**Painting and Preparation**

I tried painting one of them white, it looked all right but not great, so I think I'm just going to have to be really careful these things actually fit super super well and they turned out pretty good. I just have to be really careful to make sure that I get all of the little particles and the dust and the acrylic pieces cuz they really show up once you get light on them. So now that I've got the shelves in place, I need to figure out how to get the figures to actually stand on them. I've got two ideas for this: 3D printing and laser cutting.

**Designing the Stands**

I went into Fusion and modeled up a little stand for the figures to go on. I measured the bottom of the hole in their foot and then figured out exactly how to make it fit really well, which works great for one figure, but I've got seven shelves that are about 27 inches wide, so this would take a really long time to 3D print all these. Using a laser cutter was not even on my radar for this because I needed a little post for the figure to actually stand on. Then I remembered that at one point I had to buy a whole bunch of acrylic rods and it turns out that these rods are actually the same size as the hole on the bottom of the foot. With a little bit of testing, I figured out the exact size hole that I need to cut in a flat piece of acrylic so I can put this little post in it and then use it as a stand.

**Challenges with Laser Cutting**

This didn't work because the laser melts the end of the acrylic which is what you want but it also kind of mushrooms it out and it messed up my tolerances. All of these little pieces are just slightly too big to go into the hole, oh my gosh! Come on! Luckily, I think I can do the exact same thing at the band saw, and they'll probably fit just fine that worked way better. So I still had to use the adhesive to bond all these pieces together and do the other 13.

**Finishing the Stands**

Finally got all the stands done and they actually look fantastic. But before I put these in there, I've got to have a way to close up the case. Now, to do that, I'm going to make a sliding window that goes on the front of that. The first thing I have to do is cut down the same acrylic into a big window that'll go on the front and then cut some more of that trim that I showed you earlier to make a three-sided frame to go around the window.

**Cutting Out the Frame**

I mitered all four pieces of the frame just like the other one, but on these I added an eighth of an inch MDF piece on the back except that it doesn't go all the way to the edge. I've got a small overhang here and that is so that I can accept the piece of clear acrylic to go behind it and be locked in place. I'm going to put three sides of this frame onto the door and the fourth one will be attached to the plastic, so I can slide it in and out to open and close the case.

**Gluing the Frame**

It is kind of tough to glue acrylic to other things, so I'm going to use E6000 for this. It's a great adhesive for attaching pretty much anything to anything else. I scuffed up the surface a little bit so it'll grab, then I'm going to put bead here stick the thing down and then clamp it and then it'll probably take 15 or 20 hours to really dry.

**The Finished Window**

The window is all done but before we slide it in and cover up the case, we've got to get out my old figures and fill it up. I'm the first to admit that this is not something a lot of people are probably going to want to do. It's definitely a bob type project, but I really like the fact that I get to look at my collection and no matter what it is that you have, that you want to look at you could build a case like this into the door to show it off.

