Walnut cabinet takes shape

Prior to glueing up the carcass the shaping of the edges is done, all the surfaces are hand-planed and then everything is pre-finsihed with shellac and wax.  Never-mind the misguided focus in the first photo.

 And then finally it is glued-up.

I tend to over simplify things in terms of design.  In the previous post you saw the mock-up with the off center "mullion" on the door.  In my mind that was cool, in a sketch it was cool and then once I mocked it up it seemed overly simple and kind of dull.  One of the most beneficial parts of being at the school is sharing the space with so many creative people and thus having other people influence your work.  One such example occurred with my door.  Meredith, another student came over while I was looking at the wood I had in mind for my door panels.  Shown below, it's actually the same red elm that was at one pint destined to be my hall table.

So, Meredith sees my pieces sitting flat, overlapping each other as I pondered what they would look like once they were placed side by side.  She says, "Cool!  I like the offsetting panels!", or something along those lines.  Being that I was stuck on the mulion thing, I had never thought about anything else.  Basically to make another long story short, her suggestion or comment led me down a road that after consulting with Robert resulted in door panels that I'm super excited about.

As you can see, above the door panels have reverse flips for lack of a better word.  It involved one joint to begin the angle before the fine tuning of the shape could begin.  The panel is a book match which means that both sides share the same pattern and color on either side of the flip.

Once I was happy that the panels were roughly the shape I wanted it was a matter of creating the frame to hold them and complete the door.  It took some doing to find nice straight grained stock, thus the once big planks were further dissected, but in the end I found just the right pieces.  Robert encourages us to always have back-up pieces in case of an unfortunate error or the like, but in this case I was left with no such margin. After much stressful but also careful workmanship of risk on the through mortise and tenons, my pieces escaped unscathed and ready to be mated with the panels.

The next thing I wanted to tackle was the back panel.  This involved more decisions regarding wood.  The photot below is a piece of cherry that I quite liked and was quite prepared to go ahead with.  While Robert said t worked, he also thought it was a bit too safe.

Below you can see what I came up with instead...once again because Robert pushed me to go a little beyond where I was headed.  My favourite thing about the wood for my back panels (besides the incredible spalting and color) is that Robert salvaged it from a crate at some point in the past and we don't even know what species is.

Mocked-up with faux rails and stiles I'm please with my grain matches and ready to move on to the frame joinery as seen below and then some shaping, some pre-finishing and then on to glueing it up.

In my next post I will complete the process of catching up and then reveal the finished project.  I just need a couple days to put the finishing touches on it and then voila!