Andrew Pitts - Furniture Maker, Works in Progress, Custom Handcrafted Hardwood Gun Case

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My friend and client asked me to design and make two gun cases for some collector pieces he has. I said sure, and the next thing I knew he showed up at the shop with four large panes of heavy 1/4" thick plate glass, the kind that was used for doors in stereo cabinets a while back (well, maybe more than just a while -- I haven't bought a stereo in over 20 years). In fact, the hinges were still glued to the glass. So, I sat down to my computer and started drawing on my CAD program, and the rendering above is what we agreed on. The case is made of walnut with a plywood back, and has a mitered cherry door holding the heavy glass. I had to design a couple of things into this case that were a little abnormal. First, since the cases would attach to the wall, the door had to swing up on hinges mounted to the top of the door. That way, one could handle the guns occasionally. But, with the glass being so heavy I had to design in a pair of gas actuated lifting cylinders, the kind used on the tailgate of a van or on a car's hatchback, but smaller. Also, we wanted a lock on the door to keep out curious little hands. And, we needed to decide on a backing fabric for inside the case behind the guns. I suggested using the flag for the Army Corps of Engineers, since my client had been in the ACE. He agreed, so I ordered a flag, all the hardware, and started on the cases.

I started out selecting the lumber for all the parts, and since the glass panes would dictate the fixed dimensions (I cannot cut 1/4" thick glass), I

built the frames for the doors, first. The doors would be a straightforward miter corner design with floating tenon joinery, and I would rabbet the inside for the glass and make screwed in wood strips to hold the glass in place. So, after cutting the door frame pieces a bit oversized and thicknessing them with the planer, seen in the photo to the left, I cut the miters on the sliding compound miter saw as shown in the photo to the right. With the miters cut, I used my Domino tenon cutter to cut the mortises for the floating domino tenons right into the faces of the miter cuts.

The Domino machine simply cuts a nice smooth slot into which the floating

tenon, which is a rectangular piece of wood, snuggly fits. The photo to left shows me cutting the mortises. In fact, if you look closely you can see the Domino tenon on the bench in the lower right corner of the photo. With the mortises cut, I first applied shellac polish to the inside edges of

the door pieces, then glued the tenons in and assembled the frames. Next, after the glue had cured I cut a rabbet, or ledge, all around the inside of the frame so the glass could fit in it. The photo at right shows me cutting a rabbet using a straight rabbet bit in my router table. Using the router table to cut rabbets in a glued up frame is a real time saver and makes a flatter rabbet all around than if the stock was rabbeted before gluing, but since the bit makes a rounded corner I had to chisel out the waste so the corner would be square. I used a corner chisel, which is actually two chisel edges at 90 degrees, to chop out the corner, as shown to the left. I cut some thin cherry strips with a bevel to hold the glass into the rabbet and set that all aside while I next worked on the case.

The case was to be a dovetailed box with a 1/2" plywood back rabbeted into the case. I won't bore you with the details of cutting the stock to size and planing it to thickness, but the cutting of the dovetail joints was interesting. These joints had to be cut by hand, since the stock was just too long to fit into my router dovetail jig. So I laid out pleasing dovetail proportions and went to work on the cutting. First I cut the pins in the long pieces. These pieces were so long that I could not clamp them vertically to my bench -- the end would

be 57" off the floor -- so I clamped them to the railing on the deck at the front of my shop. That deck is 8 feet above the ground, so this worked nicely. The photo at right shows me sawing the pins with a Japanese

pull saw. See how I clamped the walnut to the deck railing? With all the "cheeks" of the pins sawn, I chiseled out the waste between the pins. For this I could use my bench, since the stock would be horizontal. The photo at left shows me chopping out the waste with a chisel. Notice the block of wood clamped on top of the work to guide the chisel. That block has a piece of sandpaper glued to the bottom to prevent slippage. To finish up the pins I pared the cheeks nice and flat, as shown at right. The pins did not have to be precisely the intended size, since the tails would be cut to fit whatever size the pins ended up being, but it was imperative to have the cheeks of the pins nice and parallel for a tight joint.

Now it was time to work on the tails. First, I scribed a line across the work at the thickness of the tail piece, clamped the stock on the bench using my guide block registered to that scribe line as a backer, then fit the pin piece in place and scribed lines to mark the tails, as shown at right. It is important to use a very thin marking knife to get a

perfectly fitting tail, especially if you are going to cut the tails by hand with a pull saw. To save time, however, I used a bandsaw to cut the tails, as shown at left. This method is not as exact as

hand sawing, so you have to make the cut a little wide of the scribe, then pare back with a chisel later for a perfect fit. But before paring I had to chisel out the waste between tails, as show at right. Note that I used the guide block again. I also saved a little time by cutting the outer waste with a table saw, using a crosscut sled. That helps me make the inside and outside tail bottoms exactly the same depth. Note that I have a registration block clamped to the crosscut sled, raised high enough for the waste piece to fall free and not jamb the blade. With all the joints cut, I cut the mortise for the lock in the bottom rail. With all the cutting done, I finished the insides of the walnut case pieces with shellac polish and then I glued up the casing. When I use shellac polish I apply as many as seven thin coats, sanding to P600 grit between the last few coats to make a magnificent finish. As with the door frames I then cut a rabbet in the case to house the plywood back, cut the plywood to size, put a coat of stain on it to roughly match the walnut (if I were to do this again, I would probably eliminate this step as somewhat unnecessary), and glued and screwed the plywood in place. Since it is the plywood that will be screwed to the wall, the joinery between the plywood and the case will hold the weight of the heavy glass door, so this is an important connection! With the case glued up I cut the hinge mortises, trimmed the door to fit and cut it's hinge mortises (I used a router for all this, trimming up with a chisel), and attached the door to the case for a dry fit. Having done this, I located the lock piece for the door and cut the mortise for it. I dry fit the door and attached the gas actuated lifters just to make sure everything would work well, then I removed the door for the next step, mounting the guns. And, I took time to trim the dovetail ends with a block plane and finish the outside of the cases and the doors with shellac polish.

Mounting the guns was a new challenge for me. First, I laid out the guns in the case as exactly as I could, shimming them to be parallel with the plywood back. Then I cut small templates of Styrofoam (scraps of wall insulation) to the shape that the gun holders would have to be. I marked the plywood with the positions of the templates, and all this is shown at right. Next, I cut

blanks of cherry and used the Styrofoam templates to mark the shapes on the cherry blanks. I used an oscillating spindle sander to shape the curved parts of the blanks and did test fits on the guns. Using this method I could make very precise custom fit holders for all the guns. Then I drilled a hole in the plywood back at the position of each holder so I could insert a brass screw from behind, and then I used thin double sided tape to temporarily attach the holders to the plywood, as shown at left. I uprighted the case and used an awl to mark the hole positions so I could use the drill press to make pilot

holes in the holders. In fact, on the second case I was confident enough to simply drill the pilot holes in the holders while they were taped to the plywood, through the holes I had drilled in the plywood, eliminating the step of taking the holders to the drill press. Then I test fit the holders and the guns, as shown at right.

Finally I removed the cherry holders, fit the backing material, in one case the Army Corps of Engineer's flag and in the other a piece of velvet material, and reattached the cherry gun holders on top of the backing material. I used double sided tape to attach the material so I could peel it back and screw the case to the wall, and I used a piece of quilting batting behind the material to give it a little thickness. This is what the fit of the flag and guns looked like without the door in place.

I reattached all the hardware, and below is the finished look of the first case!

Individually Styled and Crafted

Fine Hardwood Furniture

by

Andrew Pitts ~ FurnitureMaker