Wedesday - Starting Panels

This is a short day in the shop because I have a meeting this evening, and a few bookkeeping chores that must be taken care of this morning.

Today we’re working on making the panels that will go into the centers of the frames we built yesterday. We start by selecting lumber that is either wide enough to make a panel by it’s self or will make an attractive book-matched panel by re-sawing the plank, flippingthe two pieces up next to each other and edge gluing the thin pieces together to form a wide panel.

Resawing is done by first running the planks through the surface planer to smooth the wide faces, then on to the bandsaw to saw the board in half edge-wise. After all the planks have been split in half they are run through the surface planer again to take off the saw marks. We do not take them down to the finished thickness because we will want a little extra to use in smoothing the glue joints after the halves have been glued together.

When finished, we have a stack of nice thin panel stock. From this I first select pieces, preferably book matched, that will go into the doors. These are the narrowest of the panels. From there I see of any of the pieces are wide enough to fill the end panels. If so, I mark them and set them aside. The rest will be jointed and glued together then edge trimmed to form the wide panels still needed.

But we’ll get to that tomorrow, now it’s time to go get showered and head into town.

Doug