Quick! Quick!

Write something before it's been a month of dead air time...

Phew.

So, where was I? Ah yes, furniture making of course. I think we are just about to enter our 14th week on the course, and it is ticking over wonderfully. We are deep in the intricacies of box-making, which is giving us a good grounding in various skills, on a very fine scale.

The box itself will be in black walnut, dovetailed together, a fielded panel lid and with cedar of Lebanon liners and base. I've been really enjoying the progress I'm making, and I think this is partly because I can feel how all this new knowledge and these new skills are embedding into my brain. I've improved in huge leaps over the past few weeks.



This project has been our first foray into "proper" joint cutting, with fine furniture's favourite joint, the hand-cut dovetail. As these are decorative, they're through-dovetails, so both sides of the corner joint will show. We marked and cut and pared and marked and cut and pared again... painstakingly trying not to cut over our lines, back-breaking days spent hunched over the bench chiselling away tiny amounts of waste. And then fitting the joints together, adjusting, fitting again...



Now that I know the sides go together, I can work on the bottom and lid. There's a false sense of nearing the end having seen the sides assembled, but actually there are quite a few steps before I actually get to start final assembly. I started preparing the bottom and liners from a beautiful piece of cedar of Lebanon... and at the end (just before cutting the rebate so it'll fit into the grooves in the box) discovered a split in the timber! So, I found another piece to make the bottom from... only, it was of a very different colour to the original liner pieces I had prepared. So, I also prepared some new liners as well...

It's a good job that planing cedar (especially with a freshly honed plane iron) is about as good as hand-planing can get - the smell is lovely, and it cuts very nicely.

Now, I've cut the rebate and the rough steps for the fielded panel of the lid... Then comes the finishing off of the lid sides (to fit into the grooves). And then we work on pre-finishing some of the box surfaces. And then, finally, we get to glue some of these pieces together. More on that next weekend, I expect!