The Hive: a Tambour Door and Kerf Bending Cabinet

For a long time I’ve wanted to take on a project in woodworking since it seemed like there was a lot of creative potential, but I could never find a project that I felt was right. Eventually, I decided that if I couldn’t find a project that I liked, I would make my own, and The Hive was born. Drawing from a large amount of collected project inspirations, I decided I would use this project to learn the cool features of kerf bending, sliding tambour doors, and wood routing with custom jigs. This project took a fair bit of trial and error before getting to my final model, but I hope to explain my techniques so after this project, you can apply them when making your own!

I used a large variety of tools for this project. Any of the tools below will have a corresponding link in the document below this section.

Tools Used

1. Router:
2. Track Saw / Circular Saw
3. Router Bit (.25 inch straight bit)
4. Router Bit (45° chamfer bit)
5. Jigsaw
6. Clamps (ratchet straps)
7. Clamps (regular)
8. Orbital Sander
9. (optional but recommended) Laser Cutter
10. (optional) nail gun
11. (either works) Festool Domino or wood dowels and a hand-drill

Materials Used

1. 4 ¾” x 2’ x 4’ maple plywood sheets (covers base, inside walls, tambour door)
2. 1 ¾” x 2’ x 4’ walnut plywood sheet (covers the top slab)
3. 2 ¾” x 2’ x 8’ walnut plywood sheets (covers outside walls)
4. 2 ¼” x 2’ x 2’ walnut plywood sheets (used for top inset)
5. 1 ¼” x 2’ x 2’ maple plywood sheet (used for top inset)
6. 2 sheets of 4’ x 8’ MDF or scrap plywood (used to make jigs and templates)
7. Canvas cloth 2’ x 4’ at the smallest (tambour)
8. Titebond 3 Wood Glue
9. Minwax wipe-on polyurethane (warm satin)
10. (optional) ¼ inch dowels
11. 2-3 plastic bags
12. Foam Brushes

Hi everyone! Before jumping into the exact steps of this project, I used this Instructable as a chance to learn new woodworking techniques so I want to share them here in case you have ideas of your own that you can apply them to. The next four sections will cover my designing in CAD, kerf bending, tambour doors, and my process for making routing jigs. If you want to skip that and get straight to the build, jump to step 6.

Initially I didn’t have an idea for what I wanted this project to look like, so I sketched out a few ideas of unique shapes and structures that I wanted to see in my final product. You can find the sketche. When I was finished sketching, I took the parts that I liked from several designs and chose one as a starting template. With this design in mind, I went to Autodesk Fusion 360 to model out the main shape.

To keep complex cuts to a minimum, I decided to make this cabinet 2’ x 4’ x 2’, as Home Depot sells 2’ x 4’ plywood panels and I could use those for the base and walls. Under these assumptions, I planned to split the design into five sections, the exterior walls, interior walls, tambour door, base, and roof / top.

With these design constraints in mind, I opened up Fusion and blocked out the components and dimensions for a rough design. I’ll link my Fusion assembly files below for any referencing. If you decide to use this instructable as inspiration for your own projects, here’s some pointers that I used while making my design.

1. Use Simple Shapes: While it may be cool to model cool shapes in CAD, unless you have access to a CNC machine, it’s going to be pretty hard to cut them out by hand, simplicity is your friend and if done right it looks great!
2. Build off of one file: Because I wanted my parts to fit together without ugly edges, I prioritized making a “maser sketch” that had all of the dimensions I needed (above in photos). From there, I referenced this sketch when blocking geometry for most of my shapes.
3. Block out designs before making them perfect: It’s a better use of your time to quickly block out a shape that roughly looks like what you want before you commit to heavy detailing. This allows you to make quick changes and iterate on your design without sacrificing a lot of work. I learned this the hard way when redesigning my CAD.

With the reference CAD complete, let’s move on to the physical work.

Materials:

1. Wood
2. Wood Glue

I’m lazy, and because I’m lazy, I wanted to make the smooth corners for my build without buying any fancy wood, that’s where kerf bending comes to the rescue. When you use a track saw or table saw to cut a line through a plank of wood, the little gap left behind by the saw blade is called a Kerf. Wood doesn’t ordinarily like to bend, but if we make a bunch of little kerfs next to each other without going all the way through the wood, we can weaken the wood, allowing us to bend it to whatever shape we want.

