Moje dílna / My workshop: TV Stand/Entertainment centre

This project is rather complex and time consuming. I started to work on it some time before I created this blog, so I'll post some older pictures first.

What I'm gonna build is entertainment centre, which will be placed in our house. It should look like furniture from past centuries, in pretty dark color and decorated with carving. The design was based on some pictures I downloaded from Internet.

I'm using Sketchup to create 3D model and get all dimensions correct. This is how it should look like. Double doors with glass on both sides and in the middle one drawer and another small doors. I plan to place DVD recorder in middle top section and glass will allow me to use IR remote control.

I prepared all the joints in Sketchup and also think out the grain orientation of individual parts. It is very importatnt to account for seasonal wood movement due to changes in humidity.

Whole piece will be build from solid wood, so I had to find a solution for the bottom. It is going to be really large piece of wood for seasonal movements to be real issue. And I didn't want a visible gap between frame and bottom panels. But there will be three separate compartments inside, so I decided to use three separate panels for bottom, rotate grain orientation by 90 degrees and cover the gaps by the dividers.

The sides were easy - I used frame and panel construction

Back part is also constructed as frame and panels, but they are really thin, only 8mm of solid wood. And there is something I like to mention on this back panel. Because I want to place DVD recorder in the middle compartment, I needed to create some opening for cables. And I used really nice solution I've seen on The Wood Whisperer channel on Youtube. I really liked it, so I tried to incorporated in my project. The trick is there is an opening big enough for all the plugs to go through and this opening is covered by some small piece of wood held in place by magnets, leaving only small gap for cables.