Place holder for slide show

Introduction

In this class you  build a medium sized hanging wall cabinet (18" wide, 30" tall and six inches deep) using primarily, hand tools. This cabinet can be a useful medicine cabinet or a small tool cabinet for the workshop.

This class is intended for graduates of Hand Tool Heaven or our Basics of Woodworking series or hand tool woodworkers with equivalent skills.  This class is a great opportunity to put those skills together in a project setting.

The cabinet body is an exercise in dovetailed carcass construction. The inset back of the cabinet is ship-lapped boards.

The two shelves are mounted using sliding dovetails.

An overlaid door (the door covers the entire cabinet) is of frame and panel construction. The panel will be made from a bookmatched resawn board. The door will be mounted using solid brass hinges.

The cabinet mounts onto the wall using a French Cleat - a very elegant and simple way to hang a cabinet.

The back panel board and the book matched door boards will be resawn from thicker stock. You can do this by hand but we'll be teaching you to resaw in this class using the bandsaw and may use the planer to rapidly thickness the resawn stock.

You'll start the class working with a kit prepared by us  so that you spend most of your time on the fun stuff - joinery and details.

We're proposing to make the cabinet of local North Western woods - either Western Maple or Alder. These woods, when air dried, work well with hand tools. We'll settle on on the wood when we check on our local sources. We will have selected the boards for quality and havwe assembled kits before the class starts.

If you would prefer to bring your own wood - you'll need about 15 bd ft of usable 4/4 lumber. Please contact us directly if you propose to do this.

A cabinet like this can look great with a simple blonde shellac finish or an oil and wax finish. We'll demonstrate the finishing techniques and may be even apply the first coat.

Note: Steve Habersetzer and other faculty will do the bulk of the teaching and class supervision. Jim Tollpin will be on hand for demonstrations and Q&A sessions most days.

Class Description

In this class you learn:

• Carcass design and construction techniques
• Door design and construction techniques
• Joinery design
• Tweaking the design (optional)
• Preparing a parts / cut list
• Dimensioning the carcass and door parts
• Resawing the ship lap and door boards
• "Gang" cutting dovetails
• Cutting the grooves to house the ship lap back
• Cutting rabbets to make the ship lap boards
• Creating the sliding dovetails
• Fitting the shelves
• Assembling the cabinet
• Laying out and cutting the grooves and  mortice and tenons joinery for the door parts
• Assembling and gluing up the door
• Fitting and mounting the door with hinges
• Making and installing the French Cleat
• Door pull options
• Application of basic finishes

Tools:

• List of recommended Hand Tools (TBA)
• If you do not have all the tools on the list bring along those that you already own. We have a wide array of teaching tools and each work bench is equipped with a set of hand tools. However we do encourage you to start acquiring your own tools so that you get used to them and we can help you tune them up during class

More about this class

• Class Notes
• Blog Entries

Prerequisites

This class should not be your first time working with hand tools. We designed the class for students who have taken Jim’s Hand Tool Heaven class or the Hand Saw Essentials and Hand Plane Essentials classes in our Basic Of Woodworking program.

However if you have self studied and completed the projects in Jim Tolpin's "The New Traditional Woodworker" or have taken hand tool classes elsewhere then this will be a great class for you.

Or if you have more hand tool skills and want to work in great envirnoment with wonderful mentors then this is the class for you.

Class Information and Registration

Class starts at 9:00am on the first day.

Please read our What to Expect page for general information about the School.

Please also read our Registration Policy.

Coming Classes:

When you click on the Register link you will be able to register for the class or, if the class is full, sign up for the wait list.