Tag: poplar

French Style Bookcase

On By MVFlaim FurnituremakerIn Furniture2 Comments

My French style bookcase is painted and done. It turned out really well. My wife loves it which is all that really matters. I decided that I will build a few more and have my wife paint them with different colors to see if we can sell them on Craigslist. I posted these pictures on Facebook with a little bit of a description and an asking price of $450.00 which is cheap considering hand-made bookcases sell for over a $1000 in furniture stores. I’ll see if I get any offers on Facebook but even if I don’t, I won’t let it be a deterrent from building more because I feel that people will really like these bookcases.

The bookcase measures 59″ Long x 16″ Wide x 34 1/2″ High and is made from poplar. My wife did an excellent job painting it with two coats of semi-gloss black latex paint and a primer underneath. It’s turned out really well but I’m considering painting the next ones with a lacquer paint for durability. I’ll have one black, one white and one black with white stencil, or vice versa, whatever my wife decides to do.

The side shot shows the detail of the crown molding that I cut with an old molding plane and the cross bars that hold the case together. The crossbars are strong but make the whole bookcase light. The crossbars also imitate the sides of the Eiffel Tower which puts it in the French Style.

This morning my wife and I decided to fancy up bookcase by decorating it. We searched all over our home for trinkets and stuff to stick on the shelves. I used a picture of a bookcase from a furniture catalog to act as a guide on how to decorate it. After we were done, my wife didn’t want to put the stuff back from where we got them since the bookcase looked so nice.

Hopefully I’ll get good feedback from my friends on Facebook. Maybe I’ll even get an order or two.

Making crown molding with a complex molding plane

On By MVFlaim FurnituremakerIn FurnitureLeave a comment

While in the process of building a Bourdonnais French style bookcase I needed to make some crown molding for the top.

I wasn’t about to go out and spend money on some pre-made crown molding. That would be the easy way out. I have a boat load of antique molding planes in my shop, so I decided to put one of those bad boys to use.

The first step in make making crown molding is to get the stock prepared. I ripped a couple of pieces of straight grained poplar 5/8″ x 2″ x 6′ long. It’s important to get wood with grain as straight as possible to avoid tear out caused by the plane’s blade.

I then chopped off a section of one of the boards to use as a test piece. Placing the piece in my sticking board, I began running my molding plane over the board to create the Roman ogee profile. After a few strokes, the shape was completed in about five minutes. By the way, my sticking board is similar to the one based off of Jim Toplin’s in the book “The New Traditional Woodworker” by Popular Woodworking Books.

The next step is to create the angles on the board so that is works as crown molding on the case. I took the board over to the table saw and set the blade to 30 degrees. Once I set the fence to the proper location, I ran the board through and then flipped the board over to rip off the same 30 degree angle off the other end of the board.

I then took the molding back to the bench to finalize the profile. I used a block plane and just knocked off the top corner. This corner should be 90 degree to the 30 degree angle cut on the table saw so that it will lay on the case properly. (It’s really helpful to have a small sample piece of crown molding laying around so that you can use all the angles on the molding as a template for your piece).

Once the profile has been completed, a light sanding with 120 grit sand paper helps clean up any chatter left by the molding plane. I use a styrofoam sanding sponge and some sticky sand paper to sand the profile.

After sanding the only thing left to do is attach it to the case. Always make more molding than you need. There may and will be parts of the molding where the plane falls out of line a little bit and the profile won’t match the rest of the board. You simply cuts those parts off and use the rest.