**Conclusion**

I hope this gave you some cool ideas for future projects. Thanks for watching now it's time for bloopers!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enthis piece right here is now bent I don't know if that's actually going to matter or not but I didn't really expect it so this actually didn't work oh my gosh come on whoa this might have been a bad idea think back with me when you were a kid there was a toy or a group of toys that you absolutely loved the thing that just gave you Joy every time you saw it or played with it or maybe it was a movie or a show that you wanted to watch over and over and over because you just love the way it looked and it made you look at things differently when you think about those things the feeling that you get is Nostalgia and I love it well I spend a lot of time making things that give me that feeling or making Furniture to display stuff that gives me that feeling personally I think it's super important to surround yourself with stuff that has influenced you and things that inspire you but sometimes those things are kind of hard to display some of these things are really small and if you stack a whole bunch of them up on a deep shelf you won't actually see any of them so I came up with kind of a destructive solution for this first thing we need to do is cut a hole in my door so h core doors are interesting obviously they're Hollow but I expected there to be a little bit more inside than there is uh there's not very much this might have been a bad idea I don't know if you can really see it but this piece right here is now bent it's not straight across and if I put a straight edge across you can see there's like a high spot here and then it bends away from it so I don't know if that's actually going to matter or not but I didn't really expect it but regardless I think it'll be okay I haven't told you what the plan is behind me is my shop right there is a bathroom right behind you is the rest of my basement this is the door that goes into my shop and honestly it's left open most of the time and so I thought why not use it I decided to cut a hole in the door and instead of putting in a window there like you would in a lot of places I'm going to put in a really thin display case and this would actually be a perfect depth for Hot Wheels or mini figs or action figures anything that just needs to be kind of one depth and not stacked up on a shelf now because I'm me I did go into Fusion 360 and actually model the door and modeled the opening and modeled the shelves basically just to make sure that it would fit and to figure out how many shelves I could fit in here but I'm not really going to go by the model I just wanted to make sure that it would work and kind of visualize it which is a great thing to use Fusion for but I'm actually going to just build it in place and the first thing we need is a new interior frame to strengthen this thing up okay so my original idea was to make an MDF frame that would go in this opening would have some shelves across it and then would have a solid back so you'd really only be able to see it from this side but now that I've got it here I think it might need lights in it and to do that the sides need to allow light to come through because it's not going to shine down so I think I have to do the sides out of acrylic instead I guess H my plan is changing in real time man I can complicate anything but basically here's what I think we're going to do keep MDF for the bottom and then the sides are going to be a piece of kind of thicker acrylic or plexiglass or whatever I can find and then on the back side of that hidden in the door is going to be a black surface with some LEDs on top of it so the LEDs will shine through that from each side into the stuff that's in the middle plus each one of the shelves is going to be acrylic so that edge light should light the shelves too I think it's going to look really cool and if the lights don't work you're still going to have plenty of light from the room that's going to shine on the front of it so it'll look good either way the only question is about getting power into the door but luckily like I said this door doesn't really open and close very much so having a power cord plug into the back of a door is not a big deal although it's kind of weird I've got like a stash of LEDs that I didn't use from before this is actually a rigid under cabinet LED strip and it's in pieces so you can snap them together and chain as many as you need to and it turns out that three of these is actually the perfect height and thickness to put in inside this door and I've got enough of these that I can put them on both sides and plug them into the same Outlet so I'm going to try to actually cut this wire put a port in the back side of the door so I can plug the door in when I need it and if not I can unplug it and everything will be fine I'm going to mount these on the inside and then once I get them mounted we'll see if it's enough light or too much light or whatever because I put the LEDs in the sides I have to make the side panels clear so that light can come through but those side panels also need to be thick enough to hold shelves I need to have little tiny Doos in them so that I can put acrylic shelves in between them so I've got some quarin material here some plexiglass that I'm going to use I'm going to cut strips for each side and then go back and cut little Doos in them so that I have a place to put the shelves one thing I did want to mention you absolutely can cut acrylic with a regular table saw blade and it works but it just kind of like breaks off little pieces and sometimes the edges chip out so at one point I ended up buying a plexiglass and plastic blade has much finer teeth and it makes a huge difference when you're cutting this stuff you get a much better finish and even though it's a little bit of an expensive blade it is worth the cost and it's worth the time that it takes to swap it out when you want to cut cut a bunch most acrylics come with a protective covering on them this one happens to be white usually it's clear but you can see that the acrylic is very clear I'm going to make it frosted just by sanding the back