Router Plane

Monday, May 27, 2019

FLW Cabinet - #1 The Beginning


The history on the project in this blog series goes back in time probably the farthest of anything I have done except for maybe the Maloof rocking chair.  I have been an admirer of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie style architecture since the late 1960’s.  In the 1980’s I had a chance to tour the Dana-Thomas house in Springfield, Illinois and fell in love with stained glass it contained.  Wright designed approximately 450 art glass windows, skylights, door panels, sconces, and light fixtures for the house and fortunately most of them survive in-place in the house.

Fast forward to 1998 when I had completed building my home in Illinois, a Wright inspired brick and limestone Prairie style house that in a sun-room had a four panel 12’ wide sliding glass door whose two fixed panels were the perfect place to put a couple of panels based on a series from that house.  Here is a photo of the Dana-Thomas doors and windows that I based the design on.
After a whole lot of design, numerous iterations and a full winter building the stained-glass panels they were installed and looked like this.

When I retired and we moved from that house to New Mexico I could not stand to leave them behind.  They were carefully removed from the doors, packed in padded custom boxes and placed in a storage area in our home.  As I unpacked other stained-glass pieces and hung them around the house, we could find no good place for them to reside.  Off and on over several years my wife and I discussed various uses and just could not find the right one.  In 2016 I finally decided to start working on a design for a Craftsman style cabinet using the piece set in a frame as the door.  After over two years in design with more frustration than usual and more versions and variations than I care to think about I got the design to a point where it looked pretty good. 
Since the exact size of the glass is going to drive the final dimensions it was time to open of the storage case to measure the piece.  Once opened there it was looking just like it did when I packed it for moving almost nine years ago.

Using my almost done design a material list could be generated and then it was off to the yard to sort through piles of material finding the right pieces.  Got to say whenever I select wood, I am just like a kid in a candy store.  The cut list below is for one of the two cases.

Using that list I got the 6/4, 5/4, 4/4 red oak along with two ¾” sheets and two ¼” sheets of plain sliced red oak plywood.  Once I got it home the wood is bought in the shop annex to acclimate.  After letting it set for a few weeks I thought I could do some very rough initial work.  The 6/4 and 5/4 oak boards are rough sawn and I mean rough.  Here are the two 6/4 boards.  They are 14’ long, about 10” wide, 1 5/8” thick and weigh about 70 pounds each.  They were a bit cupped and as it is obvious in the photo, they had more than a little curve in them.

The 6/4 material is for the four outside legs.  They are tapered but the rough size is about 81” long and 4” wide.  My first step is to set the plank on some risers at the workbench then using the circular saw cut it in half.  I can’t use my chop saw as a 14' board is too long to fit on one side of the cutting table.

Next is to take the 7’ long half and take the curve out.  To do that I use a simple cutting jig clamped to the plank.  The right edge shows where the saw will cut removing the outside curve. 

However, before doing any cutting it’s always a good idea to check for any metal like these staples and remove them.

A pass with the saw down the jig and presto a mostly straight edge to work from.  That’s followed by a trim of the original uncut end to check for cracks or splits.  Since the plank is now 7’ long it will fit on my cutting table for the chop saw.  All I need to do is go through the same process to straighten the other side and I will have one plank done and three to go.

Well time has passed and now I have four planks with straighter edges that are more or less parallel.

With the planks roughed out now seemed like a good time to check the moisture content to see if the center of the plank was dry enough to proceed or if I had to wait for it to dry.  A quick check and the meter showed the moisture content to be 5.7% which is just fine.  One advantage to living in the desert where the humidity varies between not much and none is that things do dry out pretty quick.  Several times I have gotten a meter reading of 0% but that’s only because the meter does not register below 5%.

The next step is to rip the planks down to the rough width for the outside legs.  If the planks were surfaced smooth with nice neat flat surfaces it would make that a lot easier.  However, these are rough sawn and flat is not a word I would use to describe them.  Sitting a straight edge across one of the planks shows a fair size cup in the board.  I could take that out by running the plank through the planer several times but that would reduce the thickness of the finished pieces more than I want.  Rather than proceeding that way the plan is to rip the planks down to the rough width which will make the cup much less of a problem and that’s where I will start in the next post.  The big ole crack in this piece and in a couple others will still be something to work around though.

Next up – A Straight Edge, Ripping, Surfacing & a Jig

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