Andrew Pitts - Furniture Maker, Works in Progress, Custom Handcrafted Hardwood Large Sideboard

Click on images to enlarge and see details

Sideboard Rendering

A couple of years ago a friend was taking down a walnut tree that was growing too close to the house for safety and he asked if I would like to have the tree to make lumber. I didn't have to be asked twice, and the wood from that tree has been incorporated into some very nice work such as my Pedestal Cabinet and Shadows of Night. Then, last winter he asked if I could make a sideboard for storing china and so forth. I visited he and his wife in their home and we worked through the design process a bit. One thing led to another and we hit upon the possibility of using some of his walnut in the piece. The rendering you see above is the final design. It is a large piece, 60 inches long and almost four feet tall. It is walnut with red oak, plus cherry legs. The door panels are veneered quilted maple, and the top panels are ambrosia maple. I was able to incorporate their walnut in the drawer fronts, door frames, and frame

s for the top and most of the back, but I needed to obtain some other, larger walnut pieces for the sides. Fortunately, I had milled some walnut for a local client a few years ago (photo at right) and had been storing it for them, awaiting the time when we could turn it into some fine furniture for their house. As it turned out, there was more walnut in storage than would be needed for any conceivable project, so I offered to buy some of it so I could use it in the sideboard. Have I got you totally confused, yet? Two different clients, each with a walnut tree to become furniture for their respective homes, but one client having an excess of walnut that I purchased to fill the walnut deficit for the client commissioning the sideboard. OK? Now on with the story.

This was going to be a BIG piece, so it required the largest planks I had. I try to do all my work with native Northumberland County hardwoods that I mill and kiln dry myself, so I went to work sorting through my inventory. (at this point I am going to digress ... if you don't like digressions, please skip to the next paragraph) Trouble is, the way I stored my lumber was to stack it in stickered piles in my dehumidified shop basement, seen in the photo to the right. In order for me to see all the pieces of wood in my store room, I would have to completely disassemble the stacks, all six of them. So, the time was ripe for me to make a long contemplated change to my storage strategy. Instead of storing 10-foot long planks horizontally, I would cut all the stock to 8-foot lengths and store it upright along "A-Frame" structures, about six planks deep. I could then easily pull planks away from the stack to see what lay below. Sounds simple, right? In concept, yes, but building A-frames, moving planks, cutting them, then storing them -- all 8000 board feet -- took a little longer than I had anticipated (all my jobs are like that). Then, I realized that I would soon be unloading some Persimmon wood from the kiln and moving it into the storage. Problem is, I had also been planning to lay a concrete slab where this wood was to go (the shop was built with a gravel floor over two layers of polyethylene sheeting) in order to cut down on the humidity level in the shop during the winter. Without going into a lot of detail, I found over the years that the crusher gravel seemed to soak up moisture from the air and release it over the winter, so it was hard to control the relative humidity in the storage area. However, a slab of concrete over a 1-inch layer of insulation would eliminate that problem, so I needed to get the slab laid before I brought in a lot more lumber. Sorry folks, more delays. Now I have the concrete curing and the A-frames in place, and I have found the best planks for the sideboard, so let's continue!

In order to make the 20-22 inch wide sides, bottoms, and vertical dividers of solid wood it was necessary to edge glue smaller widths. Why? Well, first of all it is really unusual to find milled lumber in 2 foot wide planks, and if you do it is expensive. But probably more important is that wood changes shape as it exchanges moisture with the atmosphere, and the wider the single plank the more unpredictable the movement. I would expect a 20-inch wide plank to cup (warp) pretty severely with the slightest moisture change, while glued up smaller planks would show less total distortion. Finally, I would need a

