Combining Veneers with Solid Wood

[ajayre]

Hi, sorry for the beginner question...

I would like to make a Mahogany bookcase. It will be quite large (floor to ceiling). My thinking was to use plywood for the carcass with Mahogany veneer then solid pieces of reclaimed Mahogany for the rails, stiles, moulding and corbels on the front.

Do I need to match the type of veneer with the reclaimed wood? What should I consider when shopping for veneer?

Can a thicknesser remove old finish from reclaimed wood?

Thanks, Andy

 

[markblue777]

I would just put a shout out for veneered MDF. From my wood yard it is cheaper and in my opinion just as good, especially for a bookcase.

Sanding would be the best way to get rid of it, is it a stained or painted finish?
Cheers
Marl

 

[custard]

Hello Andy,

yes you can remove an old finish with a thicknesser (actually you would use a planer first to get one face flat then use a thicknesser on the opposite face). Some finishes can have a blunting effect or gum up the blades, but setting the blades to take a slightly deeper cut keeps the majority of the cutting action within the solid timber so minimises this.

You need to match the veneer and the timber as closely as possible, unless you're very talented at finishing. You could take a sample of the solid wood down to a large veneer merchants (ie Capital Crispin) to try and get as close a match as possible.

You can mix ply and solid, but remember solid wood moves and ply doesn't (or at least ply does move a bit, but a lot lot less than solid wood!) so that has to be factored in at the design stage. For example ply sides and solid shelves could be a recipe for disaster unless the shelves have room to expand and contract across the grain. But if you don't use solid shelves you'll have to be careful about the shelves flexing under the heavy weight of a load of books.

Having said all this I would caution that a big bookcase isn't really a beginner's project, especially a floor to ceiling bookcase with extensive veneering and slightly more advanced features like corbels. You need to recognise the scale of the challenge that you're taking on, these are large heavy components and you need to work to pretty exacting tolerances if the finished job is to look presentable. I'd also suggest that there's probably well over a hundred hours of work in this project unless you're all jigged up with a big workshop and big machines capable of dealing with these size components. If you're a guy on his own working in a shed with mainly hand tools then you would have to be very dedicated and determined to see this through to completion.

 

[AndyT]

This might help, although it's oak, not mahogany. I made it 15+ years ago when I saw a lot of oak skirting boards in a skip and thought they were too good to waste!

The shelves and carcase are veneered blockboard - nowadays I think this has virtually disappeared, so you would probably use veneered MDF instead.
The edges for the shelves, the plinth, the cornice and the face frame, are all from the reclaimed wood. In my case I just sawed it into strips and hand planed it. The edge moulding was done with a scratchstock.

I made the shelves adjustable, using a trad technique. At each corner, hidden behind a faceframe, is a vertical strip with sawtooth-like notches cut in it:

Shelves are held on battens with ends cut to fit in the notches, and have their corners cut off to give clearance:

You can see that in my case the shelves are just a bit too long for the load and have sagged slightly. You can counter this by thickening the edges with a deeper moulding or by making your shelves shorter.

I assume you already have your old solid mahogany and will be buying sheet material to match. The wood you can buy now is very unlikely to be the same species as what you have, as many of the different timbers sold as mahogany have been exhausted. You should be able to match the colours - but this will need some experiments. The good thing with a bookcase like mine is that once it is full, it's really only the solid wood which shows, so a slight difference won't matter.

PS - I didn't do floor to ceiling as the room is quite high - I stopped at a height I could reach while standing on the floor.

 

[ajayre]

Thanks for all the replies.

I'm currently setting up my workshop and this is my goal, not starting point. I'm trying to work out the tools needed and the stepping-stone projects to get me to my goal. I'm not finding it very easy.

Andy - I really like the way you did the shelves - veneered wood and then solid front with a traditional mounting method.

Thanks, Andy