Building Cabinet Drawers WOOD magazine WWW15

I have some samples here do you want to start with the hard stuff first or the easy stuff first easy stuff first okay I have to what I think are easy ones let's start with this so I can get it off the bench and then we'll move on to the other easy one this is a joint we use a lot in the magazine it's some some people saw call it a locking rabbit construction drawer some people call it a rabbit and dado and there are actually two different versions of this as well just want to double check I got that milled up actually I'll pass this around it's not glued together so you got to kind of be gentle with it but what we're what we're basically doing is we're gonna put a dado in the side of the drawer at the back in the front and then the piece that goes into that we're gonna cut a rabbet so this is a side I already have one of these dedos cut we have to cut the dado in the front then we have to cut rabbits and these this piece to fit so this can go together really really quick it's actually a good mass production drawer if you can kind of keep all your parts machined accurately so we'll start with that and then I'll show you how to do an integral front and then we'll go from there so this style drawer has we won't worry about the bottom yet this would have a false front on it meaning you're sizing this drawer to go into an opening right now I'm just worried about building a square drawer we're gonna put it in the opening and then later on we're gonna slap on a front it could be an overlay front where it covers the whole frame it could be an inset front where we're fitting it inside the opening so right now we're just trying to get a box that's quasi square and resembles a drawer together so a couple things I've done on this I've already milled the the groove in the back and I'll actually talk about what's going on with that later now we got a mill the groove in the front so over at my table saw I have a quarter inch stacked dado set up so this is just the two outer blades of my stacked dado head and this is usually when I start machining drawers this is what I like to have in it constantly I'm not adding or deleting any spacers in there or any extra chippers in there I'm just wanting to run at a quarter inch so if I need to make something wider than a quarter inch I have to take more than two cuts but typically it's just raising or lowering the head or moving the fence just a little bit so let's get started with this I forgot my drawer side already okay so I want to cut this to a depth of a quarter inch about and this is something I really like to set up my my saw it is a Veritas so often we see have you ever used combination square you know where it's sixteenths and eighths thirty-seconds and 64th and the wrong side is always away from you so you're down here trying to figure it out and you have the sixty-four scale and you're like one two three four five okay start over one two three and you just can't see what's going on what's really nice about this one is the outer well I should have went this way this is all sixteen this is all thirty seconds when I turn it over this is all thirty seconds this is all sixteen so it transfers from one side to another if I want to be super accurate I can put thirty seconds here if I'm comfortable with you know like here I'm trying to hit a quarter inch I can put my sixteenths side up and I can hit that of what I'm going to do I usually measure off the side of the left side of the blade my left side your right so I'm going to look for a sharp point put this down next to it and just set the tooth height off my square and what I'm doing here is I'm just moving this back and forth to find the high point of the blade different saws have different spots with within the throat plate where your high point is going to be some saws your high point is actually in the back third some it's right in the middle rarely do I find it it's in the front half but this needs to go up just a little bit and I'm happy with that so I'm going to lock that in place next thing I have to do so I'm gonna cut a dado in here which is just a groove across the board quarter inch deep and now I need to set my location for where I'm going to cut it right here to set that location I'm going to use the off this is actually the front so there's my sharp tooth again I'm going to move this over actually I'll do this we can see it a little better and I'm going to bring this right up almost okay so there that goes so what I've done is I've set the groove back the thickness of the drawer face or the drawer front I've set the groove quarter of an inch high all I have to do now is make sure I don't have anything in between my fence and my workpiece move this over I don't think I'm forgetting anything I'm gonna turn this on this makes a little bit of noise but it keeps the dust down [Music] [Music] well pretty good I'm not dead on but pretty good I will show you when you're doing this at home don't be like John actually test it on a piece of scrap I have just this is a cut-off of this stuff so it's always nice to have okay before I commit myself to this cut try it on a piece of scrap make sure it fits before you machine everything so for this let's say on this drawer we don't have this weird thing going on on the bottom we're just starting out what I'm going to do is cut these dados cut these dados do it on all the drawers and then depending on the style of drawer if your backs go all the way to the back all you'd have to do is flip this around and cut those dedos as well on this style I want a little bit of an anti-tip so I moved them up so at this point I would have to move this over cut these as well and then I can move on to the drawer fronts so my fronts are actually a little bit more than 1/2 an inch there they're just a little bit thicker than that so I know my blade height is at a quarter of an inch I pretty much don't have to worry about going over right now so I can set this up to cut a rabbet so to cut the rabbet I'm going to put in a sacrificial fence or sometimes I'll call it a zero clearance fence something so does anyone at home have saw marks on the side of your fence never happens does it so this will keep that off it and what I use to hold this on you could just grab a board and hold it on with a couple clamps I really like these guys all you have to do is drill a couple of holes in the top of your sacrificial fence and this drops in and you have a nice clean surface that with no obstructions that that you can kind of cut all day okay so I'm going to move this / - just the edge of the teeth okay and then I'm actually going to use my my practice board here just to dial it in before I start going crazy [Music] so I know this isn't going to go in it's gonna be a little bit tight and at this point too first of all let's double check the depth okay all I have to do is raise the blade just a little bit [Music] okay okay turn this off just this way so initially the reason I didn't use a scrap piece was I you know in my mind I really can't screw it up too bad it's when you have to start finding a piece to actually meet into that that you get into problems of one thing I noticed and we should talk about stock prep if I put this on here from the time I milled it up I think Thursday - now this thing has moved a little bit so when I was running that I didn't notice it I had this side down so it's not tipping on me then when I go to put it in my dado this goes in this goes in the center doesn't go in so that's why I stopped got out my push pad and put pressure down right on that high spot it's thin enough that I can force it down move it across and then when I put this in the joints going to pull that board straight usually I'm just using finger pressure over here just to kind of hold it down if you want to use this it's a great thing to have as well at this point in theory you wouldn't really even need the miter gauge you could just use push pads as long as this is long enough not to start moving around on your fence so I'm going to do that quick this will be the front this will be the back saw machine all this at once if you're doing this at home machine all these grooves on the sides first then worry about the fronts and the backs and that's kind of the the order of operations for mass production - [Music] [Music] okay sorry I'm gonna make you work today okay let's see if these actually go together yeah what's going sweet what I've left out on these are the grooves in the bottom and I typically do that last just because as you mill this up certain things can happen you can have a little bit of tear out you can forget what goes where it's just our cutting things and random places on these boards you're really not going to get wrong where the rabbit goes it goes on the ends so that's pretty pretty self-explanatory with these dados it really doesn't even matter where you're putting them whether it's tight to the front or there's a little offset on the back you're probably not going to get them wrong at the very very end I cut the grooves in because this is a good example that I did yesterday I cut one drawer right and or one drawer side right in one drawer side wrong so on this guy we're perfectly fine there our groove lines up but is at this side actually I'll replace the front so this side you're fine let's see if we okay see how the groove is fine there then you get to this side that's not so good so that's typically why I wait to do the grooves at the at the very low you know last sometimes I'll even you know rough assemble the drawer and just get it together like this and then go okay I need to cut grooves in the bottoms of all of