John's Blog

Article #2 in a series.

I apologize for the poor quality of these images. My cheap phone has a cheap camera and I can’t stay still while taking pictures.
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Here’s the end result of the electric install. Of note:
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First - It’s easy to determine what color t-shirt I was wearing when I took the picture, it’s reflecting off the HVAC duct inside the wall.
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Second - In each box, the hole for the ground screw is in the back of the box centered on the right side. Those holes are between two pieces of lathe so installing the ground screw won’t hurt the lathe. It’s almost as if RACO put the hole in that location on purpose.
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The next step was to fabricate a piece of wood that’ll cover the Flexible Metal Conduit (FMC). It has to be thick enough to ‘raise the wall surface out to the front edge of the boxes’, so roughly an inch thick.
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I’ll make that piece of wood from a pine plank that’s as straight and true as it was when it was cut from a tree. Here’s the starting piece.
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I cut a piece to size, planed the splotchy wood stain off the good face. My band saw isn’t large enough to fit an 8-inch board so so I had to route the back down to the desired thickness of one inch. Then I used a scroll saw to cut an opening for each box.
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On the back of the piece I penciled a routing pattern that would create space for the small piece of conduit between the boxes, the two FMC clamps at the bottom of each box, and some of the FMC itself. Here’s what that looks like.
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And here’s the end result. I like how the left side of the piece of wood is parallel to the right side of the door molding. I doubt I could do that again.
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Next up: Add drywall compound to the wall between the molding and the piece of wood. And add a bevel or roman ogee or something fancier around the edge of the wood. And I need to plan the wiring. To be continued…