Mo' Drawers

I finally got a coat of finish on my drawers yesterday and this morning I installed them. Here's the boring details.

These are the clips that hold the front of the undermount slides. Actually, the technical name for them is 'nipples' (teehee) - crazy europeans. At first glance they look pretty chintzy but they actually do their function very well.

The back of the slide has a little tab (that, incidentally, seems much more nipple-like) that needs a corresponding hole in the back of the drawer to engage. Originally I made a much fancier jig to locate and drill the hole accurately but it didn't work as well as this simpler version. Sometimes you just have to nail some scraps together.


Tab A into hole B.

One of the nice things about under-mount slides is their adjustability. This little blue wheel moves that wedge-thingy in and out, which moves the drawer up and down on the slide. So if the drawer front is a bit out of alignment you have about 1/16" of up & down adjustment on each side - allowing some fine tuning of the final fit.


...And it snaps in. Easy-peazy.


It's kinda nice to not have to see the slides.

Dust

I really have to get my dust collector set up. Unfortunately I don't have any room for it yet, so until I do I have to put up with crap like this:

This is the carnage left on my table saw after milling up a bunch of window sill material for my house.

I milled the wood for my cabinet doors last weekend. I had already bought some wide planks of birch and was hoping that I could resaw them to get rift to quarter sawn material. Turns out though that I couldn't get what I wanted out of it so I spent a great deal of time hunting around for some 12/4 birch. I'm not sure why, but 12/4 birch or quarter-rift sawn birch is really hard to find. I ended up finding what I was looking for in Sherwood Park, a 'suburb' of Edmonton. There's a guy there who builds baseball bats and all his material is 3x3 blanks of air dried ash, maple, and birch. I was a bit dissappointed to find out that it was milled green, and with drying had shrunk almost a quarter inch. Fortunately though, being air-dried, it didn't move a hair when I resawed it all into rail & stile stock. I squeezed three strips out of each blank, and they ended up at a skinny 7/8" thick. I'm really hoping I can get 3/4" out of them. The nice thing about building all your own doors though is that if I have to make them 11/16" it isn't a big deal.



I knew that cabinets would take me a long time to build, but I didn't realize it would go into the 6 month mark! I've had a pile of other things going on with my house renovation that diverted my attention, but the trim carpenter starts this week and the last few things I have to do should get ticked off this weekend. All there's left on my list before I move in is cabinet doors and countertops, and I'm getting help with the concrete countertops. So anyways, it's getting close! Housewarming invitations are in the mail!

NY Chairs

I forgot I had taken these pictures.

While I was in NY I snapped a few shots of some chairs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Brooklyn Museum. There was tons of furniture there but most was crazy ornately carved/upholstered/gilded european stuff. There was a few interesting plywood chairs though.


The plaque on this chair just said 'Ray Komai. Side Chair 1949' but I looked it up on the museum's website:

www.brooklynmuseum.org/research/luce/object.php?id=155417

At the MET there was a display that shows how their artifacts are stored and cataloged, and in that display there were a bunch of interesting chairs with no details whatsoever. Unfortunately the chairs I was trying to take pictures of were up on the top shelf, so I had to hold the camera up over my head, and flash photography is strictly prohibited. Anyway, here's the couple of pictures that sort of turned out... sort of.

Drawer Making

I started working on drawers a few weeks back and have been picking away at them since. I keep getting side-tracked by other things but I'm pretty much done now - I just have to put a quick coat of finish on them.

I don't like lower cabinets, because I hate bending over or getting on my knees trying to rescue something from the depths of the cabinet. Instead I built lower drawers, 24 of them, including a large drawer that a trash can will fit inside. I used baltic birch plywood for all the drawers, 1/2" for the smaller drawers and 5/8" for the larger ones, although I think now that 5/8" was a bit of overkill. I built the drawers in three batches. The first was the upper drawers, then the larger second and third row, and finally the remaining 5 in the island. The picture above is the last batch, all cut to size and ready for joinery.

I looked around for quick & strong drawer joinery and finally settled on a 'groove & rabbett' joint because it was simple, quick, and if oriented properly and tightly fit I'm sure it'll be very strong. Especially with a high-quality material like baltic birch ply. I don't think it would be very strong with solid wood because of the short grain the joint would cause. Also, I'm not sure it would work great with domestic plywood because the plys are so thick. The bit of holding wood left after the groove is cut might want to tear off if the joint is too tight.