these so this side goes against the fence this side goes against the fence so as I'm standing this will be on the fence side and this side will go against the fence so one at a time or if you're just running us a small batch you can kind of rough assemble them set them out and go okay don't do this we're going to keep all our parts straight if your mass producing them where you're just sending them sending them sending them in in batches about the best way is to have stacks where you'd have all your material stacked up and you want to keep it in that orientation where you pick it up and go okay I don't want to start turning around and doing this on the wrong edge I take this and this is going to run against that without turning it around so let's run the grooves on these quick and then put this together and I want to show you another style front as well yes and I'll get to that I did that just as a I don't want to call it fun it has purpose but I just want to do something a little bit different on one of these drawers just to show something out of the ordinary okay so that is set up for a half inch and that's what I want I have to stop and think [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] see which is the man this is part of the lesson I'll go either to okay let's see if this actually goes together up this is front so this will go just like this yay um I don't think I I must have moved those to somewhere else oh my stack of bottoms are under here and the quarter inch dimension works on this because I'm on these particular drawers I'm using Baltic birch um for the bottoms which is usually almost dead on a quarter of an inch because people are watching it doesn't want to go in I won't force it but so on this one the bottom slides in from the back just like that might have to do just a little bit of sanding on that plywood to get it to go in smoothly if you have undersized plywood then the bottom becomes more problematic you're probably going to have to do two cuts with a regular saw brulee door rather than a dado set just to get that to go together also you might notice the top of my drawers we have some issues with some height discrepancies and it doesn't look good at all these are actually cut way higher than I need them to be these sides are well over eight inches tall and I only need a seven inch drawer part of my rationale is I did this on purpose I have these rough edges that if I didn't have this on the bottom to tell me what's going on I know when I get over to the saw that this rough edge against a fence something's wrong this means don't cut grooves up here cut grooves down here so it's just my little way on this one I have a squiggle on this one it it's I have a defect there that's going to get cut off later I don't put the whole drawer together and then start cutting around the outside typically before I do my final assembly I'll go over to the table saw rip this down to the size I think I need and then go from there now as far as fitting this figuring out how big of a drawer we we need to have typically we try to build the case first and then we measure the opening that it's going to go in for with I usually subtract an eighth of an inch from the sides so you'd have a sixteenth to each side and this is a drawer that just it's a wooden drawer that goes in a wooden opening and then I subtract 1/16 to 1/8 of an inch for the total height as well and when you're thinking about those measurements it's it's always nice to have it tight until it gets humid and your drawers don't work anymore so when you're selecting stock for the sides a part of that the thought process is what you're what you're kind of dealing with so I have my little drawing here typically when I'm looking at stock the even if I'm picking it out like at the yard I'm looking at the the end grain the it's always funny the forklift operators think you're crazy because they just look at a board for overall length overall width and does it have any defects on the face and I'm down on the end looking okay what is this thing actually so by looking at the end grain you can pretty much extrapolate what the face grain is going to look like but you can also pick out how big was the tree how fast did the tree girl is this a tree maybe that grew at an angle because on one side it has tight grain on the other side it has really open grain so this is my very skillful drawing of just a regular old flats on board where you get those nice curved grain lines it's so the center of the tree would be here the outside of the tree would be here with this board it changes the most in its width so it would change mostly in this dimension very little in this dimension that's why in the winter of solid oak floors open up cracks because they shrink this would be a riffs on board typically riffs on boards are half green at about a 45-degree angle all the way up to 60 or more sometimes sometimes you'll actually get lucky the stuff that they sell is riffs on are darn near quarter songs so you can get a little price break there and then here we have quarter sawn where the grain goes almost straight up and down and on a quarter sawn board it changes very little and with but then in thickness that's where it makes the movement because if you think about it a quarter sawn board is really a flats on board cut or tip ninety degrees so if you have a quarter sawn floor it doesn't open up in the winter but what happens is your furniture moves up and down throughout the year which can be hard on as like base molding oh I lost my I don't even know what this thing is but it's attached to me so when I'm thinking about drawers all of this gets turned on its side if I have a flats on board it's going to move most up and down so that tells me seasonal changes changes in humidity it's probably not going to get caught on the sides if anything it's going to swell up and be too tall or in the winter it's going to swell down and maybe get too short if I use this guy it's going to do the opposite it's almost never going to swell up and down but it might swell to the side and get stuck there so that that's something I just think about as I'm putting this together is okay what time of year it is where is this thing going what's the moisture content of my wood and then what is probably what is it probably going to do in its lifecycle this guy the the rifts on is kind of nice because it moves a little bit this way and a little bit this way but it doesn't go one way usually more than another a lot of times it depends on the cut how close it is to quarter sawn or how close on the other spectrum it is two flats on so that's kind of the the first thing I'm looking at when I have a batch of wood that I need to mill up into drawer parts now as far as wood goes I'm I'm not too picky on what I make drawers out of look the joke here is everything's a photo prop anyway it's not real furniture so the we you know I'll make some some stuff out of pretty goofy stuff the stock I'm using today is actually bass wood and poplar I shouldn't say poplar roads we call it Papa what it is is it's a type of Aspen and you know it's it's it's not very strong stuff it's not very heavy stuff so it's good to keep the the weight light it's it's pretty dimensionally stable and it it it's going to be pretty well behaved because it's been kiln dried it's been acclimated to the shop it's not going to move around too much on me and and I'm I'll use almost anything people think I'm crazy but I'll use quarter sawn oak for the sides of drawers makes a very strong drawer it makes a very heavy drawer but it's also very stable the the classic that you see everybody use everywhere is poplar and nothing wrong with poplar I think the big reason they use poplar is because relatively stable and it grows on trees it's pretty cheap you'll see pine in cabinetry anymore you see a lot of soft maple going to draw parts so I didn't I just say if anything that grows on a tree is legal it's just what pains do you want to go through to do it I probably wouldn't make drawer parts out of Ebony or cocobolo or you know things like that we'll save that for the outside but you know stuff like that that oh that makes good drawer sides right there tell Bob so now going from that I have a drawer I have to do eight of these drawers seven inches tall and they're deep so there that can hold some weight I need a nice strong drawer that isn't going to fall apart and isn't going to wear out either I know that the material in this is rather soft the case that this goes in is going to be cherry so after a few years I'm probably going to start seeing a little white sawdust fall out of my my piece because I have all that weight and it's actually wearing the wood away so that's why I put these wear strips on the bottom on this particular one I used white oak because I have white oak and another good alternative would be to use like hard maple that been you know something hard that slides easy I've gone a little extra here where I'm sure you've seen on the drawer I passed around it sticks out the side its tongue and groove into the drawer side you could just glue on a eighth inch we're strip on the bottom if you really wanted to another strategy is just make it out of whatever you want and have you ever seen the the drawer glide tape at all I think we have some of that here actually maybe there it is sorry Lucas I just killed your TV I do that twice a day please don't ask me where I get this I get this from that drawer it's and and now the rest of the staff knows that it's kept in that drawer so it'll be gone okay so it isn't blue it's actually clear the blue is the backing so this is that this is that Glide tape that you