A Good Place To Start

OK so let me say this first,  I suck at blogging.  This is my third attempted now at writing a blog and I have no illusions of this going better then the previous attempts, and that's all I am going to say about the blogging.  Now on to the meat of the issue woodworking.

I recently finished a bathroom renovation that turned out pretty well, pictures should follow soon if the blogging thing goes well.  The last part of the project is to build a medicine cabinet that matches the vanity.  The cabinet is just a simple particle board box that is existing from the bathroom, my job is to build a new solid wood door that matches the profiles of the doors on the vanity.  I have never built a raised panel door before and I have never done such a project using so many hand tools. Should be interesting.  This is how it's going.

One aspect of the rails and stiles of the door is a bead detail.  I believe that normally when making a bead or a round with hand tools someone would use a molding plane of the specific radius.  I do not own any molding planes yet, I hope to own some soon.  So I made my bead using a block plane and some sandpaper and inlaid it into a grove I cut into the rails and stiles.  The first step was to layout the 3/4" diameter circle on both ends of the maples stock I am using, this was done using a simple pencil and a drafting circle template.  After drawing on the circle I added some lines to act as visual reference.  The first line is in the centre of the stock and the second lines are at 3/8" in from both edge and down each of the stock.  These lines represent the large chamfers I will plane first to start to establish the circular profile.  With that said it's time to make some shavings.

Using my block plane set for a fairly aggressive cut I begin to shape the round profile.  I first plane the chamfer between my two  3/8" marks.  Then I keep making more chamfers that are less and less severe.  At this point I am also not trying to get right down to my circles I drew earlier.  Working with hard maple, that actually had some beautiful section with some curl (lucky me), using a low angle blade and a heavy cut can tearout a bit, so the next step is to reset the block plane to take a very light cut.

With the plane now taking a lighter cut I find it much easier to tame the tear out.  Now I can work my way down to the circles I laid out.  Also with the lighter cut the facets left by each plane pass are smaller helping to create the round profile.

With the profile more or less set it's on to the final steps.  To remove all the little facets if work through progressively finer sand paper.  I start with some 120 and work up to 220.  I'm not entirely sure on my finish for this piece yet so I might sand higher if I chose to use an oil finish.  However because this is a bathroom piece I am thinking that using a finish that acts as a sealer would be a good choice.  I recently purchased some general finishes water based varnish and I think this would be a great time to try it out.

With the profile all done its on to the tablesaw to cut the profile off of the maple strip I was using.  The grove I am putting the profile into is only at 1/2" wide.  So when I set up the fence on the saw I am trying to line it up so I am left with a half inch thick strip with a 3/4" profile.

So with that the profile is done.  Next is to fit the profile into the rail and stiles and after that its on to the raised panel.  But that is for another time.

Cheers