Cabinet taking shape...

I now have the cabinet case, back panel , and front doors installed and adjusted. Everything looks fine at this point, with my next emphasis on the interior of the cabinet. Afterwards, I will finalize the design of the cabinet stand. With respect to the interior, I have a design idea in mind and have begun to make a few sketches. I will most likely leave the left hand side of the interior free and clear and build up the right with two stacked drawers and perhaps a third drawer further up. This design allows the right hand door to be opened independently in the sense that drawers can be accessed without the need to open both doors. This part of the design is interesting and helps me to resolve the division of the interior compartments.The client has indicated I have carte blanche to design the interior as I wish with the only requirement to have one large and one smaller space for art objects, along with two drawers. Sometimes less is more and in this case ( no pun intended) the larger the non-drawer compartments, the larger the objects which can be showcased.

In the photo, I use tape as temporary door pulls while I decide on the door pull design. I'm debating whether to simply have one pull located on the right hand door. If I decide on one door pull, I will elaborate on the thought process leading to this decision.

After my return from a ski trip this week I will be dedicating the next few days to finalizing the design of the interior and beginning to create it. On this ski trip, my wife and I are staying in a small resort town with surrounding towns that have plenty of small shops and boutiques. We both plan to glean some fresh design ideas from other visual objects, not necessarily wood objects... and inspiration for this piece of furniture and other, future designs along with inspiration for her wood inlay jewelry designs.

Contrasting stiles...

A cherry cabinet on stand I built three years ago had developed a small bow in the inside vertical stile of the right hand door. This happened a few weeks after I completed it. I kept telling myself I would one day either make some new doors or replace the bowed stile in the right hand door. Well, I finally decided to do this. I hunkered down , disassembled the right hand door and replaced both the inside lipped stile and the top rail. The cherry cabinet was originally finished with multiple thinned coats of super blonde shellac. Cherry develops a wonderful color and patina as it ages. There is no sense in staining this particular wood as the natural aging process and exposure to light and air provide the most beautiful color. We had this cabinet around for the past three years as it slowly developed the cherry patina. It is sometimes difficult to appreciate how much of a color change has actually occurred since the cabinet ages uniformly.

Well, I found out how much it aged and developed a dark color when I began to replace parts of the right hand cabinet door. The photo has the inner lipped stile and the top rail as fresh, new wood. I made sure to have these two pieces acclimate in my studio for a couple of weeks. The contrast is incredible... with nothing originally applied to the cherry cabinet but super blonde shellac and wax, no stain of any type applied. I took this photo to be able to show any prospective clients just how much cherry changes over time.

I notice the issue of either staining or leaving cherry to develop it's own aged color comes up occasionally in forums and the overwhelming advice given is to let it develop its own color over time. When you see the difference, it is easier to accept this advice.

I thought I would share this..

Door lip and rabbet...

Rather than leave an open gap between the doors, even a small one, it is much preferred to create a mating set of lip and rabbet along the inner edges of the front door panels. This serves to provide a positive closure of the doors and masks the very small reveal between the doors. In this particular case , I create an outside lip or rabbet on the right hand door as this is the first door opened. The method I utilize is to mark the outline of the rabbet, in my case 1/4 in. X 1/4 in. and begin to remove material at the edge of the right hand door. The wood removed is part of the hardwood edging I installed within the door panel edges prior to veneering. The tool I use is a skew rabbet block plane with adjustable fence. This particular plane is based on the Stanley No. 140 plane. I added a wood auxiliary fence to the plane to extend the bearing surface of the plane against the edge of the door panel.

This process went along fairly well without any surprises and afterwards I re-installed the door and began to fit the mating edge to it. This rabbet will mate perfectly with the right hand door edge. Rather than concern myself with a slightly wider left hand door I add a lip of the same wood and grain orientation to the inner edge of the left door instead. This allows me to create two identically sized door panels and since veneer is involved, the complexity of the process is simpler if the door panels are of equal dimensions.