When starting kerf bending, the first lesson to note is that ALL WOOD IS NOT CREATED EQUALLY, I found that when bending multiple types of wood, some pieces were more resistant to bending and either needed more densely-packed or deeper kerfs to get the same angle. When doing kerf bending on your own, I highly recommend practicing on a scrap piece of wood before cutting on your final piece, this will tell you if your cuts are too far apart or shallow.

This website is a good reference if you want to get a rough idea for the depth and number of your kerfs for a particular bend, but I’ve found it isn’t perfectly accurate to get the specific angle I want, so a little trial and error helps dial it in.

https://www.blocklayer.com/kerf-spacingeng

When you bend wood with kerf bending, the length of the outer side without cuts is not going to change, but on the inside, the cuts will close, shortening the inside curve length and allowing you to create a curve, this is a good point to start if you want a bend at a particular angle or radius.

For this project, I wanted my .75 inch thick wood to have an outer radius of 4.75 inches over a 90° angle, so here’s a little math I did.

1. 4.75 inches * 2 = diameter
2. Diameter * pi = circumference
3. Circumference * 90 / 360 = total length of outside

4.75 * 2 * pi * (¼) is about 7.5, the distance of the outer curve. If we assume the inside edge has a radius of ( 4.75 - wood thickness = 4 inches) then we can run the calculations again and get an inside curve length of about 6.25. The width of the blade I used to cut these kerfs was about 1/16 inches, therefore, to change the inside distance from 7.5 to 6.25, I needed to make 20 evenly spaced cuts.

1. (7.5 - 6.25) = distance to remove
2. (Distance to remove) / (blade width) = number of cuts

You can apply this math to make any angle at any thickness or curve radius, but it is important to note that thicker wood is harder to bend than thinner wood and you may need to add in a few extra cuts to get the angle you want

Using a circular saw, table saw or track saw, I cut slits in my wood until the kerfs were about 1/16 of an inch from the bottom of my piece

With our kerf cut wood, we can now add wood glue into the keft slots and clamp it into wood into the curved shape of our choosing. Take care to squirt wood glue into each kerf so when they close the wood glue will hold them closed. Then clamp your wood in the form you want until the glue dries. To make my clamping easier, I used a router on two scrap pieces of wood to make a form that would hold my wood in place at exactly 90°. I would highly recommend making one of these for individual curves as it means you don’t have to get your angle exact before clamping. If you don’t want to make a jig, or your angle doesn’t need to be perfect, you can wrap ratchet straps around the top and bottom of your glued joint and tighten them down until you reach the angle you want.

A quick note: Some people use steam or water to soften their wood before kerf bending, this is an option, but I’ve found by making deep enough cuts, I can easily bend my wood without using steam, and I feel this is better for the structure of the wood as it won’t be swelling or contracting with added moisture

The photos above show a small prototype I made as well as the much larger tambour door I used in this project.

Materials:

1. Wood
2. Wood Glue
3. Canvas

I really wanted to use tambour doors in this project. Shoutout to the following instructable for a great tutorial on tambour doors if you want to make them on your own, but I’m also going to try and explain my process here.

https://www.instructables.com/Tambour-Door-Cabinet/

Tambour doors are thin wood slats, joined at the back with some kind of fabric or loose bridge, that can slide back and forth along a predefined track. Each door is usually thick in the middle with two thin joints at the top and bottom to slide into a stabilizing track.

To give my door grain continuity, I grabbed a 2’ x 4’ plywood board with consistent veneer and cut it into ¼ inch thick straight strips using a track saw or table saw. I highly recommend numbering your pieces as you cut them, this allows easy assembly later and avoids the infinitely hard jigsaw puzzle of rearranging some 50+ wood slats into their previously consistent grain.

Once you have all your slats cut, arrange them in order with the outward side facing down and clamp them tight together so there are no gaps between them. Then cover the backs of all the pieces in wood glue, I used Titebond 3. After applying wood glue, get a square of canvas a little longer than the door longways, and a little shorter than the door's full height. Apply this canvas in the middle of the wood on top of the wood glue and smooth it down like the pictures above, taking care to avoid the top and bottom of the wood, as these need minimim resistance to slide smoothly in their tracks. Leave a weight on top to ensure the canvas is really pressed in as the glue dries.

