Thread: Dutch Cupboard Work In Progress

Slowly progressing with the project. I have made inroads into the frame for the base of the cabinet, which comprises two frame and panel end pieces which are joined with mortice and tenons, they will be joined by stretchers on the top using half blind dovetails. You can see the mortice and tenons and one end of the cabinet base with the half-blind dovetailed stretchers in the photos. All cut by hand, I could not have done it without the hand router, it's a great little tool for making flat parallel surfaces! I never thought I would be able to do "dark side" stuff, but it just takes a little practice and patience. Mind you, my results are far from perfect! All that joinery will be invisible in the final product, except the mortice and tenons at the back, but they will be against the wall.
Still giving thought to the plinth base and internal cupboards and drawer designs. I will be using hide glue for all the joinery as I hope this piece will be around for a long time!
Apologies don't know how to rotate images.
Cheers, Swifty

Well the base cabinet frame is free-standing now, and quite strong as hoped. Time to continue with the front facade for the drawers and doors.

So I kept working on the facade for the drawers and doors, here shown lightly clamped to the base frame. The cross pieces of the facade are joined with blind mortise and tenons. I got a bit ahead of myself to do a test piece of my intended finish, shown in the other picture. I already decided to do a French polish, the test piece was pore filled with AquaCoat then had six bodying up sessions using some old blonde shellac I mixed a while ago. Blackwood comes up a treat with a French polish! d003.jpgd002.jpg

So I decided to resaw a 1" plank for the door panels and side panels. Much to my delight, after thicknessing down to around 9mm, some fiddleback figure became visible in the panels, here the photo shows it wetted down with some alcohol I had. I know it doesn't look much now, but the french polish will really bring it out. Then much to my horror, I snapped my resaw blade when I started to resaw the second plank, and have to get that seen to.

beautiful work, mate, keep it up. I have two blackwood pieces and I love them. Scandi oil for me, but hey, shiny for other stuff I do, so go figure

So I had to start work on the drawers before I go go much further. I decided to use Tas Oak for these, just to contrast with the blackwood when the drawers are opened. The photos show the trench for the drawer base being cut with a combination plane. Then there's a photo of cutting the dovetails in a batch using the dovetail saw. I'm about halfway through, two of the three semi-assembled drawers shown in the photo as well, with through dovetails at the back and half-blinds at the front. The drawers will have blackwood false fronts, of course, so you won't see the Tas Oak when the drawers are closed.wip_05.jpg

I completed the dovetails for the drawers. After hand cutting 24 dovetails, 24 half-dovetails and 36 pins, I am seeing the attraction of using a machine for that job. For no particular reason, I decided to have half tails on the outside edges rather than half-pins. The pins are narrow and I wanted all the same size, a half-pin of that size looks a bit weak to me! I cut some marine ply, pore filled and painted with a tough oil-based paving paint for the floors of the drawers. Next is to complete the finish on the inside walls, then glue up with hide glue.
PS. A little hack I found for the non-rotating photo attachments that I and other people have had sometimes. I dragged the photos into PowerPoint and saved the slide as a jpeg, it seems to always be the right orientation then.

Well, stinky hot summer has arrived in Perth, my shed gets a bit too warm this time of year apart from early mornings. Still, I managed to finish the drawers. I had a couple of things I wanted to do, which was to use hide glue in the joinery, which I had not done before, and to test hide glue as a grain filler for a french polish. I needed to break in a new rubber anyway, so I didn't mind doing the polish on drawers even though the sides will hardly ever be seen! Glad to say the hide glue as a filler worked a charm, and the resulting polish after four sessions is shown in the picture. I reckon Tas Oak comes up very well this way, the chatoyance of the quarter-sawn wood is really prominent, and actually quite common in this timber.