We NEED These!

This project is a bit more than I expected, and it was originally supposed to be 6 bookshelves, not four. Now that would have been a bit much. Well, I've got a few other projects that will take quite some time to complete in my near future, so I guess this is a good lesson in patience.

These shelves are all tulipwood. In my other projects, the tulipwood was mostly like poplar, with a little reddish flecking in some of the boards, and sometimes a hint at a much more interesting grain pattern. In these shelves, the tulipwood grain really revealed itself. ...And boy is it exciting! Sections of this wood is hard & very dense, and has a striking red and green flame pattern emerging out of the normally golden to green grain. WOW!

I have to finish these two at a time due to space restraints. It's not an ideal solution by anyt stretch. I am finding substantial consolation for not being done all at once in that only finishing two of thes at a time isn't horribly taxing.

For the corbels, I'm returning to an earlier design, mostly.

Actually, these are more advanturous of a design than previous projects. I'd like to think that they are more carefully and properly made. For a wedding gift, Kym bought me the Taunton book on Joinery. It is an awesome reference, and it changed the way that I build furniture. Well, so did Wally Kunkel's book. For these shelves, I did much deeper mortise and tenon joints than I have done in the past. The corbels are mortised into the side frames, and the stretchers on the bottom of the lower shelves are glued into dados.

When they're all finished, they look pretty good. Here's a few glamor shots for anyone who's into that kind of smut:

The one on the left is finished with Watco oil, in all it's handrubbed beauty. It was a serious pain to get this thing finished because the shop was cold, and it took three days to a week for each coat of oil to dry enough to sand and prep for the next coat.

The one on the right is finished with four coats of Watco oil, but then I got seriously impatient with the three to seven day drying time i was getting in my cold garage, so I switched over to General Finishes Arm-R-Seal, which took ONE day (overnight in 30 degrees F!) to dry enough to move on to the next coat. There are four more coats of Arm-R-Seal on top of the Watco Oil.