If we let the wood glue sit until it fully dries, then there’s a strong chance the door slats will fuse together. To avoid this, after about an hour of drying, slowly start lifting up the door and separating each of the door slats from one another, taking care to ensure the canvas is still attached. Once each of the door slats is separated, you can set the door back down to finish drying.

Once your door is dried you need to make the short portions for the top and bottom. Depending on your slat size and width the process for this can vary, but I had a slat width and height of ¼ inches so I used a table router to cut off excess material around the top and bottom to make my slats. Until I had a short square 1/2 an inch long, 1/4 of an inch high and 1/4 of an inch thick on each end. This piece then slid nicely into the track I previously routed out.

A large portion of this project will use some precut jigs that I made out of MDF. I will link the files for cutting / printing them yourself, but if you plan on doing this yourself for your own projects, here’s my process.

I didn’t want to use a CNC machine for this project to make it more accessible, so I elected to use a hand router. My goal was to make jigs or templates out of MDF that I could run the router along so I could easily follow a straight or curved path without a lot of errors.

To start my jig, I needed the dimensions of my router, as the edge of the router will be moving along the jig, and I need the exact position of whatever bit I use. I have a Makita hand router, and I luckily found this page online with the dimensions of the base of the router. From there I moved into Fusion 360, and using the page as reference, I started making my jigs as sketches.

First, I traced out the area or line that I wanted to cut. Then I factored in the full width of my routing bit (.25 inches) and the positioning of the center of the router. I then placed a ring representing the diameter of the router base around that point of the cutting blade. Then, referencing the contour of my cut area, I made an offset tangent with the edge of the router diameter, the router edge will follow this line and the cutting bit will follow the interior line to make the cut.

Using this outer edge line, I close my sketch and extrude a feature. From here, I use Fusion to export the face of this feature as a .svg file, which I can import into Inkscape, a free vector and image editing software. If you have a laser cutter, I would highly recommend using it with this svg file to cut out your jig as it will save a lot of time. If you don’t have a laser cutter, then I recommend exporting your svg as a png or jpeg at the proper size and printing it out to scale. From there you can use this printed version to cut a physical jig from ¼ inch MDF or plywood.

Inkscape: https://inkscape.org/

To keep my jigs perfectly flat against my reference material, I also cut feet that I could nail into the base of the jig, I would recommend this to ensure your jig doesn’t move, but effective clamping is another easy way to ensure it doesn’t move around too much while you make your cut.

Now with the power of a homemade jig, you can secure your reference material, and, keeping a steady hand on your router, transform into a human-powered CNC machine. I’d recommend taking all cuts very slowly and for deeper cuts making multiple passes at depths of about .25 inches. The router will attempt to move where you don’t want it so I’d recommend pushing or holding it against your jig firmly to stay on track. Going slow will always afford you more control.

Because this project uses a tambour door, the base and top will need tracks, and these tracks will need to be mirrors of each other when the top and bottom faces meet inside the cabinet. To make a consistent track on both without a CNC I used a rigid MDF jig and hand router with a .25 inch routing bit. To make my jig, I drafted a .svg file (see below) and laser cut it out of ¼ inch MDF so I could run the router along the edge. To ensure the jig was flush against my 2’ x 4’ plywood sheet, I cut two flat pieces and nailed them perpendicular to the end of the jig.

Taking care to hold the router with steady hands, I clamped down the jig and slowly, pressing the router against the firm jig, ran the router along the edge of the material. I then flipped the jig over, as the top and bottom are inverted, and cut the reverse pattern in my other plywood sheet.

When routing out the top and bottom, it’s important to start with the interior features before adding curves to the exterior, as the corners of the square piece make it a lot easier to orient cutting jigs and ensure your patterns are consistent.

Like the tambour track, to cut the tracks for the interior walls I measured where I wanted them to go in Fusion 360 and created a laser-cut MDF jig to guide my hand router. Using a .75 inch wide straight routing bit and a plunge router I plotted the start point of the interior walls on the top and bottom panels at a depth of .25 inches. From there I used a regular router and three jigs to slide along the left edge, through the back, and back up the right edge.

The interior wall tracks for this project should end close to the front track, but the exact distance is not important as these will be covered by the interior walls later in the project.

