Starting the carcase.

Today I started on preparing the wood for the carcase. Firstly I spread out the timber I had allocated for the top, bottom, ends and internal dividers and decided what would go where.

Of course the best went into the top and next best into the ends. Note the triangle I have drawn on in chalk. This clearly shows me the match and edge to be joined incase the parts get mixed up later on.

The two ends will come from one length, so next I had to cut through to separate the the parts.

The next step was was to thickness all these pieces (which ranged in thickness from 26-23mm) to the final thickness of 21 mm. I had already straightened them on the jointer, so it was just a matter of putting them through the thicknesser - See movie below.

Two things happened during this process.  Firstly a knot came loose in one of the boards for the internal dividers. I decided to glue it back in and will hide this somewhere towards the back of the cabinet.  Not wanting to wait for the glue to dry I decided to just screw it back on - strong enough to continue my machining.

The second thing was that I was getting far too much tearout in the surface of this Fiddleback Blackwood, even though my cutters were razor sharp. 

At 22mm I decided to revert to the widebelt sander, which worked a treat.  I was happy with the final thickness of 20.5mm, sanded to 80 grit, with no tearout at all......  Very happy indeed.

Next step was to straighten the edge of each board to joint together.  Some people do this on the jointer or with handplanes, however I prefer to use my Altendorf panel saw.  Accurate to 0.1mm over 3m I reckon this is far more accurate and easier than any other method I know of. With a 48 TPI blade I get a perfect edge for jointing. See the movie below.

Tomorrow I will see about Domino jointing these boards together and then gluing them up.

About the design

The only thing I did on the piece today was to look again at the Fiddleback Blackwood. You see, I've got a business (http://www.antongerner.com.au) to run and this piece is in my spare time. I've put some water on the surface so you can see what the colour and grain will look like. STUNNING !!!

 

Before I go any further with this project I thought I'd explain a little about the design. When I first had the idea for this piece I completed many pages of small thumbnail ideas. This got the basic design out of my head and helped narrow down the direction I would take.

Watch the video below where I explain some more detail about the design.

Sanding the veneers.

So, what did I do today ?

I was very interested to see how the veneers for the doors were going to turn out, so I decided to jump ahead in the project a little by sanding these down to thickness.  I thought I had better make sure they were going to be OK before I went ahead and made the carcase.

To sand the veneers through the wide belt sander down to thickness I made a simple sled from blockboard which has a thin back stopper to hold the veneers from slipping. This sled is needed because the sander can only sand down to 3mm and very thin material it tends to compress into the feed belt which sometimes creates an uneven thickness.

 

Since my veneers vary in thickness a little I measured the thickest at 4.3mm and slowly sanded them down, 0.1mm per pass, one by one until they were all clean at a nice final thickness of  1.89mm.

 

For the sanding I used my Casolin Wide belt sander with straight 80 grit.  It did a stunning job and I am very happy with the end result.  See the process in the two videos below.

CLOSE UP OF THICKNESS SANDING VENEERS DOWN TO 1.89mm

ANTON GERNER SANDING BLACKWOOD VENEERS DOWN TO 1.89mm