The Gallery cabinets continue...

Well, the gallery cabinets are starting to roll now. The flat parts are nearly finished being cut, and the curved pieces are almost finished being glued up. The curved parts are all shaped using bending forms. I ended up making 6 different forms for the 8 types of parts needed.

For the toe kick fronts, the forms are simple - multiple layers of MDF with a curved edge, The 2" wide kick fronts are glued together by simply clamping the glued parts to the form ....

The curved display case fronts, though, require more complicated forms. The forms are made of ribs cut to the required radius, which are then joined with cross-braces and solid wood ends. This frame is then skinned with a layer of bending plywood....

Since the edge of each cabinet front layer will be shaped, the layers have to be veneered and bent separately before shaping, then the layers joined together. To maintain the correct radius of each successive layer, all three are glued up at once. It's a little tricky, but with a system, it works fairly smoothly. In a nutshell, each glue-up requires 7 components - the main layer is made of two pieces of bending plywood and a veneer covering, and the two outer layers each consist of one piece of bending plywood and one of veneer - after glue is applied to all surfaces, each layer's veneer and substrate are taped together to keep things from shifting .....

Next, the three layers are stacked and filler strips are added to maintain an even thickness throughout the entire packet. A hardboard caul is then added, and the whole packet is taped down to its form .....

Then the whole thing is put into a vacuum bag and pressed ....

You might also have noticed the big chalk arrows on the veneer faces - those are to help maintain a consistent grain direction an all parts. One of the great properties of the khaya (a type of African mahogany) that I'm using for this project is that, like all mahoganies, it has great luster, but the luster is directional. Meaning that if you were to rip a piece of wood into two halves and flipped one 180 degrees, the two halves would look different in terms of color (one being darker than the other). This is due to the directional nature of the wood fiber cells, and the way light refracts entering and exiting the cells. So, for a consistent look, its important to make sure all the cabinet fronts have their grain running the same direction - hence, the arrows!

Stay tuned .....

Swoopy Gallery Cabinetry

The latest adventure unfolding in the shop is a rare (for me, anyway) commercial project. It involves a number of cabinets for an art gallery in Sedona, Arizona. The project includes over a dozen partially glazed, curved-front jewelry display cases, three storage credenzas, and a couple of point-of-sale stations, all for a new retail space the gallery has just taken over.

The cases are being made using certified veneers of ribbon-grain sapele and khaya, two species of African mahogany. The overall layout of the display cases forms a very organic curvilinear space, and involves four different cabinet shapes, utilizing two different basic radii.

The curved fronts will be given even more dimensionality with the use of multiple layers, which will themselves have undulating edges. The combination of linear-grained veneers and curvaceous shapes will give them an exciting visual presence, but the use of consistent color and grain will ensure that what's inside the cases is the real star.

Stay tuned to watch this complicated project take shape ......

Houston, The Behemoth Has Landed!

Well, after much work and luck, the desk has been delivered and assembled. One of the biggest challenges was getting the various components of the desk, a small drawer base, the huge 8' long side case, and the big walnut slabs, to all fit together. Since it bridges the two base cases, attaching the main desktop slab was the trickiest. Its attachment to the small drawer base was pretty straightforward - four solid aluminum posts were screwed to the underside of the slab with hanger bolts, then the case was lined up and bolted to the posts from the inside.

Attaching the slab to the long side case was a little trickier. In earlier posts I described both the battens that hold the slab flat, and the milling of two walnut rounds that support the slab. The trick was to mill shaped dadoes (grooves) into the rounds that would receive the batten and keep the slab aligned. This turned out to be easier than expected using the plywood sled that was used to mill the rounds in the first place.

Each round was remounted into the sled after it was marked with alignment marks so that the sled acted as a straight, constant edge that could be indexed against the tablesaw fence.

Then, with the alignment marks still intact, the rounds were lined up with each other and with the center of the case, so that they could be attached in line. Aluminum pins were then installed to maintain the alignment of the rounds and the batten, and to keep the batten from shifting.

Once everything was lined up, the slab covering the back half of the case could be positioned and attached, then the doors and drawers reinstalled, and voila.

As you can see, there's a second set of aluminum posts that support a floating frosted glass shelf, as well as aluminum drawer and door handles, which tie the whole piece together. For a little extra flair, the panels on the fronts of the cases are veneered with custom cut pieces of figured walnut. In the end, this desk, which has both natural and tailored design features, as well as both rustic and sophisticated detailing, comes together as a unified whole with a one-of-a-kind presence.