I currently have the left hand door rabbeted edge in the process of glue-up and afterwards I will perform any small trimming to ensure the fit is perfect between the doors. There is a small, slightly greater than 1/32 in. gap between the doors at the moment which will have less of a reveal apparent once the lipped edges are created and installed.

Door panels (4)...

Once the mortises for the knife hinges are successfully created and care is taken to make certain the offsets are uniform and the depth of each knife leaf is consistent, the next step is to temporarily install the doors while fitting each door to the cabinet. The reveal around each door is important as well as any small differences in how the doors hang within the cabinet frame. In this photo the cabinet is reversed in orientation top to bottom for me to work on the fitting. The left door is in the photo. The knife hinges have a very small amount of leeway for me to adjust the doors so the reveal at both the top and bottom and the center part between doors is uniform.

I also need to be conscious of how the outside edges fit the cabinet , they need to be parallel and in the same plane as the cabinet sides. The fitting of the doors can be somewhat time consuming but in my opinion this needs to be done correctly at this stage or the visual impact of a non-uniform reveal will be very apparent later.

After completing this fitting and knife hinge adjustment I will be creating the lip at the juncture of the doors in the middle of the cabinet. The lip serves to hide any open space between the doors and also to create an interlocking, positive closure for the doors. The right hand door will have a rabbeted lip whereas the left hand door will have a additional piece of beech added to the rear of the center edge of the door to form a mating lip. To maintain grain matching I have pieces of beech left over from the same plank I used to resaw the veneers earlier.

We have plenty of snow up here at this time , more than the average winter, and my wife and I will be leaving for a skiing trip at a resort next week. We're both crazy about spring skiing and there is plenty of nice weather coming up.

Door panels (3)...

After the doors are fitted into the cabinet opening the next step is to layout and create the hinge mortises for the knife hinge pairs. Each door has one pair of knife hinges as they come in pairs. I use spacers and my small adjustable square to make certain the doors are spaced uniformly from the cabinet case. This is important as the door reveal all around needs to be uniform. After the hinges mortises are marked the process of creating the recesses is accomplished with small chisels and a small hammer.

The hinge markings are transferred from the doors to the cabinet to maintain accuracy.Creating the hinge mortises with hand tools is somewhat of a pleasant task although it can take a while. Care needs to be exercised with grain orientation as the grain is reversed depending on which corner of the cabinet is being mortised. I use both chisel bevel down and back down orientation to remove waste from the hinge recesses. The outline of the hinge and its offset from the edge of the cabinet and doors is fairly important.

Once this is accomplished, removing material from the recess is fairly foolproof. I remove wood from the hinge recess in stages, exercising care not to go too deep in one pass of the chisel.

Door panels (2)...

I now have the door panels assembled and roughly fitted to the cabinet front enclosure. In the previous post I mentioned that I had stumbled on to some nicely figured European beech. This is an excellent example of the concept and term dynamic design I described in a much earlier post. As much as I like to follow through with a pre-existing design, when an opportunity presents itself and I can enhance a design,a strong consideration is given to seizing this opportunity. My original design was nebulous regarding the front doors, I had some sort of inlay in mind as an embellishment. The figure I have found in these slices of European beech are, in my opinion, a more natural embellishment and if oriented correctly, dramatically change the front graphics of the cabinet.

Some judicious resawing and a short time later and I had enough veneer slices to create the bookmatched veneers for the fronts of the door panels. I utilize straight-grained beech veneers for the back of the door panels. The veneers are edge jointed prior to assembling together to form each of the four sheets for the two door panels. I take great care in veneering the substrates for the door panels and make sure that the substrates are perfectly flat and smooth since the veneers will telegraph any bumps or surface irregularities into the top surface.

In the photo, I have the door panels mocked up in the cabinet front to determine if the aesthetics are both correct and pleasing. I'm not looking for complete symmetry at this point and this is obvious in the detail of the figure of the individual door panels. There is instead, a partial symmetry in the door graphics which makes us more aware of the natural growth pattern of wood.

