I’ve just completed assembly of the doors for the armoire, which means I’m getting real close to finishing it. My main task now is to create the molding and the top, apply the finish, mount the doors, and I’m done. Real light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel territory here.
The doors went together almost better than I’d hoped. In fact, in addition to the dovetailing, door assembly is another area where I’ve improved tremendously on this project. Actually, mortise and tenon joinery in general is what I’ve improved on. I’ve learned how to effectively wield a shoulder plane to trim the tenons to nicely fit a mortise. Now more racked doors or floating-panel assemblies. It’s kind of nice to have achieved a level proficiency and skill with this stuff. All it takes is time and lots of crooked doors.
One nice I did different with these doors was to put an “eyebrow” on the panel. When I initially decided to go this route, I thought of a couple of possibilities for how to go about making the rails and panels. In the end, I went with the simplest, I think method: cutting a large radius across the top of the panel and a matching arc from the top rail. I still had to be careful when cutting the panel to length, and width because the arc made thing a little tricky (where do I measure the length? the middle? the ends? Plus, it has to fit into a groove in the rails and stiles.)
Doing this made the assembly of the door a bit different than normal panel door assembly. Instead of gluing and assembling a stile and both rails, then sliding the panel home and finally adding the second stile, the assembly started with a stile and the top rail with the eyebrow cut in it. After those pieces were mated, the panel was inserted followed by adding the bottom rail to the assembly. Then, I completed assembly by adding the other stile. I had to do this because with the arc from the eyebrow, there was no way I could assemble both rails and then slide the panel into place.
I’ll try to get some picture of up in the next day or so to show off the work that’s been accomplished. But in all, I’m pleased with the product and I’m looking forward to seeing the finished piece come together.