Monday, October 12, 2009

Beginnings of Wabi Sabi Cabinet

This year Robert decided to do things a little differently than in the past.  After discussing it with JK over the summer he decided that instead of just doing random exercises we would build a little poplar cabinet, and in the process, learn  most of what we will need for our first project.  It has been referred to as our Wabi-Sabi cabinet, meaning, "beauty in imperfections" in Japanese.




The piece of wood we began with was roughly 13" wide, 18" long and 3" thick.  We began by flattening one face before re-sawing it into thinner "slices".  The first piece became our door as you can see in the first picture.

The door is coopered, and will be concave when viewed from the front.  On order to do this we began by cutting our piece into staves and the edge jointing them at an angle to produce the beginning of our curve.  This was done with my jointer plane, which produces perfectly straight edges to glue together.


After some shaping using the coopering plane, the door begins to take shape.  It is tapered slightly from the thicker hinge side across to the other side.  It gives the door a more delicate feel than if the doors thickness was consistent across.




We used negative templates of our pieces in order to select the grain graphics that we wanted for each piece.




The carcass of our cabinet is all joined with dowels.  We started with a simple doweling jig in order to line up our holes.




The pieces went together like magic. Still lots to do though before we glue it up.



Much more to come this week as we have to make hinges, shape our pieces, fit our door, put in our partition, make our drawer and then glue it all together....eventually.

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