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how do you make a drawer disappear [Music] I have to admit it's really entertaining to me how divisive this mug is there's a lot of people who are very turned off by it and I get it but I do love it it's just it's it's funky it's weird so here we are now I am in the midst of starting a new commission without getting into too much detail about this particular project in this video it's essentially a small chest or a big box depending on how you want to look at it and in the front of this box there's a drawer and I think what I want to do is to have that drawer be a continuous grain drawer front so that the drawer essentially disappears into the box this is a very common technique this is a technique that you can use to elevate your work to a new level of craftsmanship but the question I get from a lot of beginners slash intermediate Woodworkers is how do you do that this is kind of black magic if you don't really know how to do it so I want to walk you through this step by step here's what I've got at the moment I've got the front of my chest which I've already done done the basic glue up and I've got my CAD program where I have my rough design now this is actually more detailed than I ever do in CAD but because there are so many intricate and moving Parts I wanted to make sure that I had measurements in detail joinery for each of those components because I don't want to be guessing at that particular aspect of this as I'm making so the first thing I've done is I've made the front of my chest oversized by about an inch in width and an inch and a half to two inches in length so I have a little bit of wiggle room to play with so my first step in actually getting my drawer face cut out is to Mark the final dimensions of my piece in the mark the location of my drawer face based on my SketchUp model alright so that part is simple enough I've marked the final width of my front based off of my Center Line where this is roughly book Matched so I know that this is seven and a half inches out to the bottom of my front from there I've marked the ends of my pieces and that is really just based on visuals there's nothing here that is determining or predetermining where the ends of that piece needs to be and once I have the outline of the front piece then I can mark the location of my drawer front I know my drawer front is one and three quarters up from the bottom of my box I know I have a half inch lip over here and so this becomes two and a quarter and then I know my drawer face is three inches wide so this becomes five and a quarter now you might be asking yourself right now why give myself an extra half inch of width so I have to do more math when I'm figuring out the location of my drawer front and that's a fair question the thing is when I go to remove this drawer front I'm going to make two cuts at the table saw table saw blade is generally an eighth of an inch thick so if I'm going to make two cuts and glue it back together and still maintain the appropriate width of this piece it needs to be a minimum of a quarter inch wider than its final thickness now I should also mention this is over dimension in both width and thickness still I still got about a 16th of of an inch to take down in thickness and the reason that is like that at this moment is so that once I get it all glued up and back together I can run it through the thicknesser and flatten any surfaces and misalignments in the glue up this is wider than my jointer so I can't go back and Joint it nor that I know that I would even if I could because I'm going to have this kind of skinny piece flopping in the breeze over here so instead I'm just going to make sure that my glue ups are absolutely Immaculate that there's no misalignment issues at all that it is nice and flat and I can just run it through the thickness or no problem now all of that is great in theory but let's make some cuts and see what kind of results we actually get [Music] thank you [Applause] [Music] [Applause] now here's an important thing to point out real quick because I want to keep the drawer face at a full three inches and I'm using the same reference Edge for both Cuts I'm going to take my measurement to opposite sides of the blade what that means is for my first cut I'm going to measure five and a quarter inches to the interior of the blade so that I keep this whole section of wood let me get that out of the way for the second cut I want this section of the wood to stay at three inches now I could flip this around and make my cut three inches to the interior the blade sure but I want to keep this same reference heads against the fence just in case something goes wrong so that means I know this is two and a quarter up to my line so I'm going to measure two and a quarter to the outside of my blade so that my waist material is on the box front not on the drawer face so I'm going to go ahead and take my measurement two and a quarter inches to the outside of my Blade Set my fence and now I can make my cut [Music] all right so we've got all three components cut now you'll notice that first seem beautiful there's nothing wrong with it it's perfect the second seam however a little bit of Wiggle in there now at this point you may be inclined to freak out and be like oh my God this is ruined what am I gonna do nothing's ever gonna work deep breaths deep breaths it's gonna be fine we have that wiggle room in width on both the top and the bottom pieces there's no way to know at this particular moment whether it's the drawer piece or the bottom piece that's a little bit warped my guess is it's the bottom piece because these boards did have a little bit of tension in them when I started Milling them up it's not surprising that this piece would want a banana a little bit once I cut it off so we're gonna check that at the jointer the first thing however I'm going to do is remove my drawer face so I'm not removing material from my drawer face itself it remains a perfect three inches wide and then if it is this piece I'm going to try to remove only the section that is a little bit warped and make that as flat a surface as possible I could alternatively just force this flat when I glue it up and then flatten it out and Joint it on the bottom after that is an option if it gets a little bit hairy but first we're going to try to do it the right way so let's cut this drawer face off and then dress these joints foreign [Music] all right so I've got all four components cut out and now we need to address this improper scene here and see what the actual problem is by tilting these up and placing them on a flat surface I can see that this seam is pretty good might have the tiniest little bit of convexity to it same with this seam this seam overall nice and flat less than the thickness of a piece of paper which both of those can clamp out I'm not worried about those at all our drawer face we're not going to worry at all about right now this joint this is interesting this is the section for our drawer front which is going to get reblued this does have a not insubstantial rock to it so something happened in the dressing of that joint where I got a little bit of a convexity on the underside of this piece that's better than a concavity because