Backyard Birds – Part 25

I hadn’t done anything with the legs of the cabinet for a few months, since I had rough cut them from my big board of padauk, but it was time to prepare them so that I could build the case of the cabinet.

I used a jointer and a planer to make the sides of the legs smooth and square. I ended up having to plane the legs more than I’d hoped: I’d initially wanted each leg to be a little bit thicker, but I had to plane off more material on order to get the sides smooth. (Now that the cabinet is built, I think the thicker dimensions that I’d originally planned would have been too thick, so it all worked out.)

There were a few knots and discolorations in the wood that could not be planed out because they ran deep into the boards. There are imperfections like that in almost any piece of wood, but they can often be concealed.

I spent some time planning which pieces of padauk I would use for which leg, as well as what the orientation of each piece would be, so that the imperfections in the wood would be as hidden as possible. I was able to come up with a layout where the knots and discolorations would all be either on the inside of the cabinet toward the front, so that they could only be seen by someone sticking their head inside the cabinet, or on the back of the cabinet, which would presumably be against a wall.