Cellarette

This is a liquor cabinet of my own design. I've admired the work of James Krenov for years and this was inspired from his Asian-inspired pieces.

The top is mahogany and the legs are ash. Each leg was shaped and sanded in about an hour.

Not having any boards wide enough I decided to resaw some 12/4 mahogany and glue up into quarter sawn panels which produced somewhat of a grain-oriented effect.

Case Legs

The legs were contructed from 10/4 ash. I made a pattern of the splay and taper. I wanted the splay to be on the diagonal and the base of the leg is actually outisde of the leg stock blank.

If you looked straight doen the leg you'd see that the bottom of the foot was outside the original blank. Just like in the above graphic. It was significantly less expensive to build the leg this way from 10/4 stock instead of 12/4. 12/4 ash is not generally available.

Another interesting artifact of this constuction is that by sawing the leg and regluing on the other side the grain matchup is quite good.

First I used the template to mark the piece and cut on the bandsaw. Then I switched their positions and re-glued on the flat side. (see next photo). Then I rotated the glued blank (now with a bend) and repeated procedure. Finally I used the template twice more and bandsawed off the excess leg material.

You can never have enough clamps! I used Gorilla glue which has good gap filling properties. However it's no better than yellow glue and I wouldn't use the Gorilla stuff again. I fell victim to the hype. Very messy.

Shaping by Hand

The legs were shaped entirely by hand with a low angle block plane rasps files and a custom curved scraper.

It's actually quite straightforward to shape the square blank into a circle. First draw a "shape to" line on the blank. For a circle this would be right down the center. Then using the 7/12ths rule draw a line from the corner to the "shape to" line 7/12ths of the way to the center line. Then rasp off the 7/12th corner and repeat as many times as you need to get the piece almost round. Then file and sand. Easy and satisfying.