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.
No comments:
Post a Comment