Some of these templates feature dovetails only because the laser cutter I was working with was not able to process long pieces, so I broke them down into more manageable chunks.

For the top of this cabinet, I wanted to make a unique pattern within the plywood so I planned to remove ¼ inch of material on the inside. To avoid making a 2’ x 4’ jig, I drafted a small corner jig so I could trace the path of the four curved corners of the piece. The tracing process for this is the exact same as the step above.

After tracing the bottom corners, I placed the router with the .25 inch cutting bit in the straight portion of a corner track. I used this as a reference to align and clamp a straight piece of scrap wood between two curves and run the router along it to connect the two. I repeated this for the remaining three joints and got the outer edge of my cut area.

After drafting the outer edge, I grabbed the largest routing bit I had and used a plunge router to drop it .25 inches into the middle of the material around each corner. It’s important to note, if your router does not ride on enough support material from the original top of the sheet then it will either drop down or angle itself and your bit will cut deeper than you want.

To keep the top of my router consistent, I started at one point, and moving in slow circles, I worked my way out and across the sheet. Pressing half of the hand router against remaining material or the outside wall, I touched the cutting blade to the edge of the material I wanted to remove and made shallow passes along it instead of forcing the blade deep.

While this took more passes, it gave me more control over the router. I would also recommend doing this cutting operation in stages to avoid putting unnecessary strain on your hand router / big from running for too long.

To round the corners, I took a similar process to the past two steps. I made an MDF jig (.svg file linked below) and clamped it down to the corner of the piece. Then using the hand router and .25 inch cutting bit, I traced it along the edge from start to finish. Most importantly, I made this pass in three stages, one at .25 inch depth, one at .5 inch depth, and the final pass through the whole sheet to remove the corner. The cutting bit isn’t normally meant to cut to a depth of .75 inches, so taking multiple passes minimizes wear on the bit and ensures that the best portion of the cutting bits are always active for the cut.

For this project, I wanted to hide the ugly edges of my plywood without applying a veneer. For straight lines, using a tack saw or circular saw at an angle is a great option, but because the corners of the top and bottom are rounded, I needed to use a 45° chamfer router bit.

I started my chamfer by placing the top slab on top of three .75 inch thick support wood scraps with the interior tracks facing up. The 45° chamfer bit has a bearing to ride along the surface of the wood and maintain a consistent cut, but this requires a deeper depth than .75 inches, adding the support wood beneath the top slab allows the chamfer bit to ride the edge and maintain a consistent cut on the .75 inch thick top.

I found that making multiple shallow passes with the chamfer bit allowed me much more control with the router than making deeper passes. I ended up taking multiple shallow passes for one small section of the wood before reaching the bottom depth of the chamfer and moving on to the next section.

For this project, my chamfer bit was too small to fully complete the chamfer on my .75 inch slab, so after making the chamfer cut around the whole piece, I grabbed my disc sander with 80 grit sandpaper and sanded down the surface until the chamfer was flush with the top and bottom of the slab. I repeated this process for the bottom slab as well, taking care that the side with tracks faced up.

For the inset on the top slab, I wanted to make a repeating pattern of hexagons out of .25 inch thick plywood with a thin border separating it from the outer edge. To do this, I opened Fusion and, using the original sketch of the top slab inset, I spaced out hexagons until the pattern filled the void, taking care to note which hexagons were cut off by the edge and what type of wood / shape they would be.

After making this sketch, I isolated every unique type of hexagon or cut hexagon for each unique wood type and counted how many of each I needed. I then converted each unique shape into an solid object to quickly extract the face svg file before formatting them into inkscape.

To minimize the amount of wood I would use in this project, I used a free svg packing website. In Inkscape, I created a reference svg rectangle the same dimensions as my .25 inch plywood sheet. From there, I added in the svg files of the hexagons I needed and cloned them to match their number in the Fusion 360 sketch. Uploading this mixed svg file to svgnest.com, I packed the individual elements into the reference rectangle and used the resulting file to laser cut my plywood pieces.

Website: https://svgnest.com/

Like the jig stage, it is possible to convert this packed svg into a printed page and trace the cutouts onto plywood to manually cut out, but this will take much more time than laser cutting and may not be as precise.

