The Wave - A little desk cabinet
vincentroy8 Nov 20, 2019
This is a little cabinet to put on my desk at work. The name comes from what looks like a wave on the middle drawer face.
Going into this cabinet build, I knew I wanted straight grain as much as possible. I had to do a lot more milling than usual for this but the results speak for themselves in my opinion. The carcass and dividers are cherry. The drawer fronts are from a maple live edge slab - though I'm not quite sure it's actually maple. Its grey'ish colour is all natural. The back panel was painted light blue to give it a little bit of a "pop" and to avoid introducing a third wood specie. Finished with a few coats of shellac and furniture wax.
For the drawer pulls I tried a few different things and ended up making my own out of cherry.
#cabinet #dovetails #cherry #maple
First time doing half blind dovetails. They're not perfect but I'm happy with it. I did the bottom one first, and almost split the front so I ended up pulling the line back a little for the top two, and proceeded to mark it wrong and pull it even back further.
The drawers are poplar.
On to some build pictures.
I had an idea of the dimensions going in but the drawer fronts here is all of the material I had to work with for the fronts so the dimensions were based off of this.
Still trying to figure out dimensions after the material was milled.
Dry fitting the dividers - stopped dados.
I pre-finished all of the inside parts and then glued the dovetails in one step and the dividers later.
Waterfall dovetails - is that a thing?
I tried a few different things for the pulls but couldn't find something small enough to my liking in a local store. Ended up making my own out of cherry and got it just right after a few attempts.
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Nice exercise in dovetails! For your next project you could attach the carcass dividers with sliding dovetails to complete the dovetail motif. Also typically you would make the carcass first and then fit the drawers to that. I find making my own pulls for small projects is better than using store bought too.
Thank you!
Yes, I thought about sliding dovetails for the dividers but decided against because I actually liked the look of stopped dados just as much.
As far as the drawer fronts goes, yes, that's what I would typically do. The challenge I had is that I only had one board that had lot's of knots and checks. I wasn't sure how much it would yield so I made sure to mill and cut that oversize first. From there it helped guide the dimensions of the case and dividers. The drawers were cut to final dimension and fit at the end.
@WoodGate said:
That's a great looking cabinet. I think you nailed it with grain selection. I love the straight grain. Thanks for sharing!
Thanks @Sean ! It was a big part of the look I was going for and I'm glad I spent the time on the extra milling to get this result.
@Sean said:Great design. I agree the wooden pulls were the right choice.