April 2, 2010

White oak panel

The panel for Joe’s cabinet is looking great. The white oak figure popped with just one coat of oil. Plus with all that shaping, it’s going to look great in the door.

The frame for the back also needs work though. There’s always plenty to do before the final assembly. It takes patience at this point to keep working away at all the little jobs that need doing.

March 18, 2010

Shaped white oak panel

Joe’s panel is getting ready for glue-up. There’s been a lot of head scratching, figuring, designing, re-designing, and decision making going on for this difficult piece. The panel is made up of 5 strips of white oak all of them cut with an undulating wave pattern. They also all taper in by 2 degrees to match the taper of the cabinet. With these staggered curves this will make a stunning panel for his Standing Cabinet.

March 3

The cabinet progresses. Joe’s “legs” are mitered and glued up.These are essentially mitered frames that will support the cabinet. He added some nice wide keys to strengthen the joints and give them some visual interest too.

The case itself is dovetailed together. But everything on this piece is at a two degree angle. So we’ve been playing this week with router dovetail jigs seeing if we can make them work for this kind of obtuse/ acute joinery. It appears we can but given the effort required, hand cutting might be a quicker method. We’ll see what decision Joe makes on joinery.

February 10

Joe’s Cabinet Design is finalized. We scaled it down a bit so that it felt a little less tall and imposing. It now stands at around 5′ tall. The door design should be very interesting as Joe is taking some ideas from the Franz Karg book on Solid Wood Cabinet Construction. Many of the European designs seen in that book show off solid wood panels with shaping or texturing.

Joe’s idea is to band saw and shape strips of wood. Then he will glue those together to create an undulating pattern of waves across the front panel. It should be very striking.

He went off to the lumber yard next to find some quartersawn ash for the cabinet. The quartersawn grain pattern will let the door panel design stand out which will be made out of quartersawn white oak.

February 4

We’re checking in on our Resident Mastery student’s progress this month on this new Mastery Blog. Our current Resident Joe has been in the Studio since October learning new skills to go with his chemical engineering degree and machinist skills. Quite an impressive resume he’s building. He’s also learning some new techniques such as shaping on the lathe and mortise and tenon work for his table.

His great little coffee table will see no feet resting on it for some time. Next up for him are designs for a Standing Cabinet. We’ll check in soon on how the design work is going.