Chest Of Drawers

this is the Hancock Shaker Village with for a hundred and seventy years a religious order of 300 people live the communal life working and farming the land and creating some of the most remarkable furniture I've ever seen and back in that five-story building appropriately called the brick dwelling is where they took their meals and slept the rooms are immaculate it's almost like they haven't even left come on well after a hard day's work out here at the Hancock Shaker Village the brothers and sisters would retire to this level the brothers coming up this staircase and staying on this side of the hallway and the sisters coming up this staircase and staying on this side of the hallway now there were several retiring rooms up on this floor this one was set up for four brothers and I'd like to read you one of the rules all should retire to rest in the fear of God without any plane or boisterous laughing and the thing I like the most and lies straight let's take a look inside in almost every room in this building you'll find one of these a little wood stove and I'm sure that was a welcomed amenity on those cold winter nights here in western Massachusetts especially before you had to jump into bed boy in a bed that doesn't feel very comfortable to me but you have to remember these people worked very hard during the day and when it was time for them to sack out I guess they didn't need as much comfort as we demand and look over here a classic a shaker box oval-shaped and made from very thin pieces of wood but it's sitting on a beautiful chest of drawers the top pumpkin pine full with a 24-inch board and the side to another full with wood very nicely proportioned look at the front of it two small drawers at the top and then the full width drawers get wider and wider as we move down and here's something I have never seen before two more smaller drawers down at the bottom and they went even one step further they suspended another drawer under the base what now look at this base it's a separate unit really that the whole chest sits on and the corners have been dovetail and that's the beauty as well as strength let's see if they did the dovetails to the drawers sure enough all beautifully hand cut dovetails a sign of true craftsmanship also note that on the front of the draw there's a little lip here rounded edge the only decorative detail the shakers really didn't believe in much decoration really function was the important thing to them each drawer has a lip on the sides and the top but not on the bottom and let's take a look inside fairly simple a wooden frame for the draw to slide on and that's been led into these side boards and I'm sure dado has been chiseled in there stopping just short of this front so that you get this kind of joint I think there's a lot of good ideas in this chest so maybe I should take some measurements the materials that I need for my chest of drawers are several pieces of ponderosa pine 1 by 12 1 by 10 1 by 8 and 1 by 6 in varying lengths and a sheet of quarter-inch luan plywood which will be for the draw bottoms and the back of the chest two drawers now the only difficult thing in building this chest of drawers is finding the half-inch stock for the draw construction the Front's a three-quarter inch material but the sides and the back or half inch pine now you might be able to find some at your home center already milled up but it's very difficult to find the Shakers would be horrified but you could substitute some half-inch plywood the only problem with it is that sometimes it might have some voids in it and if you want to not get into that problem you're gonna have to spend a little bit more money and buy cabinet grade plywood which doesn't have voids and several more laminations the other alternative is to rip the stock on your table size now even here this is one of my pieces for the draw if I make one pass with the blade at maximum height it'll cut this much and on the second pass it'll cut this much which means I have a whole area that I can't rip down a half inch so that means I'd have to rip smaller pieces and somehow glue them up but here in the shop I've got a surface planer now this machine does two things that'll smooth the surface of a board as well as reduce its thickness so I'm going to take some 3/4 inch stock and by making several passes through the planer reduce it to half-inch watch first thing that I did to start my chest of drawers was to glue up some stock for the sides and for the top and unlike the drawers where I wanted single pieces for the top I want to use several pieces and in this case four boards glued together and believe I'm not this is going to give me more stability and strength and over here I have two pieces that have been glued up for the sides of the chest of drawers and notice how I've alternated the grain for that greater stability now the first thing that I'm actually going to build are the draw frames and that's these pieces on which the drawers ride and if you were to take one out of the chest you would see that it's assembled with just a simple tongue and groove construction I'll start out by making the tongue in the long pieces and I've set up the table saw with a dado blade which can be adjusted for varying widths it's two blades and I've set it up so it'll be exactly in the center of this piece of stock quarter inch wide and we'll cut a half inch depth to join the short pieces to the long pieces I need to make a tongue that fits into the groove like this now to do that I've changed a set up on the saw a little bit I've widened the dado head cutter to take a wider path and I've put a gauge block on because I'm using the RIP fence in combination with the t-square and I don't want any kickback or bind up yet and by running each piece through and flipping it I'll get a time now it's just a matter of putting some glue on each of the joints sticking them together you know because I'm building five of these frames and I want them to all come out exactly the same it's worth building a little jig for assembly and you can see I just took a scrap piece of plywood here and screwed some cleats on so that I ended up with a perfect 90 degree angle here and I know that when I lay each piece in the frame each frame into the jig that it'll be perfectly square and I just secure each joint with a little Brad until the glue dries up and now to join the frames to the side of my drawer case I'm gonna use a couple different types of joints this is called a rabbet joint and I'll use this at the top and the bottom of the case and for the intermediate frames I'll use what's called a dado joint now notice how I've stopped removing material about 3/4 of an inch from the front of the side and that's because I want this nice clean butt joint type of look rather than having the dado show through the end of the piece of wood now I'll do that on the table saw with the dado head set in place and a piece of wood here to protect the blade from the metal fence and I've put two marks here which are indicators which will show me we had to start and stop so that I'll get that 3/4 inch remaining on the front of the piece okay one final rabbit in the side pieces 3/8 by 3/8 and I'll show you what that's for we want to be able to recess the plywood in the back of the cabinet and that'll allow us to set