Flutterby™! : Kitchen cabinet progress

When Charles Wilson gave me permission to mirror his PDF on building a butterfly leaf style dining room table with two pair of wings, which I wanted to do for this entry, he said: "As long as you give me a link to your weblog, so I can become one of your readers."

So I figured maybe I should post an update on some of the woodworking I've been doing lately. The first weekend in March I milled a whole boatload of maple down to 3/4" and ripped the rails to 2¼" (resulting bucket o' sawdust) keeping careful track of the longer pieces because I knew I wanted vertical grain continuity. That evening, as I was starting to lay out the grain matching, I realized that I wanted grain continuity in the other dimension. So during the week I milled and ripped a few wider pieces, carefully marking them.

Of course the marking system I initially came up with had problems, so on Saturday I cut the miters on the frame pieces, and laid the whole thing out on the living room floor, re-marked everything, and then cut the mortises (145 of them) and started milling the profile on the inside (the outside gets milled later, when the rest of the frame can provide stability on the table). I figure that's about a thousand passes through the router table.

There are a few bits of tear-out that I hope to patch with... something, either glue and sawdust, or a putty, or somesuch. Yesterday evening we were up in Santa Rosa and stopped at Home Despot on the way back south for some concrete backer-board, and wandered through the kitchen section to look for pulls and handles. I got a chance to look at commercial cabinetry again, which reminded me of how much you can obscure when you go with darker finishes that muddle the grain, and when you don't care about the grain matching.

And I think that the sap/heart interface will actually look quite a bit less rustic than that layout on the living roomo floor once the rounded profiles are milled in and the finish is on, but we are very much playing up the grain in this piece.

Similar entry and additional pictures over at the personal blog.