Red Elm Towel Chest

scott spencer

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953
Location
Rochester, NY
Here's my first completed wwing project of the season. It's a towel chest for our bathroom made of red elm. The doors and drawer sides are ash. The drawer has handcut dovetails, the sides are frame and panel...nothing too fancy. The stain is a combination of golden oak, cherry, and early American.
 

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Good design, really like the dovetails on the drawers, I've always had a problem doing them, I appreciate it when someone knows how to do them right!:thumb:
 
Red Elm, very nice Scott. I really like the color. Did you just mix the stains till you were happy or is this a match for other pieces? Also, how thick are the sides? Wow, I'm just Mr. Questions this evening aren't I?
 
Great stuff, Scott. :thumb: Very nice work. The through dovetails on the drawer are a bit different, but I like the look. I've been finishing up a couple Siberian elm bowls, and they have a very pronounced grain like the top of your cabinet.
 
Thanks for the kind words everyone. John - I really like the look of elm too...the grain is amazing, and I agree with you about ash too....hard to believe it isn't used more...it's cheap, stable, mills well, has beautiful flowing grain that reminds me of the better examples of oak, and stains nicely. It's also becoming endangered. :( I wasn't quite sure where I was heading with the dovetails Vaughn...I basically just wanted to try some, and that's what I ended up with! :rolleyes: I do like them, but they're not really tied in with anything else.

OK Mr. Questions...the color wasn't really a match to anything else, but I had a color in mind that I was trying to achieve that was kind of a cross between golden oak and early American. The color idea came from an antique piece that my MIL has. Elm has some good natural red color but also has a lot of color variation that includes some brown and pronounced blond areas, so different boards required a different mix to get them to blend the way I wanted. The ash also stains differently than elm and took more cherry to get it close. I'm sure there are better ways to achieve uniform color, but it was kind of an afterthought on the fly using what was available.

The side panels are just about 7/16". The 4 upright pieces are ~ 1-1/8". The tenons on the cross braces are actually sliding dovetails....another hair brain idea I had to add strength, but what a major pain to slide into place once they had glue on them. :bang: The original plan called for a couple of nice corbels at the top, but the fluting up the sides interferred with their location, so I abandoned them for now :doh:. I'm still toying with the idea of adding something decorative, whether a unique looking corbel that fits, or some pegs, but since I didn't have any "good" ideas yet, I decided to leave well enough alone until I see how the pedestal feet look. :dunno:
 
well scott i think you done right well there on that piece and in y opinion yu dont need corbels or the feet changed it looks great the way it is..nice job on the color matching and grain match.. havnt ever used elm but i thinkit just becaame something i should look into..:thumb::thumb:
 
Elm is an interesting and ornery beast Larry. It's beautiful, unique, and worth the effort, but it is not the easiest stuff I've worked with. It's stringy and prone to fuzzing and tearout even with good cutters, it's prone to easy burning, it moves quite a bit, splits easily, and dents easily, but you'll be rewarded for your effort in the end.

If you ever do work with it, I'd let it acclimate well in your shop, and dimension oversize, and let it sit another day or two, and then redimension to final size....seems to help with the movement a lot. :thumb:

Thanks for the comments.
 
Good job! I like the use of through dovetails on the drawer.:thumb:

Elm is a wood that was quite common in Spain but most of the trees dissapeared due a graphiosys epidemy that killed almost all of them.
 
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