A new blog. I finished an entertainment center and some bookshelves late last year. They're installed, finished, and in use. Now I'm starting to get back into furniture making again after too many years away working on refurbishing and building stuff bigger than furniture.
The next project I tackle will be a tool cabinet. I started with a simple design to house hand planes, chisels, and layout tools. I'll show the design in a future post. Then I began preparing the parts from cherry I have left over from previous projects. I wanted to use relatively strong joinery on the cabinet carcass because it needs to hold about 300 pounds of tools while hanging on the wall. So I cut some finger joints using a commercial box joint jig.
Not a good idea. The jig was designed for small drawers, not 9-inch wide, 45-inch long cabinet parts. Needless to say, the jig slowly slipped out of alignment. So my cabinet will now be an inch-and-a-half shorter and thinner. But I'm not going to make the same mistake twice.
I decided that since I own a bunch of hand tools, I might as well make more use of them. So the cabinet will be constructed using hand-cut dovetails. I've done a few hand-cut dovetails in the past, but they were nothing worth looking at, and hidden inside cabinets. This time, they'll be exposed. And I'll see them every time I enter the workshop. So I want to get them right. The only way to do that is with a lot of practice. Next time I'll talk about that self-induced dovetailing apprenticeship.
The next project I tackle will be a tool cabinet. I started with a simple design to house hand planes, chisels, and layout tools. I'll show the design in a future post. Then I began preparing the parts from cherry I have left over from previous projects. I wanted to use relatively strong joinery on the cabinet carcass because it needs to hold about 300 pounds of tools while hanging on the wall. So I cut some finger joints using a commercial box joint jig.
Not a good idea. The jig was designed for small drawers, not 9-inch wide, 45-inch long cabinet parts. Needless to say, the jig slowly slipped out of alignment. So my cabinet will now be an inch-and-a-half shorter and thinner. But I'm not going to make the same mistake twice.
I decided that since I own a bunch of hand tools, I might as well make more use of them. So the cabinet will be constructed using hand-cut dovetails. I've done a few hand-cut dovetails in the past, but they were nothing worth looking at, and hidden inside cabinets. This time, they'll be exposed. And I'll see them every time I enter the workshop. So I want to get them right. The only way to do that is with a lot of practice. Next time I'll talk about that self-induced dovetailing apprenticeship.