24-inch wide jointer to get a 20-inch wide plank flat, and I don't know anyone with a 24-inch jointer. By using a 'sled' I can use my 15-inch or 20-inch planer to act like a jointer for wide stock, but I decided to stick with

narrower stock when I could and use the sled for wider stock when I had to. The photo at right shows me edging a plank on the jointer, just so you know what tool I am talking about. I can lay the board flat on the jointer bed and make a surface flat. So, I pick out the best stock, make the pieces flat on the jointer, then edge the pieces on the jointer, then glue them all together into a large panel, being careful to keep each piece in the same plane as the whole panel so there are no ridges at the joints, as seen in the photo at left. Now, there is one twist to making this process a success. The edges must be at perfect 90 degree angles to the faces so the resulting panel will be flat after edge gluing. But what if the jointer fence is off by a quarter degree from 90 degrees? The resulting panel will not be flat, but will be somewhat cupped, unless I take care to place opposite faces of joining boards against the jointer fence, making any error in the angles of the edges cancel each other. Say, for example, that the fence is set as best I can to a right angle but is actually 89.5 degrees instead of 90 degrees. If I joint one board with it's "top" face against the fence, it's edge is at 89.5 degrees to the top face. Then, if I joint the adjoining board with the "bottom" face against the fence, it's edge angle is effectively 90.5 degrees from the top face. See how the two angles

cancel out and average 90-degrees? It works pretty well, but you have to be careful and keep track of what you are doing. Mindful furniture making. Once the panels were all glued up, I ran them through the drum sander to take out any ridges at the glue joints and

ensure they were truly flat. You can see this in the photo at right. For this operation, I used 60-grit sandpaper so the resulting panels were flat, which was my goal, but rough. I still had to do a fair amount of hand planing to get all the sanding marks out. Ughh! I know some folks romantically talk of the purity and joy of hand planing, but let me tell you that it is HARD WORK!!! I was pushing a 2-inch wide 50 degree angle plane iron on a low angle plane to prevent tearing out the grain in the red oak. That is akin to using a bulldozer to plane wood! I staged the photo at left to show a smiling craftsman (me, most of the time) amongst the plane shavings. Ah, how sweet .... but the reality is that if this was an audio

presentation, my language ... well, you get the point! And this is a lot of wood to surface. The photo at right shows the pieces for the entire project, milled to near final dimensions. I'm not sure how I'm going to load this piece into my pickup truck for delivery, but I know I will have to use my tractor to carry it. It's just getting it to the loading door that will be the problem!

My clients liked the look of quilted maple for the panels in the doors and back, so that meant veneering. I suppose quilted maple lumber could have been found to make the panels, but no telling how expensive it would have been and the veneer is quite available. I wanted the panels to be flat and stable so the veneer would not be damaged by seasonal wood movement, so plywood for the cores was the answer. Now, I can buy Baltic birch plywood, which is very flat plywood with many layers in it, specifically made for projects like this. However, Baltic birch plywood comes in smaller sizes than we are used to with our 4x8 sheets, and I would have to get it shipped in. Also, my experience with hardwood plywood in 1/2" and 3/4" thicknesses is that it is flat in the store, but when it acclimates to my shop, not in a stack of other plywood, it tends to warp a bit. I could not tolerate any warping in these panels. Medium density fiberboard would stay flat, but structurally it is not 100 year material (it's pressed paper fibers)

, so instead, I purchased two sheets of 1/4" birch plywood locally and laminated two layers together using Unibond 800 glue (a very stiff glue for veneering) in my vacuum press. The result was 1/2" birch plywood that

is very flat and very stable. The photo at right shows four of the made up panels in the vacuum press platen ready to go into the vacuum bag, and the photo at left shows the entire vacuum press setup. Not that the platen has the top sheet installed, making a sandwich of the panels being glued, and that the entire platen assembly is inside a clear poly bag with a clamped shut end opening. The hose leading from the bag goes to the vacuum pump, which can develop 25" of vacuum, or about 12 psi of clamping pressure. Vacuum bag clamping provides very even clamping pressure, which makes it a favorite for veneer work.

With the cores of the panels glued up, I next readied to veneer them. Previously I had experimented with gluing quilted maple veneer to a substrate, so I had some lessons learned. The biggest lesson was that the veneer showed bleed through of the glue, which then had to be sanded away. However, I could use a blocker for Unibond 800, which essentially thickens it so it does not penetrate all the way through the veneer. The other lesson I learned was that the veneer looked best with a smooth coat of shellac finish, so I planned to make an unusually smooth surface (and as you will read later, I applied French polish). I had purchased some quilted maple veneer, but it comes in long, wide sheets in the order they were cut from the log. By taking care not to mix up the sheets, I could book match the sheets on adjacent panels for a balanced look. I had to cut the sheets to the sizes for gluing to the panels, so I got out my veneer saw and went to work, as you can see at right. The veneer saw looks like a small saw with teeth on top and bottom, but actually the teeth are sharpened like a lot of little knives and I pull the saw through the veneer against a

