Wood’n Bits Workshop

If you’ve been following my blog you know that one of my current projects is a hanging cabinet that will house a spoon collection.  I’m at the fiddly stage.  All the basic construction is done and I’m  dealing with hinging, wall mounts bracketry, door magnets – the fiddly things.  In many ways this is the time a piece comes together but it is also a time when you don’t seem to accomplish very much per hour.

A quick way to solve the door pull requirement is to let your fingers do the walking through the Lee Valley hardware catalog or run to your Woodcraft or Rockler stores but I thought it might be nicer to create a set of pulls in a slightly contrasting wood.  For that purpose I used cherry.

I started by slicing a square stick from a piece that was 3/4″ thick.  I guessed about 1/2″ maximum diameter for the pull handles so this was larger than I needed but as it was headed for the lathe, I simply lopped off the corners with a spokeshave and chucked it between centers.  A skew made quick work of rounding up the stick.

Using a parting tool, I laid out two handles as above.  The ends were set 3″ apart and taken down to 3/8″ dia., the center to 1/2″ and the halfway points to 7/16″.  The spindles extending from each end were taken to 1/4″.  You can see that I’ve got a larger spindle than I need for these parts but it was convenient at the time.

With the dimensions of the center and ends established I simply tapered between them.  The taper you see here was repeated on the other side and on the other handle (to the right of these photos) but mid-process I decided to make the top and bottom tapers slightly asymmetric.  This, in my view, improved their appearance.

I trued up the exiting 1/4″ sections as these are to fit into 1/4″ holes.  A bit of sanding and this part was done.

I took another stick of cherry and planed to it to 1/2″ square.  This stick was to become the end pieces for the handles.

Using a block plane and scraper I chamfered and smoothed the corners of the stick.  Doing this prior to cutting saves a lot of tiny work later and is much quicker.

A carcase saw and bench hook made quick work of creating 1 1/4″ long pieces that become the door pull end pieces.

I used an egg beater drill and 1/4″ brad-point bit to drill holes in one end of each piece to accept a short dowel for attaching them to the door.  The lower holes will accept the pull handles.

I used a technique similar to one Marc Spagnuolo (aka The Wood Whisperer) presented (He said he learned it from Darrell Peart) to round off, somewhat, the ends of the end pieces.  I wanted the ends to remain mostly flat but with all the edges rounded over.  In each case I presented the end of the piece to the sandpaper by swirling it round and round rather than back and forth.  I started with 80-grit paper to eliminate the saw marks.  Then I moved to an 80-grit sanding sponge.  This rounded over the edges.   Then I worked through 150 and 220-grit papers, finishing with a 220-grit sanding sponge.

These are the result.  I thought they looked pretty good.  But now I know how it feels to be a mystery novelist as they write that plot twist at the end so that the guy you think did it, didn’t.  You see, armed with these pulls, I stuck them on the doors with some double-sided tape and, well, they just didn’t look right on this small cabinet.  They were too large for my taste.  Looked good but drew too much attention to themselves.  I presented their creation because they are, nevertheless, useful pulls and I’ll find a place for them some day.

And so I took another stick, this time maple with pronounced straight grain.  I used rasps, files, knives and spokeshaves and removed everything that didn’t look like a door pull for my cabinet.  I came up with these.

And here’s what the cabinet looks like, ready for finish.

Cheers — Larry

larry@woodnbits.com

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Tags: Craftsmanship, Design, Furniture, Hand Planes, Hand Tools, Techniques

This entry was posted by Larry on Wednesday, December 16th, 2009 at 4:23 pm and is filed under Tools, Woodworking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.