This is the original top for the book cabinet. In the text you may remember it turned out to be unworkable. These incredibly figured boards warped like a pretzel and I had to use the walnut for the finished piece. Maybe that was a good thing?
Here I'm scribing the final thickness of the interior shelf stock.
Working with highly figured wood can be a challenge. The key is sharp tools and in this case a bevel up jointing plane. It completely eliminated any tear-out.
A pile of shavings and a pause to catch my breathe. I posted this shot on my blog site last year and had more comments than ever before. I think that anyone who works with hand tools can relate to this…
Laying out door components in walnut and encouraging words scribbled across my bench top. I usually have to refinish the bench top twice a year due to the fact that I work in a basement shop it warps and twists with the seasons. With that in mind, I never think twice about writing small phrases and measurements or scribbling ideas and design elements across it. Bench graffiti?
Fine tuning the sticks and the door rabbet- The sticks can be a challenge but with patience and careful lay-out they’re well worth the effort.
This miniature card scraper is the perfect tool for refining these delicate pieces.
The glue up- I meant to saw some kerfs into the top through tenons to add some wedges after the glue up, but in my hast I simply forgot this step. They didn’t require them for structural integrity but would have added another small design element. This cabinet was built over a year ago and the top still hasn’t budged. I thought that using the wide walnut plank may have wreaked havoc on things and you may remember in the text I said I’d keep you updated. Most people would never consider using one wide plank for a cabinet top because of wood movement issues but I did in this case as a kind of experiment for my own curiosity and it’s as stable as the day I made it. Through these harsh Canadian winters and last summers Southern Ontario humidity my experiment worked. Thankfully…
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Good luck with them and happy shavings!
Hi. I just wanted to share my admiration for this project. My wife purchased your book for me as a Father’s Day gift, and I read and enjoyed it immensely. I was a bit surprised that the tone of the chapter about the bookshelf implied that this is one of your less favorite projects completed for the book. Honestly, this is my favorite piece. So much so that I’ve taken many of the design ideas and worked them into a cabinet design I’m doing for my wife. It will ostensibly be a very large jewelry cabinet, but it will be large enough that I refuse to call it a ‘jewelry box’. It’s just a cabinet. It will use your front door design, just slightly re-dimensioned, and the cabinet geometry is similar. I was going to do a top similar to yours, but in cherry rather than walnut. But after looking at the joinery in Sketchup for about a week, I finally broke down and changed the ‘sides through the top into a different wood species’ design. I’m just not brave enough. I suspect the sycamore (the case and doors will be in quarter-sawn sycamore) will end up cracking the cherry top if I do it that way. So I ended up adding a ‘sub-top’, also made out of sycamore, that I will then screw through up into the cherry top, with enough play in the screw holes to allow for different expansion of the sycamore and cherry.
Anyway, I just wanted to say thanks for all of the design ideas on this, and I look forward to your next book.