A couple of lessons: First, I don’t have enough clamps. In fact, I’ll never have enough clamps. Second, it’d probably be a good idea to do the curve first with its own set of jigs, separate from the shelf, and then cut the shelf to fit the curve. This would let me get better alignment between the laminated layers; I had to build a router jig to cut them all flat after the glue-up. Third, I should really do this in smaller sections so I should design for that; the creep that happened while I was bending this left a gap where the two front edge pieces came together, and clamping around those tight curves and such was really something that needed to be done a smaller section at a time.

Oh, and the strips were cut with a circular saw on a rail. This is probably the first time I’ve ever really wanted a table saw, but I still don’t have the room for it.

So yesterday I milled a whole bunch of wood into door frames. I’d picked up a bunch of eastern hard maple off of Craigslist, random sizes, about 5’; lengths, so I took the ones closest to my door frame size and milled ‘em from 13/16” down to 3/4” and ripped them down to 2 1/4”. I started laying them out for where they went on the cabinets, making sure that the grain continued from one door into another, when I realized that I was doing it wrong: The grain should also continue between adjacent parallel elements.

Whoops. Don’t know how it took me that long to figure that out. So now I have a bunch of milled materials, only half of which I’ll be using for the purpose I milled ‘em for, but if I take another smidgen off they’ll make good shelf edges, and the resulting thin strip will be good for edging other plywood.

And I generated a monster bucket o’ sawdust for the garden:

No, “pot drawers” not a reference to where I might keep my stash.

The 352 holes I drilled the weekend before last paid off, after a little bit of rework ‘cause I miscalculated the height of the slides, I bent up some dividers and screwed in the drawer slides, and loaded up the drawers. More pictures here.

However, the bottoms will be hidden, so that’s okay. Need to hit ‘em with the 220 grit sandpaper, and a coat or three of poly, and then we have pot drawers in the kitchen. Separators will be ¼” steel rod.

Same content at my personal site.

I cut a strip of wood the width of the spacing I wanted, cut it in half, put a lip on each one so that I could place it on the edge of my carcase sides and it’d protrude over at 90 degrees. Then it was just a matter of clamping, using the Domino to drill the mortise/pin hole, leapfrogging the guide, re-clamping, and repeating:

My Wiki page on the topic.

We haven’t tackled the wiring yet, and we’re still planning on replacing the floor, so I put 2×4 spacers in behind the cabinets to allow the stove to plug in, and the center piece that joins the two 2’ wide cabinets together is held on with cams so that it can be removed to allow the whole thing to come out again, fairly easily.

Yes, the grain is matched across the trim pieces, and those spots with the dividers in ‘em will have drawers.

This weekend’s goal is getting the cabinet beside the stove to at least have a usable counter-top. We picked up a beaten up 10’x2’ glued up piece of maple countertop off of Craigslist for $50, and that’s becoming the surface for beside the stoive, and the narrow counter for under the window, with a backsplash cut from the scraps. Today I took a deep breath and cut the first pieces.

As I said, the counter-top was pretty beat up with a few gaps, so as I sanded it down I filled the gaps with cyanoacrylate, hoping that the sawdust would bond with the glue and create a decent filler. The Festool ETS 150/5 EQ Sander is not the best sander to be doing this with, I should have gotten the noisy shakey Craftsman out for this, because even with the vacuum unplugged on the Festool it still didn’t leave a whole lot of sawdust lying around, but we seem to have gotten a fairly smooth surface out off the process. I am, however, going to have to do a little bit more after the rest of the glue-up, because my work surface wasn’t as clean as it should have been and I got a few grains of something embedded in there when I flipped this to do glue-up.

I was hoping to do both sides of the glue-up at once, but it’s hot and dry here today, and that glue was going solid really fast, so I did one, waited twenty minutes, took the squeeze out off with a chisel, waited another half an hour, then did the other side. The edges are held on with floating tenons cut with the Domino, I’m going to have to do a little clean-up with the hand plane before I get the back and partial front pieces on.

(Essentially the same content over at my personal blog)

I debated whether I should put this entry here or over at HomeRefurbers, but that site really hasn’t taken off yet, and the process of coming up with our kitchen cabinets is feeling a whole lot more like woodworking than it is home improvement. Although an upgrade from the 1 person 1947 kitchen will certainly be an improvement.

My arm was good enough this weekend to play in the shop again. My main project was to mock up a prototype to some lightweight appliance lift ideas I’ve had, we want to put the toaster and the vacuum sealer and the blender on appliance lifts, but we want something small, that only takes up 8” or so of vertical underneath the counter, and we don’t need to be swinging a big heavy weight, like a huge mixer, that most of the commercial appliance lifts are engineered for. My prototypes aren’t worth showing off yet, but I also whipped together a second prototype door so that I could become familiar with these newfangled “euro hinge” thingies (kids these days, what will they come up with next, eh?).

So this is a pair of practice doors mounted on a box made of cheap exterior grade plywood.

The frames are Eastern maple that we bought for cheap off Craigslist from a local guy who makes stamp handles. This is his scrap, some of it is beautifully figured heart/sap interface, some of it is just utility maple, but we like the look. The panels are Peruvian mahogany reclaimed from box beams, these are glued up from narrow pieces because this is just prototyping to see if we like it, the actual panels will be one piece for the full width.

The difficult part of these doors is that the frame is mitered. If you’ve ever tried to get 45.0000°, you’ll understand. Also, because I’m cutting with the Festool saw on a rail rather than a table saw, ripping to width takes a little bit of care. I’m getting better at both of those things. The miters are joined with loose tenons (Dominos).

We’re trying to figure out what catch and spring mechanisms we may use, I’m pushing for a handle of some sort, either carved out of mahogany or some darker wood, Charlene’s preferences seem to be running towards the “push to open” mechanisms, but I’m not so much a fan because I think they always get stuck in the wrong position, misfire, and don’t look terribly good.

Feels good to get back in the shop.

So I went home, and the next day my shoulder still hurt, so after work I went to the emergency room and was told I had an ACJ separation, which is where the ball of the top of the arm gets rammed into the socket of the shoulder hard enough to separate the three bones which come together from the back, the rib cage, and the collar bone, to form the socket. Tears ligaments, that sort of thing. So I’ve had my arm in a sling for a few weeks, and will probably be tender for another four.

But I’m starting to feel strong enough to work in the shop, which is good, because…

Today on Craigslist I scored a 10’x2’ maple countertop, which means I’ve got no more excuses for the first two stages of kitchen cabinet. It’s sitting on top of my car right now, I have to figure out how we’re going to get it down with me only having one hand in play, but I think 4’ of it are going to go beside the stove, I’m going to rip the remaining 6’ down the middle for a narrow countertop by our window, and use the remainder for a backsplash. Hopefully I can start on that this weekend.

At any rate, we recently got a Porter Cable 7518 3¼HP router with Jessem Mast-R-Lift lift to swing some of the big bits we’ve been accumulating for the shapes we want for our kitchen cabinets, and before going out of town this weekend I built a second mock-up of what we want our kitchen cabinets to look like.

Next up, I think I’ve figured out how we’re going to do some of our light-weight appliance lifts, so on the list is building one of the more stand-alone cabinet sets in the kitchen, although our office/guest-room is also needing some built-ins, so I may put together a couple of barrister bookcase style shelves for one of the walls. Those will be cherry, which is why I’m hesitating, ‘cause our cash flow is already blowing through money like we had it.