Next I make preparations for installation of the knife hinges for the doors after some final fitting of the doors within the cabinet opening.

Door panels...

I have begun work on the front doors in the past day or so. I'm not sure if you recall, but in an earlier post I decided to create the doors of the cabinet as veneered panels rather than solid wood. The primary reason for this is the width of each of the doors and the large expansion and contraction coefficient of the solid wood, along with the exceptional stability of veneered panels. Although I had originally intended to use quarter-sawn wood, the expansion rate is still uncomfortably large with the approximate 13 inches of width for each door. The first part of creating the individual doors is to have a straight, flat and solid substrate. I have selected multi-ply baltic birch for the substrate, the virtues of this wood are dimensional stability and strength. It is very well suited for use as a substrate for veneering.

After cutting the pieces for each door to approximate size, I added some solid beech edging to all four sides of each panel. This allows me to overlap the veneer the full expanse of each panel and in turn I gain solid wood at each of the ends and sides. As part of the design I need to have solid wood at the junction of the doors to be able to create a rabbeted lip. The strips of beech I use along with the substrate together provide me with two oversized door panels which I will trim after veneering.

While the glue is setting on the substrate door panels, I take the opportunity to lay out some veneer pieces from solid European Beech stock I have. Once the stock is marked I begin to resaw the veneers. This operation is fairly slow as each piece of veneer needs to be sawn fairly uniform in thickness and with minimal saw marks and due to the depth or width of the veneers, the stock can only be passed through the bandsaw at a low feed speed. While laying out the veneers I stumbled across some nicely figured stock which I will use to create the veneers for the front of the doors. This was not anticipated and a welcome surprise, the inherent beauty of wood and the surprises it holds. I now need to spend a little more time bookmatching the figured veneer for each door panel. Hopefully this will work out and the veneered sheets come out fine.

Next I will continue to work on the veneers and use the individual veneer slices to create sheets large enough to cover each side of the door panels. Working with thin sheets of veneer like this involves careful attention to their fragile nature. Although the resawn veneers I am creating are an order of magnitude thicker than commercial veneers, they can still be fragile.

Cabinet back (2)...

The back frame and panel is assembled with panels in place and installed at the back of the cabinet. The cabinet is slowly evolving into a piece of furniture. The frame and panel back fit very snugly after some light, judicious planing of the outside rails and stiles. I have not yet finalized the layout of the interior of the cabinet, but I expect to create an assembly with two or three drawers in the lower right section of the cabinet. In the photo, you can see the overhang at the front top and bottom of the cabinet to allow for the front doors. The amount of overhang or space I allowed for is the thickness of the individual veneered door panels along with a very small extra gap both behind and ahead of the door.There is also the small chamfered edge of the top and bottom surrounding the cabinet front, sides and back.

Creating the door panels is my next task in this cabinet build and I will be working on this over the next days. I'm also working on the stand design which has not yet been finalized. I have a feeling I will be modifying the original drawings and doing something a little different here. I'm just waiting to determine how the enclosed cabinet looks to me and what stand design provides the best complement for the cabinet. This goes back to a term I coined a few months ago on an earlier project.

The term I coined is "dynamic design" and allows the maker to dynamically modify a design as the build progresses. The modifications in design are directly attributable to how the project is taking shape, as opposed to moving forward with an existing design which might or might not make sense any longer. The concept of dynamic design and artistic freedom go hand in hand. I mention to my clients that the design will most likely evolve as the project continues and to expect some changes, most likely small ones. There needs to be a certain trust between the maker and client to be able to accomplish this, something I strive to provide the client.

I should have the beginnings of the door panels done in the next day or so along with resawing of the veneers I will be using.

Cabinet back...

