The Woodshop Shed

Tansu-Styled Bookcase from Walnut and Sycamore

Furnished content.
(from Lumberjocks.com)


My wife asked for a bookshelf for her 3 ring binders. She wanted to place it in our bedroom, straight ahead from where, if get night terrors, I'd see it. Realizing that looking at something really ugly was likely to cause the night terrors in the first place, I resolved to build a tansu-style bookcase.I had a couple of design goals with said bookcase. One, I wanted to use my Festool Domino Joiner. Second, I usually build stuff traditionally, out of solid wood, so for this thing I resolved to try higher grade veneered plywood. Finally, I had an old glued-up sycamore panel laying around the shop that looked nice, and was far too big for any real project, so I resolved to saw it up for some visual interest.I build in all styles, and have an excessive hardware collection, also in all styles. So I decided to go with the Tansu theme, in part to prevent myself from buying more drawer handles. I think these are from Lee Valley.The bookcase itself is indeed made out of walnut plywood, trimmed in solid wood. The shelves are are joined to the sides with a seemingly infinite number of those little Domino things. I think that had I made another one, it all would have gone faster. There's no question in my mind that if I had a bona-fide plywood-cutting sliding table table saw, everything would have been “square enough” the first time. The challenge with plywood that the solid wood woodworker never faces is that if things don't fit, you just get out your handy plane and shave away. This is harder to do with veneered plywood, because if you go just a little too far, well, it's not walnut plywood any more.What this meant was I had to be happy with a different level of relative flatness between the solid wood edging and the plywood surfaces. And I had to resaw all the crosscuts on the shelves BEFORE I realized I needed to tune up my sliding crosscut jig.The definite high point of the carcase are the sycamore front drawers, though. Sycamore is notoriously unstable, but as a set of drawer fronts, I think they look crazy good, and approach some tropical hardwoods for interlocking grain coolness! The drawer dovetails are my typical ones for a larger carcase—I use my Leigh Dovetail jig for the half-blind dovetails in the front, and cut them by hand for the back to keep skills up. No apologies for not cutting the front ones by hand—all that chiseling hurts my wrists.The details are the usual set of Greene and Greene – kinda things I thought would look good. Finish is Minwax Tung Oil finish, which is rapidly turning into my go-to for an oil finish. Very predictable. Very yellow. The back is a sheet of birch plywood, chosen because I didn't want things to be too dark inside the shelves. Considering how much veneered walnut plywood costs, it was probably a good call. But I'm not sure the thing wouldn't look better with a walnut back. Oh well. At least I don't think the whole thing will give me night terrors. But I'm not completely sure. It hasn't been filled with those ugly 3 ring binders yet!

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