TheTiddles
Established Member
I’ve made one before, it was 3-years late, so is this one.
Painted box with elm top to match the rest of the furniture. I’ve got just enough of the same veneer as all the other built-in units to do the outside of the top, plus using up scraps and offcuts which I seem to have everywhere (note to self, next time make the first piece in the house from a more forgiving and cheaper wood, then matching all the others is easier). I can’t go out and buy more elm (it’d be too wet to use straight away anyway) but thankfully I can get the MDF delivered. This is Medite MRMDF which at 15mm thick has a brown face, apparently it’s easier to paint, we’ll see. I also need 3mm which isn’t available in MRMDF so I’ve got standard which actually looks quite good, a good hard cut edge, maybe that’s the difference with the premium make.
So top first, I was originally thinking of making it as a torsion box, however I’d need to use thinner walls to open up the core and it wouldn’t have saved much weight. So two layers of 15mm then veneered with bandsawn elm. I needed to cut some more for the underside which started badly, the first cut mostly burned its way through over about 2-minutes it took to cut a 500mm length, then I changed the blade and cut the rest in a few seconds.
I have no drum sander and I recently tore apart my lathe based one, because... ok, I’m not sure why I did that. The veneers are vac-bagged onto the MDF and then the substrate is cut back to create the edge for the lipping, with the exception of the middle part which will give a panel-type look but be flat, so I inlaid a cross-band piece down the middle with a track saw, with a sharp blade you can cut a veneer cross-grain and it’s good for a glue-up with no further steps, here you can see the construction
The trim to size is also done with a track saw, the complication here is that I’m working from the centre of the book match of the veneer, not a panel edge and there’s a match top and bottom, so a lot of checking happened before committing to the cut. Again, sharp blade and good saw, you can cut less than a mm thick pieces 36mm deep.
The lipping is solid elm, the pieces I have left in a suitable size are a bit scabby, a couple of cracks that I glued up and we’ll see if they stay stable enough once moved indoors. I could have made the “panels” larger using a different design but simpler seemed better, so the long edges were put on first then the entire top cut to length, again working from the centre of the inlaid cross-band, so not the easiest. The false breadboard ends were then glued on with a bunch of biscuits.
As the veneers are still in the rough they need some attention, as they’re 3mm+ thick you can plane them cross-grain to flatten, so an hour or so with a plane and a straight edge got that done.
then it was out with a random orbit sander with a 60-grit disk, if I had 40-grit I’d have used that, or a belt sander, thick veneer really is good for certain things.
Top mostly done, it’s off to the scales, need to know the mass to do the next bit of design
Painted box with elm top to match the rest of the furniture. I’ve got just enough of the same veneer as all the other built-in units to do the outside of the top, plus using up scraps and offcuts which I seem to have everywhere (note to self, next time make the first piece in the house from a more forgiving and cheaper wood, then matching all the others is easier). I can’t go out and buy more elm (it’d be too wet to use straight away anyway) but thankfully I can get the MDF delivered. This is Medite MRMDF which at 15mm thick has a brown face, apparently it’s easier to paint, we’ll see. I also need 3mm which isn’t available in MRMDF so I’ve got standard which actually looks quite good, a good hard cut edge, maybe that’s the difference with the premium make.
So top first, I was originally thinking of making it as a torsion box, however I’d need to use thinner walls to open up the core and it wouldn’t have saved much weight. So two layers of 15mm then veneered with bandsawn elm. I needed to cut some more for the underside which started badly, the first cut mostly burned its way through over about 2-minutes it took to cut a 500mm length, then I changed the blade and cut the rest in a few seconds.
I have no drum sander and I recently tore apart my lathe based one, because... ok, I’m not sure why I did that. The veneers are vac-bagged onto the MDF and then the substrate is cut back to create the edge for the lipping, with the exception of the middle part which will give a panel-type look but be flat, so I inlaid a cross-band piece down the middle with a track saw, with a sharp blade you can cut a veneer cross-grain and it’s good for a glue-up with no further steps, here you can see the construction
The trim to size is also done with a track saw, the complication here is that I’m working from the centre of the book match of the veneer, not a panel edge and there’s a match top and bottom, so a lot of checking happened before committing to the cut. Again, sharp blade and good saw, you can cut less than a mm thick pieces 36mm deep.
The lipping is solid elm, the pieces I have left in a suitable size are a bit scabby, a couple of cracks that I glued up and we’ll see if they stay stable enough once moved indoors. I could have made the “panels” larger using a different design but simpler seemed better, so the long edges were put on first then the entire top cut to length, again working from the centre of the inlaid cross-band, so not the easiest. The false breadboard ends were then glued on with a bunch of biscuits.
As the veneers are still in the rough they need some attention, as they’re 3mm+ thick you can plane them cross-grain to flatten, so an hour or so with a plane and a straight edge got that done.
then it was out with a random orbit sander with a 60-grit disk, if I had 40-grit I’d have used that, or a belt sander, thick veneer really is good for certain things.
Top mostly done, it’s off to the scales, need to know the mass to do the next bit of design
Last edited:
does the middle placement of a single air assist work better than one either side ?
