Tuesday, November 27, 2012

snow today.

made some progress on the woodworking Kufenschrank.  Changed the design slightly to better get the needed parts from the available material, cut most of the pieces.  Assembled two side panels tonight.

Wednesday, November 21, 2012

Woodworking

What with the frost and all, there's not much to say about the garden.  So i'm turning to other things, like furniture for pennsic.  I'll be making a kufenschrank, which is a footed cabinet.  Many thanks to Marijin from http://thomasguild.blogspot.com for excellent documentation of surviving cabons in several museums in Germany, and which provided the inspiration for the design you see here.

Here are some of the initial sketches
I wasn't quite sure how the feet were going to work, seeing as I need the whole thing to fold up flat for storage and transportation.  There will be a cleat on the inside of the front and back to suppor the floor, and this can run the full width of the cabinet, because the sides of the cabinet will not come all the way down.  The feet will have notches to fit the bottom corners of the front and back panels, and the side panels will sit directly on the feet, or in German, Kufen.

Next we have the scale drawing:
on 1/4" graph paper (my favorite stuff for this kind of thing) with one square equalling two inches.  A front view, and also a horizontal cross-section.  The side panels and back panel are of little interest as they will be mostly hidden, and not a very period design anyway.  The squared-off 8 in the previous sketch is sufficient to remind me of how they will be assembled.  From the scaled drawing we are able to make the parts list:

This details each part, how big it is, and how many of each are needed.  Sometimes it helps to have a cutting diagram, to determine how to get the best use of your stock so you don't waste a lot of wood.  I don't have one of those for this project yet...

Thursday, November 8, 2012

Snow

well the blog is at 500 hits, thank you all for reading.

We got snow last night.  There wasn't much here by the morning, but further south there was quite a bit, driving to work was a winter wonderland.  A beautiful commute.  Likely be sick of it by february, but it's been a while and it was awesome.