After cutting these pieces, I test fit them to ensure I had the full form accounted for. After checking the pieces fit together, I sanded each piece with a disc sander and 220 grit sandpaper until the burn marks from the laser cutter were no longer visible.

The files below are the packed .SVG files I ended up using to cut the hexagons and other pieces. The prepackaged file is an example of a file before working with svgnest.com

To apply the top inset, I once again test-fit my laser cut plywood to the insert I routed out of the top shell. After this, I removed the inset and liberally applied Titebond 3 wood glue to the bottom of the top inset before placing in all the laser-cut pieces.

At this point, the top and bottom portions are complete!

For my interior walls I began with two sheets of 2’ x 4’ .75 inch thick plywood. I broke the interior walls down into three structures, the left wall, back wall and right wall. Importantly, the outer structure of this cabinet is 2 feet tall, but because the top and bottom slabs push inside the shape, the interior is not two feet tall! I started by measuring the height of the top and bottom slabs, subtracted .5 inches for the .25 inch deep channels on both, I then subtracted this total from the initial 24 inch height of the cabinet.

Important Note: Before cutting your plywood sheets, please make sure to cut two pieces 24 inches x 2 inches each along the 24 inch long side of your maple plywood sheets, these will be important for the exterior walls later.

I ended up cutting my plywood sheets to about 23” x 48”, removing about 1 inch from the short length of the board.

After cutting my boards to height, I measured the flat end of the right track to about .5 inches from the trambour track, the minimum gap that I wanted between the tambour and interior wall. Notably, this board was longer than the gap I cut, which I intended as I wanted a little lip on the front to hide the interior wall track.

To fit the interior wall, I aligned the right wall with the back track edge and marked where the front circle began and where the front circle transitioned to a straight line. With these marks, I drafted a circular area at the front of the right wall to be cut, and cut it to the same depth as the wall track. I used a combination of a jigsaw and sandpaper to remove the curved section.

At the back edge of the right wall (opposite the front curve) I used a track saw at 45 degrees to cut a straight chamfer 23 inches long from top to bottom. This chamfer allows the right wall to meet with a similar chamfer in the back wall.

Measuring the back wall was a similar process, measuring the distance from the flat edge of the left and right sections, and cutting that length from the 23” x 48” x .75” plywood sheet. Most importantly, the back wall featured two chamfers, one on each side to align with the right and left wall.

I wanted the tambour door to stop at the left wall so I measured the distance from the back of the back wall to the beginning of the front chamfer. I cut a similar curved portion from the piece and a similar chamfer at the back to align with the back wall.

Armed with these three walls I was able to make a rough fit of the top and bottom slabs.

To make the tambour door I started with another 2’ x 4’ slab of .75 inch thick plywood. For this slab I found the prettier side and designated it as “up”. I made all of my cuts on the opposing "down" side to keep the "up" side as clean as possible.

Like the interior walls, the tambour door isn’t exactly 24 inches tall, but loses about 1 inch from the remaining thickness of the top and bottom slabs, so I started by cutting this plywood sheet to 23” x 48”. I highly recommend measuring your top and bottom with calipers to ensure that you are cutting your plywood for this stage to the correct size, as too loose or too tight doors don’t sit well in the design and are much harder to change than simple interior walls

After cutting the plywood slab to the correct dimensions, I used a track saw to cut it into .25 x 23 inch straight pieces, labeling each piece a number and the same orientation for ease of assembly later. After cutting the .25 inch boards I sanded the burrs off of each piece to ensure a smooth fit and checked the complete “up” side for any serious errors.

After checking the “up” side, I arranged the pieces in order, “down,” or numbered, side facing up, and clamped them tight together using clamps and scrap wood. I then measured the range of the pieces and cut a piece of canvas to size. I cut the canvas a few inches longer than the whole assembly, and made it a few inches shorter in height. I then applied wood glue with a brush to the back of the pieces until there was an even coating along them. Ensure that you have an even coating of wood glue as this is an important joint in the long term health of the table. After applying wood glue I added the canvas along the middle of the piece and weighted it down to dry for an hour.

Most importantly, if the wood glue dries fully, then it will likely stick individual boards in the door together, so after the glue cures for about an hour, remove the weight and carefully flip the door until it lies canvas side down. From here, you can slowly roll it off the edge of a table, the canvas should hold firm, but the pieces should be easy to separate from one another. After separating each piece along the whole door, return the door to its position canvas side up and weigh back down until the glue fully cures.