side of it this is the easiest way to do it you don't have to worry about using chemicals to try to frost it or add something to it just sand it now that I've got all four sides of this thing I need to lock it in place I'm going to be gluing it to this surface which wouldn't really hold it but eventually we're going to have a frame on the front and the back that actually is going to keep everything in place for now I just need to make sure it fits while I'm doing that I also wanted to tell you about Orange Friday which was actually yesterday but the deal goes through this Monday Orange Friday is when we give 25% off everything that we sell all of our digital plans all of our merch all of our online courses everything is 25% off using the Code Orange Friday 25 now this is a great chance for you to get some plans to build some stuff or maybe give an online course as a gift to somebody in your life whatever you're going to do with it it's a great time of year to get a really good deal on all the stuff that we sell and we would really appreciate it so if any of that is interesting to you go to I like.com use the Code Orange Friday 25 between now and Monday and you'll get 25% off everything thanks for the support we really appreciate it let's see how these look it looks really nice actually it's a good amount of light I think it's going to spread across inside the frame really well you can still see the individual LEDs if you're looking directly at them but it's not really a big deal plus they're right up against the back of the Plexi and to have really good diffusion you actually need a little bit of a gap in there so the light can spread can't do that here and it's not a big deal but next up we need to make a back to actually cover this up so we can start to build the inside of the case okay for the back panel I'm going to use a piece of 8in MDF just because I have a big scrap of it but what I actually wanted to use was some of that whiteboard material you can get a full 4x8 sheet of it for like 13 bucks and it's brown on one side but whiteboard material on the other side and that would be great for the back of a door cuz then you have a built-in whiteboard but I don't want to spend money on so I'm just going to use this the world is happening why whoa I didn't get that tight enough now this panel can just go onto the back of the door and then we're going to cover up the edges with this trim it's kind of a general purpose PVC trims real flexible easy to cut and cheap so I'm just going to wrap it around the outside of this MIT are the corners and then just like stick it on the back of the door it'll look good okay so it's starting to come together I think it turned out really well I need to paint it though it needs to have a kind of not bright color but like a bold color on the back so that everything on it that's lit will be standing out so I'm going to paint that but next up I actually need to work on the shelves those shelves have to fit in these little Doos they have to be really shallow and really long so there's kind of a problem there but I think I have a solution to make them strong enough over a span like this this is the material I'm going to use it's pretty thin pretty flexible it's less than an eighth of an inch and once you cut it into strips it actually gets a lot more flexible and would totally not work by itself in this situation but once you glue the two pieces together in different orientations they make a t kind of like an I beam or a t beam or whatever and it's a lot stronger this piece is more than strong enough to span the entire thing even with a little bit of weight on it and these figures are actually really light so I have to cut a whole bunch of strips and then we can talk about gluing them together now the only downside of using the blade that's made especially for acrylics and Plastics is that it's super mess it makes These Fine little fuzzy things that fly all over you and get in your pockets and everything so it's kind of annoying but if you use a regular blade then it just shoots sharp hot pieces of plastic at you so it's a trade-off uh this is with dust collection on so you know now you could use CA glue or super glue to actually glue these pieces together and it would work but it's basically filling the space in between two pieces of plastic this acrylic cement is thinner than water so so it fills every tiny little Gap and instead of just gluing them together it actually chemically bonds them together so they become one piece it's fast and it's much stronger I did mess a couple of these up and I wanted to point out why because it kind of like Wast a piece basically because it's clear if you get the acrylic cement on any of the surfaces that you want to stay clear they kind of cloud it up and you can see where it goes you have to be really careful about just getting it in the joint especially once you start adding light to the outside of it all of those imperfections really pop out and it just looks bad I tried sanding one of them just to kind of evenly diffuse it didn't look very good I tried painting one of them white it looked all right but not great so I think I'm just going to have to be really careful these things actually fit super super well and they turned out pretty good I just have to be really careful to make sure that I get all of the little particles and the dust and the acrylic pieces cuz they really show up once you get light on them so now that I've got the shelves in place I need to figure out how to get the figures to actually stand on them so I need to make some individual stands or some stands that can hold a bunch of figures at once I've got two ideas so the two ideas are 3D printing and laser cutting basically I went into fusion and modeled up a little stand for the figures to go on I measured the bottom of the hole in their foot and then figured out exactly how to make it fit really well and this works great for one figure but I've got seven shelves that are about 27 in wide so 3D printing these would take a really long time at first using a laser cutter was not even on my radar for this because I needed a little post for the figure to actually stand on then I remembered that at