Birdseye and Curly Maple Entertainment Center

This project started years ago when I got some “scrap” birdseye maple plywood from the cabinet/millwork shop I was working for. A customer covered the entire inside of their 10,000 square foot home in Aspen with sequenced matched birdseye maple ply(ceilings and all). All the windows in the house had to be cut out of the full sheets on the CNC machine that I ran. With tons of cutout scraps in hand, I racked my brain for a project worthy enough of this beautiful “scrap”. I came up with a design that I liked that made efficient use of all the pieces that I had, and went out and bought some solid birdseye for the face frame, surfaced it down and got all the parts laid out.

Then the project sat through the craziest three years of my life(got married, bought a house, had a kid, lost my job, setup a shop, and inherited a company.) I saw plans for this on an ad for Woodsmith magazine and bought the plans from plansnow.com. They inspired me to get going on this again. I liked the “add em as you go” design. The whole thing is six separate pieces connected with hidden t-nuts and furniture bolts. I liked the design much better than what I had designed, but wanted to keep some of the features from the old design. This is kind of a hybrid of both.

It holds my 40” flat screen, but it’s big enough for up to a 50”upgrade:) Fixed shelves hold all the electronic gear including my vintage gaming systems (yes that’s a functional original Nintendo.) The glass doors allow the remotes to work on the equipment behind them. I used seedy glass (with the bubbles in it) because I thought it would look cool with the birdseye. Four drawers house all of my DVD collection, my first attempt at dovetailed drawers are shown off with Blum’s under-mount soft-close drawer slides. The faces of the drawers are birdseye frames with solid curly maple panels, same with the side cabinets doors. Thanks to Paul Taran at curlymaple.com for the amazing solid curly maple.

About another year passed after I finished the base before I started the upper cabinets. I soon realized my birdseye plywood was not going to work like I thought for the top because it was only birdseye on one side and random on the other, and the upper cabinets were visible on both sides. Big big thank you to Joe at veneersupplies.com for all his information, outstanding customer service and for the amazing flitch of birdseye veneer he sold me. His other site joewoodworker.com is very helpful and informative if your interested in doing veneer work and don’t know anything about it. The veneer came out great and turned out to be pretty easy, it looks spectacular under the LED puck lights in the top 5 bays.

Finish is lots of shellac, followed my even more semi-gloss pre-catalyzed urethane. Between this and the matching coffee table and the learning curve of the sprayer, about a gallon and a half.

All this work, time and money and it’s still not done, I’m planning on adding a curly maple crown moulding around the top to tie it all together. But in the meantime, it’s functional. If you read all this, I sincerely thank you for showing interest, spent a lot of time on this bad boy, and I’m pretty proud of it. So happy to have found this great site.

-- Lucas, "Someday woodworks will be my real job, until then, there's this http://www.melbrownfarmsupply.com"