straight edge and cut it without splitting it. After cutting the veneer, it is glued to the cores using the vacuum press, just like I did to make up the cores. I had to work fast

to get all the faces glued and in the press, and then I kept vacuum on the assembly over night. When the glue had cured, I trimmed the panels and cut rabbets all around so they would fit into frames in a frame and panel assembly for the

back and for the side doors (actually, I cut the side door panels after I made the door frames, which I will discuss later; that way, the door panels would fit perfectly in the frames). The photo at left shows me using a plywood and veneer blade on the table saw to score the veneer. Notice that I taped the veneer at the cut line to prevent tearout on the end grain. I then used a dado blade to finish the rabbets, as seen at right. With the door and back panels rabbeted I could finish them. I used shellac polish to bring out the quilted figure, and to really make it shimmer I French polished the surfaces, as seen at right. French polishing is a very traditional process where shellac is padded on with a rubbing pad in such a manner that the shellac dries as it is padded and makes the classic gloss finish you associate with fine shellac. Let's allow the panels to sit for a while so we can build the carcase and the frames the panels will go into.

The carcase for this piece is big and heavy solid wood. I already milled all the pieces and glued up all the big panels, so next I could machine the joinery of the panels so that they would glue together into a strong carcase. For this piece I chose dowel joinery so I could butt the sides to the bottom and butt the dust dividers/shelver to the sides. There are other methods to attach these pieces, but I chose dowels because there would be so many of them in all the different joints that I knew the piece would be strong and have clean lines. I ended up using 104 dowels, all 3/8" thick to assemble the carcase. When the top goes on, that will use additional dowels. Remember that this piece not only has sides, but it has inner "sides", or vertical dividers as well. All

these were doweled together. I started by marking and drilling dowel holes in the edges of the sides and dust dividers/shelves. For this I used the Shop Smith as a

horizontal boring machine. This is like a drill press on its side, as you can see in the photo to right. Because this piece needed a lot of strength, I used between 9 and 10 dowels for each joint. With the edges drilled, I could mark the corresponding dowel locations in the faces. I inserted dowel points, which are simple metal pieces with a center point that fit in the drilled holes. All I had to do was carefully align the pieces of wood and tap them together to make a depression everywhere a dowel would go, then I drilled the holes. The photo to left shows me aligning two panels with dowel points. To get perfect alignment

of these very large pieces I clamped a guide block to the horizontal piece and then lightly clamped the vertical piece to the guide block. I also clamped the pieces front to back with a long clamp so that they were perfectly aligned. Once the centers for the

holes were marked, I used a drill guide block and a portable hand held drill to drill the dowel holes, as you can see in the photo to right. After I drilled all the holes, I did a dry test fit, then finished all the parts with shellac polish, which is 1/2 pound cut shellac I mix from shellac flakes. This is a very thin solution of shellac, applied in six or seven thin coats, sanded to P600 grit between coats to make a very smooth but thin coating. I finish this way with shellac so that there will be no shellac buildup in the corners. I want my work to look very clean, so that is the only way to do it! Only then did I start the glue up. In the photo to left you can see the first phase of the glue up, where I glued the center dividers to the center shelf and dust divider. Notice that I used long cauls to distribute the force of the clamps evenly across

the wide panels. Once that glue up was dry, I did the same with the sides and other dust dividers, in two more gluing sessions, and then finally glued on the bottom, upside down for ease of alignment. You can see the carcase glued to this point in the photo to the right. I did a few other intermediate steps, as well, as the panels were accessible. For one, I cut all the mortises for the door

hinges. In this piece I used "L" shaped knife hinges, so the mortises were cut into the shelves and dust dividers. I also made a hidden channel for an electrical cable that would snake up through the bottom and up to some LED lights I would install on the bottom of the center dust divider so the showcase area would be lighted. This nice touch hid the unsightly cable from view in an otherwise open piece. The photo to right shows how the cable and lights were installed. The carcase is upside down for this, and you can also see the stub legs I glued onto the bottom to support the weight of the center of this piece. One other detail was rounding the bottom