one point I had to buy a whole bunch of acrylic rods and it turns out that these rods are actually the same size as the hole on the bottom of the foot so with a little bit of testing I figured out the exact size hole that I need to cut in a flat piece of acrylic so I can put this little Post in it and then use it as a stand and to do that I have to cut a whole bunch of these and then cut a bunch of these into tiny pieces and glue them together so this didn't work the laser melts the end of the acrylic which is what you want but it also kind of like mushrooms it out and it messed up my tolerances so all of these little pieces are just slightly too big to go into the hole oh my gosh Come on luckily I think I can do the exact same thing at the band saw and they'll probably fit just fine that worked way better so I still got to use the adhesive to bond all these pieces together and do the other 13 and then I can actually start putting the figures in the case finally got all the stands done and they actually look fantastic but before I put these in there I've got to have a way to close up the case now to do that I'm going to make a sliding window that goes on the front of that the first thing I have to do is cut down the same acrylic into a big window that'll go on the front and then cut some more of that trim that I showed you earlier to make a three-sided frame to go around the window I mitered all four pieces of the frame just like the other one but on these I added an eighth of an inch MDF piece on the back except that it doesn't go all the way to the edge I've got a small overhang here and that is so that I can accept the piece of clear acrylic to go behind it and be locked in place I'm going to put three sides of this Frame onto the door and the fourth one will be attached to the plastic so I can slide it in and out to open and close the case it is kind of tough to glue acrylic to other things I'm going to use E6000 for this it's a great adhesive for attaching pretty much anything to anything else I scuffed up the surface a little bit so it'll grab I'm going to put bead here stick the thing down and then clamp it and then it'll probably take I don't know 15 or 20 hours to really dry the window is all done but before we slide it in and cover up the case we've got to get out my old figures and fill it up now I'm the first to admit that this is not something a lot people are probably going to want to do it's definitely a bob type project but I really like the fact that I get to look at my collection and no matter what it is that you have that you want to look at you could build a case like this into the door to show it off I think the more important thing is that your home is for you and you can make every single part of it work for you including doors either way I hope this gave you some cool ideas for some future project thanks for watching now it's time for bloopers and the first thing we need to do is cut a hole in my door and this stuff is thick enough that I should be able to cut a dang it wow so I'm going to use some quarter inch uh L I'm going to cut some strips and the reason that I'm using quarter inch wow okay I'm just going to start over againthis piece right here is now bent I don't know if that's actually going to matter or not but I didn't really expect it so this actually didn't work oh my gosh come on whoa this might have been a bad idea think back with me when you were a kid there was a toy or a group of toys that you absolutely loved the thing that just gave you Joy every time you saw it or played with it or maybe it was a movie or a show that you wanted to watch over and over and over because you just love the way it looked and it made you look at things differently when you think about those things the feeling that you get is Nostalgia and I love it well I spend a lot of time making things that give me that feeling or making Furniture to display stuff that gives me that feeling personally I think it's super important to surround yourself with stuff that has influenced you and things that inspire you but sometimes those things are kind of hard to display some of these things are really small and if you stack a whole bunch of them up on a deep shelf you won't actually see any of them so I came up with kind of a destructive solution for this first thing we need to do is cut a hole in my door so h core doors are interesting obviously they're Hollow but I expected there to be a little bit more inside than there is uh there's not very much this might have been a bad idea I don't know if you can really see it but this piece right here is now bent it's not straight across and if I put a straight edge across you can see there's like a high spot here and then it bends away from it so I don't know if that's actually going to matter or not but I didn't really expect it but regardless I think it'll be okay I haven't told you what the plan is behind me is my shop right there is a bathroom right behind you is the rest of my basement this is the door that goes into my shop and honestly it's left open most of the time and so I thought why not use it I decided to cut a hole in the door and instead of putting in a window there like you would in a lot of places I'm going to put in a really thin display case and this would actually be a perfect depth for Hot Wheels or mini figs or action figures anything that just needs to be kind of one depth and not stacked up on a shelf now because I'm me I did go into Fusion 360 and actually model the door and modeled the opening and modeled the shelves basically just to make sure that it would fit and to figure out how many shelves I could fit in here but I'm not really going to go by the model I just wanted to make sure that it would work and kind of visualize it which is a great thing to use Fusion for but I'm actually going to just build it in place and the first thing we need is a new interior frame to strengthen this thing up okay so my original idea was to make an MDF frame that would go in this opening would have some shelves across it and then would have a solid back so you'd really only be able to see it from this side but now that I've got it here I think it might need lights in it and