Sapele Music Cabinet

[h3nry]

On 3/6/2024 at 5:53 AM, curlyoak said:

If you bought yourself a quality jointer the time savings would be much more than the bandsaw. Years ago I had a friend that created some amazing work. His only power tools was a router table and a jointer. I have an old 8" delta that continues to provide good service. On occasion I have a need for a 12" jointer. A neighbor has a very old fully restored and modernized 12" jointer. To adjust the bed it has a small ships wheel to turn. I call it the benevolent beast.

I guess it's a question of what was I not making because I didn't have the tools for, and what was I making with the tools I had but wishing for a different tool ... and for me the answer was bandsaw, every time.

I want to keep power tools to a minimum, and I've not missed having a jointer yet. My next big tool purchase will probably be a lathe big enough to turm furniture components ... my little mini lathe is too small for anything significant.

[h3nry]

so I finished shaping the drawer fronts, and started thinking about the doors ...

I decided I'd try coopering the doors to match the curve. So first I duplicated my template so I could rest my parts on it:

and then lay the staves of wood on it to see the angles needed.

Then it was mostly trial and error to match the angles by planing down the edges

Then the problem of how to clamp this for the glue up. I found it easiest to glue the staves together in pairs ... then two of the pairs I could clamp ok, but the part with the biggest angle I couldn't get good clamping pressure on, and the join didn't quite seal up properly ... a bit of filler will probably fix that though.

However ... once I got the clamps off I realised my BIG mistake ... My template is for the outside curve of the piece, and by lining up the staves on top of it ... I had matched it to the inside curve of the door  ... I should have built an opposite template. The wood is a generous 4/4 and nearly an inch thick, and I'll be happy if I still have 3/4 after planing to final shape ... so maybe there's enough material in the glue up to salvage this, or maybe it's a do-over ... I guess I'll find out tomorrow.

[h3nry]

I think I may have got lucky ... it will have to narrow to just under 3/4 just after the hinge ... but I think I'll shape this one and see what it looks like.

[h3nry]

I think that is close enough ... since I'm calling this a success, I'm going to go ahead and build the other door the same way.

[h3nry]

Shaping the convex side was a little easier, because I could use the bench planes and block plane ...

The concave side needed the moulding plane, then a lot of work with my new best friend ... the spokeshave...

And finally I have the drawer fronts, and cabinet doors constructed ... Now I'm going to have to cut and fit them into the case.

[Von]

Thank you for the posts. I'm enjoying following along.

[h3nry]

I decided the next thing I needed to do was to glue up the frames ... but before I can do that I need to veneer the panels.

The inside faces of the panels that will be visible in the lower cabinet need to get a sapele veneer. Cutting my own veneers from project wood is something that was just beyond me with just hand tools ... so time to see what the band-saw can do ...

The best I could do is very much thicker than the veneers I've bought before, yet still thin enough to look like veneer.

This is obviously my first time working with sawn veneers like this, and I found them much harder to hammer down flat onto the substrate. I guess being thicker their tendency to curl has more force than thinner veneers. So there is a more limited window of time that the glue will have enough tack to hold, but not gelled too much to stick at all.

My veneering skills are a bit poor at the best of times ... I think to start with I had the glue mixed a bit too watery, which gave me a lot of trouble ... but eventually I managed to get veneers stuck onto the four smaller panels ...

although it is not as good as I'd like ... fortunately these will be inside a dark floor level cabinet and not particularly visible.

I use a traditional hide-glue hammer veneering process ... I'll try and post some pictures of the process with the next panels ... but it is a bit of a messy, sticky business and doesn't really mix with phones and cameras.

[h3nry]

Well, this is not going to be a "how to" on veneering ... but me struggling to get by ...

It involves a few "power tools", the iron and glue-pot:

brushing glue onto both sides, and then pressing the veneer down onto the plywood. the iron is used to reactivate the glue if it starts gelling too early. The veneer "hammer" is used like a squeegee to push the air out from under the veneer and leave a uniform layer of glue.

once the glue cools it should form a nice bond holding the veneer flat ... however again I had trouble keeping it flat and not curling up at the edges.

however this isn't the end of the world, since once it's dry, the glue can be reactivated by a bit of water and the iron ... leaving the bits that were glued down well the first time, and working on the curled up edges ... slowly I managed to work down all the edges. I figured out that the curling is exacerbated by the top surface drying faster than the glued surface, so it helped to keep the top a bit moist until the glue had done its thing.

with thin veneers I joint the edges by overlapping the veneer, scoring through with a knife, then peeling back the top veneer to remove the off-cut from the bottom veneer. With these thicker veneers that wasn't so easy, so I mostly just butted jointed edges together, although they did need some trimming with a knife to get reasonable joints.

eventually I got the veneers glued down satisfactorily, and then once dry could start cleaning up  I like to scrape veneered surfaces to get them smooth ... when there's a lot of scraping to do it's time for the #12 scraper plane to get to work before finishing with a card scraper ... and since there are still saw marks on these veneers, there is a lot of scraping to do.

These panels are just 3/8 ply and being held in a strong frame, which should be able to hold the slight warp of the ply from the one sided veneering, so I'm not going to add a backer veneer too ... so once smooth, the frame can get glued up

Far from perfect ... but once again, these panels will only be inside a dark cabinet well below eye level ... so a good place to practise ... I still have the side panels to do.

[h3nry]

I don't know if it's just two days of practise, or whether the board these veneers were cut from was better behaved, but these panels were a bit easier ...

Since the side panels have a visible outside face, the other side needs a show veneer ... for this I'm using some figured bubinga that I've got.

