Single malt scotch is the best whisky in the world, scientifically proven to make your beard longer and your tools sharper. Great whisky deserves a fine cabinet; I had been keeping my whisky in a IKEA particle board cabinet and felt like I was keeping a beautiful princess in a castle made of turds. So it was time to make a cabinet worthy of the whisky it held.
I started with claro walnut: if walnut is the king of woods, then claro walnut is the emperor. The cabinet went through many, many design changes; it started off as a Krenov type of cabinet with long legs, then an Asian inspired cabinet with a live edge top. Mainly through trial and error I decided on this design. I did NOT want to do dovetails for this cabinet, the original plan was to do splined mitre corners. However, dealing with 50” long and 13” wide boards seriously limited my ability to cut accurate mitres. Considered various router jig options for dovetails but I hate the uniform look of dovetails from most jigs and I couldn’t spend $700 for a Leigh jig that would allow me to variably space the pins and tails. So, much to my dismay, I hand cut the dovetails.
Had a lot of issues with the build; wood that had been seasoning for months in my shop suddenly decided to twist and cup, made various errors with the dimensions of the shelves and base which required a lot of extra work to fix. Overall, I’m happy with how it turned out, but like most projects, I’m glad it’s done!
Video of the build
https://youtu.be/NRrPYTL2raM