Deborah has been coming to my Tuesday evening class for about 18 months. Having no previous experience she started with some basic woodworking techniques such as sawing and planing square, cutting a mortice and tenon and lap joint and tool sharpening and maintenance. Her first project was a shoe rack in ash, an exercise in careful setting out, edge jointing and use of the domino jointer.
More challenging was her second project, a CD cabinet in maple with book matched masur birch veneered doors. Deborah cut the corner mitres on the saw bench and reinforced them with biscuits. The doors are an mdf substrate with maple lipping. This was then veneered with the masur birch. It was important to get absolutely accurate alignment of the veneer across the doors, so they were temporarily stuck together with double sided tape, the veneer applied and then cut through with a scalpel at the join to separate the door. Deborah then had to fit the hinges to ensure the alignment was maintained, she got it spot on. We had a little discussion about how the doors could be opened! The catches are magnets in door and carcase, but how to provide something to pull to open the doors. Knobs or handles would be a bit intrusive, Deborah finally settled on discrete loops of shoe lace. It sound strange but I thing it looks really good.
The cabinet should be wall hung but Deborah had not got round to this when the photos were taken! Her next project is a maple jewellery box, she has spent some time practicing her dovetails and started machining the wood for it last week.
