Website update - Tallboy pictures

I have made an update to the gallery on my website to include the pictures of the cherry tallboy.

Go have a look and you can see what it really looks like.

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.

No polo neck jumpers

I have now broken up for a few days over Christmas, but will be back in the workshop next week.

For the last couple of days I have been putting coats of oil on the carcass. This involves sanding it down, hoover off the dust, apply the oil, lets it dry over night. Then repeat the process. It takes time to get a nice smooth finish, but it is worth doing it correctly as a poor finish can let down a finished piece.

Here is a picture of the tall boy with the drawers and top fitted.


I will be working on the handles next...but I need to get my head round how I am going to make them yet. That is something to do over the next few days in between a mince pie or two.

Have a good Christmas everybody!

21 days later

For the last few weeks I have been making the drawers for my cabinet.

When I was training, we were told to allow three days per drawer, so with the seven drawers I am making gives a total of 21 days. No wonder it seems like I have been making them forever!
Let me tell you why making a drawer takes so long, and I am sure you are thinking ‘it is only an open top box’.

Well, you are correct, as a drawer is basically and open top box. But it has to be a box that is square, stable, fit into a hole, and have dovetail joints to make life fun. Each drawer I am making has twelve separate components, giving an overall total of 84 components – and that excludes the frames the drawers run on (an extra 48 components if you are interested).

The sides of the drawer must be made from timber that is dry and stable. Ideally it should be made from wood that is quarter sawn as it is very stable and does not move significantly, but finding good quality wood sawn this way is very hard. I have made my drawer sides from American cherry as it come shipped very dry, and the way I have cut it gives me sides that are near enough quarter sawn.

The joints on drawers are traditionally done as dovetails as these are very strong and resist the forces put on a drawer each time it is open. A jig can be purchased to machine cut the joints, but on my drawers they are all hand cut – you get a much more elegant joint if they are hand cut.
For the drawer bottoms, I am using Cedar of Lebanon. This is a traditional wood for drawer bottoms as it has a wonderful smell that is supposed to keep at bay any insect attack. I do personally love the aroma you get when a cedar-bottomed drawer is opened.

But that still doesn’t really say why it will take about 21 days to make the drawers…just believe me, it does!

Gluing the carcass - phase two

In the previous post, I was gluing the drawer frames to the carcass sides. The next stage is to glue the back panel and legs to the side assembly.

Once again it is done in a couple of stages. First I glued the two back legs to the back panel. Once this was dry these two assemblies come together. All that is missing are the two front legs. These two are glued on one at a time. It just makes it easier and less chance of mishaps.


Here you can see the final leg being glued on. It did the front leg glue-up with the carcass standing vertically. This is to ensure the legs are level and the carcass does not wobble.

And here it is...one glued up carcass.

Now I am working on the drawers.

Gluing the carcass - phase one.

I have been doing the first of many glue-ups today. This is always where it gets very stressful as if something is stuck in the wrong place then it usually means starting that piece again. Hence care must be taken!

What I have been doing is taking the drawer frames (the things that the drawer sits on and runs on) and gluing them to the carcass sides. As I have eight frames, each with four joins, that gives a total if my maths is correct of thirty two joints. The best way to attack this is in stages, which is just what I have been doing.

To make things easy, I glued the frames to one carcass side first - but only a couple of frames at a time. This then lead to the big glue-up when I had to glue the other carcass side to the frames. This had to be done in one big hit.


This picture shows that final glue-up, during which I had to use all the clamps I own, plus a couple of others from the workshop. You can never have too many clamps!

The next stage will be to assemble the back panel and gluing on the legs. But that is for another day.

Who needs Brain Training on a DS?

I don't, for one! Not after spending a day working out how the pieces of my tallboy carcass fit together. Okay, I do know how they fit, but working out all the joint work was a bit mind taxing. Let me tell you why....

I have lots of pieces of wood that need to be stuck together, but rather than being flush to each other, they have to be offset by a few millimeters. All that really needs to happen is I cut the joints offset. But that is where the problem lies - how do I work out the offset and how do I make sure the offset is in the correct direction?

The best way to solve a problem like that is to do some test pieces - make the joints in scraps of wood before you do it on the real thing.

Anyway, after I did the joint work I did put the carcass together, it did fit correctly. Doing test pieces is well worth it.

By the end of the day, I could feel my neurons well and truly stimulated.

My current project.

At the moment, the project I am working on is a tallboy chest of drawers standing 1.4 meters tall.

It is made from English cherry and American walnut, and has seven drawers each slightly larger than the one above. The sides, back and drawer fronts are made from the cherry, while the legs are made from the walnut.

The legs of the tallboy are tapered in a curved shape, similar to the boxes in my website gallery.

I think it will look good when complete.