in the front, as the center section of the piece extends out from the plane of the front. I cut the curves on the center dividers before assembly, then cut the curves on the bottom itself after glue up. The photo to left shows this detail. Now, I just described in one fairly short paragraph a very long and strenuous process. Due to the shear mass of the parts of this piece, it was difficult to align all the parts properly, and moving it around was quite a struggle (so I planned my work to only move it a couple of times). The completed glued up carcase has a clean and simple look that belies the effort it took to get it like that. I think that was mainly because this is a solid wood piece, except for the veneered panels for the back and doors. Had I used veneered plywood for the carcase it might have been easier to construct, and would surly have taken less effort, but then it would not be solid wood! Plywood might have given the piece more of a kitchen cabinet look, and that was not what we were after.

The carcase joined was one thing, but it was the back that would really make the piece. I had used some really fine quilted maple veneer for the panels, and next to the walnut rails and stiles the back would be dyn-o-mite! And, in my minimalistic design the back really lends a lot of strength to the piece. So, the first step was to pull out the pieces of walnut I had machined earlier for the rails and stiles. I joined these pieces with floating tenons in mortises cut with the Domino machine. The tenons are called "dominoes" because they are about that size and shape. The photo to right shows me using the machine to cut the mortises, and

the photo below it shows the completed mortise. With all the mortises cut, I used a dado blade in the table saw to cut the grooves in which the panels would fit. Since the back would fit within the sides, so the edges of the back would not show, I simply cut the grooves all the way along

all pieces and did not worry about the exposed groove on the side edges top and bottom. Then, I dry fit the panels to check the assembly, broke down the assembly, then finished the rails and stiles with shellac polish. When all the parts met my standard for finish, I glued the dominoes into the mortises and clamped up the back. Once dry, I glued the back into the carcase and clamped it firmly, reinforcing the sides to edge joints with four stainless steel screws per side. The photo to left shows the clamp up of the back into the carcase. Note the look of the quilted maple on the panels!

The carcase was almost complete, but it needed two details, well, maybe details is not the correct term. First, I did not want the drawers guiding

on the bottom of the top, so I designed a spacer between the top and the drawers which doubled as a stretcher to help pull the sides together at the front top edge. If you look closely at the photo to the right you will see three "aprons" that stretch across the drawer openings. These pieces are set into the sides and center vertical dividers with a large dovetail on each end. Look closer ... do you see the dovetail, now? With a bit of tension on these pieces, the sides are reinforced from spreading even more than the shelves/dust dividers themselves can do. Also, the carcase needed legs! If you look at the photo

at the beginning of this treatise, you will notice a leg wrapped around each of the four corners, plus stub legs in the center. I had glued the stub legs on earlier, back when the carcase was upside down. Now I had to form and install the corner legs. I used cherry and aimed for a 2" square cross section. Each leg would have a rabbet cut in one corner to fit around the side of the carcase. Also, the legs would have a chamfer spokeshaved on the edges, but the chamfer would be wider in the center of the leg. This would give the leg the illusion of being somewhat hour glass shaped, although they are actually not that way except for the chamfer. The photo at left shows me using a spokeshave on a leg to get the profile, and if you look closely you can see the rabbet I cut in the corner. I have no photos of cutting the rabbet, but I used a straight bit in the router table to do that, using multiple light passes so I would not chip out the cherry. With the legs formed, I sanded and shellac polished them, then glued them in place. Despite my best efforts, I did not succeed in getting all eight legs (including the stubs) in the same plane, so I had to flip the carcase over, again (ouch, my back!) and touch up the high spots with a sander. It is important for all legs to make contact with the floor, although for a piece with eight legs I will surely have to lightly shim the legs on the floor where the piece will call home.

