A tall corner cupboard from rough reclaimed wood

Here's a tall cupboard I made for the corner of the sitting room.

Its quite discrete. It's mainly just a plinth for popping vases or flowers on. It does open and has two shelves for storage if needed.

Build

This one is definitely NOT a cabinet making showpiece. In fact there's not a single proper woodworking joint in it. I knocked it up in two days to fill a space in the living room. It is a companion piece to a trunk I made recently.

(see https://makingweirdstuff.blogspot.com/2019/12/making-table-into-trunk.html)

This one was made from some old reclaimed hardwood baulks and some cheap packaging-crate ply. The main effort was in antiquing the finished piece with a bit of blowtorching and a lot of shoe polish.

Here are the "designs" for the main elements of the basic carcass. It's two rectangular mitred frames with ply panels for walls.

The design shows corner bracing (in the plan view). In the end, I didn't bother with this.

Translated into wood, it ended up like this...

Here are the frames. Mitering the corners is as close to proper joinery as I got here. I guess these could be called pinned mitred butt joints, but that's a bit flowery. To be fair though, they are stronger than one might imagine. They are glued, but it's the screws that hold them rigid. You can do this with a good hardwood like this. It is less effective with basic softwoods as they spilt too easily.

The "joinery" is simply two screws on each joint to pull the mitres together. This works pretty well with this old mahogany type wood (it might even actually be a mahogany, as it was reclaimed from discarded casements from a library at the Natural History Museum).

The joints just needed pilot holes and a countersinking. With a hard timber like this, the wood will split every time if you try driving a screw into it without doing either of these two things.

But as long as the prep is done, the screws tap in beautifully and the joints are really strong.

The basic cabinet is very basic. Just three pieces of cheap plywood scavenged from old packing crates. This is strong, but the finish is generally pretty poor. You can see how rough the finish is on one side in this shot of the panels.

The panels were fixed into the frames with screws. PVA wood glue was used so these joints are really strong.
The roughness of the plywood is actually a good thing when gluing as the fibres are exposed and the glue can get a good purchase round them.

Prior to screwing, the panels were held in place with cramps...

Some classy joinery there. Gaps like this were filled with PVA and sawdust and once dry, sanded down.

A close up of the fine craftmanship on the vertical panel joints...

The vertical joints have no jointing apart from butting up of the perpendicular panels. To stabilise them, they were glued with PVA and pinned.

The panel pins were driven halfway in then had their heads nipped off...

Thus...

The fairly tiny pins could then be punched discretely into the panels...

The top panel and the door front were from a very nice piece of an old tropical mahogany-type hardwood. This came from from an old wardrobe. I don't know exactly how old the wardrobe was, but no later than early 20th century, possibly late 19th century.

The panel was cut very slightly oversized. It was then trimmed with this nice old plane...

Until it could be squeezed into its slot nice and tight...

To get the panel to drop down to the right depth needed a bit of a plane with the edging block plane.
Any excuse to use lovely hand tools...

Once it was tight, it was glued in with PVA.

I used PVA and sawdust to fill in any gaps...

Later on after the glue was set, any slightly raised edges were planed down smooth to level them with the edging frames

And all were sanded smooth...

On the mitred corners, where there was any slight overlap, I used a rotary burr in the die grinder. This can file down end-grain without jarring it, like a plane sometimes does. This avoids splitting it.

The shelves were just sheets of ply. To make them slightly classier, I tacked and glued on some hardwood strips. Here, the pins are having their heads nipped off before being punch in.

The door was built with some cheap T-hinges and a piece of the rough ply.

Once the basic door was functioning the decorative front panel was screwed on.

The door panel once fitted...

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Finishing

The raw wood was a light sandy-brown. The richer dark reddish-brown came from using ordinary shoe polish. This is dark tan.

Shoe polish is basically wax with dye in it. This is the colour after the first application.

Here is the front panel of the door with the polish just being applied. You can see the difference in richness and darkness of colour between the raw sanded wood and where the polish is applied.

Antiquing

Although the basic polishing gives a good colour, some additional richness was added using a blowtorch to scorch the wood.

So here is the side panel, which has been polished, but is a bit plain.

Out with the blowtorch...

The scorching gives darkness. This is more easily controlled on the solid hardwood pieces. On the plywood, more care is needed. It is quite easy to burn a hole in the top layer.

After some random darkening, some pseudo-grain was scratched into the surface using a coarse (60 grit) sandpaper. This looks a bit rough when you do it. The scratches made by the grit look light when first made.

Once re-polished they deepen into a darker brown to mimic grain.
And it all starts to get rich and old-looking...

Similarly, the door panel was scorched in diagonals and scoured back in the same way with the rough sandpaper. This sanding is best done with very light pressure or the scoring causes grooves.

The finished door panel, after re-polishing. The nice mottled grain is all faked. The original panel is almost completely uniform in grain and colour.