We recently moved to Kelowna and our bedroom has an enormous fireplace right in the middle of one wall, at first I thought it was a bloody monstrosity, until the cold snap. Suddenly and without warning, breakfast in bed, at the weekend, with the local paper, and a raging fire became very appealing. It’s a hard life in Canada!!
The reason for having to make two identical dressers, is to balance the fireplace wall visually. Well I finished the first dresser, over two hundred hours, and counting. So now I only have to complete one additional dresser, one bench, two end tables, and a bed. I thought this was supposed to be a labour of love and fun, maybe its evidence of inherent masochistic tendencies. I’m joking of course, I did enjoy the process, but there’s a long way to go. The dresser was 100% dowel construction, thank God. Can you imagine doing 77 m & t joints?? I also taped the joint surfaces, then prepped, stained, and sprayed all partially assembled parts, before final gluing and clamping. Instead of lacquer I thinned Varathane and sprayed, the result was very pleasing, a lacquer look alike, but with more protection. I should add Alder is my favourite wood - but a pain to stain.
I should mention the second dresser is about 75% complete. For a change I made the very wise decision to construct both simultaneously. I intend showing both in a promotional video, sort of before and after so to speak. We machined longer stepped aluminum dowels to provide an exploded view of the assembly. That’s been quite successful. I’m including photos but I’m not happy with the photo of the finished dresser, I couldn’t get the light quite right, but it’ll have to do.
Bye the way all six drawers, were made with Dowelmax in the face configuration, using ¼” dowels, and that was tremendously successful.
We are heading to Maui in February, and if we take the laptop, I’ll do some blogging while sipping my Mai Tai, under a palm tree, watching the whales, turtles, surfers and sunsets. Back in March. Aloha and Mahalo till then.