can usually I put on the case so pass that around and in and it's you know you're like oh it's a strip of you know it's basically overgrown scotch tape it works wonderfully with a lot of use it does wear out but you just put another strip down and as long as you have a drawer with it in it you're fine so how's that going I'll just show you quick how in the world I put this bottom on part of the reason I did this was just for me no one will ever really know what's there on this particular piece there's gonna be a false front on so all of this stuff gets covered by a solid drawer front the only time you'd ever see this is if you pull the drawer out look at the bottom and go what in the world is going on so someone once said I don't even know who it was what I build is for other people but how I go about it that's for me so this is just one of my little things that that I like to do once in a while is just something that no one is ever ever going to see and the big reason I I did this too is it it gives me of a great way to actually lock everything together while I glue it up so hold apart this isn't together yet but I'll pass this around so the runner has just a groove in it pretty easy to do you could just run that at the table saw really quick this has a groove to fit it so what you have to do is cut the groove and then cut this tongue to fit in the groove so that the inside edge is flush and on mind the outside sticks out you could just run this so it's flush on both sides as well but you can pull that apart and look at it and know that it's not a parlor trick I I cut it down actually let's start with that if I can find my board back it's right in front of me so this is actually what I start out with for the base and that's a good point if I'm trying to run that at the saw I don't want to have that little strip and try to be running it over the blade because then for us we're really testing the effectiveness of the saw stop it's you just flat out know something's going to go wrong so on this I use a wider board as a handle and for this I I'm gonna cheat a little bit I actually have a hand plane to do this this is a Stanley tool this one is not new by any means this is this probably came out this particular model was post-world War two planed but let's see if I can turn this on this side it has a little eighth inch blade and I'll turn it right so to your right there's an eighth inch blade so that's going to cut that groove then on the other side it has a blade with a notch in the middle that so happens to be an eighth of an inch wide and that is going to cut the tongue so you can still get these they just reside on eBay or in antique stores but there are companies that if you want to do this by hand they still make tongue and groove planes today or like I said you could do this just on the table saw you could get your router table do this you could do it a myriad of ways so all I'm doing is pushing it and every time the plane moves across it takes a shaving and when it stops cutting I know I'm done not cut anymore so the next step is I'm just going to rip off the bottom do that at the bandsaw [Music] okay I might as well leave these up here now we have to cut the tongue what's that this is a tongue and groove plane this particular one is a stanley 146 and the good news is it's the most rare of the entire line so you're welcome they made a 147 and 148 this actually if I can hold it up it it cuts a centered tongue and groove joint on three a cinch thick stock the 147 would be five ace in stock and the most common of them is the 148 and that cuts on seven a stock and then they had a different style it looks different than this then the the flip around push-pull they had a 48 and a 49 that did 3/4 and half inch stock as well and then you have all the other companies making similar things as well but Lee Nielsen still makes tongue and groove planes you can get a tongue and groove plane attachment for Veritas Lee Valley plow plane so this stuff is still around it's just a neat little way to to do stuff quickly without having to set up machines and so that would lock on there right now now I should explain this too I've already run the groove in the back so on this particular setup I know that my bottom is going to slide in from the back I don't need this groove to go all the way down so I stopped it one little thing that I hate that no one ever sees is when you do a side like this this would be for the front this would be for the back and then you have a groove in the bottom so you have this this random piece of wood back here that's not doing anything because your dado went right through so when you look on the bottom of the drawer you have this just random joint mark on the bottom of this drawer you don't have the random joint marks so I'm sorry things that no one ever sees bothers me so so yeah that's that's how I'm putting this corner together and you know it's a little bit of work but the nice thing is when I go it together it's not moving around it's locked in there and I've added a little more glue surface area so it can't go anywhere makes it the joint a little bit stronger and going back to wood selection I know with these this set of drawers this wood it's not going to be the strongest drawer in the world it's not going to be heavy and the wood is pretty stable but I have everything in these drawers from quarter sawn grain to flats on grain a little bit of riffs on and maybe that's all in one board so I don't want to take the chance of this thing swelling up vertically I don't want to take the chance of it's swelling up side to side so this little runner keeps all of this away from everything in the case I can run this almost tight to the case and if I have to make any adjustments all I have to do is shave off a little bit of this I don't have to touch the side at all typically if I if I am in a situation where the drawer swelled up or the case moved and I I can actually get it back out of the case I'll actually taper it from front to back a little bit either by planing or sanding aggressively so maybe I'll take a sixteenth off the back and feather that out to zero on the front so the front stays pretty tight but then it's almost wedge-shaped so as you push it in it doesn't jam in the opening tighter and tighter and tighter same with any adjustments up and down I'll leave the top as tight as I can and then if I have to I'll cut the back at an angle so you can actually get it in there whatever I happen to have at that moment if I'm in the kitchen maybe I just have a kitchen knife so I'm just kind of whacking at it and I'm making fun of my wife now who should know that screwdriver success but continues to use flatware but no one ever does that right well the other thing I want to show you on this style drawer this is just a false front worried about making the box worry about building is as well as you can we're going to put a false front on it so what I typically do for when it comes time to install false fronts is I get double-sided tape and this is the double-sided tape that we have it's wonderful it resides in a drawer over there and you actually have to guard this because the editors will come out and try to steal this I don't know what they're doing but I had someone say yesterday that there's a pretty good double-sided tape at Ace Hardware that is almost like a mesh this were lucky we have a wood Smith store in town so it they store double-sided or they stock double-sided tape this is from IPG which is the inner tape polymer group it sounds like a front for the mob but it exists this stuff is really nice it's not like the thin scotch tape where unless you're touching exactly on it'll it'll grab it's thick enough that there's a little bit of a cushion so what I would do on a drawer like this we're depending on how much tape I have left at the time I could run a strip side-to-side sometimes I'll run a strip up and down like this so I have a strip over here I try not to do that where I I have spots without tape so let's do like that and pretend we're we're putting that together get this thing in the opening and then let's say I want to do an inset drawer which are the hardest to do on an inset drawer I would very carefully size the drawer to the opening and at that point it doesn't matter really what it is if it's not a perfect rectangle that's fine if it's a parallelogram cut it to fit that opening and just get a nice even reveal around the outside a lot of our photos you'll see us using pennies as spacers because we figure people can't afford those and you can use shims you can use you know playing cards however many playing cards you want left to right top to bottom and then just push that drawer that false front against the drawer after you peel the backing off and it should stick on there give it some good pressure and then very carefully pull the whole unit out typically on a big drawer will actually screw through this into the false front so we'll screw them from the back into that on a smaller drawer you could probably get away with just drilling whatever holes you want for hardware and attach it that way and that's how these guys were done so I don't know if you sorry so this is our sharpening station this ran maybe in the last month's issue and this is a false front so what I've done is I've I've just spaced that so I have a nice even reveal all the way around but when I pull out the drawer you might notice it's not even left to right this side sticks out more than that side and in that's just to cover up how the interior of this drawer worked so this drawer is actually screwed three times from the back the double-sided tape is still in there it's not