The Aery: Woodworking

We needed more space for our DVDs, and a little overflow space for our CD's. We'd gotten some wood from a friend and had some cedar boards from the trim that was around the windows when we bought the house. There was plenty of wood, so why not make a match set of cabinets.

The doors of these new cabinets would be made out of the cedar. That meant the cedar would need to be joined. When I started the first DVD cabinet I bought pine for the doors that was already joined. I only had to cut those to size. This time I would need to make four doors worth of joined cedar, but first I needed to strip all the paint and stain from the top and edges of the boards.

A joiner is a pretty scary piece of equipment. Almost as scary as the table saw. I cut the boards down to approximately 32 inch lengths. That gave me 23 cedar boards to run through the joiner, two edges each. Next came the planer, which had to be used carefully so as not to damage the blades. Each board had to be run through multiple times, taking only a little bit of wood and/or paint off each time. Prepping the cedar took the better part of three days, bearing in mind that I was working on these only after putting in my eight hours at work.

The pine wasn't exactly in the best of shape either. Five of the six shelf boards had been left outside in the Florida weather for about 8 months. They had turned gray and one of them had warped. Those needed to be sanded down to fresh wood and, hopefully, the warp taken out of the one. It worked, even though that left me with thinner boards. Luckily, the weight that would be on these shelves was not going to be that great.

It took a week of an hour or so after work just to prep that wood. Then I could finalize the design and start on the real work. Building the cabinets.

Since I wanted a matched set I needed to make them at the same time. That was nearly the straw that broke the camel's back. I would have had plenty of time to make one cabinet, two cabinets took twice as long... if not longer.

The design was simple. Three shelves each, doors, and a back. With the cedar ready I could start assembling the doors. Each door was five and a half cedar boards, arranged so that the boards would give me darker color on the outside, lighter boards toward the middle. Of course in the final sanding, there was no guarantee they would end that way. Each board was joined to the next with biscuits, using a biscuit cutter, a special tool. The boards were glued together, then clamped tightly and left to set over night. Once all four doors were glued and set, they were run through the drum sander until all four were smooth and the same thickness.

Next the slots, called dados, had to be cut into the side boards of the shelves. Lance and Ron helped set up the dado blade on the table saw, which because of the unusual thickness of the shelves took a little longer then normal. All four side boards were cut at the same time, so that both cabinets would be the same. Then the top had to be cut. It used a "rabbit" cut, a dado without once side. I also wanted it to overhang the doors. It's what's referred to as a blind cut, so that the top board sits over the doors and has a more finished look. That required the router to make those cuts. Using both the dado blades on the table saw and the router table required a little practice before working on my wood pieces.

By the middle of the second week, I was beginning to wonder if I was going to get them finished before vacation started. Edward knew I was building these, so I didn't have to make excuses to stay late to work on them. By the end of the second week, I was working 4 or 6 hour days, and filling in my time with credit time I'd earned earlier in the year.

At the beginning of the third week, I glued the shelves themselves together which took two days, one to glue the shelves and sides, one to glue on the tops. The problem was there wasn't enough long clamps to hold everything at once, so that had to be done in stages. It wasn't until Wednesday that I could start the final fitting for the doors.

I had to custom fit the top of the doors to the tops of the shelves, since neither cabinet was completely square. I started by putting on the backs. I used 1/4 inch plywood and pulled the shelves as square as I could before nailing them in place. Once the top edge was matched to each door, I used that edge to define the bottom. The doors are 28 inches long, slightly longer then the bottom of the bottom shelf. It worked perfectly, with some help from Ron. Next each door had another rabbit cut in the edge. The door overlap 1/4 inch with rabbits on the center edges, one up and one down in each door, that lets the doors lie flat, giving the cabinet a more finished look.

Lastly, I put on the hinges. I'd done this type of hinge before on Sandy's Box, so I knew what to do. It required placing the hinge and chiseling out the wood beneath it. Of course, the doors never hang perfectly on the first try and I had to grind the screw holes of the hinges to a slot shape in order to level a few of them and get them to sit correctly. At this point, I am into taking vacation time. The one good thing was that this time of year, it's very slow around the office. There is a major conference in San Francisco. Most folks aren't there, or thinking about starting vacation themselves.

Once the doors were on I could start the final sanding and put on the handles and door magnets. I finished that part on Friday afternoon, the day before vacation officially started. I packed everything into may car and cleaned up my mess in the shop. I'd finished the construction, but I still needed to stain and varnish them.

I stained the cabinets three days before Christmas. The next two days were putting on the varnish. I put the hardware on the day after Christmas. Then they had to cure, i.e. de-stinkify, before we could bring them into the house (3 more days) and even then we needed to keep the windows cracked.

They sit under the window in the dinning room, 1/4 inch below the window sill. Prefect. I'm really happy with the way they came out. Hopefully, it will be a little while longer before I need to try something like that again.