22 March 2012

Perseverance...



The pic below shows a nice little wall hung cabinet, nothing very complicated on indeed fancy.  There are  a couple of things that make it a little bit special though and the first is that it's been made entirely out of a scabby old bit of elm that I picked up some years ago for a fiver.  Construction is entirely band sawn veneers over a multi-layered hardboard substrate. 





















 The second thing is that the back panel...


...has also been made from the same piece of elm and it has a rather distinctive and somewhat foreboding appearance if you care to look at it for long enough.  Making the cabinet and hanging it on the wall in one 
of the bedrooms went without a hitch, until about a week later...


...when I noticed the door as I walked by it one morning.  There was something not quite right as the door wasn't level with the bottom so that when I came round to the side I could see clearly that the lower section of the door had warped by around 1mm...if you scrutinise the pic you'll see that the gap is bigger at the bottom than the top.  When is was completed, it was dead parallel.
Why did the bloody thing warp?...I haven't the faintest idea, though the material is elm, which is notorious for warping and twisting at the drop of a hat.  However, this stuff was bone dry (it had been drying for at least 5 years) and it was a veneer, not even a solid elm door.  As the little green guy with the pointy ears was heard to say in a galaxy far far away...'perplexed am I'
















Some folks would just accept that the door warped and would put up and shut up...but it would irritate me  beyond belief every time I saw it.  So I need to persevere...which is the reason that a little pile of elm for a panelled door is conditioning indoors in the same room. 

1 comment:

suggie said...

Woodbloke....Possibly using quarter sawn materal for the rails and stiles would have prevented the problem!!