On the "50 years" thing, yeah, technology and the like changes (and, yes, the cost of wood is going to be overshadowed by the cost of those cool "self closing" slides), but...
This last summer I was being recruited for a gig at a photovoltaics startup, and, as much as a silicon fab plant can be environmentally sensitive, they understood that part of their pitch was "save the planet", and they were trying to walk the walk. The CEO was a big fan of "Cradle to Cradle", and being the toadying corporate climber that I am (wait, I lie, I actually respect the CEO a lot and consider him a good friend, even if we don't get together all that often) I read the book.
The book is a push towards building products in a way that, at the end of a product's life cycle, it can be returned to components that can be re-used at the same level of the manufacturing process. For instance, right now soda bottles can't be recycled into soda bottles, just into "fleece" jackets and similar things further down the plastics chain. In my first read through I had a "okay, fun cheerleading, but there's no solutions here", but as I've done some product development in the intervening time I've realized that the reasons there aren't solutions in the book is that it's up to us to think about engineering those solutions (and that, in the soda bottle instance, the trade-off was that the economics of returnable glass bottles with a deposit costs more than throw-away plastic, so maybe we need to look at the entire product life cycle and figure out if it really is cheaper, or if we're just hiding costs).
I'm not going to pretend that I'm Joe-eco-friendly or anything, I live fairly comfortably in the United States after all, and I'm sure that styles and kitchen use patterns and drawer slide technologies will change over the course of 5 decades, I even acknowledge that once you lay saw to board the only way to get back to the same level of product is to use the sawdust as fertilizer, but I've got a couple of hundred board feet of mahogany reclaimed from "box beams", a similar amount of maple that, to the guy I bought it from, is cast-off scraps from his manufacturing process, but to me is still going to have to be ripped down to make rails and stiles, and as I process those into cabinets, doors and drawer faces and whatever else I want to do two things: Design those products to be useful for as long as possible, and to think about how the waste from demolishing those products will be repurposeable.
So, yeah, that mahogany that's currently a part of box beams, parts of which are going to be tough to extract because I have to be careful of pin nails used during construction, can become raised door panels, and I'm going to reduce a good portion of that to sawdust because I'm weighing aesthetics over flat expanses of lumber, but a decade or two of me (yep, I do most of the cooking) vaporizing grease in the kitchen is going to reduce that product to either completely unusable, or to something that, with a few compromises now and a little bit of work then, can be worked back into service.
I like the idea of using a detachable strip as the back part of the panel groove, I can probably just mill that myself with a quarter round bit.
I'll chase down that Festool rail cutting bit, the profile looks like it might work, especially if I can pull the slot cutter portion when cutting the shape on the outside of the rails.
The latest issue of Woodsmith has an idea for cove cutting that looks scary as heck and dangerous to bearings (running a circular saw blade, in their example on a table saw, diagonally sideways through the wood) so I may have to see if I can build a jig for my old Skilsaw to try that, and then do something else to cut the recurve where the cove hits the face.
Thanks, all!
