Douglas Fir Burl Tansu Cabinet (I)

Several years ago I spotted a cabinet by Seth Janofsky. He incorporated some unusual pine panels with tiny pitch pockets in the grain. The frame is cherry and the interior is I believe red oak.

I really admired the clean lines of the piece, and the use of the unusual pine was charming but not overblown. It was discrete even though it was right in your face! 

As a bonus, it was designed for the front and sides to be removable and then it becomes a display cabinet. Realistically probably would not see much use in this manner, but a nice touch.

 

 So I decided to make a cabinet based on this, as I had some Doug fir with a rare burl pattern in it.

The Doug fir had a good backstory, as it was given to me years ago by my dad's cousin who has now passed.  He told me that his dad was burning a bunch of scrap wood 50+ years ago and had tossed this piece into the fire, so he rescued it. Many years later as he was getting older and knew that I was interested in woodworking he gave it to me. It still had scorch marks on it when I received it from him!

 

Doug Fir slab with grain detail after run thru planer

For the interior I had the last of the straight grained Port Orford cedar that I had chainsaw milled myself into slabs probably ten or fifteen years ago. And for the frame I had some Kwila, a very hard and heavy tropical wood, that I had purchased several sticks of many years ago in a lumberyard in Chilliwack. Kwila was apparently a favourite wood of James Krenov's, and it goes by many different names, none of which I have heard of either!

 

The panels were going to be veneered, with the fir on the outside and the cedar on the inside. So the first order of business was to cut the veneers on my bandsaw. I was careful to make sure that the face of the veneer which was going to be visible was jointed and handplaned smooth before I cut each piece off.

 

PO cedar veneers stacked

 Once that was done I glued up the panels with a layer of thin commercial veneer in the middle, using a vacuum bag veneer press I purchased. No good pictures of that process, but here is the end result: Two foot long panels with the Doug fir on one side and the PO cedar on the other. 

 

I'm not sure what the dimensions are of Janofsky's cabinet, but in my case the size of the Doug fir slab limited the veneers to about two feet long, so I decided to make the overall cabinet about three feet tall and the main pieces of the carcass 1 1/4" wide. So I proceeded to resaw the kwila accordingly. I was very careful to make sure that all surfaces were square and flat.

The kwila is so hard to handplane, even though my plane blade is made of hard steel, it requires frequent resharpening. I also picked up a splinter of it in my thumb several months ago which I cannot seem to get rid of. 

So that is where I am at now. Next I am planning to mock up the frames for a couple of panels. Once that is done I can nail down the exact dimensions and start cutting the Kwila up to length. I calculated there will be 54 separate pieces so I have some work ahead of me!
 

 

 

 

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.

Oak Box

I once made a sacred vow to never have more than one project on-the-go at a time. Despite this, earlier this year I gave up on the two cabinet projects I was well into at the time, and instead did a deep dive into a simple box with a sliding lid. Apparently three is the sweet spot!

The top and sides are red oak, the bottom Port Orford cedar, all milled from logs by myself some years ago. I gave up on my wood milling, but I am still benefiting from some interesting pieces in my wood pile.

I decided to use finger joints. Originally I was going to pin them as well, but decided that was not necessary for strength. 

I cut the finger joints using a vintage horizontal milling machine I picked up last year. I purchased a 3/4" end mill for it in order to cut the finger joints in one pass. It worked well, but it was good that I did a few test cuts as it seemed to cut a couple thousands of an inch oversized, which added up over the length of the joint. To solve this I just spaced each cut a little further apart to match the slightly wider cuts. 

For finish I applied several coats of shellac to the inside, while on the outside I used a Watco type oil. Each piece was prefinished before clamping. The top and bottom were shellaced on both sides, I did not want any oil evaporating into the interior over time. I think the figure adds a bit of interest to an otherwise utilitarian piece.

 

In order to clamp the finger joints I had to make special offsets to prevent the clamps from pressing on the ends of the fingers. Although this was not an especially large piece, the finger joints and prefinishing required quite a bit of care with glue application to prevent squeeze out.

The box is an odd size, relatively long, narrow, and tall. That is because it is intended to hold some specific family heirlooms. 

