- Joined
- Feb 1, 2015
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The upper cabinet doors are actually ellipses. I had to do tha in order to have equal reveals for the two side walls. It was a n interesting exercise in SolidWorks. The doors were made by gluing wedge shaped pieces much like making a barrel. Because of the elliptical profile, the I kept the wedge angle constant but varied the width of the wedge. All of the drawings were given to the cabinet maker and he made the cabinets to specification.
The corner cabinet to the left in the photo has a lazy susan. The door on it is concave. The cabinet in the right corner is unique in that it abuts the stove on the right wall so the corner space would be dead space or inaccessible space at best. To get around this, I designed a "slide/slide/slide" system. The door is opened and the exposed sleeves are slide out. Then they are slid to the left, exposing a second set of shelves which can be slid out as well. It works slick and amazes visitors. I used double sets of ball bearing full extension slides for the mechanism. Because the slides could not be disassembled for installation, I actually had to crawl inside to install them. That may be why my joints are complaining now.
The island is an interesting story. I originally designed a rather simple rectangular island but the wife said she wanted a kidney shaped top so I designed a dumbell shaped cabinet. I handed the construction to the cabinet maker which he agreed to make for $7,000. All of our cabinet facings are solid cherry. In order to fit the curves, the ones that I made were done using 1/8" strips which were laminated in forms. You have to allow for springback but it provides a very stable curve. The cabinet maker decided to build the laminations in place instead. One of the curves delaminated so he decided to remove those laminations and redo them. He used a router to remove them and as he was almost finished, the router bit broke and the router went skating on the bottom shelf, plowing a groove. He took the cabinet up above his barn and ran over it with his Bobcat,. $7K worth of work. When he told me that, I said I would have just put Formica on the marred surface and sold it to some else. I'm glad he didn't as we have a one of a kind. We were very picky about selection of our cabinet maker and in that moment our discrimination was justified..
