footprint (I have small feet) somewhere in your house, for one of those obnoxious iPhone/Android thingy-me-jiggers to rest on, to get you and the missus toe tapping to the embarrassment of your aged kids that refuse to leave home… and without the need for wires to boot (no not wires on the kids… they just need handcuffs)…

 

 

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