Chippendale Buffet Cabinet

This is what has been keeping me busy as of late. This is the Chippendale Buffet Cabinet. The plans for this cabinet can be purchased here from Wildwood Designs. It looks quite intimidating to build. It really is not. It does require that you have plenty of patience and time though. The actual cabinet part of it I built in a day. The feet took me another two days to finish. The scroll work took me close to two weeks. Then it has to be finished.

Let's talked about those feet. The cheapest feet I could find that were anything close to what the design calls for were close to twenty dollars plus shipping. I also found some I really liked that were closer to fifty dollars. With those prices, and the fact that this cabinet has six feet, prohibited me from going that route though. So I made my own feet. With a little knowledge and a band saw, they really aren't that difficult. The hardest part about making them was the sanding. I use power sanders for pretty much everything. There was a lot of hand sanding on these though because of the curves that the power sander just could not get into.

As for the wood, I used cottonwood for the feet and the actual cabinet. Then I stained the cottonwood with Minwax Gloss Pecan stain. All of the scroll work was done using half inch cabinet grade plywood. After assembly, everything was then finished with three coats of Minwax semi gloss polyurethane.

I changed quite a few things having to do with the construction from the plans. According to the plans, all the scroll work was supposed to be done with quarter inch material. I done it in half inch. Also, for the thin sections near the top and bottom, you can't see them, but there are hidden cleats that help support everything. I just didn't like the weight that was supposed to be sitting on nothing but scroll work. The other changes were caused by the fact that four main plates I built using three quarter inch cottonwood. The plans call for half inch. The fact that I changed this thickness threw most all of the measurement off on everything else. It wasn't a big deal, but it did make me have to stop and think through everything as I was constructing the various pieces.

I hope you all enjoy seeing something like this. After doing the very large chandelier a while back, I realized that I really enjoy building large pieces that include a lot of scroll work. So, furniture seemed like a natural progression to me. I enjoyed building this so much that my next project is a cabinet that is larger than this one. So, it looks like it may be weeks before my next post too.