I can remove the section that's causing the rock without touching my two key Dimensions especially down by the drawer face so I think what I'm going to do is I'm going to take a hand plane to this piece and see if I can't redress this surface now while I'm doing that and before I actually glue up I am going to redress both of these surfaces as well because remember where this drawer face is let's get this out of here where this drawer face is when you take the drawer out you are going to see these two surfaces so you want to make sure that they're good and clean and finished before you glue up because it's going to be a lot easier to dress them now so I'm going to hand plane all of these surfaces as little as possible I want to remove as little material as I possibly can and then I'm going to go ahead and get ready for the glue up foreign [Music] with our joints dressed I went ahead and did a dry clamp just to make sure all of our seams closed up because if there's any Gap or glue line on the front of this piece it's really going to ruin the effect for the entire piece now when I do this actual glue up obviously I'm paying attention to making sure that things are flush and closed up but also I'm going to use a straight edge to make sure that it's remaining flat that I'm not gluing a bow or a cup into this piece of wood because I've only got a 16th to remove after this is all glued up so it all looks good it's closing up nicely and it's staying flat so let's go ahead and get this thing glued [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] everything is looking good my seams are closed up nicely the drawer front fits all of my Grain Lines lined up pretty well in spite of the fact that there's a lot of movement to those pieces the critical measurements where the drawer face starts is clean and accurate everything else is pretty well adjustable as it were also look who's back for another visit he's chilling he's living life but I'm gonna let this sit in clamps for an hour or so and then I'm going to take it out make sure everything looks good and looks clean before I Mill it to final thickness [Music] looks pretty good thank you foreign everything is cleaned up and milled flat so let's see what it looks like now looking at my Grain Lines and at my seams I'm really happy with the way that this turned out it's clean it's tight you're not going to notice that seam on this face unless you're actively looking for it in the only couple of places where you can really actually locate it are where the grain moves really quickly and you get a misalignment even over the distance of an eighth of an inch so you got one grain misalignment over here you've got another one right here but that's it and again unless this is something you're actively looking for and you know is already there you're not going to pick that up with your eye if this was perfectly riffs on material or perfectly quartered material it would just be completely gone but that's not the nature of the material I chose so this is where we're at and all things considered this is perfectly acceptable so the last thing we need to check is how the drawer actually fits oh yeah oh yeah it sounds good now couple of things number one the drawer face is of course a little bit thicker right now because I did Mill down the front and not the drawer face yet I can take care of that with a hand plane or build a jig to Mill that down the thickness later on I'm not worried about that now the other question is will this drawer face actually disappear into the front no for a couple of reasons number one because it's solid wood so I'm going to need to give this room to expand and contract which means I'm going to need to take Material off of the top of that especially because this project is going down to Florida where it's inevitably going to be more humid than it is in Philadelphia so the nature of it being solid wood in and of itself is going to negate any ability to really make this thing disappear into the face as it were the second reason it won't disappear is because I always put a like chamfer around those edges just so that they're more comfortable to touch kind of highlights where that drawer is and I don't mind that look it's still going to blend into the face of the chest really nicely it's not going to stand out as though it's a different piece of wood now if I wanted it to completely blend in I would have to veneer that face I would have to create a stable drawer front with veneers so that there could be no gap which is possible it's just not the thing I want to do now the last thing I'll say about this is I'm not even going to use this giraffe front I don't want to use a continuous grain Maple drawer front because the client specifically asked for some Pizzazz on the outside I got them to agree to a little bit more subtlety a little bit more quieter approach to the exterior and a bit more decoration on the interior however I am going to give them a little bit of pizzazz on the outside by using a contrasting drawer front here and so I've got this piece of gummy Cherry with a nice figure in it which is going to look great the client for whom this is being built is a redhead so I wanted to tie in a little cherry on there just to you know a little knot a nod to the personal things the reason I think this is going to upset some people is because this whole video is about how to get a continuous grain drawer front however the process for this particular application would be identical even if I wasn't using a continuous grain drawer front because I still need to cut out a square hole in this front so in order to do that I would follow the exact same steps all I'm going to do is replace it with this drawer front which I will cut size later on once I get it milled all down to final thickness so that's the situation I just wanted to be upfront about that now so that later when you see the project build video you're not screaming at your television saying that I didn't use that same drawer front so that friends as they say is that I hope this was helpful I hope it was educational I hope it was at least mildly entertaining and maybe this is a technique you employ in a future project just to bring that level of craftsmanship and design up one more Notch so I am going to leave this as is for the day get things in stickers and steal out of here because I've been promising Huckleberry we'd go for a hike for the last several hours and he has just been patiently waiting so I'm gonna go do that friends and in the meantime I'll see you all next week cheers what do you say bubba what do you say I think it's time to go for a hike huh [Music]

Channel: ENCurtis

Views: 96,792

Keywords: Woodworking, fine woodworking, woodworking techniques, table saw sled, woodworking for beginners, beginner woodworking projects, woodworking basics, how to make drawers, how to make pocket hole drawers, how to make easy shop drawers, easy diy drawers, how to build a drawer, how to build drawers, how to build wood drawers, wooden drawers, blum undermount slides, how to build a drawer cabinet, drawer front, drawer front diy, drawer front woodworking, Erik Curtis, Encurtis

Id: 12G_7-37hpk

Length: 17min 30sec (1050 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 03 2023