Woodworker: Aurelio Bolognesi
Bolognesi has always admired the clever clamshell-action cabinets from the 1930s that pivot open to reveal storage inside a plain case. He decided to build one, but he didn’t like the idea of putting his on casters like the originals. He wanted his cabinet to be stationary, yet to open and close smoothly and easily. It took some sleepless nights before he arrived at his solution to the puzzle: He put a lazy susan under one half so it spun in place, and a pivot on linear tracks under the other half, so it both spun and moved sideways. He reached his eureka moment after making a Plexiglas mockup of the base and the lower section so he could witness the dynamics of the parts as he pivoted them. Bolognesi bought the lazy susan and bearing hardware, but fabricated the tracks himself on a milling machine. He installed a heavy-duty version of his mechanism in the base and tucked a lighter-duty, lower-profile version under the top. He built the two halves of the cabinet from solid cherry and connected them with double-offset knife hinges. The cabinet is 16 in. deep by 32 in. wide by 43 in. tall.

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