I've been working on the frame and panel for the back of the cabinet. This frame is composed of the same wood, European beech, as the cabinet. The components of the frame and panel back are two outside stiles, a center stile, and the upper and lower rails which are continuous along their length. The width of the individual components is approximately 2 inches or thereabouts, and I based this on aesthetics along with availability of clear quarter-sawn beech stock on hand.

The type of joinery I have selected for this back is the mortise and tenon. The stiles are of equal length, so are the the respective tenons at either end of each stile, which also fit into the grooves in either horizontal rail. In the photo, the frame is temporarily installed in the cabinet back recess for a test fit. I am in the process of creating the panels to fit into each of the frame halves.

Some judicious planing is involved in creating a perfect fit of the frame and panel into the back of the cabinet, but I had already allowed for this with a very small fraction of an inch in extra width of the frame. Another factor in the decision for the stile and rail widths is the factoring in of any small wood movement of the rails and stiles in their widths. The wood I have selected is fairly quarter-sawn so movement is substantially reduced and the fairly narrow widths of the components reduces the remaining movement considerably.

The panels will be floating with a small gap around each edge to allow for wood movement. Once I have this frame and panel back installed, the cabinet will have developed an entirely new look, that of a cabinet without front doors.

Doweling...

I use dowels to join the panels together, the sides together, the sides to the top and bottom. The main reason for this type of joinery in this particular application is that it allows me to have a slight overhang of the top and bottom panels vis a vis the sides, to accommodate the chamfered edges.. Alternative methods of joinery that allow this are mortise and tenon, sliding dovetails. etc. I use dowels as I feel comfortable with this joinery and it has not let me down so far. A considerable amount of accuracy is necessary in aligning the dowel holes that mate with the top, bottom and side panels. There are also different methods to accomplish this. The simplest method is to use dowel centers, next would be a doweling jig of some sort.

Instead, I make a doweling guide which is simply a block of wood with the exact dimensions , thickness and length of each of the side panels. The concept is to use the guide to create mating dowel holes in the ends of the panels. I use standard size fluted dowels and have pre-measured and carefully oriented each of the side panels to its corresponding top and bottom panel. In the photo, I am aligning the doweling guide on one of the side panels. I since removed and bored two other holes in this particular guide for a total of ten dowel holes. Also in the photo, the face of the side panel is displayed, the back of this panel has a rabbet running lengthwise at the left hand side. The first dowel hole from the left is offset to accommodate this.

As I continue with this boring process ( no pun intended) there are eventually a total of 80 holes bored into the ends of each of the panels. A stop is used to bore to the correct depth to accommodate standard size dowels. Afterwards, each of the bored holes is checked with the depth gauge of a caliper and install the dowels, first on the side panels, then these panels to the top and bottom panels. Some test fitting, and the glue up begins...

Rabbeting the back...

My next logical step in the progression is to create the rabbets for the frame and panel back. The rabbets in the left and right side panels are fairly straightforward. I selected a 5/8 inch depth and 5/16 inch width for the rabbet. The 5/8 inch thick frame provides sufficient strength for the 5/16 inch back panels. The will be two back panels housed in the frame which is divided by a center stile, or at least this is what the plan is. It is fairly important to have the depth of the rabbet uniform in both side panels and the top and bottom panels, this involves careful measuring and allowance for the chamfer edge profile of the top and bottom panels.


The rabbet in the top and bottom panels is a stopped rabbet, ending just before either end of the back of each of the top and bottom panels. After removing most of the wood to create the rabbet, I squared the ends of the rabbet using chisels and careful marking. To ensure all the panels are squared up and exactly the same size I overlay the top panel onto bottom panel without the side panels and then with the side panels in place.

In the photo, the panels are loosely assembled to confirm all the rabbets are the same depth and uniform around the carcase. I also take this opportunity to mark the outline of each of the side panels onto the top and bottom panels. This paves the way for the next step which is to create the joinery for the panels, in this case dowels. I create a doweling guide which is the same dimension, thickness and width as one of the ends of the side panels.

More about this in the next post..