Back at it

I made some extra cash doing a little carpentry work back in January and blew it all in one place: cherry lumber from Craigslist.  I got about 220 board feet for $450...not too shabby.  It had been poorly stored and a lot of it was pretty severely cupped and warped.  Not a big deal though...it was 5/4 lumber, so much thicker than I needed.  Home Depot just happened to have 13" Delta planer blades on sale for 50% off...perfect timing; in the end I got a lot of good wood out of it.
The plan is to make some nice bookcases out of it.  The one Im working on now will have a cabinet on the bottom and then some shelves on top of it.  So far the casework for the bottom is coming together nicely:

This is only a dry fit...gaps between joints will be closed during the glue up.

The interior contains a single shelf:

The top is joined to the sides with hidden (full-blind) dovetails:

This is the first time Ive tried this joint and Im pretty pleased with it.  The great thing is that it only has to be functional...the tails and sockets dont actually have to look good because theyll never be seen.

The frame for the doors has a tongue running around the outside of it:

The tongues fits into a groove running around the inside of the case:

This method allows easy alignment of the frame within the case with a consistent offset from the front edge.

The bottom is also dovetailed to the sides, but very differently:

This is just a quick and simple joint that will keep the bottom from falling out if its ever picked up.  The exterior of the joint will eventually have a run of molding around it, so it wont be seen either.

The panels for the doors were resawn from a single board--resawn on a new bandsaw, but that will be another entry.  I wouldve liked to have had the panels symmetrical (book-matched), but with book-matching the grain ends up running in opposite directions.  This isnt normally a big deal but in this case the grain of the panels was somewhat iridescent and changed color at different angles.  So had I book-matched them, they wouldve alchoices been different colors.  With one of them flipped vertically, the colors match.

The next steps will be ship-lapping some planks on the back, making some molding, and making feet for it.  Should be some new techniques, so Im looking forward to it.

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