The Desk Keeps Moving Along

Greetings. The big statement desk has been moving right along the past couple of weeks. In the last post I ended by showing some of the parts of the web frames that make up the main desk pieces. Since then, the frames and panels have been assembled and prefinished ...

... and the cabinet carcasses have been glued up, finished, the drawers installed, and the drawer fronts fitted. Below you can see the various stages....top - the glued up parts are dry assembled to assure proper sizes and fit (you can see how the prefinished panels are taped off to protect them as the frames are finished); middle - the glue-up of the finished pieces; bottom - the unfinished drawer fronts test fitted to check size and alignment.

Another unique feature of this desk's design is that the desktop slab will be floating about the storage cabinets. On one side the top will float on two wooden disks made from the ends of veneer logs. To make the disks, a two foot round was first squared off. Next, because the round was unevenly shaped, I made a plywood sled to help feed it through the band saw safely. Then the disks were sliced sequentially by mounting the round to the sled.

Now its time to complete the finishing, and put it all together. Stay tuned!

Museum Show Chiffonier

Here's the next installment on the making of the chiffonier that I'll be showing at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History show the coming summer.

Two of the most distinctive elements of this piece's design are the sculpted bonnet and base. Both are made of wenge, a dark, dense, black/brown wood, that will give weight to and ground the piece. Both are stack laminated and then shaped. This series of photos shows the steps involved in making the bonnet:

First, pieces are face-laminated to achieve the required thickness for shaping. In this case, to accommodate the width of the part, it was made in three sections and then glued together after shaping (you can see the mortises for the floating tenons that will help with both alignment and glue joint strength) ....

Next, the built up blanks are rough cut to shape on the band saw....

Finally, the subparts are glued together and the entire piece is shaped ....

The base was created in much the same way, with the pieces in each layer being bandsawn roughly to size before glue-up, then the whole part being shaped afterward ....

Stay tuned for the next installment on the making of this piece, when I'll talk about the distinctive features of it's seven drawers.

The Desk Continues ....

Happy New Year, and welcome back after what hopefully was a good Holidays with a minimum of weather-related headaches.

Well, the desk is moving right along. The slabs are finished, and the structure of the cases is taking shape. Because the walnut slabs are so large, and in their "natural" state, some stabilization was the first order of business.

In the small slab, there were a couple of significant cracks that could continue to open over time with seasonal movement, so I bridged them with butterfly inlays. Butterflies are a very elegant way to stabilize natural slabs, first popularized by George Nakashima. It involves cutting bow tie-shaped pieces of hardwood and inlaying them across a crack. These are wenge, and are about 3/8" thick. In the picture you can see the simple band saw jig used to mill them, and the finished product.

The large desktop slab presented a different challenge. Surprisingly, there were no cracks to deal with, but at over 2" thick, and nearly 40" wide in some parts, cupping over time would be inevitable - in fact, it started to move around a we were surfacing it on the big CNC router! So braces were installed to keep it as flat as possible. Of course you can't just screw a brace to a piece of wood that size, or seasonal movement would eventually cause unwanted damage. Screwing the brace on with elongated holes to allow for movement is a popular technique, but the screw heads are unsightly. So, as with last summer's bench, the most elegant solution is sliding dovetails. To accomplish this, good stout braces of straight-grain ipe were milled with four 2" long integral dovetail pins. Matching sockets were then routed into the underside of the slab, and the brace dropped in and slid home. The dovetails allow the slab to expand and contract with environmental changes, and keep everything in plane.

With the finish on them the slabs look pretty great!



The next step is putting together the casework that these babies will sit on. The cases will be made using web frame construction, in which each part is made of a solid wood frame filled with a plywood panel. This method allows for the strength and edge/corner durability of solid wood, but avoids the problems associated with seasonal movement and cross-grain joinery. The only down side is that all those frames mean lots of frame members to cut joinery into (I'm using floating tenons) and to pre-finish before they can be assembled (the picture only shows about half the panels).

That's where we are, so stay tuned as the work progresses.

A Statement Desk

My newest commission is a large desk utilizing substantial slabs of walnut. The design is in the final phases of tweaking, but the slabs are already in hand. They came from Jim Baker in Gilroy, who specializes in large scale tree milling. They were then flattened and dressed on an impressive 5' x 22' CNC router by FrameCom, also in Gilroy.

The main desktop slab measures over 3' x 7'! This is the smaller of the two pieces. They should look great with a little sanding and some finish. Stay tuned for more as this piece develops.