Mahogany Entertainment Center

I’ve decided to join the “blogging” generation so I can record and share my thoughts as work through various woodworking projects. I’ve had my own web site http://www.larryciesla.com for several years and have written extensive articles describing my past projects. But these were always done “after the fact,” months after the project was actually completed. I’ve decided to try to document my entertainment center project differently this time. I want to use my blog posts as a way to force myself to create journal entries as I actually work on the project in the shop. My Mahogany Entertainment Center project is perfect for this because I’m at the beginning of the project and have yet to do the actual design or any woodworking. I anticipate this project will likely take five or six months from the time I make my first mark on my full size drawing until the day I move the finished piece to its new home under my 70” Sharp Aquos TV.

I actually have done some work on this project up to now, but it has been limited to researching the furniture style I want to build in. I’m one of those woodworkers who freely admits that I’m not a “furniture designer” although I do design furniture. My approach to furniture design is to be very pragmatic about what I am and am not good at. I also recognize that certain furniture designers have created their own recognizable style, and for someone like me, choosing a particular (well known) style is a great place to start. I’ve always admired furniture in the Greene and Greene style. I love the use of ebony accents to hide screw holes, or the cloud lift features that often characterize a Greene and Greene piece of furniture. Such furniture is most often made from mahogany and ebony. In particular, most often the mahogany chosen was from South America, which unfortunately, has become very scarce and very expensive. I’ve found a source for purchasing South American mahogany at Owl Hardwood in Lombard, Illinois, and recently purchased a few boards to use to help me work out the finishing schedule. Naturally I’ll try to document how I go about determining exactly how I will be finishing this piece. One of the lessons I’ve learned over my woodworking years is that figuring out exactly how you will be finishing a project should be the first thing you do, not the last!

I expect the construction of this entertainment center to be relatively straightforward, but I do anticipate at least a few interesting problems to have to solve. For me, that is what attracts me to building furniture - solving problems, figuring out how to execute a particular joint, or how to achieve a particular finished look. I’ll try to focus my blog entries on some of the more difficult aspects of building this piece, but will also describe the more common aspects. I hope the content I provide will be interesting to both novice as well as advanced woodworkers.