After processing the door I needed to make the lips on the top and bottom to slide along the tracks. To do this I used a table router, but any saw or hand router should do as the cut is a simple square. Using calipers, I measured out how deep of a cut would leave .25 inch at the bottom of each board and cut out a square .25 inches into the board and about .5 inches deep from the “up”, or pretty, side of the board. I repeated this on the top and bottom of the boards and they were good to go.

These exterior walls were easily the most intense part of the project. I wanted to include a stripe of a different wood at the front and back of my model to break up the wood transition instead of including a seam, so I started by opening my Fusion 360 file and measuring the EXACT distance that each wall would have to be. For the context of this project, I found each wall needed to be 65.9225 inches long or about 65 15/16 inches. Taking my two 2’ x 8’ x .75” walnut plywood slabs, I cut them to this exact length.

For the middle section dividers, I will use the 2’ x 24’ maple plywood pieces set aside earlier.

There are plenty of methods to join two pieces of wood, luckily I have access to a festool Domino, but if you do not, using wooden dowels and a hand drill should do the same job.

This next stage is very important, as not paying attention to details at this stage can result in your walnut and maple exterior not lining up well.

I started on the short edge of a walnut slab I cut earlier. Along the 24 inch length I chose a starting side and from it measured .75 inches, 8 inches, 16 inches and 23.25 inches. After this I measured my plywood and found the center of its height. IMPORTANTLY, just because your plywood says it’s .75 inches thick doesn't mean it’s .75 inches thick. My plywood was actually about .73 inches thick so I had to adjust slightly when calculating my wood height.

At each of my four points, I cut a slot for my domino connectors in the exact middle of the plywood height. I then cut into the plywood to a depth of about .5 inches for the dowell / wooden connector

After tackling the holes on one side I went to the other side of the long plywood sheet, and, taking note of which side I originally measured from, I measured and cut at the same points from that reference side

Now I had a sheet of plywood with four holes in each short side, measured from the same reference side. I repeated this process for the second sheet plywood as well as the two maple plywood sheets.

Luckily for this project, preparing the exterior for the kerf bending is pretty easy. Using the reference jig I made below I planned to cut 20 evenly spaced slots, 1/16 inch thick, over a distance of about 7.5 inches. The most important part of this kerf bend is where it starts, but using the Fusion 360 model I measured it was 18.25 inches from where the walnut met the maple divider to the start of the curved wall, or the start of the kerf, so I used the jig and a straightedge to mark 20 markers 18.25 inches from each side of the long walnut sheet.

I HIGHLY recommend making a jig or setup for the next stage as ensuring consistency is key for good kerf bending. I used a series of clamps and two scrap pieces to set up my kerf processing station so I could move my wood slab, clamp it in place, make a kerf, and slide it along to the next kerf. Most importantly, having the scrap pieces at the top and bottom allowed me to perfectly align the kerf cut every time and saved me a lot of time calibrating.

To cut my kerfs, I practiced with a track saw and an off cut from my walnut slab until I was sure I had the right depth dialed in, this may vary for you so I recommend experimenting. With a successful test I used my track saw (you could also use a circular saw and some kind of straight edge if you don’t have a track saw) to cut kerfs in both walnut slabs.

This jig is specifically designed for my project dimensions, if you plan to do your own project, I recommend calculating and making your own jig.

After making the exterior kerfs I grabbed a maple divider and applied a liberal amount of wood glue to my wooden joints and the middle edge. Then I added in the joints and pushed the maple wall against the walnut before letting the assembly cure. I noted which side of the kerf was up and where the relative bottom of the sheet was before adding the second maple wall to the other walnut sheet in the same orientation. Doing this allows the walls to perfectly line up when they are added later.

After letting the wood glue on the maple-walnut joint cure for an hour I used my track saw again, and placing the walls with the kerf side down, I cut a 45° chamfer along the long edges of the maple-walnut exterior wall. This chamfer allows the walls to sit flush with the exterior walls.

Now it’s finally time for the fun part.

This was easily the most intense and exciting stage of the project.

Through my assembly process I ran into a few errors, so I would like to put down two approaches to assembly and completion this table, one that I did, and one that I think will work better should you wake on this project yourself.

