Synopsis: Aaron Levine’s quilted Western maple and lacewood tansu chest offers lessons in veneering, NK-style drawers which are screwed together, and adding wheels, which are traditional on certain tansu. He picked the project because it contained such an array of parts to make and challenges to meet.

For Aaron Levine, who built this quilted Western maple and lacewood tansu chest during his apprenticeship, the cabinet was a curriculum unto itself. Among the techniques he learned in the process were cutting shopsawn veneers in highly figured wood, shooting their edges with a handplane and laying them up into panels in a vacuum press; building and fitting frame-and-panel sliding doors; and building NK-style drawers. “None of this was extraordinary woodworking,” Levine says now, “but I remember it being very challenging to me.” All of this was welcome, since he picked the tansu precisely because it was packed with such an array of parts to make and challenges to meet.

Photos: Art Grice

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