Shaker Chimney Cupboard - Part 3 finishing the interior

 In the last post on this build, I talked about the housing dados that I cut.  To finish the interior, I had three operations I needed to complete: cutting out the angled feet, putting grooves in the back of the sides to accept the rear panel, half blind dovetails in the top front and rear of the sides to accept the top front and rear pieces.

Running the Grooves

For this, I was going to use the Veritas skew plane.  I haven't used this tool a lot yet so this will help give me some experience with it.  Given the long grooves I need to make, I should get some good experience for this project.  After running the first groove, I finished off the bottom and sides with a shoulder plane.  The groove looked pretty good, however I eventually discovered that the fence moved and I hadn't noticed it.  As such, the groove wasn't a uniform distance from the rear edge.  To fix it, I glued in some thing offcuts of cherry and then used a combo of chisel and shoulder plane.  Now the groove was uniform and given the location for this error (rear of case) it will likely never be seen.

Cutting out the feet

Was pretty easy to mark these out and then cut with a mixture of saws and chisels and rasps to clean up the newly formed edge.  I got more breakout that I would have like on the chisel work but that was completely due to me being aggressive and not sensitive to the work.  Unless someone gets on their belly and then looks underneath, it will never be seen.  Still, it is a reminder to myself to be sensitive when working.  No good can come from beating on the wood.

Half blind dovetails

Cutting the two horizontal pieces with the tails was straightforward.  Given the length of the vertical pieces, it was a bit challenging to set things up so that I could transfer with my marking knife the tails locations.  I found a way.  Needed to use a ladder for the sawing but that is ok.  For half blind dovetails, the way I was taught by Paul Sellers is that you don't need to cut close to the knife lines.  It's chisel work on half blinds that gets you to the final distances.  They came out pretty good all things considered.

Glue Up

In order to get deeper clamping, I used this project as an excuse to buy some Bessy clamps that have a bigger head.  I wanted to get more pressured deeper into the sides.  I am sure I could have rigged up some sort of wooden cauls.  Again, I just used this is an excuse.  One thing I am really fussy about doing is a practice dry run for glue ups.  Though its still stressful gluing up something this big, it was reasonably uneventful.  I did the glue up in two steps.  The first day, I glued up the center horizontal divider so that way I would have less clamping directions to worry about when doing the main carcass.  I didn't talk much about this piece but I did keep grain direction in mind so that way it would be able to move with the main carcass and not create a cross grain situation.

I did have my wife help me as the pieces are big and heavy and I just want to avoid a crisis.  The other thing I do is now use Titebond liquid hide glue.  It has a longer open time and this helps my stress level as well.  I almost always leave things overnight so its longer dry time isn't really an issue for me.

With this all behind, this piece is starting to look like furniture.  Still a lot to do but I kind of felt like the "hard" part was behind me.  This was mostly true but I did done some bone headed use a bigger hammer to pound things together that created problems but I will save that for the next post. 

Hands Made of Iron

 Not really.  When I started woodworking six years ago with hand tools, I found that my hands would be sore.  This went on for years.  At some point, they stopped becoming sore.  I was  happy about this as my hands had finally built up whatever muscles needed strengthening; same with my shoulders and arms.  Two days ago, my company had a holiday get together.  It was a lot of fun; especially so given the last 20 months or so of sheltering in place.

The celebration was at a bowling alley and we bowled.  I used to bowl in grammar and high school.  I liked bowling.  When my career settled down, I joined a bowling league the large company I was at had and even got my grammar school bowling partner to join.  Bought a new ball and we had a lot of fun.  The one thing I noticed was that my bowling hand would hurt after bowling.  Tried tweaking the finger holes, etc.  I found no remedy to stop my hand from hurting.  After one or two seasons, I stopped bowling because of it.  When I joined another large company that had a bowling league (at the same lanes I did league in grammar school), I didn't join it based on recent hand pane.  The few times I had bowled since my hands would hurt after bowling even using lane balls.  

It had been about 7 or 8 years since I last bowled meaning I hadn't bowled since I had started woodworking.  I fully expected my bowling hand to be sore the next day.  It wasn't.  I was very happy about this and am smiling as I type this.  Woodworking has made my hands stronger.  They are not hands of iron but it looks like I can bowl pain free.  I'm very happy about this.  Hmmm, need to see what local bowling leagues are out there.

Shaker Chimney Cupboard - Part 2

The first step was to lay out all the boards and choose the best orientation possible.  Fortunately, the wood that I had was all pretty good so it would have been hard to make a bad choice.  The boards were long and heavy (mostly 1x12's of cherry).  As such, I cut it into rough lengths for the sides and shelves.  Though long boards, conventional hold downs work well to secure the wood for rough cuting.  Rough cross cutting a 1x12 goes quickly.  I actually don't mind cross cutting wood.

Once the wood was to rough length, I used a series of hand planes to get it smooth, square and twist free.  Since I started with S4S wood, this was fairly straight forward.  Took a while but that was mostly due to the size of the piece I was making.  As with all my projects, I sharpened up all my tools before the start of this.

The big decision I had to make was whether I wanted a fixed or adjustable shelf in the cabinets.  Given it's intended use to hold bath towels, etc I figured a fixed shelf would be fine.  I really don't like the way most adjust shelving looks on a a case.  When I eventually make book shelves, I plan to go with fixed shelving as well.  I will take a look at heights of the longer books I own so I will have one shelf that will fit them and then more conventional widths.

Given that this  shaker cabinet has a small face frame, I didn't need to debate whether to use stopped housing dados or full dados.  Full through dado's are a bit easier as I can saw down the sides.  Though the dado's were long and there were a lot of them, I quite like chopping them out.  Most of the shelves got a nice friction fit.

One of the tools that I received several Christmas's ago has really come in handy.  I received a 24" beam for my engineering square.  I use it quite often.  On pieces such as this, it really comes in handy.  Really happy I have it.  With that done, it was time to move onto the rebate in the back and that will be the next post.