This kitchen unit was made to hold recipe books as well as general kitchen stuff. Does it quite well as well I think.
The lower parts and shelves are made of Ash all tenoned into a 2″ thick Elm ‘slice of tree’ for the top. The ‘feet’ of the unit are rising dovetail joints (although in the orientation they end up they would be sinking dovetails I guess) which, in combination with the wedged tenons through the top, hold the whole thing in place rather well, in fact I didn’t end up using any glue in the final assembly, we’ll see if this becomes a problem later. . .
The Elm worked surprisingly well at first, with hardly any tear-out even with my aggressively set No.5 plane, but then started to dry out with further planing- things then got a lot tougher.
The edges of the Elm were varnished to preserve the soft outer layers of wood, the rest of the unit was oiled with Danish oil.