going to go anywhere so I figure that's not going to hurt and on this particular one the the hardware doesn't run all the way through front to back because that's the size of screw I had if you want to go through all the way a lot of times you have to buy a longer screw because they know you have to buy a longer screw and they make you buy a longer screw it's a way to generate more revenue I guess sometimes you get lucky and you get something long enough for you can also counter border to try to make it work so I do want to pass this around this is another secret weapon I have in here it's you've seen this before right it's not the push pad it's what's on the push pad have you ever seen the little bench cookies or bench pucks that these companies have you get them in and it's like what is this stuff it actually sticks usually when a company gives you a free push pad with a machine you know the the pad on there that doesn't do anything it's it has the consistency of this floor where you're pushing a board and the pad keeps going and you're like oh the board's still back there well that was fun we found this material at Lavallee they sell it in big sheets and it's it's a adhesive-backed foam pad and it really really works well on push pads so you can do stupid things and get away with it - when I was cutting the groove I had my double push pads on there with something that I wasn't comfortable that the pad is actually going to grip the wood if I don't have a positive stop behind the board I or a hook I can't be a hundred percent sure that the board's going to go through as I push it so this allowed me to do that put pressure down on the board so I get a nice even groove on the side and part of the reason I wanted to show you that is because the next cut we have to make is kind of stupid so I I warned you going into it yes sir sure do all the time it's just you know obviously a drawer for the shop works perfectly if I try to make plywood drawers for my wife she would probably beat me in my sleep but I love making drawers out of Baltic birch plywood it just looks nice it has a nice modern look a cool look the only problem I get into plywood and I run into it sometimes here is yeah that's weak so the first thing you know that's going to break off is this little piece right here and sometimes this will break off I actually made one of these sides a little bit tight it would have been this one so this should have that dado on the front but now it got donated to the drawer front and that's when I was in there it was fine when I tried to take it apart it must have swelled overnight oh now it's shrank so so this is now with that so that that would be my only kind of my warning with plywood especially around the edges just to make sure the stuff doesn't delaminate on you and you wouldn't necessarily have to do this lock rabbit anyway you could well you could domino it or biscuit it or even pocket hole screws with bud joints and it worked great too so that's what I want to do is actually do an integral front which is this thingy majiggy see if I get out of the way I'm not helping there it is so think of this like this 1/2 inch drawer front is right here you have your little tongue that goes into your dado you have a rabbet back here but on this we already have the front on there and this isn't as fun to machine but when you get done you have an integral drawer front where you don't have to attach anything it just it's on there goes right in so to do this the first thing we have to do is we have to cut this groove in there and you could do it a couple ways you could do it at a router table either vertically like this with a I do it with an up cut spiral bit or if you have one of those three wings ring slot cutters you could do it at the router table like that I'm gonna do it at the table saw just to show you how to do that if you want to try it I must have put those boards right here okay so this will be the side on this the first thing I need to do on this cut is I need to make a groove the same depth as my drawer side so my drawer side is going to drop in and I'm going to use my side to set my blade height okay next I need to set my fence actually we're going to get rid of this because I don't want that to get in the way and move this stuff off and I'm gonna set this spacing for a quarter of an inch so typically on a a besom iron fence everything locks to the front if I have to make any small changes I'm not going to try to tap it up here because that's not where it connects I'm gonna make little changes up here at the front move it with my thumbs sometimes I come over and actually grab the the the wing and make that adjustment or sometimes I'm just bumping the handle on the fence as well this is about a half an inch yeah Oh but our planer does not like to make half inch it likes to make about a 64th over a half an inch so that's why I said it like this if I was really dead on I know I could come in and go 1/2 inch tall if I measuring to the inside tooth quarter inch or if I'm measuring to the outside tooth 1/2 inch so obviously if this was thicker thinner you'd have to double check that if I can at all I I try to make my measurements off my stock a good example would be if I need to subtract the width of what the the drawer sides will be instead of saying oh it's a half an inch and a half an inch I'm sure it's it's just a full inch I'll stack them together make that measurement and go oh it's actually a hair over an inch and if I had to make that set up here I might use both to do that it's just a way to decrease error and try to get a little bit accurate so now I have to run this over over this and I talked to my boss Kevin about this I said how do you do this and he said I'll do it I do it the exact same way you do it you get a push pad you grab the board and push it across now if we try to put this in the magazine's I'm sure Dave would have a coronary yeah yeah safety the police would come out so the first thing people would say well well let's get a high fence on there let's get this high fence on here if I push this across like this I have a place to actually grab the board in the strongest method I know assuming you have thumbs and I shouldn't laugh at that because I cut myself yesterday but this is the strongest way I can hold this if I go to this high fence all I have is this where if it starts ejecting if it goes like this if it goes like this I can't do anything but push towards the fence and try to hold onto it so I can actually hold on to it like this if you're not comfortable doing this or let's say your saw doesn't have a fence that suggests exactly square to the table or it's a low fence where you don't feel like you have enough meat to keep this thing from moving back and forth a good way to go about is a build a little saddle jig where it saddle jig would simply be a vertical board similar to this and then you'd run a board across the top and a board across here and then your saddle fence would ride along your your rip fence but for this we just do it this way as long as you have a sharp blade in it in your saw we haven't run into problems so here goes you want to stand there now it'll be fun [Music] [Music] [Laughter] so there's that guy CY Dave comes and and then the other two things that really make this safe safer I have a zero clearance insert when this goes through it's not going to fall down into the saw and then my other little secret weapon I have a push pad that actually pushes not slips on me so we have that so for this particular style of drawer front we now have this groove cut all the way in and we have to remove a little bit of material so that the drawer has somewhere to go so on this I have to actually cut away about a quarter of an inch and I better double-check to make sure what side is front and what side is back so this will be my front I'll actually write on it front genius and now to do this I could set up I could take out my dado set put in a regular saw blade and just make that cut but what realistically is going to happen is all you're going to do is create a little projectile that comes shooting out at you anyway so I'm not going to change my setup I'm just gonna put my sacrificial fence back in and then machine off the whole thing basically turn that off cut into sawdust and not have to deal with little projectiles so for this guy again run the fence right up to the edge of the teeth because I want to go in at about a quarter inch right now this is set a little bit high so you want to make sure to lower this just a little bit so you don't plow through your drawer front I've already messed up because I have the wrong side up so we'll go like that so on this I could push this through with my blocks I'm gonna get a little bit more support if I use my miter gauge [Music] if I want a little bit more support [Music] so that is that guy the only different thing about this on the first store we did we could start with all the sides machine all the sides and then get that rabbit to fit in there on this one you have to just about do the front first and then do the sides one negative thing I find about this style drawer is that the back of it I really don't want to go through all this work to make the back of it look like this I'd want to do the back like I did before where it's just a rabbit so I have yet another setup it's just it's a cool way to do it but it's about two extra setups and you're dealing with one oddball thickness that is different than the rest but if you want that integral that's that's the way to do it on that guy again you notice I haven't run the grooves yet I would make the side in the back to fit in it get the drawer together