Tuesday 5 March 2013

Display Cabinet Part 2

The build of the display cabinet is going really well at the moment.
A template was made with the curve of the front. From this the side panels were cut out and then routed with a pattern following bit.
I have routed the mortises in the top and bottom panels. I also made full length tenons on the side and centre panels.
mortise and tenon detail from
Sketchup model

As the customer has asked for adjustable shelves I made a jig to make the holes in all the side and centre panels. Essentially all this is a piece of 3/4" scrap plywood with a hole pattern drilled in relative to two squared and jointed datum edges.

Drill jig turned on its side
The holes in the drill jig are on 32mm centres and are 35mm in from the long edge. The second set of 3 holes are 50mm further in from the first set. The reason for these is because the lower shelves are deeper than the upper shelves so the supports are on different centres. The shelves will follow the graceful lines of the curve of the front so the support holes are changed accordingly.
Shelf support holes
The jig holes are 5/8" diameter and are used for the router guide bush.
The holes in the side panels and centre panel are 8mm x 8mm deep and are transferred through using the router.
The front of the lower and upper panels were then run through the table saw with the blade set at corresponding angles to follow the curve. I have left about 1/16" to remove with a plane after the glue up.

Glue Up

The final job prior to glue up was to sand all internal surfaces to 220 grit. I wouldn't get much opportunity to do sanding properly if everything was already glued up.

The lower tenons are glued into the base using West Systems epoxy quick set. This has quite low viscosity when it has just been mixed. So for the upper tenons I just used regular yellow glue to avoid any drips from squeeze out eminating from above.
The epoxy takes about 7 hours to setup and 48 hours to reach full cure whereas the yellow glue takes about 24 hours to reach full strength. The rear panels are not glued in just slid into their grooves.

The whole assembly was then clamped making sure that everything was square and put aside for a couple of days. Even after taking care not to put too much epoxy on the joints there is still a little squeeze out that will be removed with a chisel plane.

Front view of clamp-up
The grain runs from left to right
as per the original cabinet


Rear view 
Side view showing graceful curve

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