The original plan was to build a door chime and mount it on a veneered board with a cross-hatch inlay to echo the limestone tile floor in the room. But when my wife saw the design, she asked me to first line the recess with mahogany so it would look similar to a nearby door and cabinet. Easy, right?
Well, nothing about this recess is square. Nor is the top an arc of a circle. So there’s going to be a lot of shimming involved, and I’ll have to make a wide molding to hide all that ugly business.
I had to cut 1/8" kerf every 1/4", almost all the way through the plywood, so it would bend smoothly around the 14" diameter arc.
You can see the results of kerfing. The plywood now bends easily to the required 14" diameter.
Here are the four pieces of plywood, temporarily clamped in place.
Lining the sides is straightforward, using a couple pieces of 12mm mahogany plywood. But the top piece has to bend. So I decided to kerf it.
Here you see the kerfed piece on the tablesaw. I made the first cut (almost all the way through), then attached a scrap to the miter gauge and inserted a 1/8″ pin in it, 1/8″ away from the blade.
Once this fixture was in place, I could set each kerf over the pin to cut the next, working my way down the board. This edge view shows that the kerfs go almost all the way through the wood. There’s an unkerfed section at each end, with a rabbet to mate with the straight walls.
With the sides and top taken care of, I cut plywood for the back, jig-sawed the top roughly to size, then hand-fitted the curve with a rasp. I drilled a hole to feed the wires through.
The next step will be to make moldings that echo design elements already in the room—in this case, fluting and reeding.
More to come…