and then run it the grooves at the last minute so you don't end up like this stack of what should be a drawer but isn't have we talked about anything you wanted to know about so far I have to check my list we talked a little bit about fitting in are you happy with that or I don't see too many blank stares but or this guy yeah well you get a hammer and yes this this style side would fit on this I'd yes that never happens that well I'm done so that style side would fit on that front now one thing you'll notice this this is actually a little trick I do too this side I know is just a little bit more than a half an inch and you know it's not seated all the way down anyway but do you see how that side sticks up just a little bit that's another trick I'll use for fitting because what people see on the outside is the reveal that's that's just the line that they see how it fits in the opening when it's in the drawer you can't really see what's going on so by having this stick out a little bit I can go back through and fine-tune this side I can either plane it or sand it down and kind of fine-tune it for the opening sometimes that means I would have to remove more material at the back than the front sometimes I'm just trying to flush it up and sometimes I'm leaving it alone because I've made everything too small but we got that drunk let's do we talked a little bit about that where did that time a morning is it better hurry up okay one thing I just want to talk to you a little bit about is how to speed things up a little bit and what one way to do that is maybe to use some construction that a lot of people don't think is really classic but is just as strong to tell you the truth I see more and more like kitchen cabinet drawers where their pocket holes screwed together and at first you go oh that's pretty shady craftsmanship but then you start thinking about like what what do you actually see on these drawers because if you just did a butt jointed drawer glued this together and run pocket screws down it you can't really mess it up so it's going to be a nice strong drawer and on this let's say this is a little bit bigger and we're gonna cover this with a false front you never see them anyway it's like well you guys aren't lazy you're actually pretty smart another way to do it that I love to do on drawers is I I like to actually use a domino on it and I I talked about that in several classes this is will pass these around you have to give these a bat back these are like this is like 15 cents I'm handing you this is a domino it's it's a piece of wood so what we're doing is we're cutting a floating tenon or we're cutting a mortise for a floating tenon and that's going to go in there I use Domino's and biscuits kind of interchangeably depending on what project that I'm doing so I could go right down the side of this with biscuits so if I want to hook this together I could do biscuits right down the side it'd be pretty strong it it aligned it really really well for the glue up so things aren't moving around on this one I actually used Domino's there we got that apart so on this board I have those Domino's already installed this one is what that goes into and then you see see my one mistake it happens that's why I have this so I my first class yesterday I was going along and actually had this and I was Domino engaño Domino and or the cutter into the end of my finger and it didn't feel good either so I just want to show you how quick you can go about doing this so for this particular drawer this will be my front I need my sides to go all the way up so if I if I put it together like this when I put my false front on you'd see front the secondary front and then the side I want to run the side all the way up to my false front too high that and all I have to do is mark out where I want these things to go so for this I'm going to clamp this board in my vise like this and then it's a matter of marking out my center points for where I want this thing to go so we're gonna put one here and we're gonna put one here on this side I'm I'm keeping them off the bottom because that's where my groove is gonna go you can measure this out if you want to be fair to everything it looks like I have a few more here and a little wider spacing there it's okay and typically what I'll do is these come in different sizes so this is a size I passed around to you but this is the smallest smaller size that I'm going to use for this one a lot of times on these joints the more of these that you pack in along the width the stronger the joints going to be fine woodworking did an article on tenon strength I don't know how many years ago and the Domino didn't look very good in it because pretty much they did it wasn't a joint this wide by any means but they put like two dominoes that far apart in it and whoa it came right apart and the strength for this if you want the strongest joint possible when you're doing this whether you're doing a domino or you could also do this with a spline just run a dado down in there is just a pack as many of these things in as possible so if I really pack them in what am I gonna get two four six I could get ten across this with with this size but you know at fifteen cents apiece you know six is good enough for who it's for so on this particular one this is about the spacing we're gonna get so it's probably more than enough with this material to these are stronger than the wood around it these are out of beach and this is boxelder so that's not going to be a problem so for the actual machine it looks a lot like a biscuit joiner and instead of the little circular saw blade to cut out pockets for the biscuit footballs it has what basically is a it's a up cut spiral router bit and you can get different sizes to put in this this is the six millimeter for the ones I'm using I need to go down to the 5 millimeter lock this in place plug it in get dust collection all right ready so it spins just like a drill bit or a router bit but then this is wobbling back and forth and I have three settings on the top so right now this setting is it would be a tight mortise side-to-side so it would be like these guys where they just go in tight I can open it up are a little bit or I can make it really really wide and and that's what that's doing so I like to show this because this technology is not going away some people just flat-out don't like Festool I'll agree it's it is not cheap but what I've seen with biscuit joiners throughout the years no one's putting more money or development into biscuit joiners what they're trying you're seeing them rush to the low end of the market where how can we economize these and compete against everyone else that's selling them for almost nothing and when the when the patent runs out on this everyone's going to have one did you notice a few years ago the multi-tool all the sudden everyone happened has one what do you think happened Patton ran out for was it fine finds Patton ran out same thing happened with the biscuit joiner when the lamellas Patton ran out everyone rushed to the market and had a biscuit joiner so it's a it's just a neat thing because you can do stuff like this but you can also do door frames with it for an example I could biscuit this together it's going to be strong it's not going to be quite as strong because I can't put as many biscuits along that edge so it's it's just a fun thing to do if you can avoid running it into your finger so if I'm a little gun-shy here that's what's going on of my depth setting is right on the side so initially I do want this set on 20 millimeters because what I'm doing is I'm cutting a little bit more into the front and back then I am into the sides because if I cut all the way through the sides than I do that and I don't want that so [Music] so I have these guys cut and for this I'll actually glue these in place if I have a bigger Domino or a loose tenon that I'm putting in here I need to actually put quite a bit of glue in for these small ones it's just a little dab so what I do is I just run a little good bit of glue along one face of the mortise run more glue or on the back face and after a few uses you have a pretty good gut feeling for how much is enough glue and how much is too much glue really what I want to do is drive these home and not have glue just spill out all over the place on me so that's putting that part of the joint together now when it comes time to cut the other side I have to stand that up double-check my markings stand this guy up okay this is what I missed the last time set it so the bit doesn't go through the wood and so very quickly I can not get a drawer together maybe now probably never get it apart to actually glue it together but that's how fast you can put that together and so this is something I I really like doing because of course a lot of the stuff I'm building is prototype stuff where you just you don't know what size it is so you can very quickly put that together talking about sizing stuff this is also nice because remember the first drawers I showed you it's like okay how in the world did I fit this to the opening I need to measure the opening subtract an eighth of an inch get the front size subtract for the sides what if I have some joinery do I add a half an inch back do I take a half inch away to a or is it an inch or what do I do with this I can pretty much just measure the opening subtract okay let's say I have an opening of twelve inches and I need an eighth inch to the sides or let's not even make it an eighth inch let's say with this stuff I probably feel like I should do 3/16 of an inch so I can subtract 3/16 of an inch and then go down my tape and say okay subtract the sides I'm at