I’m slapping together a night stand for my cousin out of crap I have lying around the shop, and I’m using the project as an excuse to try out some stuff.
Carcass is “hardwood” mystery meat 7-ply from Lowe’s. Joinery is all dovetails; lower shelf and mid frame are sliding dovetails, upper frame is half-blinds. I did that to see if I could. Answer: Barely. The sliding dovetails were fine but the half-blinds wanted to blow the plywood apart.
Face frame is rift sawn traumatized pine. That’s what I managed to salvage from a damaged section of 8:4, and judging by the growth rings that tree had been through at least one divorce. The curve on the bottom I laid out with a bowed spline. First time I’ve actually done that. It’s attached to the carcass Norm style, with Tite-bond and #10 biscuits.
Tomorrow I’ll build the drawer.
That tree had a few awful years, a couple of the growth rings got really narrow, and around those narrow growth rings there were a lot of pitch pockets, and a third of the board had a crack running along it. I started with a rough sawn 2x8 and managed to get the face frame of a night stand out cutting around all the damage.
I counted at least 15 growth rings outside of that before I ran out of board, I wonder if it was the 2003 drought?
Oh I’m sure baltic birch would hold up to joinery a lot better than this stuff does. Especially the innermost plies seem to be very low in quality, I think it’s made out of kudzu and politics. It held up do dadoing and tenoning reasonably well but I had to do the half-blinds as all climb cuts, if I tried any conventional cuts it would start blowing apart. Baltic birch is a lot better made, maybe appleply if you can find it.