Spalted Maple Shelfy Cabinet

 Well this has been an absolute banner year for woodworking accomplishments. Yes, I have completed another project! That makes it two. In fact much of the work on this was done last year, all that remained was to drill it for dowels, finish it, and glue it. Of course easier said than done! 

I had a couple slabs of some unusual spalted maple from a log I milled on October 22 2010.

It wasn't really spectacularly spalted, but had some very unusual light flaking distributed throughout. I had seen a fantastic cabinet in similar wood done by a student at the IPSFC so I knew I wanted to do something with this rare wood.

 

Over the years I had in fact given most of my slabs of these away, I had two remaining when I cut into them in 2023. I quickly found that a lot of it was too soft to use, consequently I was left with very little material and had to downsize my dreams. 

Since I was already building a small open cabinet in beech, I just piggybacked this along for most of the build. 

So, picking up the project when it was nearly done, I have selected alder for the main rear panel as I thought it was something of a match with the darker parts of the maple. And for the smaller panel I selected Manitoba Maple, AKA Box Elder, as it seemed to match the 'flakes' in the maple. And both of these were fairly tame and would not distract from the main event, the flakes in the maple!

You can see that there is a hint of colour in one corner of the Manitobe Maple, which I thought was rather cheeky of me to include! You may also notice that the alder panel is actually too short, a fact which eluded me until after I had spent a lot of time planing and shellacing it! Fortunately I have a lot of alder so no harm done other to my self esteem. 

The last step before glue up was to pre-finish everything. Luckily it was a simple project so the finishing was correspondingly, well, simple! However that did not prevent me from undertaking a lot of very proactive dawdling while trying to make a decision on the finish. I tried a few options but found most of them were turning the flakes in the wood into an orange hue. Shellac did not have this effect nearly as much, so shellac it was. 

Even for a simple project like this the glue up was not simple! However it went well. 

And finally here it is, temporarily resting on another very similar shelf of arbutus from a few years ago. Even though they are similar, the arbutus shelf has a bold large panel and all the other wood is calm, whereas the spalted maple cabinet is the opposite, the panels are calm and the cabinet body is lively. Quite a different effect from two similar cabinets. 

Next up, a tansu inspired cabinet with sliding doors and Douglas Fir burl veneer panels! I hope also to get back to the glass display cabinet I abandoned a year or so ago. And I have an idea for some lamp sconces I would like to do.