Woodworking Tips from Pop…

Building a custom bar…..Page 4

 I didn’t get to the arches today like I had planned today. Pop always says write your plan down on a piece of paper and then throw it in the garbage. Because in this business things rarely work out as planned. Instead we worked on the raised panel doors and the columns for the upper back bar. The 5 piece door system we started yesterday came together pretty well. We planed the glued up boards down first to ¾” and then sized them all to fit inside the stile and rail frame. The boards were then profiled on a shaper with an automatic feed and given that raised panel profile that looks so good. After the panels are profiled, they’re inserted into the stile and rail frame and clamped together until the glue dries. See stile and rails for details on how this is done. Tomorrow we’ll sand the doors, profile the edges with a router, bore the 35mm hole for the hinges and hang them.

Next, we worked on the columns for the upper back bar. These columns were built out of ¾” shop grade birch plywood, because it’s less expensive and they’ll be covered by a ¾” cherry hardwood frame. This frame will consist of a ¼” cherry plywood flat panel with a beaded molding mitered around all four corners creating what we call a flat panel or as I have heard other craftsmen call a drop panel. Since the column itself is only 7 ½” wide, I didn’t want to shrink up the inside of the panel when I applied the moldings, so I kept the sides of the frame fairly narrow around 1 ¼” wide. The top and bottom were left at 4″ wide to match some of the other components on the bar. The beaded molding we used inside the columns was made completely out of scrap material. We planed the scraps down to ½” thick and profiled the edge using a beaded profile cutter we picked up at Rockler. Next, I ripped the molding down to 3/8″ on the table saw, and yes I used a push stick for this operation. Here are some more of the photos from day 3