to do that the sides need to allow light to come through because it's not going to shine down so I think I have to do the sides out of acrylic instead I guess H my plan is changing in real time man I can complicate anything but basically here's what I think we're going to do keep MDF for the bottom and then the sides are going to be a piece of kind of thicker acrylic or plexiglass or whatever I can find and then on the back side of that hidden in the door is going to be a black surface with some LEDs on top of it so the LEDs will shine through that from each side into the stuff that's in the middle plus each one of the shelves is going to be acrylic so that edge light should light the shelves too I think it's going to look really cool and if the lights don't work you're still going to have plenty of light from the room that's going to shine on the front of it so it'll look good either way the only question is about getting power into the door but luckily like I said this door doesn't really open and close very much so having a power cord plug into the back of a door is not a big deal although it's kind of weird I've got like a stash of LEDs that I didn't use from before this is actually a rigid under cabinet LED strip and it's in pieces so you can snap them together and chain as many as you need to and it turns out that three of these is actually the perfect height and thickness to put in inside this door and I've got enough of these that I can put them on both sides and plug them into the same Outlet so I'm going to try to actually cut this wire put a port in the back side of the door so I can plug the door in when I need it and if not I can unplug it and everything will be fine I'm going to mount these on the inside and then once I get them mounted we'll see if it's enough light or too much light or whatever because I put the LEDs in the sides I have to make the side panels clear so that light can come through but those side panels also need to be thick enough to hold shelves I need to have little tiny Doos in them so that I can put acrylic shelves in between them so I've got some quarin material here some plexiglass that I'm going to use I'm going to cut strips for each side and then go back and cut little Doos in them so that I have a place to put the shelves one thing I did want to mention you absolutely can cut acrylic with a regular table saw blade and it works but it just kind of like breaks off little pieces and sometimes the edges chip out so at one point I ended up buying a plexiglass and plastic blade has much finer teeth and it makes a huge difference when you're cutting this stuff you get a much better finish and even though it's a little bit of an expensive blade it is worth the cost and it's worth the time that it takes to swap it out when you want to cut cut a bunch most acrylics come with a protective covering on them this one happens to be white usually it's clear but you can see that the acrylic is very clear I'm going to make it frosted just by sanding the back side of it this is the easiest way to do it you don't have to worry about using chemicals to try to frost it or add something to it just sand it now that I've got all four sides of this thing I need to lock it in place I'm going to be gluing it to this surface which wouldn't really hold it but eventually we're going to have a frame on the front and the back that actually is going to keep everything in place for now I just need to make sure it fits while I'm doing that I also wanted to tell you about Orange Friday which was actually yesterday but the deal goes through this Monday Orange Friday is when we give 25% off everything that we sell all of our digital plans all of our merch all of our online courses everything is 25% off using the Code Orange Friday 25 now this is a great chance for you to get some plans to build some stuff or maybe give an online course as a gift to somebody in your life whatever you're going to do with it it's a great time of year to get a really good deal on all the stuff that we sell and we would really appreciate it so if any of that is interesting to you go to I like.com use the Code Orange Friday 25 between now and Monday and you'll get 25% off everything thanks for the support we really appreciate it let's see how these look it looks really nice actually it's a good amount of light I think it's going to spread across inside the frame really well you can still see the individual LEDs if you're looking directly at them but it's not really a big deal plus they're right up against the back of the Plexi and to have really good diffusion you actually need a little bit of a gap in there so the light can spread can't do that here and it's not a big deal but next up we need to make a back to actually cover this up so we can start to build the inside of the case okay for the back panel I'm going to use a piece of 8in MDF just because I have a big scrap of it but what I actually wanted to use was some of that whiteboard material you can get a full 4x8 sheet of it for like 13 bucks and it's brown on one side but whiteboard material on the other side and that would be great for the back of a door cuz then you have a built-in whiteboard but I don't want to spend money on so I'm just going to use this the world is happening why whoa I didn't get that tight enough now this panel can just go onto the back of the door and then we're going to cover up the edges with this trim it's kind of a general purpose PVC trims real flexible easy to cut and cheap so I'm just going to wrap it around the outside of this MIT are the corners and then just like stick it on the back of the door it'll look good okay so it's starting to come together I think it turned out really well I need to paint it though it needs to have a kind of not bright color but like a bold color on the back so that everything on it that's lit will be standing out so I'm going to paint that but next up I actually need to work on the shelves those shelves have to fit in these little Doos they have to be really shallow and really long so there's kind of a problem there but I think I have a solution to make them strong enough over a span like this this is the material I'm going to use