A great bit of kit

I am lucky in the workshop to have access to a Plano clamp system. It is such a good method for the glue up of panels.

I often use it when making drawers.  I take a plank of timber, joint one side, then shove it through the thicknesser to flatten the other side.  Then I rip sections off a few mm thicker than the desired drawer side thickness (say 11mm for an 8mm finished side).

Then using the Plano clamp, I butt joint the pieces together to get the required width.  As the clamps really do keep the joint flush, it is only a simple task when the glue is dry to flatten and thickness to the required dimensions.

In this picture, I am jointing the timber I used when making a couple of jewellery chest of drawers.

Plano clamp being used to glue pieces of ash
to form drawer sides.

And here is a little montage of pictures taken in the workshop of the completed jewellery chest of drawers. The ash I glued up in the Plano clamps was used to make the drawer boxes.

A pair of jewellery chest of drawers.

You can see more pictures of this chest of drawers (not taken in the workshop) in the gallery page of my handmade boxes website.

I suppose a chest of drawers like these could make the ideal Mothers Day present for a mum who has a large collection of jewellery.........



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

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I forgot the pictures

In the dark and distant past, when dinosaurs ruled the Earth........

.....okay, not that long ago but in the summer last year, I did a blog post on the making of a chest of drawers. Remember?  Probably not.

Well, I forgot to post the pictures of the completed piece. So here they are.

Notice how the drawer fronts curve alternate left and right.

The drawers are made from maple, and use dovetails in
their construction.

The drawer fronts have fumed oak on their edges - it helps to
show the curve on the drawer fronts and adds a visual detail
to the finished piece.

Next time I promise I will post the pictures sooner.




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

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The final stages

"Previously on Jonathan Pearce Fine Furniture....

.....I had glued the drawer frames to the carcass sides. Stay tuned for this weeks episode."

Once the sides had been glued together, it only seems logical that the top and bottom are attached. Yep, that is what happened. Here you can see the completed carcass, minus the back panel and foot assembly.

Carcass all glued up

The carcass is standing on a white platform the is square, flat and level. If it was standing on something that was out of true, then the carcass could also be pushed out of true. Something you don't want when fitting drawers. You see this out of true effect on flat packed furniture. When it is screwed together and doors fitted, often it is impossible to get good alignment. This is often because the floor is not level and is influencing the carcass.


Once the carcass is complete, the next stage is making the drawer boxes. It is a long process with many individual steps, most of which go unnoticed. But the thing that people do notice is the dovetails.

Each drawer has twenty dovetail joints, and with five drawers gives a total of one hundred dovetails!

I do my joints by cutting the tails first, and then marking up and cutting the pins. Some people do the reverse process. Neither is incorrect, just personal preference.

Marking up the 'pins' from the dovetails.

Finished - one hundred dovetail joints!

These drawers will have 'slips' and two central runners. A drawer slip is a small piece of wood that is glued to the inside bottom edges of the drawer sides. It gives the drawer more wood to run on, and also has a groove cut into it for the drawer bottom.

Drawer runners have three grooves - two for the drawer bottoms and one for a piece of wood that exactly fits into the runners (used to guide the drawer in and out of the carcass).

Drawer slips (on the left) and runners (on the right).

In this picture I am fitting the drawer fronts to the drawer boxes. Using yellow shims and masking tape to hold the drawer fronts, I can ensure that the gaps between the fronts are even.

Almost finished....just a need to fix the drawer fronts with screws, a final sanding and a final oiling.


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

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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.

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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.

Follow the winding path.

There is nothing like making something extra tricky for yourself.

For example, take a hall table.  Better still, take a hall table I made. Better even still, take a hall table that I made from oak.

Now I wanted to make the table top more interesting than just a slab of wood. Don't get me wrong, a slab of wood can look very good, nice grain, nice timber, nice edge detail. But that wasn't what I was looking for.