a little over ten and a quarter mark my front and back for ten and a quarter cut them and put them together done and there you don't have to think about adding or subtracting for any joints it's just cut this if I can cut this straight and square it's going to go together I can put a drawer together and I actually fit in the opening this is also really nice it's something I like to when I have to start dealing with drawer guides so when you're doing I forgot to measure to double-check I'm not saying this wrong because I can never remember and it is side-mounted guides typically are half an inch on either side so you have to subtract an inch from the opening and that's assuming that the front of your opening is the same as the back of your opening hopefully it is so it's for this style if I if I had that so let's say I have 12 inches I'd say okay I have 12 inches I need to subtract the thickness of this the thickness of this come up with my drawer front that stuff is nice what is nasty is when you get into the undermount drawer slides which look like this thing and this is what I have on this workbench so see if I can get this drawer to come out so this is the drawer for this workbench and that is what the mount looks like you have these little clips that go to the front and you notice on the bottom this is actually cutaway so the slide can operate into that opening so on this that stays put this moves but then from the side when this pulls out you don't see the slide at all the fun with this guy is all the instructions are in metric so what they'll tell you is take the size of the opening and subtract 9 millimeters and you go thanks for nothing how am I supposed to do that so what I typically do when I get into to stuff like this where I have to subtract goofy numbers is I'll just lay out my my rule and say okay let's say I have a drawer that is 25 inches now I need to subtract 9 millimeters so what I got is is just a little 6-inch we're on one side it's in inches and on the other side it's in millimeters put this up to my 26 and say okay 26 minus 9 in American is 25 and a strong 5 ace and then from that 25 and 5 ace I can subtract my drawer sides and then know what to cut this and to cut this to so that's that's my first recommendation on this stuff if you run into stuff where it's all metric stick with what you know just find a way to convert that very quickly without having to go okay how many millimeters isn't a centimeter and how many centimeters is an inch and I'm going to convert that over and get it there it's just take the numbers off your piece don't worry about converting anything and end up with that number so these drawers are actually dominoed together as well it's 5/8 inch stock instead a 1/2 inch stock and of course if I was going to go back and do this tongue in dado stuff I would have to go okay my sides are this but then I need to add a quarter inch back or so to add to this and then you might end up with a drawer that doesn't always and help to what it actually should be it's the same with with these guys over here sometimes you'll get slides that are a little bit off so you just have to double check before you get into it of course I think it's easier to build a drawer that's a little oversized because if it is I can actually shave a little bit off the side I don't try to run it through the planer but a aggresively sander door you can hand plane it as well if it comes out with a side mounted slide and your opening is too narrow you can always add a shim to either this or inside the case to bring that out as well we had the question yesterday where in the world do I mount a side mounted slide and I don't think there's a right or wrong answer it's it's what you feel comfortable doing you'll see a lot of people mount a side mount right along the bottom and I think they do that because it's the lease obtrusive on a bigger taller drawer I get a little nervous when it's just all the way down on the side because you have a lot dancing around on the top so I'll typically move it up into a center line and I think in a lot of instances a center line is almost easier to deal with than to mount it on the bottom and then try to figure out that offset I can mount a center line here and I can do a center line on my case and then mount the slide right to that point probably the slickest hip I've ever seen for for mounting slides if I have a box without any dividers so I just have a solid wall coming down let's say this is my my box and I need to install a little drawers in it so I just have solid walls coming all the way down and I need to mount these slides I need to get them square and I need to get them even one trick that I saw was you get a piece of plywood you rest your slide on it you screw the side of the wall move this over screw this into this wall take this up and then cut off what you don't need put it in mount the next one down move it over mount the next one down it beats cutting up 12 pieces of wood one for each side of all different lengths and then you can just systematically work your way down and the nice thing with a lot of these things is they're all they all have adjustment in it so if you got them a little bit off you can move the loosen the screws move the slots a little bit get them in there and go so I would say the biggest thing with slides is don't worry about mounting the slides there they're pretty easy to do I mean you look at how many holes are in this thing and you can add more if you want to right so you have a lot of adjustability in this the the big thing I would say is building your drawer as precisely as possible to actually mount this through and actually read the instructions I know it hurts but you have to do it occasionally so that's drawer slides in a nutshell I do also want to talk about solid wood bottoms versus plywood bottoms I typically do a lot of solid bottoms because wood grows on trees in plywood does not so I don't like to pay for anything unless I have to these are this is a built-up bottom and I actually did it with this little tongue and groove plane so I had some leftover softwood and you can kind of see the joint lines of where these are joined up so their tongue and grooved and then all of these boards are are glued together it's tight to the front there's a little bit of a rabbet you might see it more along what would be your left side there's a rabbet so it actually goes in a quarter-inch groove and then there's a space at the bottom so I know this bottom is going to in this dimension it's going to shrink and swell this way it's glued to the front so it can't go anywhere it has to go out the back so this would expand towards the back and contract back towards the front that allows my movement no glue in the sides it's just free-floating in the bottom and then I have I haven't mounted this drawer yet because I don't have enough time this is something I've I kind of worked up to fix a large drawer where the bottom might sag and this isn't anything new this is a classic old cabinet makers trick you have a drawer that's just it's just a normal drawer this is dominoed together as well it's got a groove all the way around but then I have two bottoms in it and a center rail that supports the bottom from sagging on me if I did a plywood bottom on this it would sag like you wouldn't believe that's probably one of the reasons I gravitate towards a solid wood bottom anyway besides that it doesn't cost me anything so this actually you can see it's this stock is about three eighths of an inch thick the the bottom is I think it wasn't quite three-quarters it was maybe five ace so I put most of the meat on the bottom to help port these drawers and then it has a tongue on either end and that tongue fits into the groove that's going all the way around so I had the front glued this into that tongue and then I started sliding the the bottoms in then glue on the the sides in the back these free float as well so on this side if I flip it this way you can kind of see the groove along the bottom of that as well this will allow that to move out the back and hopefully it won't sag on me now the the Box I did first which would be I think I have the remnants of it here actually has a slide in bottom that's not trapped in the back so this bottom is free-floating it's going to be loose in the back to keep this from sagging in the back I might have to put a screw here or because it's a plywood bottom I could also glue when I put this back piece or the back of the drawer down I could actually put a bead of glue there and glue that in and clamp across that face to keep it from moving with a solid bottom I'd want to have it free so it could float all the way around in there maybe again put a screw there but have it in a elongated slot so it could move around on me probably the classic classic drawer joint that all woodworkers look for is the dovetail and dovetails on drawers are a horrible horrible thing but they're so much fun to do and we recently did a tansu have you seen that cover with the stair step and looking thing it's if after class it's right out in our galleries so if you go out this door and halfway down the hall it's sitting there almost all of it is there it's just missing one drawer and where did I put that drawer okay so Kevin's designing this thing and I know it's not going to be fun to make because he wants me to build it and he goes well I want to do dovetail drawers and I said okay you know how do we go about this in a way to to make it look good but actually have it be able to be achievable because what is it it's a at least five six drawers and they're not very deep so in talking about like anti tip on drawers the