You can hear a pin drop

You could hear a pin drop? In other words it has all been very quite here on my blog for a while.

It doesn’t mean that I haven’t been busy though. Sit back and I will tell you what has been going on.

So in my last post, I was talking about making the handles for my tallboy. So by using some card, I came up with a shape that was happy with. Next I had to make the actual handles out of wood.

Cutting a long story short, I did that and put them onto the drawer fronts. But I wasn’t too happy with them. I still liked the idea, but there was something just not right with them. I have a picture here of the tallboy with the handles on the drawer fronts.



You can see what I mean…it just isn’t right for the piece.

I needed a rethink. Rather than worrying about it, I just put some blankets over the tallboy and forgot about it. Let ideas run around in the back of my mind for a while, and get on with making something else.

I have always wanted to make something that is coopered, i.e. similar to the construction of a barrel, but without actually making a barrel!

James Krenov is always making cabinets with coopered doors, and as I am a bit of a fan of his, then I thought that I will have a go.

I had some American cherry left over from making the drawers in the tallboy, so I decided I would use that. Also I wanted to cut some dovetails on my Woodrat, and that lead to the design of having the carcass sides dovetailed together.

Inside the cabinet I wanted to put a couple of drawers. I managed to get some off cuts of rippled sycamore veneer, so the drawer fronts would be made of that. The white colour of the drawer fronts would contrast the rich red colour of the cherry.

Anyway, if you want to see some picture of it, you can check out the cabinet on my gallery pages.

After making the cabinet, I knew the solution to the tallboy problem. I should have stuck with my initial idea of routing a handle into the drawer fronts rather than changing my mind half way through and wanting to make an applied handle.

What I came up with was to route an elliptical handle in the drawer fronts. The down side was that I will need to make another set of seven fronts!!

A trip to the veneer merchant and a nice bundle of cherry veneer under my arm (and somehow a new mobile phone – I am easily side tracked) and I could then get to work making the final set of fronts get getting the project finished.

Well here it is. The completed tallboy with the new drawer fronts.



At least I am now happy with it.