New AV equipment cabinet

I previously pictured and discussed an audio equipment cabinet that I built. That article can be found on this site at:

http://lumberjocks.com/projects/52766

However, I wanted another one for my AV system in another part of the house. The one in there was an old vinyl-covered thing we (my wife and I) had owned for years, and we wanted it to be replaced. (It is now at Goodwill.)

So, we have this new cabinet. Unlike the one I built before, which had a cedar top, bottom, and sides, with mdf shelves, this one has Cedar only on the top and bottom (like the other cabinet, it is 1.5-inches thick), with double-thick mdf (also 1.5 inches) for the sides and standard-thickness mdf for the shelves. The cedar for both cabinets was purchased in rough-cut form from Home Depot, and so I used both a thickness planer and jointer to get the wood planks where I wanted them. Both screws and glue were used during assembly, with Kreg pocket cuts used in some places.

The mdf sides use single sheets on the outside, with spaced segments on the interiosr (glued and screwed to the outer panels), with those spaces serving as dado-styled grooves for the shelves to fit into. Unlike the previously built cabinet, which had the dado-cut grooves in the cedar sides open ended at front, this new one has cedar trim strips down the vertical front edges to hide the ends of the cuts.

The earlier cabinet was made of darker cedar (it comes in a variety of shades, as most of you know), and so I simply clear coated it and it came out very well. This cabinet’s cedar was much lighter, so I did apply some red-oak stain and then clear coated it. The sides were given a clear lacquer coating and the shelves are coated with very dark brown lacquer.

The cabinet is somewhat taller than the first one, because it has more stuff in it. It is also considerably heavier. The small TV on top is used to program the video recorder on the first shelf. Under that shelf is a BluRay player, under that is a big Yamaha receiver, and under that is a Rane THX-44 equalize for the three front channels and the subwooferr. The bottom shelf has an AudioControl one-third-octave real-time analyzer that is simply stored there, unplugged. It does get use when I am “voicing” (equalizing) both of my installations for smooth response.

Howard Ferstler