Wood US idea

Have to crawl before you can walk and walk before you run and that is how my projects get started. I am preparing to build a media cabinet for my house based on a Pottery Barn design.

From MediaCabinet

The first thing I had to do was get some measurements, which Pottery Barn provides, and then guesstimate how much wood I was going to need. I am not using any plywood, all solid wood, so I will be compensating for wood movement as I go. So, with that, I have procured what I hope to be all the wood I need, but I will probably need more.

From MediaCabinet

From MediaCabinet

The lumber is made up of 12/4, 8/4 and 4/4. The 12/4 will be for the legs and the top (resawn) and the 8/4 will be for book matched doors, rails and stiles and other parts and the 4/4 will be for just about everything else.

So, for the baby steps, it begins with deciding what to use where, which Ive started to do, as well as mill the lumber. Here you can see some of the 12/4 milled for the legs; these will be cut in half to form two legs, four total and a leg in the middle for center support.

From MediaCabinet

Next I needed to resaw some 8/4 to make the rails for the base; Im building the bottom platform before anything else as everything will be based on this dimension. So here I am setup for for the resaw.

From MediaCabinet

And a shot after it has been cut.

From MediaCabinet

This, roughly 6, section will give me all four rails I need for the bottom; two about 57" and two about 18". Next will be milling them to final size and laying out and cutting the tenons. Once I cut the tenons, I will layout for the mortises and begin to fit dry fit everything and move to the next stage. More to come...

Be Safe!

So with starting back to work on my normal job, I havent spent a ton of time this last week on the media cabinet, just a little bit here and there. I was able to do some work on it today. During the week I was able to work on getting the base glued up. Below you can see where I am gluing up the long stretchers. As you can see, I dont have any clamps long enough for this so I had to improvise.

From MediaCabinet

So today I decided to do some more work on the doors; specifically the two outer doors. These doors are 26" tall by 13" wide. As I mentioned in my last post, the center panel is one solid piece of wood. What I worked on today was to mill up the rails and stiles. I am using 2" rails and stiles so once I got them cut and planed I used my matched rail and stile bit to rout the pieces. Here are the individual pieces.

From MediaCabinet

And here they are loosely put together.

From MediaCabinet

Here is one door dry fit, without the center panel obviously.

From MediaCabinet

Next, I took the two center panels and used one of my new vertical raised panel bits and routed the panel profile. Here is a glimpse at the profile.

From MediaCabinet

Here is one door dry fit. Note the chalk marks, this is how I keep track of where each piece goes and how they should be oriented.

From MediaCabinet

Straight on look.

From MediaCabinet

Also note that the I kept the stiles about 1" longer; this is on purpose so I can lay the door flat, make sure the panel is centered for glue up and then trim it to exact length. Here are both doors together.

From MediaCabinet

Well, that is all I was able to get done today really. Next I need to finish gluing the bottom together and then I need to do a little trick to them to re-enforce the mortise and tenon joint. Next, I am also going to turn my attention to the bottom panel and take my card scraper to it to get all the glue off from the glue up and work on flattening any unevenness. Hopefully more on that tomorrow!

Be Safe!