How to make a shime stand for under $50

This past weekend I made a stand for the shime. It was WAY easier to make than I thought it would be. I found the instructions on how to make the stand on the internet. I find everything on the internet. These instructions were clear and unintimidating. They included a list of everything you need and even included a couple of diagrams. I completed this project in an afternoon, in between cleaning the house and watching Whale Rider on KQED. You could spend hours and hours sanding it if that's your thing. Or you can make plans to sand later, like I will, maybe, someday.

I went to Home Depot for the materials, and wound up spending a little under fifty bucks for it all. A shime stand for under fifty bucks is not bad. I already had a saw (for making bachi!) and a power drill, and those were all the tools I needed, unless you call sandpaper a tool, in which case you would need some of that too. I could have spent less money if I had: a) not bought 10 feet of extra wood, which I only got because I wouldn't put it past myself to accidentally cut some important piece in half--with a handsaw. Yep. It would take me 5 minutes to cut and another 10 to realize that du-oh!, I wasn't supposed to cut the main part in half! (not that I did. Not this time anyway) b) I had measured the bolts I bought so that I bought two 2" bolts instead of one 2" bolt and one 3" bolt. That was just dumb. I even had a tape measure on me and everything. c) Home Depot only sells drywall screws by the pound. I had to get a pound of screws when I only needed 16. If you make this stand and want 16 drywall screws, let me know and I'll send em to you for FREE!

Anyhow. Making the stand was all about cutting the wood accurately and screwing everything into its correct place. The instructions make it really easy for you. My only additional suggestion would be to drill a pilot hole ahead of time where you want the screws to go. I learned this by watching the New Yankee Workshop on PBS. That guy is a genius with wood, and he has all the carpentry tools ever created. I know nothing about wood working but I love to watch the show because he'll start off by showing you some old antique sideboard, and then he'll go step by step cutting and drilling and dovetailing away and half an hour later he'll have completely re-created the whole thing. Amazing. But anyway, for a pilot hole you just find a drill bit a little smaller than the diameter of your screw and drill down. That way when you're actually drilling the screw into the wood, the wood is less likely to split. In which case you're screwed. Ha! Ha! Ha! Get it? Screwed? Ha! Ha! Ha! No seriously. We have a shime stand at the dojo that's practically worthless because it's all split from people trying to repair the thing only to split the wood. Now a whole leg will have to be replaced and that's out of the realm of my carpentry skills. The New Yankee guy could fix it easy.

The stand turned out beautiful, don't you think? Or as beautiful as a person who only has a saw and a drill gun could make. Maybe I'll stain it, or maybe just paint it black. But that requires me to get dirty and spill stuff that doesn't come out of the carpet. Did I mention that I built this shime on the living room floor? So easy. You should try it yourself.



The only problem I'm having with it right now is that I need to do a little tweaking to get it just right. As it is now, I have to open the stand wide in order to get the shime to sit at the right height. But this means that it's barely sitting on the stand and it seems a little more precarious than I would like. I may have to move the cross bars or cut off part of the legs. It's kind of complicated because when you change one thing, something else changes. The rope on the bottom controls how wide the top opens, but also the height. Do you see how this could get complicated? If I adjusted the rope so that the top opened only just wide enough so the drum fits good, will cutting off the legs change something else? I dunno. And then there's angles to deal with too. I'd like the legs to stand flat on the ground. Right now they're kind of poking down at an angle. Ack. That's more thinking than I want to do. Less thinking, more playing. That's what I say.