first drawers I did you notice how I move the back up on it that's kind of my anti tip I have a solid side so you can pull it out to that point and it doesn't fall out of the opening with these guys we we moved it all the way to the the corners so it comes all the front goes all the way to the front and the back goes all the way to the back this is typically something I'll do if I do a drawer slide or a guide where I'm not worried about pulling the drawer all the way out and it falling out this cabinets only like fourteen and a half inches deep so he had to move the front in the back all the way to the edges just so you'd be able to put something in this drawer this style drawer I'd say more is for when you want to use it you pull the whole drawer out and then when you're done you put the whole drawer back in so we dip dovetails on this guy but we machined them all and we actually cut these at the table saw typically what you'll see is if you want to do dovetails people say well you can only do it with hand tools so let me sell you a thousand dollar kit of hand tools and you can make one corner and then you know go do something else for a while so what we did was we actually figured out how to cut the pins with a table saw and we did the tails with a bandsaw so the pins on this are on the front and on the back so the pins are the little part that you can see endgrain right there the tails are going to be on the side and those are tails are a little more evident because they're they're shaped like a bird tail so this is a it seemed like a good idea at the time it still took a while to machine all these out if I did it again I wouldn't put dovetails on the back you put dovetails on the front so when you pull the front out the the rest of the drawer comes with it and you can see it you're never gonna see that but it's a I guess it's one of those little things where I know it's there but no one else will ever know it's there so I'll pass this around the other thing I wanted to show you on this when you look at the bottom there's a little rabbit right there and that's for the reveal because when you think about this drawer sitting in the opening you have a sixteenth of an inch there and 1/16 of an inch there and a sixteenth of an inch there but it's flush on the bottom so you cut that little bit of a rabbet in the bottom and it provides that reveal all the way around I didn't cut it all the way through it's just about a halfway through that that piece the rabbit I just did it on the table saw I got the whole drawer done and as I'm fitting it I just cut that went right through on the table saw typically when I put drawers together I try to be as precise as I can in all the construction of it cutting up the pieces measuring it getting it together try to get the box together as square as I can then put it in the opening and make any little adjustments that I need to do one thing I do want to warn you about I had a drawer this will be my example drawer is okay I'm gluing a drawer together so on this drawer I'd actually have to put clamps both ways because the coroner's are rabbited so I need clamps to hold the sides to the fronts but then I also need clamps this way to hold them tight to those rabbits so I'm putting the drawer together I measure corner to corner my measurements off so then I go okay well I'm gonna bring this together so I'm going to put a clamp across these corners and pull it together you can get into trouble when you do that on on anything because what usually happens when you have all this joinery and you have a bottom in is you don't pull it into square what you do is you pull those two corners hi so you end up with a drawer that's tippy so I'll just stick this in so let's say I pulled those corners up what I did was I just made it do this I didn't pull it into square I what I did was I pulled those corners hi and now the drawer isn't sitting flat in its opening so it doesn't have to be perfectly square all the time to go into an opening it can go in at an angle as long as it ends up with the face doing whatever you want to do but that's one thing I always check as well as get this on a flat surface and make sure this thing doesn't tip all over the place because that can cause a lot of problems when just for fitting let alone in the lifetime of a drawer if you do have a high corner what I'm typically doing is taking a block plane shaving off the two high spots getting it back and saying okay how are we doing making any more adjustments and getting it down once I get it flat on the bottom then I start checking it in the opening do I need to shave anything off the sides to do it this is another fast way to do a drawer instead of butt joints we've done rabbits on the corners and then after the the glue is dried we've gone through and pinned the corners with just wooden dowels these are maple dowels on a pine drawer the bottom on this is trapped so we did a Baltic birch bottom you could do the same thing also with the Domino if you think about it if you can glue this together carefully you could come in with this and just plunge all the way through the side so instead of these dots you'd see that sticking through the side as well so that's a quick and fast way to do it too so let's oh I need this you want to do dovetails this is my press so we want to do a half-blind dovetail on the table saw this is what we'll end up with so this would be a sample drawer front with the dovetails cut into it to achieve this you know I can't stop the saw at a perfect 90 degree angle so what we do is we actually Reese off the face and I have a board in the clamps that's been Reese on off so here's the face for that this started out just as a board took it to the bandsaw Reid saw the face off what's the first thing you notice about that it is not flat at all if you want to try this technique what I would encourage you to do is resaw it off get this done as fast as you can and get this cooed back on don't come back in two months because this is going to be this is messed up so I think I can get away with it when I glue this I like to use my parallel jaw wooden clamps and you can kind of see the marks across it I don't have to put calls on this to try to distribute the pressure of the clamp I just put it in there and there's clamping pressure almost all the way across here so this was Reese on on the bandsaw as well I don't try to clean that up if your bandsaw wobbles a little bit as you do it it actually works to your benefit because when you put it back together it's a mirror image and it locks so that helps you once you get glue on there if it's really smooth it can really shake up on you and this is an old trick - this is this is an old cabinet makers trick where what they'd actually do it doesn't matter if it's power tools or hand tools it's faster to cut through dovetails like this than it is to try to cut something where it's all together because you can't saw it at all you can saw a little bit and it ends up being a lot of chisel work with this method another thing that you saw guys would do is they'd use let's say I'm making it out of walnut I'd use a plain Jane walnut board here and then maybe this board would be burl or crotch figure walnut glue that on the front and then you go well how in the world did you cut dovetails on a piece of burl it's just the the actual veneer on the front so we have this part this I cut yesterday and I actually have this marked out so what I'll do is I'll just roughly mark out my pin locations all I did was I put a square on it mark those lines so on this guy what I pretty much want to do is leave these four little pins and I want to remove the material in between them and I'll do that with the dado set it at the table saw so we don't need this now the one thing I forgot was my tall fence has anyone seen a piece of wood with two holes in it here little fence how about we start a new fence this is my zero clearance fence for miters so I have this big beautiful miter gauge that is great for making 90-degree cuts it's great for miters too but for a lot of the goofy stuff I do I just use a little miter gauge this is an Inc incra yeah so I'm saying that right anchor 120 someone if someone told me yesterday they were on Amazon buying one already but this is one I use for for a lot of miters and just kind of general purpose stuff at the table saw I like it because it does it has a lot of adjustability but it doesn't have too much where you're worrying about am I on up by a tenth of a degree it's I'm either on 0 or I'm not on 0 and it's also easy with these slots to attach different things to it so for this I want to put on a little taller fence so I have zero clearance back here but I also have something to hold on to so I'm gonna put that about right there and then just screw this into place okay so for these guys actually if I had it set up like this and I was cutting straight across I'd be cutting box joints I want to tip this ten degrees so for the first cut I'm gonna make I'm going to tip it 10 degrees to my left and then the next cut I'm going to tip it 10 degrees to the right just to cut that angled shape of the dovetails so when you're doing this after you've done it for a little while it isn't bad to do it by hand where you're just holding it with your fingers moving it over the board you don't really don't get into trouble what I'll try not to do usually is cut through and then pull it back it's when I pull it back and it hits these teeth going against me that stuff wants to move so typically I'll move it across pick it up bring it back not so worried about the miter gauge because that's trapped in the table slot if you don't feel comfortable