Progress report (Sapele and birch cabinet)

I've spent most of today in the machine shop, readying a second batch of components for the next stage of constructing my cabinet. It's noisy and tiring in there.

The carcass, shelves, munting, drawer runners, guides and dust boards are all complete.

I still need to veneer the back board, construct and shape the stand and there is also the small matter of making eight drawers. (Whose silly idea was a cabinet with eight drawers?)

We had a class outing to the veneer shop (Capital Crispin Veneers) somewhere in East London last week. Piles and piles of veneers in a huge warehouse at the back of the Galleon shopping centre - where is that??

John - Master woodworker and wise  man - was very taken with the Malaysian Tiger Wood veneer... (orangey and stripey) But he managed to resist.

I came away with a roll of ice birch veneer for the doors and drawers of my magnificent cabinet! It has some very pretty grain figuring and a small amount of ripple which will look beautiful when polished up.

So tomorrow... back to the machine shop to prepare the rest of the drawer components... 16 drawer sides, 8 drawer backs, 8 drawer bottoms...

Or fashioning a set of dancey feet to stand the beast on.

We'll see.

(pic caption: The top section will have two shelves (but they're just sat on top of the drawer section for now!) the asymmetric drawers are still to be built)

Cabinet-making

For my final  project while still a student on John Lloyd's fine furniture-making course, I am making a cabinet. Initially I was thinking of making a corner cabinet but as I was making sketches and plans I decided against it because there would be less usable space within it.

This is a basic sketch of my idea. The swooping serpentine curve will form the edges of the top section's cabinet doors. It will then flow through the middle section of eight drawers and down through the lower cabinet door to the cabinet's foot where it ends with a flourish.

The cabinet will be about 2 metres tall by 40cm wide and 30 cm deep.

I went to English Woodlands Timber to get the wood on Friday. Warehouse man, Graham, helped me nose through piles of boards to find the ones that I wanted. 

The carcass will be constructed from Sapele, a tropical red-coloured hard wood, the batch that I selected my boards from had been imported from the Democratic Republic of Congo. 

Most of the cabinet's front will be from Maple which is a beautiful light coloured wood with a very close grain.

Unfortunately the wood won't be delivered until Tuesday/Wednesday and so in the meantime I think I'll be making a few templates for all those curves...