I've had this stuff hanging around for a few years, and it was really brittle and crinkly, but I used a home-made veneer softener recipie that I found online if a 3:2:1 mix of water, alcohol and glycerine ... which seemed to do a good job of flattening it and making it more subtle ... they weren't then too bad to glue down

The glue wasn't quite dry this evening so they still need scraping.

[h3nry]

A bit of a disappointment this morning ...

One of the problems with hide glue is that it is water based and quite wet ... so there is a lot of potential for wood movement. With the thin veneers, if you don't get a good even bond to the substrate they can pull themselves apart as they dry ... and that is what I woke up to today :(

This is a bit of a disaster, clearly Plan-A of just calling it good enough and hoping nobody will notice won't work here ... so I'll have to try one of:

Plan-B ... hide the cracks. The only real option here is to fill the cracks with filler and hope they disappear.

Plan-C ... make them a feature.  I don't know how to make the cracks a feature, but I was thinking of adding an applied carving to the panel as a feature, and with some clever use of shape to the carving I could cover the worst of the cracks.

Plan-D ... a complete do-over. The problem with this is I don't have enough of the veneer, so I would need to order in a whole different set.

Plan-E ... redesign the panels as solid wood, so no veneer is needed. The problem hree is that the drawers and doors still need veneering, and I may have similar problems there.

Plan-F ... burn the whole project and go sailing.

Hopefully I won't have to resort to plan-F ... but start with Plan-B to see what it looks like.

FIrst create some sawdust by sanding down some of the veneer

Fill the cracks with dust and pack it down nice and tight.

drop low-viscosity CA glue onto the powder, and leave to dry

Do all the small cracks too

And finally scrape it off to see what it looks like:

Well ... it's a big improvement. I can live with the small cracks, but the bigger cracks are still quite visible, although they at least look like part of the wood now.

[wtnhighlander]

Looks like a good time to break out the artist's paint brushes and a couple shades of brown stain. With a little patience, I bet you could add swirls across the filled cracks that appear completely natural.

[RichardA]

I've used crayons in the way Ross has suggested.

[h3nry]

More veneering ... moving on to the drawer fronts ...

To get a tight joint at the bookmatch ... apply one side overlapping the other slightly, then score through both layers with a knife, peel back the top layer and remove the surpless from the lower layer, then hammer down the veneers again ... I slughtly damaged this veneer, but it doesn't show in the final joint:

I was a bit worried that the veneer on the door faces would crack on me like the panels did, since it is such as wide piece of veneer. The curve makes it slightly harder to hammer down, but not too much ... ended up with just one crack of not, and a couple of small ones, oh well. I also added a backing veneer on the doors to try and balance them a little.

And finally all the drawer fronts and doors are veneered.

Time to air out the garage and get the smell of the hide-glue out.

[wtnhighlander]

Thise are some impressive veneers! This cabinet is certainly going to catch the eye.

[h3nry]

Trimmed the drawer fronts and doors to fit in their respective holes ... they'll still need some more trimming later ... but I just wanted to see what this all looked like.

[wtnhighlander]

I'd say it looks pretty darn good!

[Chet]

On 3/20/2024 at 4:45 AM, wtnhighlander said:

I'd say it looks pretty darn good!

+1

[tperson]

On 3/15/2024 at 9:36 AM, RichardA said:

I've used crayons in the way Ross has suggested.

Not to derail the awesome build being documented here, but doesn't the wax in crayons affect the topcoat?

[RichardA]

On 3/20/2024 at 2:08 PM, tperson said:

Not to derail the awesome build being documented here, but doesn't the wax in crayons affect the topcoat?

It depends on the topcoat. It doesn't affect Poly, and some others.

[h3nry]

A little more progress ... I constructed a small frame to hold a row of drawers to go behind the central door.

And the last little bit of veneering for the drawer fronts for these

The next thing I want to do, is to get the doors in place and measure for the hinges, which might be easier to install before the carcase is glued up ... but before I can do that, I need to add the cock-beading to the doors. So I prepared all the parts for the cock-beading on the doors and drawers.

[h3nry]

Putting the roundover on the cockbeading. The straight parts were easy enough with the small round plane, and the convex section of the serpentine parts too. But the concave sections were roughly shaped with a gouge, then finished with a scraper.

Then I had to trim off the edges of the doors to make room for the beading, I did this at the bandsaw.

Then paring the mitres on the ends, and trimming them to length until they fit.

I'm a little concerned that future wood movement could cause the cock-beading along the top of the doors to pop off  But googling how this was prevented on antique pieces, I just found a couple of blogs by furniture restorers describing how exactly this happens ... so if/when it happens to this piece it will he in good company.

After gluing the cockbeads on, they needed fairing to the back of the doors.

And I have the doors complete.

Before they can be installed, they need mortices for the hinges.

And the doors fit.

 

 

 

[wtnhighlander]

Looking great, @h3nry! Did you modify the scraper yourself, or is that commercially available?

[Mark J]

8 hours ago, h3nry said:

a little concerned that future wood movement could cause the cock-beading along the top of the doors to pop off  But googling how this was prevented on antique pieces, I just found a couple of blogs by furniture restorers describing how exactly this happens ... so if/when it happens to this piece it will he in good company.

I may be wrong, but I think 18th century woodworkers didn't have a very good understanding about wood movement, and so didn't make much accommodation.  

[gee-dub]

@h3nry - Thank you for sharing so many pics and discussions of your methods and decision points.  I enjoy a wide variety of styles.  The ride-a-long so far has been a lot of fun.  Thanks again!

[h3nry]

On 3/31/2024 at 10:28 AM, gee-dub said:

@h3nry - Thank you for sharing so many pics and discussions of your methods and decision points.  I enjoy a wide variety of styles.  The ride-a-long so far has been a lot of fun.  Thanks again!

Thanks gee-dub ...  I enjoy watching your builds too.

But there are still more challenges ahead on this adventure yet.