Andrew Allen, Croydon, Vic

TV Entertainment Unit
Jarrah
1150 x 600 x 1700mm h

Materials
The entertainment unit is made from recycled jarrah verandah boards. The boards came from two different sources. The majority of the jarrah was salvaged from the verandah of a house that was renovated. The cabinet was nearing completion when the first source of jarrah timber ran out. The back of the cabinet and the TV shelf was completed with jarrah flooring purchased from a secondhand timber yard.

Methods
The jarrah boards varied from 18–20mm in thickness to
70–80mm wide and up to 2400mm long. The first task was to dress the jarrah to uniform size. The boards had not been removed with much care. Many nails or worse still, parts of nails were left in the boards. In addition some of the boards were painted which made dressing a little more difficult and made finding nails that much harder.
As I could not guarantee that all nails had been removed I did not want to run the timber through a thicknesser for fear of damaging the blades. Instead I built a jig that allowed me to run my router over the top of the board and dress first the top then the bottom surface, one board at time. I used a three-flute 50mm, replaceable insert facing cutter to dress the boards. After all the boards had been dressed with the router they were finished off in the thicknesser. Final dressed thickness of the timber was 16mm.
Edges on the boards were trued on the tablesaw, then the router table, before being biscuit joined together to form the required sizes of panels for top, sides, back and shelf.
Each panel was finish sanded before assembly, which greatly reduced the amount of sanding required on the finished cabinet. All four doors are of rail and style construction. Pocket door slides have been fitted to the two upper doors so they can slide back into the cabinet when open.
One of my aims was not to use screws or nails in the assembly of this piece. All of the large panels are biscuit joined. Panel to panel joints are doweled and glued. One concession to the use of screws was the rear panel which is secured with screws as I was not satisfied that dowelling was practical.

Concept
I wanted a small unit that had an Australian appearance. Hence the use of BlueScope Steel Mini Orb in the upper doors and security door mesh for the lower doors. The mesh being reminiscent of meat safes, used by earlier generations in Australia.
The mesh in the lower doors allows control of the stereo unit located in the bottom section of the cabinet, via remote control without needing to open the doors. Speakers for the stereo are also behind these doors, the sound apparently unaffected by the security mesh.