that in now there's one more thing that has to be done to these side pieces all the rabbits and dados that we've made have to be chiseled out so that they're square and I'll just do that with an ordinary chisel or one final operation while I've still got the dado set up in the saw is to make this knotch and that allows me to put the frames in behind the blind a toe pocket like that so now a little bit of glue some nails and we can start to see what this chest of drawers is gonna look like now the glue is really what holds this together you want to think of these nails it's just little miniature clamps before I glue the back on I'm gonna check the diagonal measurements and since these are equal I know the case is squid and now I can nail my plywood in place this little piece of wood separates the two top drawers and speaking of drawers we're ready for some drawer construction we want to show you a little detail on all the drawers in our chests on the front piece of the drawer there's a lip so that when the drawer is set in the case it fits right up against the frame like that but to do that I use my table saw again with the dado head set in place and I'll do each end and the top of each drawer front let's take another look at our draw construction you notice that the sides are connected to the front with this dovetail joinery and this is not only aesthetic but also serves a purpose of holding the draw together an ordinary joint constant poling of the draw would fall apart but with these wedge shapes of the dovetail there's no way that that's ever going to pull apart it will last forever what's in the old days those will cut with a chisel and hand-sized but today in the shop I can cut the same dovetail in a few seconds with a router the router has a carbide tip dovetailing bit and this little collar right here which will ride in my dovetailing jig now I've installed the side of my draw and the front of my draw and if I follow the instructions correctly for my template I get a perfect dovetail every time okay now the instructions call for me to remove the side piece make an adjustment to the top gauge and make another pass on that front piece okay now we can unclamp the whole thing and see how it fits perfect now let's take a look at how the sides are joined to the back of the cabinet just a simple dado joint with a little glue and some nails and I'll do the dado joint right here over on the table saw with a gauge block and the dado head being careful to take my side pieces with the dovetails this being the outside this being the inside of the draw placing the inside down and making my group and now for the last dado of the day this one right here and that helps support our plywood bottom for the draw now I'll do that to both sides and the front now I've got my router table set up here with the router mounted underneath and a quarter inch rounding over bit now I'm going to round over all four edges of my draw front being sure to do the edge grain first to minimize chipping on a finished edge now that is never going to come apart and now our plywood bottom which just slides into the quarter-inch dedos and doesn't get any glue just sits in there loose now the back does get glued and nailed together okay now I'll check the draw four square by taking diagonal measurements with those equal I can secure the plywood to the back of the draw and notice that the plywood runs over the back of the draw now our chest of drawers is supported by a base and this does two things it holds the draw case up so the bottom draw want be right on the floor and it's been carved out so it's easy to clean underneath it also on the corners we use the dovetail construction not only for strength but for beauty now I'll do the dovetailing for my base again with the dovetail template and I want the dovetail joints to show on the front of my base so I've positioned the pieces differently than we did with the on the draw this is now the front and this is the side all right with the bass loosely assembled I'm ready to lay out for the cutouts and I made a template so that they'll all match now on the side it's just a simple matter of marking from each edge as they intersect in the middle but on the front I'll have to mark the arkad on each side and then I'll connect two points together using a straight edge frankly it's quite a luxury to have a bandsaw like this in the shop but it sure does a great job with the assembly together and sanded I'm ready to put these cleats down which will actually support the draw case now this little molding detail is done with the router table fitted with a coving bit okay a little bit of glue and I'm ready to fasten the basin to the bottom of the draw case and I'll do that with just a few screws now this bothers me right here this is the back of the base and this is a little fragile standing on its own so I'm going to put these angled blocks in here to help support it they won't be seen from the front of a chest of drawers one of the last things I have to do is cut my top to size I'm gonna use my homemade panel cutter which is nothing more than a big t-square we have pre drilled some holes to fasten the top and in the center it's just a regular hole but in the front and the back I've got a slot and that'll allow the top to expand and contract with changes in humidity so now at the top flush with the back of the case and overhanging the sides about an inch I'm ready to fasten it down with some regular screws well I think that adds a nice little touch to our top don't you I did that with my router and a half-inch beating bit now it's some time for some fine sanding and we'll be ready to put some finish on it well before I do any staining of a project I want to make up some samples and that's what I did here I took a piece of pine that's similar to the material that was the case was built out of and on this side I put some stain just on the raw pine untreated and you can see how dark and blotchy it is but over on this side I prepared the wood first by using a pre stain sealer and then I put the stain on and you can see the effect it's a much more uniform staining job and that's the color I want so the next step is to put the pre-stain sealer on all the display surfaces well the color of the stain that I've chosen for the chest of drawers is sort of a honey maple I can put it on with either a brush or a rag I'm using a brush here just giving it a nice even coat and depending on how long I leave this sit on here and how much I rub it when I take off the excess will really determine the final color well now that my stain has dried I'm putting on a sanding sealer this will dry quickly and hopefully it won't pick up too much dust and this will provide me with the perfect foundation for my final coats of polyurethane and now I'm ready to put the first coat of satin finished polyurethane well after a final sanding I'm ready for the last coat of polyurethane which is going to give me a durable attractive finish for many years

Channel: Boby Wood

Views: 13,169

Rating: 4.8644066 out of 5

Keywords: Chest Of Drawers, Ponderosa pine, build a chest, build a chest of drawers, wood, cut and plane the wood, Drawers, design of chest of drawers, build out of wood

Id: Tsbcj9KUjn0

Length: 23min 33sec (1413 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 22 2014