The Finish Line (Pun Intended)
I’m a happy guy. Why? ‘Cus I’ve got a happy wife :-).
This is the end-game and of course my most disliked part of any project is the last part: sanding and finishing.
Category: Sewing Center Page 1 of 2
The penultimate chapter, can you see the light?!!
Hi everybody! It’s been a while since my last post as I have been on business travel and not had a chance to do much woodworking for a while 🙁 . I have returned from a certain Middle Eastern country and since I didn’t say anything bad about the ruling party I still retain my freedom (if not my principles; hey, we all gotta pay the mortgage).
Nearly there, I can almost taste it!
Yeah, it tastes like furniture 🙂 .
Last week we had just finished installing breadboard ends on both top panels. Now we’ll look to mounting and hinging the panels. Before going further however, I’d like to position and mount the lower panel to the carcass.
Table tops….. (cats like them too)
So we’re approaching the end-game: table tops, door hardware, and sewing machine lift. I might get this done before Christmas 🙂 . In the early days of my woodworking, I was always a bit intimidated by gluing-up large panels but I learned that if you follow a straightforward process and prepare the stock properly, good results can often be obtained.
Mounting doors, a little easier than horses……
Mounting the doors is going to take a little bit of careful preparation. Not only is this a critical step (for me) but I’ll be cutting a shallow rabbet in each of the doors and I want to be absolutely sure everything is going to come out right before I do that.
Hobbits aren’t the only ones who need supportive feet…..
The thought of carefully carving intricate ball and claw feet in the style of Chippendale makes me want to drink hard liquor, so I’ll stick to the simple, yet very strong foot design in the original plan.
Who thought that the drawers would be the most complicated part of this cabinet? Complicated yes, but difficult, not so (except for the dovetails). Drawers go together with a straightforward, step by step process that is at times painstaking, but without the hair-pulling and teeth-gnashing that one might expect (except for the dovetails).
“Oh Boy, drawers, my favorite part!” (said nobody, ever….)
Okay, drawers are not so bad, it’s the dovetails that continue to trip me up and typically, a drawer is one of the components of furniture that almost always benefits from dovetails.
“When is it going to start looking like furniture?”
Kind of like framing a house, this is an exciting part of the build process for me, when “whatever it is” begins to look like “what it’s supposed to be”. Too bad we don’t have our faithful companion Luna to help, she always offered a comforting “bark” when I hit my thumb with a hammer…. (I realize now that they have been seriously over-bred, but honestly, I never met a Labrador I didn’t like!).
And now: back to our regularly scheduled furniture.
Phew! I think we’re ready to take the plunge…..
So with the major cutting complete on all the parts of the frame and panels, it is worthwhile to take a moment and consider some final actions that make sense to complete before we go past the point of no return (glue).