Chest of drawers....The making of - Part 1

I am currently making a pair of chest of drawers. It is a long process making anything with drawers in, as the drawers themselves take a while to make.

Although the drawers are the last thing to make, getting the timber machined up for them at the start of the project is a good idea as it allows the wood to dry and settle.

So here is how I do this part of the process.

First of all, select the timber you are going to use for the drawers. In this case, I am using American cherry.  It is a good wood, as it has few defects, comes in good size planks, supplied dry, and is stable.

I got some big planks sent to me. Each was about 3.4m long, about 160mm wide and 50mm thick. For those who want to know, it was 7 cubic feet of timber.

The downsize of these long lengths was they didn't fit in the lift up to the workshop. They had to be carried up the stairs to the 3rd floor.

The planks laying down are the American cheery used to make the drawer boxes.

Next I work out how to cut these planks up to make the best usage of the wood. I worked out that from a 1.2m length, this wood give me a piece for the drawer side, and a piece for the front (or back) of the drawer.

I cut the large planks into these length, and machined them on four faces giving a final thickness ranging from 46mm to 51mm.

The cherry machined up into 1.2m lengths.

Now comes the hard slog.  These planks are then ripped (a woodworking term that means cutting along the length of the grain) into strips 15mm thick.

So each plank has two edges, that is two cuts on the band saw to give two pieces, and then the rough surfaces on the plank from the cut are then cleaned up (and squared) with a couple of passes on the jointer. Repeat until all the wood has been processed.

Here are all the strips of wood straight from the band saw

I got about 150 strips of wood from the planks.  These can now sit while I make the carcass of the chests. During this time the wood will dry more and become more stable.

Lucky all those pieces, when arranged nicely, fitted under my bench.

The timber neatly stacked up under my workbench

So what will I ultimately do with all these strips of wood? Yes stick them back together! Ha ha ha.......utter madness!


Next I will be starting to make the carcasses. Funny enough, this also starts with cutting more wood into smaller pieces.......



For more information please visit either my bespoke fine furniture website, or my handmade jewellery boxes website.
Follow me on Facebook or read my tweets on Twitter.

Working out how to do it

One of the great things about making furniture and boxes, is coming up with an idea and then having to work out how to put that idea into practice - problem solving.

I recently made a cabinet that has two doors, and when these are open, it reveals a drawer. I needed to make a handle for this drawer which had to be flush with the drawer front.

There still needed to be a way to grab hold of the handle to open the drawer, so my idea was to take some wood and hollow it somehow to allow purchase  for your fingers.

The shape of the handle I wanted was like the key stone in a stone arch - a 'V' shape with a flat bottom. To hollow it out, I would use a Router and something called a finger-pull cutter. The problem was how to hold the wood while the Router is spinning the cutter at over 20,000 RPM.

 

So how was it done? With lots of screws and various pieces of MDF cut to different shapes and sizes.


In this first picture, the handle black can be seen surrounded by various pieces of MDF. The handle is not screwed down, it is just held in place. The two upper pieces of MDF stop the handle from moving up and down, while also providing a guide for the hollowing process with the Router.

Fig 1 - The handle blank held down.

 

The first part of the hollowing process is to remove most of the wood with a straight sided router cutter. Finger-pull cutters are small and not really designed for removing too much waste wood, only really the 'pull' detail. As I had to remove a fair amount of wood, I made a number of passes with the straight sided cutter, getting a little deeper each time.


Fig 2 - Waste wood has been removed with a straight sided cutter.

 

The actual finger-pull shape, shown in the picture below, is done with a single pass of the router cutter.

Fig 3 - A close-up showing the finger-pull detail.

The handle is finished. All that is required is some sanding to remove the machining marks.

Fig 4 - The completed handle.

 

This final picture shows the handle fitted to the front of the drawer.

Fig 5 - The completed handle fitted to the drawer front.

Five pictures don't really convey how much time it took to make the handle, both thinking time and making time, but it was probably about 5 hours in total.



For more information please visit either my bespoke fine furniture website, or my handmade jewellery boxes website.

Follow me on Facebook or read my tweets on Twitter.
 

For the Gold Cup?

