Aloha!

Credenzas are some of my favorite pieces of furniture to make. The doors have become my signature style, modeled after the thin panel doors found on Japanese Tansu cabinets. Monkeypod is beloved for its wild figure, but that wild figure also means the grain isn't stable. A board of wood is stable when the wood fibers are all aligned and pointed in the same direction. In the below picture, you can see the grain in the side and top of the credenza is relatively straight and parallel, making these boards very strong and stable. However, for the door panels, I like to choose a little busier of a grain pattern.

Below, you can see the monkeypod door panel as I'm gluing the two halves together. The two door panels will be bookmatched, meaning that they will mirror each other. I make these panels from a slab, so that the grain will flow over the entire door panel. I didn't take very many pictures of this process because I made this credenza in a rush. It was tough to make this credenza in time for the wood show. I'm pretty tightly scheduled with regular projects, so it was difficult to sneak this credenza build in. The entire piece, from rough lumber to finished furniture took three long, near sleepless days and nights.

The next picture is the end result of fifteen very hectic minutes gluing up the case. The glueup process is stressful because wood glue only has about fifteen minutes of open time before it starts hardening. So, I have to make sure all of the joints are aligned perfectly and clamped tightly in fifteen minutes. I also check to make sure all of the angles are perfectly 90*. This glueup actually went pretty smoothly and I got everything right on the first try, not too much adjustment needed.

The above picture shows the case, all glued up! At this point, it is pretty much ready for spraying lacquer on.

And here we have the slab! This was a beauty sawn by Erik at Ruff Cut Hawaii. It has great color and a really pretty bit of curl in the bottom right corner. I also tried to put the little piece of sapwood in the center of the slab when I cut it, so that the credenza would end up with as much symmetry as possible. This pretty much wraps up the pictures I have of the build process.