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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
When I got this piece home,
I began contemplating on how I was going to get it sectioned into lengths
of the right size to begin making the corner legs. The first thing
I did after jointing one of the sides, was to get it up on my table saw.
I then raised the saw blade as far as it would go (which was not enough
height to cut through the entire thickness of the board). I set the
fence for ripping four inch wide pieces. I did make an attempt to
rip the pieces but my older, under powered saw couldn't handle the rip
and bogged down about 6 or 7 inches into the cut.
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.
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This photo shows me
retrieving one of the leg boards from the exit side of my DeWalt model
DW734 twelve inch planer.
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Here you can see me
feeding one of the corner leg boards into the planer.
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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.
I also purchased two seven foot
long five quarter boards for the top from Johnson's
Workbench and had them planed down in their shop. I jointed them,
edge glued them and cut them to final length after the glue had dried.
After mounting the top on the case, I routed a beveled edge around the
sides and front of the top. Upon completion of the case and top,
I moved on to making the doors and three upper drawers using the same dovetail
drawers and cope & pinned doors that I had used on our kitchen cabinets.
This page doesn't show everything along the progression of this project,
but you should be able to get some kind of an idea of the process from
this page.
As always, comments are welcome
and you can get them to me by the e-mail address below.
Dave
dave@oldaveswoodshop.com
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