As I said above, I used Kreg Pocket screws to join the rails and stiles together for the front panel.  While this is a strong joint, it is not very visually appealing.   I much prefer the look of a good mortise and tenon joint. But that presented two problems.  I would traditionally put the rails into my dedicated hollow mortise machine and plough out the mortise in the stiles, a little time consuming, but doable.  But remember that I already cut tapers in the outer edges of the stiles.  This outer/tapered edge is the edge that is held against the base of the Hollow Mortise machine. So, any mortises I cut would therefore be cut at the angle of the taper.  Yeah I could have cut some shims, and inserted them beneath the stiles to make them square again, but after the trouble I had cutting the tapers, I figured this would just lead to more problems.  

The other issue is more about economics than anything else. If I were to make a mortise and tenon joint for the top rail/stile joint, I would want to make the mortise at least 1” long on both ends.  In my mind anything less could produce a weak joint.  Problem is that I didn’t have a single piece of cherry that was both wide enough and long enough to make up the top rail.  I could have glued up a couple of pieces to make up the piece, but I was concerned about matching the grain.

So my solution was to create false tenons.  Before I attached the rails and stiles together, I used my hollow mortise chiseler to cut squares where a through tenon would be, if there actually were tenons.  I used a ½” mortise drill bit and cut each of the squares 3/8” deep.

 The next logical step for me was work on the back panel. I went through several iterations on how to build the back panel before I finally settled on one. Naturally I wanted a back on the cabinet, both for appearance sake and stability.   My first consideration was to use plywood back.  This presented several of issues. The first was that none of my local suppliers carried cherry plywood.  I could special order it and then pay shipping charges.  I wasn’t too keen on this; I really like to be able to look at a piece of wood before I buy it. And second, I just have bad images of what a shipping company could do to a nice 4’ X 8’ piece of ¼” cherry. The plywood also presented another issue I hadn’t thought of until now.

The plan was and still is to have glass shelves inside the cabinet.  I had planned to have maybe three or four shelves horizontally in the cabinet.  I had planned for them to run the full width of the inside of the case. By doing this I could have a bracket on each end.  But my wife, better known as the design committee or smarter of us two, convinced me that having shelves of different lengths would look aesthetically better. And of course she was right.  That meant that instead of a bracket at each end of the glass, I now needed several brackets.  My wife also pointed out that the brackets should be adjustable vertically.  So we went from my original design, which had two permanently mounted brackets for each shelf, which I had planned to secure to stiles, to a much bigger project.

To accomplish the adjustability of the shelves, I decided to use the same black metal shelf guides I used on the book case in my office.  These are readily available, and not overly expensive.  But using them took the use of the plywood out of the picture.  I didn’t figure that I could secure these metal shelf guides to the ¼” plywood.  Ok I could have, but the first time we put anything on the glass shelves that they supported, I would end up with a lot of broken glass.   Not to mention the curio, or knick knacks that were on the shelf. To properly secure the metal shelf guides I would need a solid surface, something more than ¼” plywood.

Taking into account the need for more vertical support, I changed the design from only the two outer stiles separated by the cherry plywood, to having four vertical stiles separated by a cherry insert.  This way I could install four of the black metal shelf guides, instead of the original two, one on each of the outer stiles and the other two on the intermediate stiles. Since I no longer needed to cover the area from the outer stiles with a single piece of wood, the idea of the cherry plywood went further away.  Instead I elected to use solid cherry pieces for the inserts between the stiles. 

The inserts ended up being a ¼” thick and were cut to fit into dados in the rails and stiles.  Rather than simply planing pieces of 4/4 stock down to a ¼”, I used my band saw equipped with a wide resaw blade to split the 4/4 stock into two pieces that were about 3/8” thick.  Resawing even with the best equipment will leave the wood very rough, but a couple of passes through the thickness planner took the wood down to a nice even ¼” thickness.

I just made resawing sound easy; it isn’t that simple of a task.  There are so many things that can go wrong when resawing.  Believe me I should know, because I have wasted many good pieces of wood trying to learn this skill.  Describing that will take up more space and time then I have here, so I think this would be a good place to stop for now.

For more information on or to purchase any of the products discussed in this post, please click on the highlighted links and images in the post.

Related posts:

1. How to Build a Curio Cabinet
2. Woodworking Projects: Building End Tables Part 2
3. Woodworking Projects Building a Bed Headboard Part 2

Well I think I may have found a source for the type of information I have been looking for.  The folks at ShopWoodworking.com have a very extensive collection of books and DVD covering just about every aspect of woodworking. My personal favorite is the DVD shown at the right.  Yeah you guessed it, the best of Arts and Crafts Woodworking Projects. 

In these trying economic times, it was nice to find a product that met my needs and didn’t break the bank.  As I was looking through their listings, I found a few others that I would also be interested in.  I  was just wondering if maybe I could add these to my Christmas wish list.

Related posts:

1. Woodworking Projects – Arts and Crafts Style Furniture