18 April 2012

The Wood Warped!

Those at the front who've been paying attention will have noticed that there's going to be another cabinet in the offing soon, this one made from some rather spectacular English Walnut recently acquired.

Being a bit of a parsimonious soul, I thought I'd try and get the bits and pieces out of the thickness of one board that happened to be 28mm thick...I needed to finish at 26mm so I thought I might just get away with it, which, as it happened, proved a mistake because....
  



















....several bits of timber that I needed to be straight, decided, in their infinite wisdom, that they weren't going to be.

Bugger!  However, all is not lost because the bits shown in the first two pics are almost exactly the right size for picture frames and as we're off to Japan very shortly and SWIMBO would like some woodblock prints, I can see that I'm going to be a bit busy in that department when we get back.

The back though, for this cabinet is the rather nice piece of walnut shown on the left (which was part of my 'Final Job' piece at college in the 70's) and there's just enough room to mount the two Venetian masks, but in fact if you look closely, you'll see that I've glued a couple of strips onto the edges which will eventually form the tongues for the framed back panel.

Having had bits of this walnut bend on me, I had no option but to hoick out another board and cut some thicker, larger sections, which can be seen in the pic below on the bottom section of the rack...




















...but hang on just a cotton-pickin' minute I can hear you chundering..."what's he got on the top rack?"

The answer to that question is a lot more walnut for another cabinet, this time mounted on a floor stand.  The pic below...















...shows some of the component parts of it.  The two bits on the left will form part of the back panel and the bits on the right are the panels for the doors, still from the 'Final Job' piece of 1978.

What I've neglected to mention thus far is that the stand is going to be made from teak, every single piece of which will have to be planed by hand, meaning that plane irons will have to be sharpened every five minutes.

Hell's teeth...what have I let myself in for?

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