Greene and Greene Stereo Cabinet - Finished!

Greene and Greene Stereo Cabinet - The Top

I got lazy and neglected to take any construction photos while making the top. But no matter, really, since it's almost exactly like the one on the Aurora nightstand. Several of the posts in this blog series show how I made the nightstand top and its fancy ebony splines.

Greene and Green Stereo Cabinet - The Doors

The doors are made from the same plywood that I used for the sides and back of the cabinet.  I trimmed them all around with solid wood to hide the plywood edges, then just glued on the fake rails and stiles.  This picture shows one of them about halfway done.

I thought about using some fancy Brusso brass leaf hinges for this project, but the only ones I could find seemed a little big and a little pricey.  So instead made some the right size from some 1/8" aluminum plate for the leaves and some 1/4" aluminum rod for the pins.

I paid for a little bit of poor planning surrounding the hinges.  First of all, it was no fun at all cutting the hinge mortises in the part of the cabinet that I had already put together.  That would have been much easier if I had done it before assembling the front frame.  The other problem was the stupid decision to mount the hinges in a little way from the outside edge of the doors.  This made it somewhat challenging to actually hang the doors.

Normally you're supposed to 1) attach the assembled hinge to the cabinet, 2) slide the other leaf into the mortise on the door, and 3) install the screws into the door.  But I couldn't do step #2 the way I mounted the hinges.  So instead I had to screw the leaves to the cabinet and the door, then hold the door in place and then install the hinge pins.  That wasn't a show stopper by any means, but I did spend a few minutes wishing I had a third arm.

Greene and Greene Stereo Cabinet - The Drawers

The drawers in this cabinet are put together the same way as the drawer in Darrell Peart's Aurora Nightstand, with a big finger joint attaching the sides to the front, and a couple of ebony plugs for good measure.  As in the nightstand, they slide on wooden runners attached to the inside of the case.  These drawers are big enough that I probably should have used ball bearing slides instead of the wooden runners.  As it is, I'll have to be careful not to overload them.  Live and learn.

I made the drawer bottoms from solid poplar.  The bottoms float in grooves cut into the sides and the front, and are supported in the back by a little metal clip.  This arrangement allows them to expand and contract as the humidity changes without tearing themselves to bits.

Blocks at the back of each runner limit the travel when the drawers are shut, while some little tapered shims center the drawers from side to side when they are fully closed.

Greene and Greene Stereo Cabinet - The Back Panel and the Shelves

With the front and sides all put together, it's time to measure the as-built cabinet width and make the back and the two internal shelves to fit.

The back panel looks suspiciously like the side panels.  In fact, it's the same, except a little bit wider.  Like the side panels, it's just a piece of plywood with the faux rails glued on.  The shelves are even simpler; they're just rectangular chunks of plywood.

The two shelves and the back are all attached to the sides with screws that run through little wooden ears glued to the plywood panels.  This makes them easy to remove and replace as needed during construction and especially later when it's time to stain and varnish the remaining parts.

Greene and Greene Stereo Cabinet - First Assembly

On a project like this, it's really hard to get into all the corners and whatnot with sandpaper after it's put together.  So to make things easier, I installed the decorative ebony plugs in the legs and then pre-finished all the parts before gluing them together.  The finish is some water-based dye stain followed by multiple coats of wipe-on polyurethane.  I may or may not stain the inside later, depending on whether I have any stain left after doing the back, top, doors, and drawers.

Greene and Greene Stereo Cabinet - The Front Frame

The next big step is to build the assembly that includes the two front legs and the horizontal pieces that connect them together.  Then when that's done, I'll measure its as-built width and make the internal shelves and back panel to fit.

The front horizontal pieces all have tenons on the ends that fit into mortises cut into the front legs.  Because it's a lot easier to trim a tenon to fit an existing mortise than the other way around, it makes sense to work on the legs first.

 Each front leg has six mortises for the front horizontal pieces, five more for some decorative ebony plugs on the front face of the leg, and five round holes for the dowels that align it with the side panel.  The rear legs only have the dowel holes.

I tried a new trick to lay out the mortises.  Rather than marking their locations one at a time directly on the wood, I used a CAD program to make some little paper templates.  Each template has the outline of a mortise, along with its center line and a second reference line that represents the edge of the board.  After folding each template along that second line and hooking the fold over the edge of the board, it was easy to align the center line on the template with a mark on the board to precisely establish the mortise position.

Once all the mortises were cut, I was then able to make the horizontal pieces with their tenons to match.  I cut the tenons slightly oversize on the table saw and then trimmed them to fit with a chisel.

Here's a dry fit of the front assembly, before cutting the curved edge on the lower skirt:

Greene and Greene Stereo Cabinet - The Side Panels

With a design in hand, I hitched up my trailer for a trip to the lumber store.  Although Spellman Hardwoods is the biggest hardwood dealer in Phoenix, they've always been more than accommodating to me and my tiny (by their standards) little orders.  This time was no exception.  I came home with a stack of rough-cut African mahogany for the solid parts of the cabinet, and a sheet of mahogany veneer plywood for the side and rear panels.

Given the difficulty of storing and handling full sheets of plywood, I decided to chop the plywood into bite-sized chunks and work on the side panels first.  Each of them is just a piece of plywood with three faux rails glued on.  Instead of trying to cut the rails to exactly match the size of the panels, I took a page from my own playbook by making the panels and rails slightly oversize, gluing the rails to the panels, and then trimming each edge of the assembly with a single cut.

The legs will eventually be glued to the front and back edges of the side panels.  Here you can see one of the holes for a dowel that will help align one of the legs with the panel during assembly.  You can also see a little channel I cut into the back of the faux rail to keep glue from squeezing out onto the face of the panel.

The back panel is almost the same as the side panels, but I'll wait to make it until I can measure the as-built front of the cabinet to see exactly how wide the back panel should be.

Greene and Greene Stereo Cabinet - Genesis

For some time I've been wanting a dictionary stand of some sort to keep my big unabridged dictionary handy for occasional use.  At the same time, I've been needing to replace an old stereo cabinet that was originally built to store a bunch of vinyl LPs that have long since been replaced by CDs and digital music files.

My first thought was to combine the book stand and the stereo cabinet into a single unit, but I couldn't come up with a good way to integrate a tilting support for the dictionary with the rest of the cabinet.  So I decided to punt by making the stereo cabinet about the right height to support a separate book rack (to be built later) that will just sit on top.

Having built a copy of Darrel Peart's Aurora Nightstand and an almost-copy of his Rafter Tail Table, I wanted to make the stereo cabinet in the Greene and Greene style.  After way too much time fooling around with SketchUp, I settled on this:

 

The three drawers at the bottom are for CDs and miscellaneous junk.  The two doors at the top open to reveal the stereo itself: a CD player that sits on the shelf immediately above the topmost drawer, and a receiver that sits on its own shelf above the CD player.  The tray at the very top holds a laptop computer for playing digital audio files.  I'll normally operate the laptop remotely from a separate computer, but its tray slides out in case I need to access it directly.

You may grab a copy of the SketchUp file here if you're so inclined.