Today is a conflicted post for me. I finally got around to installing the curly maple veneer wrap on the test cabinet, which has been a long time coming. As the saying "Experience is what you get when you didn't get what you wanted" goes, I got plenty of experience today. I am now experienced enough to know I don't like the way veneer looks if it's only sitting on part of the cabinet. I am also now experienced enough to know that curly maple veneer doesn't always like getting massaged over a 3/4" roundover! I had to pull up the veneer on my first go-round since I didn't get things lined up correctly. That caused me to take even more time to make some repairs to that roundover... at least I got to practice the tomzarbo veneer seaming method twice on this cabinet! Overall I think I need a thinner utility knife blade. The one I used left a clean, if a bit wide seam.
After all this learning I'm also conflicted about how to best proceed with the aesthetics of the cabinet design. I will not wrap the veneer around the other two "real deal" cabinets, but I do intend to have the veneer side panels still. To avoid the appearance of the veneer sitting on top of the cabinet like I created today, I'll set up a router jig to carve out the surface on the side panels so the veneer sits more flush with the cabinet wall. That brings me to the choice of paint color...the painted portions of this cabinet were going to be satin black, but I'm concerned it will be too much black without the veneer wrap. I'll still have the black from the driver cones, so I'll need to make a new paint color choice to regain some visual interest.
This also means I'm not sure about the 1/4" x 1/8" channels I was going to cut on the cabinet to trim the veneer... Honestly, after today's adventure I'm thinking I might want to rip the veneer back off the test cabinet so I can still have 3 total cabinets that have the same visual styling. I imagine that will be a royal PITA.
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