Another Shelf

In 2023 I had started an ambitious Arbutus display cabinet with legs, with the intention of giving it as a gift. However with the deadline only a few months away, I realized that it would not be completed in time so instead I decided to build a small wall-hanging shelf similar in design one I had previously made. 

It is made of beech with some unusual staining in it, and two rear panels, one of Port Orford Cedar and the other of an unknown burl.

The beech log was milled by myself in 2010. I air dried it for a year, ran it through my home made kiln, and stored it. I had several pieces initially, but gave most of them away. I did retain a couple pieces for myself fortunately! 

The alignment of the stains is not perfect, but nonetheless is quite interesting and unusual. One notable screw up I made along the way was a misalignment of the dowel pins. In order to recover I had to go with biscuits on the top. Worked out OK but I was sweating it for a while.

It all came together well, with handmade consoles and hangers. This photo is still before assembly but gives an idea. 

At the same time I dimensioned the pieces for a similar cabinet made out of spalted maple. Hopefully more to follow on this one later!

New Tool Toys

I love my vintage Davis and Wells horizontal mortiser. I picked it up in eastern Washington state in 2006. I have fond memories of getting a huge hassle from the American customs agents when I crossed the border into the USA on my way to pick it up. It was because I had dreadlocks at the time, not because I was traveling to pick up a Davis and Wells!

 

The D&W has served me well, if somewhat infrequently, but as time goes by I enjoy the freehand aspect of it less. So I decided to upgrade it with an X-Y table. Thanks to some excellent advice from my friend Craig who has the exact same setup, I was able to source and install a very nice Felder table. I felt somewhat bad destroying the originality of the D&W, but it is a much better tool now and the made-in-Austria Felder is a worthy upgrade.

 

On a bit of a whim several (10?) years ago I purchased a vintage metal lathe. A 9" Standard Modern, made in Canada back in the day. However I never really got into it, so it sat in my garage until a I got tired of it taking up space and I sold it on. 

 

Recently the bug bit again, and I bought a Vintage Myford ML7 lathe, made in 1951 in England. It has been fun to learn about this entirely new domain of metalworking along with my son, and to turn a few parts.

 

The other BIG NEWS / disaster was that I damaged a chip breaker on my 8" General jointer early in 2023. The cost of getting a new chipbreaker made at a local machine shop was about comparable to getting a Shelix helical cutterhead. So, six months of dilly dallying and waiting later, I have a Shelix in my jointer. Works very well. Better than the original cutterhead? Probably not.

 

Box Box Box!

OK so maybe I have been watching a bit too much of Drive to Survive on Netflix and that is where the inspiration for this post's title came from!

Picking things up from my hinge saga in the embarrassingly long time ago last post, I did eventually locate my old Bosch router and was able to use it with a couple hinge templates to route out for the hinges.

I am not a fan at all of routers, and my skepticism was amply rewarded in this case as the templates shifted minutely as I clamped them and I wound up with a pretty sh*t job that required a lot of fiddling to make fit. I had a hunch it was going to be a fiasco, so it sat on my workbench for a couple months until I gathered the courage to do it. I should have used chisels.

This is the first project in a very long while that I have done with veneers. I enjoyed it quite a bit and hope to use them more in the future.

The box was completed and in fact I gave it as a Christmas 2022 gift to my daughter. 

 

 

More Box

 Well I got all my plys glued up. Then I cut them apart and embedded some arbutus pieces in each, before I glued the veneers on. You will see why below. Got the inner and outer veneers applied.

 

I applied several layers of shellac to the inside faces. The outside will be done later. 

Glued the box up.

 

 I cut away the edges to apply ebony trim.

And sawed it in half to create the base and the lid! That was scary to do!

Where I sawed the box apart is where I had previously glued in the arbutus pieces. This is so that the edges of the ply do not show. 

I have a hinge saga and I have not even installed the hinges yet! I ordered the Brusso Quadrant hinges from Lee Valley a while ago. They arrived and I started thinking about them some more, I was checking on line and realized Brusso has a router jig to help with the install of these. So I ordered the jig. When it arrived I read the instructions and realized I needed a collar and a couple router bits in sizes I don't have. Sigh. So I was about to order these when I also realized that my router is actually a laminate trimmer and that it cannot fit anything other than a 1/4" router bit. Double sigh. I am going to try and borrow a router when the bits finally arrive.