A Homemade Grooming Table for Dummies - The Freelance Files MMCXLVI

DIY grooming table

Some of the freelance writers who infested the original eHow.com in the site's earliest days developed a technique that served their bank accounts well, although it rarely served the web surfers who stumbled over their output. Simply put, when asked a how-to question, the contributor (as eHow called them) would find a blog describing doing the project and just reword it. eHow put a stop to this in later years because blogs are notoriously unauthoritative, but early examples are still out there. Today's nominee is one such example, "HOW TO MAKE A HOMEMADE DOG GROOMING TABLE" [CAPS theirs] by returning DotD J. Lang Wood (moved from eHow to Mom.com, a website Leaf Group appears to have sold off).

Wood, who fancied herself pet-friendly, did the research on table height; explaining that big dogs need a low table and small dogs a high table. Duh. After than, she basically scraped her impression of how someone had built a DIY grooming table, mostly from looking at the picture reproduced above.

As is typical of eHow instructions for DIY projects, Wood glossed over details and shared some common misconceptions, one of appears in a (not) surprising number of freelancer how-tos involving building anything from wood:

"Purchase 3/4-inch-thick sheet of plywood at a lumber store and have it cut to 26 inches wide and between 40 and 48 inches long."

Besides the irritating inflation of "buy" to "purchase" (a hallmark of people attempting to sound authoritative), Wood does not seem to know that you can buy "project panels" that are 24 by 48 inches; no paying Lowe's to cut it for you, if they even will.

J. Lang also wants you to "purchase" some folding table legs and,

"Attach the legs to the plywood tabletop with 3/4-inch wood screws. Make sure the legs are held securely to the top sheet..."

Wood apparently didn't notice that, in the picture she used as a reference, the legs are bolted to the top (you can see the nuts and ends of the bolts on the bottom view). The consensus around the staff here is that the legs would probably fall off the second time you unfolded the table if you just attached them with ¾-inch screws!

Of course, all of that pales alongside the utter stupidity of J. Lang's first step, which is,

"Purchase a pair of collapsable [sic] table legs at a hardware store. These are widely available and typically cost less than $20. Have the hardware store or a lumber store cut the legs to 24 inches in length."

Well, A), the legs are not "widely available," especially at the quoted price (Home Depot has them for about $30; you can buy them at Amazon for as little as $30 and as much as $170); and B), here the whole "have a lumber store cut" them business is utterly ridiculous, considering how such a set of legs works and what material they're made from!

All that's not to mention the flimsiness of a simple sheet of plywood. So we won't. Suffice it to say that it's obvious that not only had our Dumbass of the Day never made a grooming table like this, she likely had never made anything from building materials at all. Feh.

DDIY - FURNITURE