For now, the carcase was complete, but I still needed to make doors, drawers, and the top. Now, I concentrated on the doors. They are simple frame and panel construction, although the center doors will have muntins and windows, while the side doors have panels veneered of the quilted maple I glued up earlier. First, I selected lumber with a lot of attention to grain. If doors are going

to be "double doors", I make the top and bottom rails of the same board so the grain crosses seamlessly. I also look for straight grain for the vertical stiles. I make the rails and stiles thick enough to allow a good groove for the panel, or room for the muntins The parts are joined with open mortise and tenon, or bridle joints. These are strong and easy to cut on the table saw. The photo at right shows me using the tenon jig on the table saw to cut the mortise part of the joint. The tenon part was cut the same way, except the sides of the part were sawn. After cutting these joints, I dry fitted them and then used the router table to cut the groove for the panel to fit in, or the rabbet for the glass. In the case of the center doors, I also had to cut "T" shaped mortises for the muntins to fit into. The muntins, themselves were cut from cherry and, using the router table with a straight bit, the rabbets on each side of the muntins, where

the glass would fit, were cut. Now, the muntins are very fragile at this point. They are only about a half inch wide. Trying to feed them into the bit on the router with my fingers would be, uh, really dumb. One false move and there goes a finger tip. So, I made a little "fence" that would feed the muntin into the bit with my fingers nowhere near the action. This jig is simply a piece of wood with a rabbet cut in it the size of the cross section of the muntin. Take a look at the photo to right and you can see what I mean. In the photo I am feeding the muntin into the "fence", against the rotation of the bit (so the stock does not get launched across the shop!). You can see my hand, the rabbet on one side of the muntin, but you cannot see the router bit. See, it works!

Gluing up the door frames was a straight-forward process, but first I finished all the pieces with shellac polish so after I glued them up I would

have cleanly shellaced corners at the joints. The muntins were also fit with a lap joint in the center, where the pieces crossed. Once the doors were glued up I cut the hinge mortises for the L-knife hinges. As with the carcase hinge mortises, I used a router with a straight

bit and a template to quickly cut the mortises to the correct size and depth. I used to do this with chisels, but that takes longer and the bottom of the mortise is not as easily made true with chisels. Not shown in the photo is the clamp that held the template in place. I used a guide bushing in my router to guide the straight bit in the template.

The photo at left shows the completely assembled hinge and door. After cutting the mortises, I spent a good deal of time fine tuning the fit of the doors in the carcase. This included planing the edges and shimming the hinges slightly so that the doors would fit properly. Here is a photo that shows three of the doors preliminarily mounted in the carcase. Later I would take the doors out and clean up and finish the edges. Also, I still had not installed the door pulls nor the glass.

I needed a break from fitting doors, so I moved on to cutting dovetails for the drawers. I had rough milled the drawer parts weeks ago and they had settled out. Next I trimmed each of the parts to size so that the drawers would be slightly larger than the openings, minimizing planing of the sides for

the final fit. I calculated the anticipated movement of the drawer sides with humidity changes and trimmed the parts accordingly. Then I set up the dovetail jig that uses a router to cut the tails and pins. Since I was making six large drawers, or 24 dovetail sets, I could save my client a whole lot of money cutting them with the jig. The jig pays off with large numbers of drawers, but if I was making only one or two drawers I would save time cutting the dovetails by hand. I use a Leigh dovetail jig, which is fully adjustable so I can make the

tails and pins pretty much as I like, with varying spacing. The photo at right shows me using the jig with my large ELU router. Once the jig is set up, the cuts go quickly, much, much more quickly than hand cutting. After all the parts were cut, I stacked them up so you could see what goes into six drawers. The photo at left shows all the parts, including the white oak drawer bottoms that were bookmatched and glued to make the large panels for the bottoms. This stage took quite a lot of effort, because not only did all the parts have to be dovetailed, but grooves had to be cut for the drawer bottoms to fit into, holes had to be drilled into the drawer faces for the handles, and all the parts had to be sanded and finished on the insides, since if I tried to finish the drawer insides after glue up I would

not be able to keep shellac buildup from the corners. There were 34 total parts that had to be sanded and finished, quite a job. Then, the glue up had to happen. Gluing up parts of drawers can be a little stressful if the drawers are large, but these went fairly smoothly, although each glue up required a lot of clamps to make sure all the parts stayed firmly seated and the drawers true. The photo at right shows that one can never have too many clamps!

