Here is the another one of my favorite projects.  It was built to go with the kitchen cabinet project that I had recently completed.  The design was based around a set of plans for a Shaker sideboard that I found in the February/March, 2007 issue (No. 127) of The American Woodworker Magazine.  The original design had typical Shaker styles and rails utilizing flat paneled doors and wooden door and drawer knobs.

I modified the design slightly to match the cope and pinned styles and rails used on my kitchen cabinets.  I also used the same burnished copper styled handles and hinges that I used on my kitchen cabinets.  Other than that, the plans were followed exactly as drawn. The photo on the right is a view of the finished sideboard.

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There were a couple of new challenges for me while building this sideboard of which I had never encountered or attempted previously. 

One of those challenges was building the corner legs.  I had purchased a large plank (or board) from a friend who had cut down several trees in 2001 from his lot prior to building his new home.  He hired a firm with a portable sawmill to come in and cut the trees into rough lumber.  He had them cut the trees into several widths and lengths and then he stacked them with stringers in his barn.  He had cherry, red & white oak, walnut, ash and sycamore.

I purchased a piece of his red oak in a plank that was roughly 4 1/2" thick X 14" wide X 48" long.  You can see a couple of pictures of this plank in the back of my pickup truck below.

Now what?  Guess I'll set up my roll stands on both sides of the band saw and see if that would work.  Nope!  That didn't work either, the blade began to drift on me.  Well now, I wonder if I could cut this with my 30 year old circular saw?  That worked for a while until the handle got so hot I had to put on some gloves.  About one and one half rips, the smoke started rolling out of the saw motor.  So much for that!

This all led me to Lowe's to purchase a new DeWalt circular saw.  Arriving back at the shop, I unpacked the new saw and continued the ripping process.  I can't believe how easily that new saw waded through that hunk of wood.......just like butter!  After completing the rips, I moved back to the jointer to flatten two adjacent sides of four pieces that I intended using and then moved to the planer to finish getting the thickness down to the planned size.  You can see some of the pictures of this process below.
 

This photo shows a couple of the leg boards after ripping with the new circular saw.	This photo shows me retrieving one of the leg boards from the exit side of my DeWalt model DW734 twelve inch planer.	Here you can see me feeding one of the corner leg boards into the planer.

Once the boards were all planed to the correct thickness, I set up the table saw to cut the tapers on the ends.  I then made rabbets on the legs that was to be the inside corners of each leg to adapt to the corners of the base cabinet as the plan called for.  There was a lot more detail work involved with this whole project than is shown in these photos and in the photo of the base cabinet prior to leg assembly shown below.

As always, comments are welcome and you can get them to me by the e-mail address below.
 

Dave
dave@oldaveswoodshop.com