Mid summer has gone....the nights are now drawing in (of sorts, I am sure for a time the sun sets later than it did on the solstice)...soon be Xmas! 

But before then, there are a couple of shows I will be attending, so that means I am making a couple of new items.

One thing I am making is a chest of drawers. I know this as I have started it. If there is time, I may also make a coffee table. We shall see.

Five drawers in this one. Made of oak. Curved drawers fronts.  Fumed oak detail on the drawer fronts. Got the idea?  No?? Here are a couple of simple SketchUp images.

Made from oak. Curved drawer fronts, that curve alternate right-left.

A close-up showing how the curving drawer fronts will look.

So these images give an idea what I am making. Wanna see some 'work in progress' pictures? If you do, then scroll down. If you don't, then you are done for now.

A big pile of wood, rough cut to size, ready to machine.
I have another two piles as well. Takes a fair bit of timber
to make a chest of drawers.

The drawer boxes are made from smaller pieces of wood that have been
glue together. It makes the construction of the drawers more stable, which
is very important to stop them sticking and binding in the carcass.
The gadget being used is a special clamping system that helps keep the
pieces of wood flat while the glue dries.

Here I am doing a test fit of the components that make up the carcass - two sides,
a top, a bottom and five drawer frames. The test fit ensure all the joinery is correct.

Here is the final phase of carcass to drawer frame glue-up. It is a multi phase
process. First of all the frames are individually glued to one carcass side. Once this
is done, and in one big hit, the frames are then glues to the other side.

That is it for now.....check back later to see how I am getting on.

To see more of my furniture, have a look at my website and the pictures in the gallery section.

Follow me on Facebook or read my tweets on Twitter.

Lights and glass

Apart from hand tools, there are loads of other tools that are useful for a cabinet maker.

I suppose a pencil, a pencil sharpener, a straight edge and paper could be classed as a collection of tools, as these are traditionally used to design work.

I sometimes still use the above, but more often than not, I use drawing applications on my computer.  There are a couple I use.

To produce engineering type drawings, I use a package called Visio. I first used this package sometime in the mid 90's while working for NatWest.  I was on a project and we were reverse engineering some code, and needed a tool that allowed us to produce flows that could be used to explain how the reverse engineered code worked - nobody actually knew.  Visio allowed flow diagrams to be made, which were the ideal pictorial representation of what we had found.  Basically Visio is a simple drawing package.  You drag shapes around, set their sizes etc. It is not technical type drawing package. It just uses shapes, but I have used it so much I find it easy and quick to produce plan/elevation type drawings.

This is an example of the type of drawing that I produce with Visio.  It give me all the information that I require for making a piece of furniture.

An engineering style diagram, giving dimensions etc.

Another good software package is Sketch-Up, which you can download for free from Google. Sketch-up is designed for producing 3D type drawings. These types of drawings are great to help people visualise something, as looking at a 3D render is a bit easier than looking at an engineering type drawing. Using Sketch-up is a bit strange at first, but there are plenty of on-line help type videos around, plus there is a useful book from Taunton Press which is aimed solely at woodworkers using Sketch-Up.

Here are a couple of images of the piece of furniture shown about in the Visio drawing.

A 3D image that gives a totally different view compared to the engineering drawing.

The cabinet placed in-situ in an alcove.

This display cabinet is the piece of furniture I am making at the moment.  It is designed to hold a collection of pottery and ceramics. It will be made from oak and sycamore (this wood being inside the cabinet to help keep the inside bright). The doors will be of glass, and there are two glass shelves.  In addition, there will be LED lights inside the cabinet to add even more illumination.

Real pictures will appear when I have finished, then a comparison can be made with my drawings. I hope they match, but I expect the real piece of furniture to be better.




To see more of my furniture, have a look at my website and the pictures in the gallery section.

Follow me on Facebook or read my tweets on Twitter.

The trials and tribulations of making things.

A few weeks ago I was contacted by someone who had seen a piece of my furniture on my website. They had been looking for a something like it for ages, and the one I had made fitted the bill exactly. Even the wood was perfect. They asked if I could give them a price for how much it would cost for me to make another. I said I would, and that I'd give them the low down within a couple of days.

