My wife owns and is the controller of the upstairs in our house. It is dedicated to her quilt making.
We have decided to get those rooms in order after almost being in the new house for 3 years. We are starting with the "long arm" sewing machine lower cabinets. For those not familiar the long arm sewing machine has a foot print of approximately 48" x 132". I have designed two lower cabinets, each 60" long for this large tool to set on. There will be a 12" gap between the two cabinets. The base of the long arm machine base is 16" long front to back and has arms that support the quilt front, back, and center padding extend approximately 30" total front and back. Anyway the cabinets are going to be 22.5" deep, 30" tall and 60" long. The machine is currently setting on top of a 72" and a 60" fold up lunch room style tables.
I picked up materials on Thursday last week and this morning began the glue up of the carcases. Once again I am using my double face frame construction with no screws or nails, all dado's, lap joints, domino floating tenons, and glue construction for this stage.
The cabinets will have a maple plywood body with poplar for the hard wood parts. The exterior will be painted a light mint green color with oil based alkyd paint. Interior coated with varnish.
This first picture shows the 5 dado's in the back face frame. The cabinet bottom outer sides and inner panels will engage the face frame via those dado's.
This picture shows the bottom of the cabinet sitting in the back face frame bottom rail and one of the end panels leaning up against it. The end panels engage the face frame outer stile dado and the bottom panel engages the side panel dado.
Next is basically the same with both outer panels engaged with the back face frame and outer bottom panel. You can see where the inner panels will engage the bottom panel dado's and the back face frame inner stile dado's
Next a more close up view
Next, a shot of all panels and the back face frame. There are 9 dado's that have been filled at this point. The face frames were glued up with out the aid of the panels and their dado's. Often I will dry fit the panels and assemble and glue the face frames on top of the edges of the panels to insure accurate placement of the center stiles. I used waxed paper between the dry fit panels and the face frame to keep them from sticking together from the glue squeeze out. In this case and on the TV console project I took a leap of faith and assembled the face frames and the panels according to my drawings. Basically 14 dado's and 7 different sections have to come together perfectly on 7 different planes. Unfortunately with using this method a mistake can mean the need to rebuild the face frames and or panel sections if the fit is not perfect on the dry fit. The up side is that if every thing is perfect, the assembly goes much more quickly. This is the 20th and 21st cabinets that I have built with the front and back face frame method in the past 3 years and so far all has gone well with out a problem. I may have said this before, ;!), I could not do this as quickly or as accurately as I do with out the aid of Sketchup and the Cutlist 4.x component import program that accurately takes the drawings measurements of it's components and imports them into CutList Plus. This import program eliminates the possibility of entering component data incorrectly into CutList Plus.
Next the complete assembly with the "front face frame added to the top of the assembly. FWIW the back face frame and front face frame are not identical, because of the lap and floating tennon joinery I use on the back face frame the back rails and inner stiles are 1" longer than the ones on the front. This just adds to the complexity of the assembly.
Lastly, inside of one of the compartments as seen from the top looking down to the bottom. All joints are dadoed.