about it and you're just getting started with this one thing you can do is is obviously just put a clamp across here clamp it to the fence then you can put your hands wherever you want move it across the only negative thing then is it it does take a little bit longer because once you get over here you either pick up the whole thing or you release the clamp get this move it you have a spinning blade so again sometimes over doing this can get you into trouble because you have so much going on that you forget that the table saw is actually turned on so I'm just gonna do it like this do it quick to set the blade height I am gonna use are these my this is my side so to set the blade height on this again I use the side that tells me how high up I need to go into the front of the front to create that joint right there okay Oh also I have zero clearance so I know if I put this line on the left side there that's where the blades going to contact it same with this other side what I'm cutting there I can put the line right on that point where the blade is relieved a slot and my my insert and so that's how I'm lining it up [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] now that I have that machine away and I have both sides done I would actually return this to the clamps get some glue on here really make sure that I get a nice amount of glue on these pins before I glue the front on make sure yep and just like that so that would go in the clamps all right now with the magic of TV we're already done and now we have to cut the actual tails that go in the side boards one thing I should point out too when we were developing these dovetails we Kevin just did okay ongoing dovetails usually my groove for my bottom is a quarter and a quarter inch up from the bottom a lot of times I run that a little bit higher than that I figure that the the more meat you get between the bottom and the end the actual bottom the stronger that is so if I did my groove an eighth inch from the bottom unless I really good the whole thing in there it's probably just going to flake away so he originally drew it in at a quarter inch on the bottom if I did that on this I would actually plow into that bottom pin so in the plans we actually had to move the groove up to 3/8 of an inch so that's something you have to think about - typically on this I would do all the machining on this get it together and then figure out where that groove is so it doesn't go through the the joinery the groove can go through the pin or the it can go through the tail because that goes in and you're never going to see it to transfer this line now what I would typically do is use a marking gauge to mark a base line so this is a wheel marking gauge and to set this what I'm going to do is set the fence against the inside face of the board run the wheel up to the bottom of the joint and lock that in place then once I have that measurement I can scribe it across the the faces of this board and the ends as well so what I'm doing is I'm just pulling this to scribe a line scribe along along the end that has to be cut away Subscribe line here and the best thing is if you have these scribe lines on everyone will think you did it by hand even IKEA has that one figured out if you are having a hard time seeing those scribe lines a trick I also use is fill in the line with lead so I get a pretty hard lead pencil this is a 5 H get it sharpened down to a nice point put it down in that line and just lightly pull across so what I'm basically doing is using that as a guide just a kind of colored in with a little bit of lead so I can actually see what's going on right there run it there as well now I can transfer this so what I typically do the reason I want to have that line is I want to bring the face of this board right on to that line tight to the bottom I at this point don't care what's going on with the top hold that down and then just trace or scribe the locations of those dovetails this one's gonna be a little bit of a problem child if those lines are a little bit let's call them drunk go back with a rule or a straightedge and figure out where it's supposed to be based on what looks the most straight go back through and get a nice line struck on that now when it comes time to cutting this it is can be done by hand but another fast way to do it is at the bandsaw so I have these lines I'm just going to freehand cut them at the bandsaw so I'm going to cut here cut here then to remove the bottom I could make a series of cut and cuts and kind of wolly that out another way to do it would be just to chisel it out as well the one thing we found is when you go to the bandsaw we just resaw the faces off right so you have an aggressive blade in there when you start cutting this little stuff don't do it with a resaw blade because it goes like this and you have a little hard problem so at that point most Mord workers would go buy a second bandsaw rather than change the blade in the one that they actually put together I do the same thing it's like nope nope nope nope not not changing the blade not going to do it but so we have that so on these guys kind of the cool thing is you're using a machine to to cut what look like hand-cut dovetails because you could obviously go through and measure this out but you could have a little variability in the spacing as well so when you get done it it looks hand done but you've taken a lot of the labor out of it I typically don't do too much with a dovetail jig or a dovetail machine because they're all different I'm still my marvel at the people who can use like the lead jig where they actually don't have to read the manual for two days before trying to do something on it and you know I'm not not a big fan of the fists fixed spaced ones because with those you're stuck to fixed you know it's like well I can only make my drawer five and five five eighths of an inch so now I have to redesigned my whole cabinet with this it's just you walk up and you say what sized roar do I need cut that drawer face cut the joints to where I want them and then describe the side to fit and it'll go right together so that's how we did those guys on the on the tansu oh boy run out of time Oh like that Oh to cut those so on these guys if I could go back and cut it at the table sauce so I've been cutting these at 10 degrees I'm pretty confident I could do that if I tip the blade to 10 degrees the only negative thing is the way this thing is angled I don't get into the corner does that make sense so when I get my blade extend this line okay so when my blade comes I never get into these far corners I would have to do that as handwork but I you certainly could do that you actually find some production people they will grind a custom blade at this 10 degree or what or whatever degree angle they're using it have a right blade and a left Boyd and so they can cut right up into the corner right up into the corner and then they either nibble this out or maybe chisel it out the other negative thing on the table saw is if your spacing here isn't wide enough you can't get the blade in there so if you make these pins really really small like you look at some of these where the head of the pin is almost narrower than your table saw blade you can get into problems there as well and besides my table saw is a dado had set in and I'm not changing that out for anybody so it's it what I want to stress is do what works for you what I actually found was they wouldn't let me go buy a new band so it was faster for me to cut these by hands so I got my little dovetail saw put him in the vise cut that out not a not a big deal at all for me it was actually one of the more enjoyable parts of the process but yeah yeah I'd say with all this take what what you think would work and apply that to your own situation and run with it kitchen drawer you just make one of these drawers and put it in a kitchen and going back to you know putting it together obviously a lot of times in a kitchen you are using a drawer guide so you can get away I mean a little bit with wood selection again I see a lot of maple going into kitchen drawers these days I think it's just part of the clean look and the the one thing I would do with a kitchen drawer is I would design it so it didn't have a wooden bottom I'd glue in a plywood bottom on the thing get the whole thing glued together as tight as I could you don't have to worry about tipping because with a drawer guide you could put the front to the front and the back to the back and then what I would worry about the most with a like a kitchen drawer or a bathroom drawer is getting a good finish on it that's going to be water resistant whether it's oil-based poly or are you using like a pre catalyzed lacquer just getting that thing so moisture isn't going to hit it and and do weird things to it and we did talk about dovetails so I'd call the dovetail the classic and you you you look at a lot of old pieces of furniture people did some crazy crazy things but you know the dovetail is what at least we look for isn't it we the worst customers ever at a furniture store because you pull out all the drawers you crawl underneath it oh yeah I see where you cheated and you know normal people don't do that they're just looking at how it looks from the outside so any questions at this point good okay you

Channel: WOOD magazine

Views: 1,096,287

Keywords: WOOD magazine, woodworking, how-to, project, plan, carpentry, tool, technique, saw, band, cabinetry, cabinet, making, make, build, drawer, box, slide, runner, joinery, joint, stock, bottoms, festool, dovetail

Id: iS7STRDOs4A

Length: 113min 58sec (6838 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 12 2018