I duly worked out the price. What I normally do is work out how long it will take to make, which gives the labour charge. On top of this I then add an estimate of the materials. I never know this amount exactly as the price of timber constantly changes, and I have to visit the timber merchant and select the boards before I can get an exact amount. So when I give an estimate, I normally say it will be X amount plus or minus Y depending on material costs. Y is normally only a couple of hundred pounds.

I passed on the estimate.

A couple of days later I got a reply. It was a out of their price range. They wondered if I could still make the piece, but out of cheaper wood.




We had water troubles in the workshop. The biggest was that we never had water for three months as the main into the building was crushed by all the lorries that deliver to a unit further down the road. As the road is private, there was an argument as to who would pay to get it fixed. Good news is that we didn't have to pay when it was fixed.

Anyway, one of the taps in the workshop was broken. You know how it is. Turn it for ages and nothing comes out, and then a big rush of water. So the bloke who runs the workshop called in a plumber to have a look.

The plumber came in, had a look, got his spanner out, fiddled around, and changed a washer. Tap fixed! 

When the bloke who runs the workshop saw the bill of £80 + VAT, he said “but you only changed a washer. Can’t you use a cheaper one?”




A stroll through the park across the road from the workshop takes you to a street with a few nice shops in.

One of these is a sandwich shop and they sell some really nice looking artisan bread. I went in the other day to have a look.

I couldn't believe the price of the bread. £4.95 for a loaf!

Now I know a bit about baking, and bread is only really flour and water and salt and yeast.  Water (if your main isn't broken) comes out the tap, yeast will grow by itself, and salt comes in very big bags for not much money. How much must the flour cost then?




A cabinet maker, a plumber and an artisan baker walk into a pub.

“Three pints of your finest real ale, please.” asks the plumber.

“No problem” says the landlord who pulls the pints. “That will be £11.55, please.”

“Hold on!” says the cabinet maker. “That’s a bit steep, isn't it?”

“Yes” says the plumber. “I know water comes out of the tap.”

“And I know that you can grow a yeast culture.” says the baker.

“And I know that hops and barley don’t cost much.” adds the cabinet maker.

“Ah yes gentleman” says the landlord. “It isn't the ingredients in the beer that make up the expense. Okay, there is a tax to pay to the government to be accounted for too. But what you are paying for is the skill and knowledge of the brewer who makes the beer.”

“Oh!” say the cabinet maker, plumber and baker in unison, with a look of enlightenment of their faces.



To see more of my furniture, have a look at my website and the pictures in the gallery section.

Follow me on Facebook or read my tweets on Twitter.

Good enough to eat

Here are some pictures of the chest of drawers I mentioned a few posts ago, the one entitled 'January'.

It is made from steamed pear, walnut and maple.........custard anyone?

To see more of my furniture, have a look at my website and the pictures in the gallery section.

Follow me on Facebook or read my tweets on Twitter.

Dark in the afternoons

I don't like these winter evenings. I don't even think it is really winter yet. I am never sure the exact months that make up the seasons. Are the solstices and equinoxes in the mid part of the season? That doesn't seem correct to me......

....is summer May-June-July or is it as I always believed June-July-August?  And the Christmas carol 'In the deep mid winter', are they implying the mid winter is around Christmas or the winter solstice? I always assumed winter was December-January-February.

Have the seasons slipped? Is it to do with the earths orbit or global warming? Is too much forest area being cut down to make way for dairy farming? The tress are the lungs of the planet and soak up carbon dioxide. Cut too many down and the planet can't breath.

And now in this country we might loose 90% of our ash trees.  Damn!  I like English ash. It is a great wood. I have made lots of pieces from it.

I just finished a big hall mirror where the frame is from ash. It is to go with the olive ash and ash sideboard I will be taking to the Handmade in Britain show this week in Chelsea Old Town Hall.

I also made a small jewellery chest of drawers. Something that sits on top of a dressing table. It is from olive ash and walnut. Here are some pictures of it.

Olive ash and walnut jewellery cabinet

Drawers have divider compartments

The jewellery gives the piece a sense of scale

Four of the drawers have dividers in them, the size of the divider compartment getting large in each drawer down, while the fifth drawer is just empty for large objects.

