A cabinet full of learning

In late winter of 2018, I was in Maine on a weekend with friends and no kids. It was a great weekend. And no, I don't feel guilty saying that. We stayed at an inn near Rockport and the Center for Furniture Craftsmanship. I had never been to the center and decided to take advantage of being so close. (You can read more about the trip in a blog post I wrote on the experience, click here.) I can't say enough great things about the center. If you ever get an opportunity to take a class there I highly recommend it. I got the opportunity in the fall of 2018. I don't do very much continuing education. It's out of my budget. The classes are well worth the price. Fortunately, for me and many others, they have an amazing scholarship program. I have received a scholarship to attend classes several times and will actually be doing another class this September.

The first class I took in September 2018 was called Classic Casework. It was taught by Tim Rousseau and Kendrick Anderson, both amazing furniture makers. I brought up a few small pieces of some beautiful walnut and some extremely vague ideas about what I was going to construct. The idea was to build a case piece from wood, not plywood, in order to understand wood movement as well as look at different methods to approach a solid wood case. Students were also able to put a door or a drawer into the case, ideally not both. With that mandate I decided I was going to try to do both. My real goal in the class was to do as many things I had not done before as possible under the guidance of two amazing instructors.

Look to the photo above of the case. I'll go through the joinery involved to get the piece to what you see in the photograph. My apologies to those not as into the woodworking for the woodworking minutia. Starting with the top, outside corners, these are 45 degree miters that waterfall (which basically means the grain continues all the way around the piece). They have an L shaped loose tenon in the corners. The bottom corners are put together with a slick mortise and tenon that is cut on the router and table saw. It produces a bombproof case. The middle divider, between the doors and drawers is a sliding dovetail joint. The firsts don't stop with the joinery. The front edges of the cabinet are cut on a 30 degree angle. The doors of the cabinet are shop sawn veneer over a plywood core. And lastly the drawers are side hung, which allowed there not to be a middle divider.

All of the processes that I described were things I had not done before. I was determined to get every last bit of education I could out of the experience. I brought the cabinet home with the doors completed and fit and parts to make the drawers. I then moved the cabinet around the shop for the next three years until picking it up again this summer. There were a few things I needed to understand for a current project I was working that I needed to complete to finish the cabinet. That was reason enough, to pick it up again and finish it.