First I cut the groove. On the first run of drawers I used my router table but I had inconsistent results with each test joint I cut (for some reason) so I switched to the dado blade. It worked more consistently but I had to scribe each cut to prevent tear out.


For Euro-style bottom mount slides the drawer bottom must be captured which adds another step into the drawer construction. I made sure to reference the fence to the top side of the drawer so that the top was all flush during glue-up. It means that I had to re-setup for every different drawer height but it made for less clean up after glue up.

I cut the rabbett last, using a sacrifical fence.

The final joint, ready for glue-up. When I had the joints together and the drawer box square I shot 3 or 4 crown molding staples through the joint for some added security. Like I said, I'm just a CNC router and a drinking porblem away from being a production cabinetmaker!

The Splinter

There's this graduate design student down in North Carolina who's building a car entirely out of wood for a graduate project. Not just 'a car' though, a mid-engine supercar. His name is Joe Harmon and I have found myself obsessing over his project. At my work there's a handful of websites that I frequently use as time wasters, and joeharmondesign.com is near the top of the list. The fact that he's building the entire car out of wood aside, his website, blog, and flicker pages are incredible, and definitely worth a browse. Check it out.


Just a few details that I find fascinating:

1. The body panels are made from woven strips of cherry. They built an old school loom to weave the strips of 1/8th inch cherry veneer that they cut with a homemade veneer slicer.
   
2. The leaf springs are made from laminated osage orange.
3. The engine is a twin-supercharged Cadillac Northstar, and to reduce heat in the engine compartment they flipped the heads over so the intakes are on the sides of the engine and the exhaust is routed out the top.
   

I'm not certain what the state of the car is right now, except that they don't seem to be working on it at the moment. I have seen pictures of it at shows and what not, so I know that it is at least assembled, but I don't think they actually have it running.

Will This Work?

Calling all people smarter than me...

This weekend I should be able to start working on the doors and drawer panels for my cabinets. I'm building bridal jointed frames with a flat panel. I want to use plywood for the panel, because I can match the grain of all the panels and don't have to resaw a ton of wood. Rather than cutting a groove and capturing the panel however, I'm wondering if I can rabbett the panel into the frame. See crappy sketch below.

I actually only want to do this on the drawer fronts, the doors will have a glass panel. The reason I want to do this is two-fold. First, it's quick. The frames can be rabbetted after they're glued up which also simplifies the glue up. Two, it makes the back of the assembled frame and panel flush, which makes it easier to screw it to the drawer box. It won't look as nice from behind as a frame and captured panel for sure, but once the frames are screwed to the drawer boxes the back side of the panel won't even be seen.

Here's what I don't know though: can I glue a plywood panel into the solid frame, or will it eventually bust out from wood movement? Essentially this is the exact same process that we've all done to assemble a back panel into a solid cabinet, so I think it would work, but I don't think I've ever seen it done this way.

What's everyone think??

Pete's Digs

I just got back last night from a week in New York. The guy who was the other resident at the Inside Passage while I was there, Pete Heilman, owns a large co-op shop in Brooklyn and last September I had a chance to check it out while I was out for Pete & Maura's wedding. Unfortunately though I was only out there for a few days, so when a seat sale came up last January I snapped up some cheap tickets and spent this past week hanging out, sight seeing, eating, etc.

Pete is in the very enviable position of living in a city where there is a built-in clientele for custom woodworking. New York City, particularly Manhattan, seems somewhat insulated from the economic trouble of the rest of the United States. Pete owns a 5000 square foot shop in an 'up and coming' area of Brooklyn, where he rents out space to other woodworkers as well cranks out various custom commissions with his own business, Heilman Design.


The morning I was there the guys were just loading a completed project in a van. Everyone was busy working on something so I just wandered around snapping pics.

Pete has been working for months on a cabinet to house medical journals. He's been picking away at it between other work. It looks to be near completion.


Pete recently moved his personal area upstairs - to be closer to the ping pong table maybe? While the bulk of the machine work goes on in the machine room downstairs, he moved a mini-max five-in-one upstairs as well. It's a nice little machine, and eliminates the need for him to run up and down the stairs for incidental machine work.


The machine room downstairs has all the usual stuff plus a 12" jointer, 10" cabinet saw, and two big sliding tablesaws.


The big daddy Northfield jointer got a complete re-haul when it showed up at the shop, and purrs like a kitten now. Pete said that blade changes are a real source of frustration though. I like the ship-wheel depth adjustment.


The front of the building is currently getting a sharp new facade made of Sapele and glass.