The bottom drawers would fit into the pockets formed by the bottom of the carcase and the bottom of the doored storage spaces. It was a fairly straight forward operation to carefully plane the sides and tops of the drawers to fit in their pockets and run smoothly. My goal with drawers is to allow enough play for wood movement, so the drawers don't bind when the humidity goes up, but still have them run smoothly without mechanical runners like you see in kitchen cabinets. After planing the drawers to fit a little 'sticky', and them applying wax to the sides of the drawers and the opening, I can usually make them slide nicely. For me, the quality of the drawer is its ability to slide like a sled down a snowy hill. With such large drawers, this is doubly a challenge, but with patience I did get them to fit perfectly. The top drawers were a little different, though. Here I had to take into account a lot of wood movement issues. The drawers would seat on the wood that made up the tops of the doored storage spaces, but the tops of the drawers needed runners to guide on. Now, remember that all the vertical and horizontal parts of the carcase were constructed with the grain running in the same direction so that the carcase could expand and contract from front to back seasonally. The top, however, was to be constructed as a frame and panel assembly - ambrosia maple panels with a walnut frame. By the nature of frame and panel construction, there would be long grain in

the top abutting short grain in the sides, or in other words, the top frame would not move front to back seasonally. Therefore, I could not attach the top to the sides with a solid glue joint - the top would have to be able to float a little. The solution was to make drawer runners that would attach firmly with screws to the sides at the mid point of each runner, but would attach at the ends with a sliding joint. The photo at right needs to be studied to see what I mean. If you look carefully at the blown up photo you will see the ends of each runner have a screw going through an elongated hole into the sides so that the sides can move and the screw will not bind in its hole in the runner. Also, I could run a screw up through the ends of the center runners into the top frame to secure it to the carcase. Well, this worked well, and I fit the drawers as well as the bottom drawers -- maybe better!

While we are on the subject, let's talk about how the top was made. As I said, it was made as a frame and panel assembly. The reasons for this construction were several fold. First, we wanted to use walnut on the top, but not a total sheet of walnut, which would be just too overwhelming of a dark expanse. At one point we were talking about using panels of granite, which would go well with another piece of furniture in the home. Well, the right granite was not to be found, so we decided to look at panels of ambrosia maple, that is, maple with dark oblong streaks made by the tracks of a beetle that was in the wood long ago. This close grained wood could finish up to be very smooth like granite, and if I cut the panels to stand proud of the frame by a sixteenth of an inch or so, chamfering the edges, they would have the similar 'presence' that granite would have. So, I made the frame, which was not a simple rectangle but had the 'bump out' in front to match the bump out on the carcase, cut mortises with the domino machine, grooved the insides for the panel, and then

made the panels to fit. The panels were made from boards that were resawn to make them 1/2" thick and were slip matched so that the direction of the beetle marks tended in the same direction across the boards. After edge gluing the boards for the panels, I ran them through the drum sander (photo at right) to level the halves at the glue joint. I then cut panels to the exactly correct size to allow seasonal movement but have about the same gap all the way around each panel, then cut the

rabbets so the panels could fit in the grooves of the frame. If you take a close look at the blow up of the photo at right, you can see what I am talking about. This photo shows the top assembly just prior to glue-up. Of course, since the panels were to sit a little proud of the frame, I had to put the finish on the frame parts before gluing, and before I could finish I had to sand the loosely assembled frame to be perfectly flat at the joints. With all that work done, I glued up the top assembly. Actually, there was another operation on the top that I did, for the most part, before assembly. The edges of the frame were to have a shallow undercut, or bevel on the bottom. I wanted this to be a cove, or slightly concave shaped bevel. But, the shape of the

bump-out was not conducive to using a big shaper cutter to make the cove, plus there is something a bit boring about a machine cut cove. Instead, I used a technique I had used on a previous piece where I used carving gouges to make the cove cut. First, I rough cut the bevel on the table saw, then using carving gouges I cut a 'rustic' cove edge, that is, I left tool marks so when you feel under the lip of the top you will sense the texture of the cuts. The photo at left shows me using a gouge to make this cut. This is just one of those little touches that set custom studio furniture apart from production furniture. So, with the top glued up I cleaned up the places where the coves came together at the joints, put finish on the bottom, and then set to attaching the top to the carcase. Remember, the carcase will move seasonally, but the frame and panel top is very stable. For this reason, the top cannot be firmly attached front to back. So, I had already drilled three dowel holes close together and centered on the sides and inside vertical pieces so at least I could achieve a glue joint in the center of the top at four different points. Using dowel points I marked the hole positions on the bottom of the frame, and also marked the screw holes for the screws that would attach the top to the drawer runners, discussed in the last paragraph. The result would be attachment at a total of eight points and the carcase could move while the top was stable. Of course, you cannot pick up the entire piece by lifting the top ... in fact, I can hardly lift even one side of this piece with all the drawers removed ... without damaging the connections to the top, but then furniture should not be lifted by grabbing onto the top, anyway. Always lift from the bottom, or from a structural component like a bookcase shelf. I trued the top edges of the carcase, and then attached the top. After the top was secured, I French polished the ambrosia maple panels to make them smooth (and replicate the surface of the granite we had thought of using).

