As you guys may recall, back in August I was in Wales for a week long vacation. Shortly after arrival I managed to lose my passport, so I had to make a quick trip to the embassy in London to get a replacement. After getting that done, I still had a couple of hours to kill so I walked over the Victoria and Albert to look at their medieval woodwork collection again. Once again I encountered this Italian cassone (marriage chest) and took some better pictures this time:
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I found the shape of the chest to be a real change of pace from anything I'd done or even seen before, and the 500 year old paint job to be a radical departure from the clear finishes or stains that mostly get used today. Looking closely at the structure, though, it didn't really look too hard to build. I decided to give it a shot.
The chest is roughly 60" long, 21-1/2" tall, and 17-1/2" deep (front to back). Except for the length, that seemed to be a practical size. I decided to keep the profile and just shorten it. The V&A has some details including pictures with the top open on their website which also helped out with the details:
https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O109268/cassone-unknown/ The original front had been hewn from a single plank, and the top shaped from only 3 boards. I decided to go with multiple boards for each to allow the workload to be practical and keep the weight down. I have a lot of sycamore (Platanus occidentalis, not your sycamore) in my wood shed, and it's all 15+ inches wide, so that would work for the chest ends. The original chest was built of poplar, so I called a friend who sells wood and got 24 bdft of quartersawn 4/4 poplar for a little under $3/ft. These boards were 6-1/2" wide (rough sawn) and just over 8' long, so I was able to get six 3" x 32" out of each of the first three boards.
For practical purposes, i.e. not wanting to have each front or top board trimmed on the inside to a unique curvature, I laid out the front and the top to sections of a circle. Here are the ends during and after being cut out:
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I decided to make the ends of the poplar boards curved to match the front curve, then plane down the outside to give a matching curve there. I don't have a compass plane, so I put together a jig to hold the boards while I used my router:
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The jig is a 2x4 piece ripped to my poplar board width. It has a plywood template screwed to the top, a couple of tabs sticking forward off the sides to hold the work boards straight, and a backing block under to allow me to clamp the whole thing including work board in my Veritas twin screw vise between the screws. I used my longest router bit with a guide bushing to cut the curves. It turned out very clean and easy.
The picture shows two test examples, one mounted and the other already cut. I managed to make all the cuts without putting any cuts on opposite faces of the same board.
Results were pretty decent:
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Not perfect in all cases, but much better than flat.
Next up I resawed another piece of scyamore down to form the bottom and back of the chest. I then cut a shallow dado across the insides of the ends to hold the bottom, and nailed these parts together:
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Finally I could test fit the front boards and determine the correct bevel angle on each to make their long edges match up.
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Ok, that's it for tonight. By now you should be hearing ominous music in the background as I have already made an annoying but not fatal mistake. More later...
Kirk