I read something a while back about making a chopping board with solid wooden inlays. The result looked good, and the technique could be extended to other items. I gave the method a go and made myself a chopping board.  It worked out fine, and I already had in the back of my mind something to make on a larger scale...a hall console table.

I wanted the table itself to be simple with clean lines, but adding the inlays to the top would really add an eye catching detail.

"So what does the technique involve?", I hear you say.

Well before I spill the beans, let us first discuss inlays.

Most inlays are made by cutting a small groove in a surface, normally a couple of mm deep (if inlaying a veneer string, the groove could be only 0.6mm deep) and then sticking in the item to be inlayed. So the inlay is only just in the top surface.

What is different about the technique I used on this table, is that the inlay goes right through the table top.  So when viewed from the ends, the inlay can be seen 'wrapping' round the ends and continuing onto the under surface.

How is it done? Roughly like this. First of all, make your table top. Sand it nice and flat.  Cut it in half and stick it back together with the first inlay. When dry, flush that inlay back.  Cut the table top in half again and glue back together with the next inlay. When dry, flush back. Repeat until complete.

This table top has three inlays, so including the initial making of the top, that makes a total of four glue-ups for the top.  Oh, and did I say that because the inlays follow a curved path, when you stick the top back together, it slips and slides around like a bar of soap?

And did I say the inlays I used are different widths? 

And did I also say that making a table top is much harder than a chopping board because it is so much larger?

See, tricky. 

Anyway, enough words. On with the pictures.

It looks small, but it really is a full size table!

The three drawers have a hidden finger pull detail on the bottom edge. Saves having handles sticking out and getting caught on things as you walk by.

Here you can see how the inlays go completely through the table top. 

Overhead shot of the table showing the inlays - the 'Winding Paths'.

I like the effect you get doing this technique.  I have loads of other ideas in mind too.............


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.

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.

As I was saying....

....the sides of the cabinet are made by laminating pieces together and putting them in a veneer bag.  I'll show you.

The veneer bag is a heavy weight plastic bag which is connected to a vacuum pump which sucks all the air out. Anything that is in the bag will then get squashed by the atmosphere around us. In theory you should be able to get 1 atmosphere of pressure, but in real life you only get about 0.8 atmospheres which is enough.

The picture shows one of the curved cabinet sides being made.  Inside the bag goes a large flat piece of material, in this case a piece of white faced chipboard.  On this sit the former which has the shape I want to produce - in this case a simple curve. On top of the former sits the pieces I am laminating. Shove it all in the bag, switch on, leave for a few hours for the glue to set and the result is a panel that has the shape of the former. Easy.

As the curved panels are only 8mm thick, by themselves they would not be strong enough. To beef up the cabinet sides, the curved panels are glued to curved ribs that are in turn glued to a flat panel. This then gives the cabinet side the strength required. The flat side becomes the inside of the cabinet, while the curved side is the outside of the cabinet.  I must remember this during the glue-up and make sure I don't get it the wrong way round!

Before the cabinet is glue together, I have to drill evenly spaced holes on the inside faces for the shelf supports.  These need to be drilled accurately otherwise the shelf will not sit right and wobble.  To do this I use a jig and a router.  The jig is simply a piece of ply wood that has holes drilled into it at a regular spacing.  On the base of the router a guide bush is screwed. This is a circular collar of metal that has an outside diameter the same as the diameter of the holes I drilled in the ply.  You see where this is going?  The jig is clamped to the cabinet side, the guide bush sits in the hole and the router is then used to drill the hole.



This picture shows me doing a dry fit of the cabinet components before I do the glue up.  It is always good practice to do a dry fit, as once glue up starts it is too late to fix any problems!

You can see how the curve of the cabinet sides is mirrored  by the curve of the legs. Another reason for this dry fit is that I need to have the four legs completely sanded to their finished state.  The reason for this is I am going to fume the oak to make them go a dark chocolate brown.  Once fumed, I can't start sanding down the legs otherwise I could sand all the colour away.