The piece was close to completion, but a couple of very important details were still left to do. First, the doors needed glass. My doors use solid wood retainers inside the muntins, screwed in place by tiny brass screws. I make these retainers triangular in cross section and carefully cope them to fit

exactly against one another at the corners. I have to be careful not to make the retainers clamp down too hard on the glass lest the glass crack. This is a dicey process, usually requiring trial and error, but if you look at the photo to right you can see me drilling the screw pilot hole in the muntin (using a tiny hand drill), through the pre-drilled hole in the retainer, with the glass sitting in the rabbet and a business card as a spacer between the retainer and the glass. Usually, when I install the screws the retainer will move 'down' about the thickness of the business card, holding the glass firmly but not causing it to break. Well, usually this is the case. In these doors I only broke two glass panes trying to get the holes set just right. I'm continuing to improve my process, and my goal is to make a set of doors with no glass breaking. I'm thinking of making a special bit that will drill the pilot hole, the retainer full diameter hole, and the countersink in one step for a small #1 screw (this is a really small screw). But, that's for another day.

The second important details to complete were the handles for the drawers and doors. Handles can make or break a piece, so I leave them for near the end. For this I asked my clients to stop by the shop so we could discuss the handles while viewing the piece somewhat assembled (although the top was not made at that point), then I made prototypes, photographed them, and e-mailed the photos to my client so they could have some choice. We had already established a preference for a handle style I had used in a prior piece (my roll top desk), one that replicates a boat cleat, so starting with that style I made a couple of variations, one with straight sides

instead of the 'bow tie' shape of the original, and one with the curve of the handle convex instead of concave. The photos at right show the drawers with the 'bow tie' cleat on the left and the alternate styles on the right. The top photo shows the straight sided version on the right, and the bottom photo shows the convex version on the right. My clients chose the original "bow tie" style, but at least we were satisfied

that we considered other possibilities. So, I set about fashioning the handles using my spindle sander. The process was this. First, I cut rectangular blanks, in this case from cherry, and then drilled the dowel holes using the same template I used to drill the holes in the drawer fronts. Then I rough sketched the shape of the pulls and cut them on the bandsaw. With that done, I used the spindle sander, as seen in the photo at left to shape the pulls. I used to hand carve the pulls, but I can get better results faster using the

spindle sander. I can make a pull in about 15 minutes this way, instead of an hour and a half of carving. And, my thumbs are in better shape using the sander than when using a whittling knife, if you catch my drift. After the pulls were shaped, I sanded them by hand to P400 grit, then applied my shellac polish finish, sanding to P600. I then installed the dowels in the handles and installed the handles into the drawer fronts, using a wooden clamp and specially shaped padded caul to bring them all the way home without breaking them. The photo at right shows this clamping process. The door pulls were made in a similar manner, although they have only one center dowel attaching them to the door.

Now, all the construction was complete. I took some time to do touch up on a few places and apply a coat of wax, and then spent a day photographing the piece (on my time). In all, this piece took over 330 hours to design and build, by far my largest project ever. Cost wise, this piece ended up costing less than a similarly shaped piece (but with half the number of drawers and not nearly the attention to detail) I had seen at a furniture factory this summer, so I felt good that my client is getting good value. I had worked the project for over eight months, interspersing the work with other jobs, milling trees, teaching, doing shows, stacking lumber, pouring concrete, and all the other things it takes to operate a business, but I guess the lesson is that the physical size of a piece like this has a lot more influence on the time requirement, both in terms of actual production hours and total elapsed time for allowing wood to settle, obtaining supplies, and so forth than I had anticipated. As always, another lesson learned in furniture making!

Individually Styled and Crafted

Fine Hardwood Furniture

by

Andrew Pitts ~ FurnitureMaker