I designed this cabinet to fit a specific corner of my MIL's house. The design carved on the doors was taken from Tommy Mac's blanket chest in Fine Wood Working. The other parts of the cabinet are my original design. This project represented several firsts for me:
1. Raised panel doors. I constructed a jig for the tablesaw to cut the raised panel doors. I got the idea for the jig from the internet.
2. Combining carving with a piece of furniture. I did the carving on the doors with a combination of router and Foredom flexible shaft grinder. I used the router to hog out the majority of wood and the flex shaft grinder to fine tune the carving and to dimple the background. The background dimpling was Tommy Mac's idea to prevent having to sand the background.
3. Using Hickory. While it finishes well, hickory exploits any weakness in your tools. I had to replace my circular saw, the flex shaft and handpiece on my Foredom, and a couple of jig saw blades.
4. Using gel stain and shellac. The gel stain was easy to work with. I would highly recommend gel stains. I finished the pieces separately and then did the assembly as several have recommended on this forum. This worked well.
5. Creating a half column WITHOUT a lathe. I had read that years ago they would glue paper between boards so that they could be split later. I glued up 4 boards for the columns and place a sheet of newspaper between the middle two boards. I created a box so that my router could set on top. I would make a pass and rotate the block. This rounded the column. To get the details, I constructed a jig for my Foredom to hold the handpiece and a pattern for the jig to ride in. See the picture below and in my gallery to see WIP of the column. I finished the column with a great deal of sanding. A turner could have completed this project in a fraction of time, but I did not have access to a lathe and I wanted the half columns as a design feature. To my surprise, when the column was removed from the jig, I was able to split it where the newspaper was. Part of the newspaper was left on each half of the column.
As I was agonizing over some of the details, my wife said that I should not make it look perfect or people would not believe that it was hand-made. You gotta love her for this comment and there should be no question that this was hand-made.
Seeing some of the projects on this forum and reading the advice has improved my skill and allowed me to take more risks with my projects.
Comments welcome.
