Tool Cabinet Parquetry – Circling Back, Or Maybe “Triangle-ing” Back

After a very long while of not working on it I have resurrected the (very showy) decorative parquetry aspect of my mondo tool cabinet.  I cannot recall exactly where I left it blog-wise and thus presume you don’t recall either.  So, let me go back to the start and endeavor to keep the thread going better than before.  Although with blizzards, greenhouses, and soon-to-be-three grandsons you never know.  My goal is to post every week or so, walking you through my process step-by-step.

The short and sweet re-introduction is that I’m going to use a fancy parquetry composition, one inspired by the works of the Roentgens.  Certainly not as fancy as theirs, and definitely not as well executed (they were perhaps the finest furniture-surface-decorators of their time, or maybe of all time [their pictorial marquetry is without parallel in my opinion]).

All of my base veneers were sawn from leftover chunks of white oak from the French Oak Roubo Project, so though the material is not literally contemporary with the Roentgens it does not miss it by much.

Depending on the piece and my mood (or weariness) I used both hand and machine sawing for the task.

The parquetry pattern is a cluster of four 30-60-90 triangles assembled into both swirl and sunburst patterns into diamond shapes, to be used alternately in the final composition.  An early sketch and proof of concept confirmed my vision for the cabinet.

Once the veneers were cut into their ~1/8″ sheets I began sawing out the hundreds and hundreds of smaller triangles.  These did not have to be particularly precise, and it was more efficient to deal with them ex poste and in the assembly process.  So my little Delta bandsaw was the perfect tool to saw a stack of the veneers into the requisite triangles.  Hundreds and hundreds of triangles.

At first I thought I would plane the edges of the triangles and created several jigs for that purpose.  It turned out to be way more trouble than that was worth, trying to hold on to little pieces of really dense white oak, planing the skew edges.  Did I mention that there were hundreds and hundreds of them to do?

I wound up taking a whole different approach, which will be the topic of the next post in this series.