Thread: WIP - Rory's Cupboard

I've built a house since you sent them!

OK I'll stick the ruddy things on tonight...

Originally Posted by silentC

I've built a house since you sent them!

OK I'll stick the ruddy things on tonight...

Post a photo of them in place or we won't believe you

The Banksia has beautiful grain and nice colour. Can’t wait to see it done.

Hurry up Silent. It’s been more than a month now.

I wonder if you could use those scales to measure fish?

Hurry up Silent. It’s been more than a month now

You're starting to sound like my wife...

Originally Posted by Rocker

Actually, SilentC is vying for the post of Procrastinator-in-Chief; I happen to know that he has had those scales ready to be glued on for around three years now; Midge's dust-collection system has only been delayed about 18 months, I believe

How quickly they forget!

Rocker, here's a post from July 2004 in which I had already commenced describing my dust-collection system as a lifestyle rather than a mere project!

Stick around Silent, I can teach you heaps about procrastination, but it may take a while..

Cheers,

P

Pic 1: I've ripped all the panels to width and now I'm docking them to length. I use a cross cut sled for this.

Pic 2: I clamped a bock to the fence and set the fence as a stop. The block is there because it's not a good idea to run a panel like this along the fence and into the blade (although I have done it ).

Pic 3: A nice stack of panels ready to be scraped, sanded and coved.

Pic 4: While I had the cross cut sled on the saw, I docked the horns off the bottom panel and filed down the brass pins.

Pic 1: I'm using my home made scraper (from an old handsaw blade) to scrape the panels. Trying to hand plane this stuff is lunacy. There's a bit of tear out from the thicknesser. Wish I had a drum sander.

Pic 2: You can make quite a pile of shavings with a scraper. Very hard on the thumbs though.

Pic 3: The weather has been foul lately and these panels cup very easily, so I keep them clamped to the bench when I'm not working on them. Once they're in the frames, they be OK, but I'm just trying it minimise the cupping because it makes them harder to work on.

Pic 1: I'm coving the panels on the table saw. I use this bit of pine as a fence. I marked the angle and distance from the slot so I can get repeatable profiles. I take about 1/16th off with each pass. The panels are 1/2" thick and the edge needs to be brought down to a bit under 1/4" to fit the slot. I just wind the saw up a quarter turn for each pass until I get within cooee, then for the last pass, I creep up and test on one edge until I get the right depth, then do the rest.

Pic 2: The stack of panels coved. They need a bit of scraping and sanding to remove saw marks but if you take it slow, the finish is not too bad.

Pic 3: I cut the tenons with the dado blade and fine tuned the shoulders by creeping the fence so that the distance between shoulders was spot on. That made a couple of the tenons a touch longer than 1", so I back them off with the block plane to prevent them from bottoming out. It's easy to do with the plane riding on it's side on the bench. In hindsight, there's no reason the mortices could not have been a bit deeper.

Pic 4: I tune the tenon thickness to fit the mortice by paring the cheeks with a 1" chisel, then chamfer the ends - this makes the tenon easier to locate and gives the glue somewhere to go.

Test fit of the back and sides. Starting to look like something now. You can see the 3/4" groove in the bottom rails to take the base and the shelf supports near the top. I have to knock it all apart again now and finish all the panels, notch out the legs for the base and the shelf, and generally tidy things up ready for the big day.

I'm picking up a tin of acrylic lacquer tomorrow, so I'll do a couple of test panels to see what sort of finish I can get. I have completely changed my opinion of this Banksia. I once thought it would not be suitable for anything other than panels. Happy to be proven wrong.

Looks good mate. It does look sexy.

Yep. It's gunna be a beaut!

P

Furniture with strong grain timber used well is the best really

I really wish this one still had the pics to it - it was a classic https://www.woodworkforums.com/f40/piece-completed-16712