Woodworking

I am quite confident of my ability to design and make functional items with wood. I had plenty of experience while building "Orange". However I have mo experience of the high precision and high quality finishes that are normal even in cheap furniture.

YouTube is a great place for instructional videos. I have learned about drawer and cabinet construction and fitting zip fasteners to cushion covers.

Two things became very obvious from the wood working videos. The carefully matched sizes of cabinet parts are the result of all the parts being cut on a table saw at the same setting or cut with a router working against a template. And achieving quality finished edges involves a lot of waste - for example edges may be cut close to final size and then finished off with a router.


I don’t have the space for a table saw, even though as with most machine tools, they are relatively inexpensive. I did buy a Wolfcraft Mastercut workbench which is a combination of a wood-working table and a saw table. It can take a circular saw, a jigsaw or a router. I also bought a cheap circular saw. (It was a lot cheaper than going back to Ireland to collect my old saw). The workbench folds to a reasonable size, perhaps not as small as I would have liked. Assuming I make my drawer fronts, and charge the full cost of the workbench to them, they will still be cheaper than bought fronts.

The workbench has proved very useful. It is a comfortable height and very solid when assembled. Its first job was as a sewing machine table for making the cushion covers. And, while it took some time to set up the guide rails to the right size, cutting the under-bed drawer fronts all exactly the same size only took a few minutes.