Sunday, February 27, 2011

The doors...

Since I now have the cabinet case temporarily assembled I took the opportunity to create the door panels. The doors are also veneered both front and back, the front is ambrosia maple whereas the back is a soft maple which matches the interior of the cabinet. There are a few steps involved in veneering as I mentioned when I created the side panels, namely applying bake-ins to the substrate, levelling these bake-ins to match the level of the substrate and applying the veneers. Not quite so simple in reality though... the door panels need to be accurately measured to accommodate the bake-ins and the center part where the doors meet. There is an overlap here and it needs to be done correctly, hopefully I got it right.

Once the substrates are prepared and accurately measured, I spend a little time reviewing my choice of ambrosia veneers for the fronts of the doors. I place them in different orientations to confirm my original choice is correct, and if not change it around. This part is actually fun and I also managed to get a second opinion from someone else. Afterwards, some trimming of all the veneers to slightly overlap the substrates and off to the vacuum veneer press. A few hours later the first of the door panels is ready, aside from the next phase of trimming. At the very least I can begin to visualize how part of the cabinet will look like once completed. I'm confident I have the aesthetics right for each of the cabinets. I can safely say that a veneered cabinet can easily take twice the amount of work to create, in this case these cabinets are sort of hybrids, some solid panels, some veneered panels. You can see some of the tight curl exhibited in the front panels. It's kind of unusual to find figured wood with both interesting graphics and colours as well as other elements such as tight curl. The highly figured woods became veneers and in my small way I make very efficient use of some rare and not so rare woods by using them sparingly throughout the cabinet.

2 comments:

daiku said...

I see that jk book in the background. I miss him and his cantankerous personality. Beautiful shop. Is there a blog post with a tour and history?

Norman Pirollo said...

Oh that book.. it just happened to be sitting there :)

Earlier on in my blog, maybe 2-3 yrs ago I describe my studio with more photos. There is another level below what you see where I mill wood and have some machinery.
The upper level is where I do my hand work, it is quiet and dust free for the most part.

Yes, JK did have quite a personality, I heard a couple of his interviews. He deserves his attitude though, someone that's been at this for so many decades. I really admire his philosophy of placing emphasis on the wood and the graphics of the wood and making the creation of the cabinet secondary.