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8K views 5 replies 4 participants last post by  Beginningwoodworker 
#1 ·
Design Choice and Lumber Purchase (pictures)

Well, this will be my 6th active blog. I'm spreading myself a bit thin.

My wife and I learned that we are are having another baby in the near future. I decided I want to build something for our latest addition and after a lot of thought, concluded that a toy chest/blanket chest is probably the best choice. It doesn't need to be done immediately (good since I'll be busy), it can be used to hold items for the baby, when she is older it can hold toys, and finally it can go back to a blanket chest when she is older.

Another selling point to this is that I already built one. While I usually want to build different items, I think this is a nice project to compare how far my skills have progressed since the first project I built after taking up woodworking. Here is the first one I built:



Here is a link to the original built by Norm on New Yankee Workshop:
http://www.newyankee.com/getproduct.php?104

I think the pine looks great in the original, but I am going to do this one in hardwood again. I've always wanted to try using really good quality curly maple, and I think I'm going to do just that with this project. I looked up fellow lumberjock Porosky . He has an ebay store if you are interested in looking at better pictures than what I've got here . I sent him a request for a quote and we worked everything out. I ordered 30 bf roughly cut to my general specs so they'd fit in 4 ft boxes for shipping.

Just three days later, I had a couple 50 lb packages on my doorstep. Please note that I think the figure will be much better after finishing the project. These were taken with poor lighting and a focus on keeping clutter out of the photo backgrounds. Future photos will undoubtedly be better (-:

Here is a picture of the 3 boards that will be glued up into the top. I'm not sold on the layout, but I'll arrange the boards just the way I want them when I have better light to work with:


I think Scott did a very good job of trying to give consistent figure and color in all the boards that he provided. That being said, it is still wood so there are going to be differences from piece to piece. Here are two of the boards that look the MOST difference. Still pretty similar, but it does show some of the diversity of figure if you are mixing a bunch of boards into one project:



I've started laying out the boards to try and figure out which pieces were cut down from the same piece. I think it will help me to have the most similar boards positioned near each other within the piece. It is my understanding that board can look identical before finishing, but they might not take finish the exact same way. Keeping boards from the same tree close to each other should help with that. I matched up the boards by lining up the grain as you can see below:



Now the boards are inside just acclimating. The lumber only traveled a few hundered miles, but after Scott milled up the material for me, I still probably need to let it sit for a bit to relieve any internal stresses.

I've got a lot going on so updates may be few and far between, but I'll post as I make progress.
 
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