it's pretty thin pretty flexible it's less than an eighth of an inch and once you cut it into strips it actually gets a lot more flexible and would totally not work by itself in this situation but once you glue the two pieces together in different orientations they make a t kind of like an I beam or a t beam or whatever and it's a lot stronger this piece is more than strong enough to span the entire thing even with a little bit of weight on it and these figures are actually really light so I have to cut a whole bunch of strips and then we can talk about gluing them together now the only downside of using the blade that's made especially for acrylics and Plastics is that it's super mess it makes These Fine little fuzzy things that fly all over you and get in your pockets and everything so it's kind of annoying but if you use a regular blade then it just shoots sharp hot pieces of plastic at you so it's a trade-off uh this is with dust collection on so you know now you could use CA glue or super glue to actually glue these pieces together and it would work but it's basically filling the space in between two pieces of plastic this acrylic cement is thinner than water so so it fills every tiny little Gap and instead of just gluing them together it actually chemically bonds them together so they become one piece it's fast and it's much stronger I did mess a couple of these up and I wanted to point out why because it kind of like Wast a piece basically because it's clear if you get the acrylic cement on any of the surfaces that you want to stay clear they kind of cloud it up and you can see where it goes you have to be really careful about just getting it in the joint especially once you start adding light to the outside of it all of those imperfections really pop out and it just looks bad I tried sanding one of them just to kind of evenly diffuse it didn't look very good I tried painting one of them white it looked all right but not great so I think I'm just going to have to be really careful these things actually fit super super well and they turned out pretty good I just have to be really careful to make sure that I get all of the little particles and the dust and the acrylic pieces cuz they really show up once you get light on them so now that I've got the shelves in place I need to figure out how to get the figures to actually stand on them so I need to make some individual stands or some stands that can hold a bunch of figures at once I've got two ideas so the two ideas are 3D printing and laser cutting basically I went into fusion and modeled up a little stand for the figures to go on I measured the bottom of the hole in their foot and then figured out exactly how to make it fit really well and this works great for one figure but I've got seven shelves that are about 27 in wide so 3D printing these would take a really long time at first using a laser cutter was not even on my radar for this because I needed a little post for the figure to actually stand on then I remembered that at one point I had to buy a whole bunch of acrylic rods and it turns out that these rods are actually the same size as the hole on the bottom of the foot so with a little bit of testing I figured out the exact size hole that I need to cut in a flat piece of acrylic so I can put this little Post in it and then use it as a stand and to do that I have to cut a whole bunch of these and then cut a bunch of these into tiny pieces and glue them together so this didn't work the laser melts the end of the acrylic which is what you want but it also kind of like mushrooms it out and it messed up my tolerances so all of these little pieces are just slightly too big to go into the hole oh my gosh Come on luckily I think I can do the exact same thing at the band saw and they'll probably fit just fine that worked way better so I still got to use the adhesive to bond all these pieces together and do the other 13 and then I can actually start putting the figures in the case finally got all the stands done and they actually look fantastic but before I put these in there I've got to have a way to close up the case now to do that I'm going to make a sliding window that goes on the front of that the first thing I have to do is cut down the same acrylic into a big window that'll go on the front and then cut some more of that trim that I showed you earlier to make a three-sided frame to go around the window I mitered all four pieces of the frame just like the other one but on these I added an eighth of an inch MDF piece on the back except that it doesn't go all the way to the edge I've got a small overhang here and that is so that I can accept the piece of clear acrylic to go behind it and be locked in place I'm going to put three sides of this Frame onto the door and the fourth one will be attached to the plastic so I can slide it in and out to open and close the case it is kind of tough to glue acrylic to other things I'm going to use E6000 for this it's a great adhesive for attaching pretty much anything to anything else I scuffed up the surface a little bit so it'll grab I'm going to put bead here stick the thing down and then clamp it and then it'll probably take I don't know 15 or 20 hours to really dry the window is all done but before we slide it in and cover up the case we've got to get out my old figures and fill it up now I'm the first to admit that this is not something a lot people are probably going to want to do it's definitely a bob type project but I really like the fact that I get to look at my collection and no matter what it is that you have that you want to look at you could build a case like this into the door to show it off I think the more important thing is that your home is for you and you can make every single part of it work for you including doors either way I hope this gave you some cool ideas for some future project thanks for watching now it's time for bloopers and the first thing we need to do is cut a hole in my door and this stuff is thick enough that I should be able to cut a dang it wow so I'm going to use some quarter inch uh L I'm going to cut some strips and the reason that I'm using quarter inch wow okay I'm just going to start over again\n"