MY MOST IMPORTANT LESSON FROM THIS PROCESS: When I used this first method, I ended up using a few clamps to hold my interior frame together while applying the exterior frame. I believe in hindsight that this caused my model to deform and created some weird angles that made finishing difficult, ESPECIALLY because they were perpendicular to the direction I was later planning to orient my walls in, I would recommend you read both approaches and draw your own conclusions about the orientation and steps of finishing your part.

To start, I rough fit the top and bottom slabs to the interior walls using no wood glue before inserting the tambour door along its track. The presence of these interior walls provides stability and prevents buckling in the structure while the kerf sets.

Grabbing the two walnut-maple walls and two 15 foot ratchet straps, I laid the ratchet straps underneath the walnut slabs longways. I then applied wood glue and wood connectors to join the walls together in a single slab. I then flipped the interior assembly 90° so it was on the slab’s chamfers like runners and clamped it firmly together at the top and bottom.

I marked the center of the interior assembly and lined it up directly over the maple joint in the middle of the walnut slabs. This is another vital step that is easy to forget

After aligning the center, I squirted Titebond 3 wood into each kerf on one side of the slab and placed plastic bags at the bottom curved corners of the top and bottom. These plastic bags will prevent wood glue on the outer frame from bonding to the interior frame so it can be taken apart for later finishing.

From there, I removed the base clamp on the interior and carefully, grabbing the thicker sections of the walnut slab to prevent strain on the kerfed sections, lifted it up until it rested fully around the structure and on top of the interior section. I then restored the clamps and moved to reappear the gluing and lifting on the other side.

After lifting the other side, I added in wood connectors and glue to the final middle maple-walnut joint and slowly tightened the ratchet straps until the joint sat flush.

I then left this joint for 8 hours to fully cure.

After curing the table, I disassembled it and finished each of the pieces using Minwax wipe on warm satin polyurethane which I think gave the cabinet / sideboard a good contrast between the maple and walnut; however, when I went to reassemble the pieces. After finishing, I went back to Fusion 360 to measure out the amount of material I would need to remove for a front door. I highly recommend being done with all cuts before "finishing"

When assembling the final finished pieces, I found that it was significantly more difficult to put it all together than it had been before adding the exterior walls. I ended up spending about an hour trying to get all of the interior walls to properly line up, so the following step provides an alternative version of events.

This method uses all the same finishing techniques, but changes up the order. To start, after rough-fitting the base, top, interior walls, and tambour door. I would finish all of them and do a final assembly with wood glue to lock the form into place. After locking this form into place, I would take my two maple-walnut slabs and cut the required middle section BEFORE gluing them around the frame. I initially believed that having such a large gap would compromise the structure of the kerf bends and the wood would buckle while the glue cured. If this does occur, then I believe using a simple few pieces of scrap wood can simulate the gap without the excessive effort of cutting out the doorway AFTER the wood has been bent into its exterior shape.

When gluing the exterior walls to the interior structure, this time, place the exterior structure right side up and ensure all the pieces are firmly together, potentially using weights, BUT the tambour door should be free to slide, if it is not sliding well, I recommend applying beeswax first and seeing it that improves your performance. If all of this is good Then lift the two walls individually, or join them together and lift with a friend before wrapping and ratchet=-strapping them around the interior before leaving the structure to cure.

Completely glue the exterior walls to the interior frame while assembling the final structure, and finish by applying finish to the exterior walls.

Basically the process is the following

1. Apply finish to all internal components and tambour door
2. Assemble inner components and tambour door
3. Cut entrance from unbent kerf bend sections
4. Bend kerf bent sections around freestanding internals
5. Wood glue all components together and hold together with ratchet straps

To finish this project, I used Minwax warm satin wipe-on polyurethane to bring out the natural color and contrast between my walnut and maple. Using foam brushes I applied two even coats to each visible part of the structure, letting the pieces dry for two hours between coats. I sanded these coats smooth with 320 grit sandpaper sponges.

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I wanted to do this project to make a unique cabinet / sideboard without a wood CNC, but more importantly, I wanted to learn how to use kerf bending and tambour doors. I hope that part of this instructable teaches you something new about these techniques, and feel free to ask any questions about my approach / notes from the project. Good luck on your next creative pursuit!