It will look good at the show sitting on the sideboard.

Please check my website if you want to find out more about my furniture, follow me on my Facebook pages, or see what I am talking about on Twitter.

Not so plain Jane

I am building a display cabinet at the moment, something open fronted with glass shelves.

The outside of the cabinet will be from American walnut, but for the inside faces I wanted something lighter and contrasting.

Something like sycamore could be used, as it has a minimal grain patter and is a 'white-with-a-hint-of-yellow' colour. But I thought this will be a bit dull and uninteresting.

A wood I have always wanted to use is something called lacewood. It has a lace or snake skin pattern and is a pinkish colour with brown flecks. A good contrast for the walnut.

Here is a picture of the lacewood I have for the cabinet inside. You should be able to get what I am talking about.

Lacewood showing the striking grain pattern

Lacewood has an interesting background.  Most woods with an unusual grain pattern or colour are exotic timbers, but not this one.  It is a tree that grows very well in this country and exceedingly well in cities.  I am sure you know the tree I am talking about - sometimes called 'lungs of the city'.  Want another clue?  Here is picture of the tree in question.

The source of lacewood

Still clueless?  A hint is in the blog title........yes it is a Jane tree!!

Alright, it isn't a Jane tree, but it is a London plane.  Yes, that tree you see in parks and streets everywhere (and not only in London or the UK, but global).  

The London plane tree is a bit of an odd one...there is some argument as to where it comes from.  It is a cross of two trees, the oriental plane and American sycamore but these are debated. It has been widely planted in England since the late 1600's.

Apparently the tallest London place tree is in Bryanston School, Blandford Forum, Dorset. In 2008 it measured over 48m tall. Maybe fresh air is good for them.....

So now you know all about lacewood and where it comes from.

I will post some more pictures of the cabinet in due course.

For more information about me or my furniture, the have a look at my website.

A good place to arrange your collection

Remember a post a few weeks ago where I was talking about the jewellery cabinet I was making.  Good news, it is all finished and actually delivered to the clients.


Normally I take photographs of pieces in the workshop, but as you can imagine it is a bit of a kerfuffle.  The floors are dusty, the walls dusty, everything is dusty. So sweep up, let the dust settle, sweep up again and then unroll a white photographic backdrop. Umm. Dust on that now. And don't even talk about light set-up! So that is why for this piece I had a change of tactic. I had pictures taken for me by a photographer.

I really like the pictures and I think the show the piece off really well. So a thank-you to Peter Hughes for taking them.


At the moment I haven't added this piece to the gallery on my website, as the whole site is going through a bit of a rethink.  But once it is done, I am sure I will post an update on this blog!

Making of a jewellery cabinet

Remember I was talking in my last post about a project I was making, then came along the cold weather and put a halt to it.....

...let me pick it up from when it got warmer and I had finished the little jewellery boxes.

So this cabinet is based on an existing piece of mine - the drinks cabinet I made last year. The couple I am making the jewellery cabinet for saw the drinks cabinet on my stand in a show. They wondered if I could make another, but this one with drawers. Of course I can.

Building the carcass followed the technique of I used for the drinks cabinet (read  my blog from early last year to find out how).

This cabinet has drawers, and drawers always mean loads and loads of bits of wood. Twelve drawers with two sides, a front and two backs (yes, too backs). Add a few spares and you have a right good pile of wood!

Normally when I am making a piece of furniture that has drawers, machining the wood up for them is one of the first tasks I do.  Wood for drawers needs to be dry and stable. By machining the wood as early as possible, allows it to dry and move. Then it can be machined down to final dimensions when you are ready to make the drawers. Doing this gives a fighting chance of getting good stable components.

So I wave a magic wand....and 'hey presto!', here is a set of drawers.

The drawers 'hang' in the cabinet on runners that are fixed to the sides of the cabinet. A slot is made in the drawer side that fits snug to the runner.

As this cabinet will be used to store jewellery, nine of the twelve drawers will have drop-in lattice dividers in which the jewellery will be stored. The dividers are sized depending what will be stored in the drawers. So small dividers for rings, larger one for larger items! You get the idea.

I will tell you about the dividers in the next blog post.

For more information about me and my furniture, please visit my website.