Australian Wood Review – June 2017

Having also decided to build the carcase of the cabinet
out of veneered plywood to reduce problems with wood
movement, I needed to figure out a way of adding solid
wood edging to all four sides of the top and bottom. The
back and the two sides are straight and square, so no
problem there.

Matching curves

There are two ways to deal with the front curve (see fig.1).
The simplest way is to start off with a rectangular piece
of veneered plywood and add sufficient width to the front
solid edge component to later cut out the curve. A more
elegant method is to make matching curves in the plywood
and the solid edge so the latter has a consistent width on
all four sides.

Matching a curve to a curve is not easy and after
researching and discarding a few different methods I
eventually used a very simple and effective technique
described by Carol Koebbeman^1. In this method the curve
of one template component is used to make the matching
curve of the second component.

Making the templates

Step 1 The first thing to do is to draw the required curve
in the middle of a rectangular piece of plywood, which is
about 400mm longer than the final length of the curved
parts (photo 1). There are a number of different methods

for drawing a curve of this type^2. In this example, I used a

thin baton held in place with brads.

For alignment purposes, make sure you draw a centre

line across the plywood and mark each quadrant ‘left’

or ‘right’. I also found it useful to make another four

alignment marks, two on each side of the centre line

(photo 2). Transfer these alignment marks to the furniture

components before you use the template to cut them.

Step 2 Bandsaw along the curved line. It is not necessary

to be painstakingly accurate, just follow the line fairly

closely (photo 3).

Step 3 A flexible strip of masonite or MDF, bendyply

or similar is held against one of the bandsawn edges with

clamps and then small blocks of wood (photo 4) are used

to hold the flexible strip against the bandsawn edge by hot-

gluing them in place (photo 5).

Step 4 Another flexible strip is now clamped to the first

strip and the other half of the bandsawn ply is brought up

to it and held in place with hot-glued blocks (photo 6).

Remove the clamps and you now have exactly matching

curve templates (photo 7). Use the convex template for

the plywood component and the concave template for the

solid wood component.

http://www.woodreview.com.au 27

TECHNIQUE

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