|
|
This page:
|
|
 1. Snow White and . . .
Final dimensions (all approximate): Materials: mostly 18 mm knotty pine, except 14 mm Douglas fir in drawer walls and backs, and 5.5 mm veneer plywood (back panel).
|
|
My father used to say that he was a frustrated auto mechanic—although he made his living as an independent agent for a major insurance firm, he found his greatest joy not in insuring cars, but in lying under them and getting his hands dirty. He built four motor homes, basically from scratch, buying trucks damaged in accidents (as an insurance agent, he knew where to look for accidents), cutting off the damaged bodies and building his own on, using steel pipe and sheet metal (he had learned how to weld in the shipyards of WWII). He did quite a bit of carpentry work as well, building much of his own home in the 1970s. I must have picked up something of his desire, if not his talents, since I suppose I've been a frustrated woodworker for a number of years as well. Having our house contractor go bankrupt and being forced to take up where he left off was an important, if unexpected, push in that direction. I'm still less proficient than I wish, and I lack a number of the tools necessary to do the level of work I'd like, but part of the enjoyment is in learning. I began work on this CD cabinet in October, 1999, and finished on Christmas Eve. The cabinet started out as a plan from the Book 3 edition of The Best of Wood, a series of books that gather plans previously published in Wood magazine (photo 3. This book also furnished the plans I used to build our deck table and benches). The cabinet was originally designed with fixed shelves to serve multiple purposes as an entertainment center, wardrobe, or storage cabinet. I modified the plan to hold my CD collection, adjusting the dimensions to fit the available wall space while allowing the addition of drawers on roller rails, with each drawer sized to hold three rows of CDs either horizontally or vertically (photo 4). With the drawers full, the cabinet could theoretically hold around 650 CDs, but since the drawer rails reach their stop before coming all the way out, I have to keep each row no more than about eighty percent full (25 instead of 30 CDs) to allow access to the discs in the back of each row. The cabinet is built of knotty pine (the only material I could afford for a first project here in Japan), and while it's basic structure is straightforward, building it involved a number of "firsts" for me: using splines to edge-join wood for the top and side panels, tongue-and-groove construction for the door rails and stiles, raised-panel construction of the doors' center panels, building the seven drawers so that they would fit, and designing and building the crown and base molding. I realize that these are embarrassingly elementary procedures for any woodworker, but they were all baby steps for me The edge joining process turned out easier than I had thought it would be. Since I didn't have a tablesaw, I used a router with a tongue-groove bit to cut full-length grooves along the factory edges of the boards, then cut splines from veneer plywood to fit the grooves, using standard white glue to join the two pieces with their splines. After the glue had dried I was able to sand down the joints to an imperceptible transition, although the wood had enough slight warps in it to make fitting the tongue and groove of the door rails and stiles a minor nightmare (photo 8). The hardest process for me was cutting the raised panels for the doors. The plan called for use of a table saw with the blade offset at a 5° angle to cut the angled silhouette of the center panel. As I said above, though, while I do have a fairly good Makita finish carpentry circular saw with a flat machined base plate, I didn't then have a table saw (N.B. see final note below), so I had to improvise. I sandwiched the panel-to-be between several pieces of wood, adjusting the pieces' height as precisely as possible to form a level "base" to rest the circular saw on, then ran the rip fence carefully along one side. It was a compromise and I didn't end up with a perfect job, but like the man said, "that what's you get for hiring an amateur." According to the original plans, the cabinet's crown molding was to be formed from off-the-shelf millwork. I found the necessary molding at the DoIt home center in Sagamihara, but the lack of a tablesaw prevented me from using it. The instructions called for the milled molding to be glued to a 2x4, after which the 2x4 was to be ripped at angles parallel to the edges of the molding where they would normally meet their "walls". It's hard to describe, but I could show it to you in a moment. Anyway, making hand-held cuts for the raised door panels was one thing, but I could see no way to rip the 2x4s at the precise angles called for using my circ saw. So I gave up on that part of the plan. Since the book called for using a router to make base molding, though, I reasoned I could do the same for the top panel's crown molding. It was a relatively easy process using cove and round-over bits, even though the results don't appear exactly the same as a piece of off-the shelf millwork. I built up the molding to the necessary thickness using two pieces of pine, with the addition of an off-the-shelf piece of decorative millwork (the little molding with the embossed motif in detail photos 5 and 6). Photo 9 shows the crown molding silhouette viewed from the rear of the cabinet, making it easier to visualize how the two pieces of molding blend into each other and the top panel above, as well as the small piece of embossed millwork below. Fortunately, I do have a serviceable table-top circular miter saw, so cutting the corner angles was fairly routine. I stained the cabinet with an oil-based stain, using a light oak shade diluted to roughly 40%, followed by finishing with several coats of polyurethane varnish. I have several pieces of additional furniture planned, but based on what I went through with this cabinet, the others will have to wait until I get the tablesaw. Update: early in 2000, I bought a new tablesaw, a Ryobi BT3000; this saw gets a lot of bad press from aficionados of cast iron, but it is just about perfect for my needs. I took some time modifying it, installing a lifting handle and building an undersaw cabinet which has made it even more convenient to use. Among the other things I've built since then are a Box-joint Tray, a Deck Cabinet, Kanon's Cabinet for my daughter, and most recently The Boot Bench.
To return to your previous location, use your browser's "BACK" button, or click your heels together three times while saying, "there's no place like home" . . .
|
Green Gables: A Contemplative Companion to Fujino Townshipby Norman Havens nhavens@gol.com
Updated: February 17, 2005
URL: http://www2.gol.com/users/nhavens/