To fume wood, you need to expose it to ammonia vapours.  Ammonia is horrid smelly stuff and not nice at all - the fumes need to be contained to get the best effect on the wood.  Hence, you can either fume in a sealed plastic box or make a fuming tent. I did the latter.

The tent I made is a simple MDF frame that is covered in heavy weight plastic.  A plastic flap is pulled over the top and seal with brown packing tape. It reminds me in some way of the first fish tank I had when I was much younger.  It was one of the glass-and-frame types that existed before the all-glass versions you see now days. My Dad got if for me. He found it in a friends garden. It was in a right state. All the iron rusty, glass broken.  He did a repair job on it, got the rust off, painted it, replaced the glass.  It looked good as new once finished!

Anyway, back to the oak and fuming.  Here is the method. Place the wood to be fumed in the tent. Get some ammonia. Wear lots of personal protection equipment. Pour some ammonia into plastic trays. Place trays in tent. Seal tent up. Wait 24 hours or until you have the desired colour (which maybe before 24 hours if only a light fuming is required). Remove oak.


Once the wood comes out of the tent, it really wiffs of ammonia.  I left the legs for a few days to air off before I coated them with oil. After that it was the carcass glue up!

So this is the state of play.  Carcass glued together. Doors on, but not finished as I have to make the handles.

Ah the handles.........how am I going to do that......

What's the buzz?

So in my last post, I was talking about a black and white chest of drawers that I was making. Yep, done that now! And also I have made the following items:

• Two bathroom cabinets


• Four jewellery boxes from oak and sycamore


• A shelf unit for a computer room


• The carcass of an AV cabinet


• Twenty two drawers made from cedar


• Nine dovetailed pencil boxes


• Three book cases

And at the moment I am alternating between making a sideboard and a blanket chest. So I have been busy.

Today I have been spraying some of the sideboard door. The sideboard is completely black, and having sprayed 35 big panels black, the spray room is now black. And sometime, like yesterday, I seem to get as much black over myself as over what I am spraying. Don't ask how or why, but yesterday I did manage to spill 1/2 litre of the lacquer, all over the spray room table, floor, my measuring scales and myself. Although there was lots of black running everywhere, the air was a dark shade of blue!

While I am waiting for coats of lacquer to dry, I swap between projects. So today not only have I been shaping the legs of the blacket chest, I have also been making some 3d CAD models of a drinks cabinet I want to make for early next year.

I plan to make the cabinet from oak (the light brown in the model) and wenge (the dark brown in the model). As it is a drinks cabinet, the top most shelf will be used to hang wine glasses from, while the other shelf used to store spirits and mixers. I can't decide yet if I should made something for the bottom shelf area for storing wine bottles lying down.

A stones throw away

Today I went round to a veneer merchant to buy some sycamore veneer. It is for a pair of bedside cabinets I am making. The sycamore will be married up with some oak, and will give a light/dark combination.

The veneer merchant I use is on a big industrial estate in Beckton, East London. It is really funny as I grew up in East Ham which is only a couple of miles away, and even more odd as my grandfather worked on the gas works that used to Beckton before it was knocked down many years ago (Seen the film 'Full Metal Jacket'? That was filmed in some of the old gas works before it was finally pulled down. I remember them filming it, as all the building were made to look war torn).

Although I now have my veneer, I won't be able to use it for a while as we have a new veneer press in the workshop that is currently being renovated, as it is probably over 50 years old. It is hard to describe what a veneer press looks like. It is a cross between a cider press, a printing press and a medieval torture machine! When it is finished I will post a picture here.

I have added a couple of video links to the gallery section of my website...see if you can find them!

The trio of bookcase have now been installed and some pictures of them can also be seen on my website.

I have my first show coming up in a couple of weeks. It is called Handmade in Britain and is being held in Chelsea Old Town Hall. I have never done a show before so I am sure it will be an experience!

Till next time.....