The Quarter-Quarter-Quarter Drawer System

hey I'm Gary Katz from this is carpentry magazine and the Katz road show we published an article well years ago written by Stephen Phipps and I think Steve published the same article in jlc magazine at one point in order closed on the quarter quarter quarter system that's what Steve called it it's a system for making drawers and boxes you cut a dado on one side you cut a rabbet in the other and you get a lock joint and this would be the front of your drawer and this would be the side of your drawer so can the front can never ever come off a really great thing about the quarter quarter quarter system is you make all your cuts every single one with exactly the same setup including cutting a groove in the bottom edge of the drawer on the inside of the sides in the front for a quarter inch drawer bottom and if you want to you can even make a 1/2 inch drawer bottom with exactly the same setup I mean this kind of stuff really excites me I'm not really a woodworker I'm a production finished carpenter I have to make a lot of cabinets and drawers have always been a pain in the neck for me I don't know how to dovetail yet maybe before I'm 70 I'll learn but I'm running out of time but boy this system works really well and the drawers are bulletproof you cannot take them apart let me show you how this works first thing I'll do is I'll run some pieces through so I can show you how to make the cuts and then I'll back up and I'll show you how to do this setup so I have already pre-cut the pieces I've got two sides I always make the sides the full length of the drawer the depth of the drawer however you want to think about it and I've got the ends cut to the front and the back ends I make the ends a half inch shorter because a quarter and a quarter has to fit inside the data first cut I like to make is on the sides to the size of the easy they get a date all right each end [Music] then they get it glued in the bottom edge for the toy you'll notice I always use push blocks when I run up sides there's a pretty long and you got to make sure that they're in contact with the table saw all the way in order to get a consistent cut if the groove isn't consistently your drawer bottom is not gonna fit in there that's a bummer to find out later so that is the two sides they're actually the easiest pieces of the cut because all the grooves and the dedos are in the same face I've got the dado for the two ends and I've got the groove for the bottom of the drawer but the ante pieces they're cut differently to cut the ends I have to run them through on edge same table saw set up nothing gets changed at all I run them through on edge and I'll end up with a rabbet there's a quarter inch on each piece so I'll flip the piece grab at the other side and then I'm going to cut the groove and this is the part that gets tricky it used to confuse me to no end until I did it enough times remember the grooves cut in the backside the long tail end of the rabbit not in the face of the rabbit if you do that it won't work trust me the first cut I make is with the work piece flat against the fence vertical and I run it right through the blade to cut a quarter inch rabbit and then I flip the piece over and do the other side exactly the same and then I take the piece and I lay it down on the back of the rabbit so the long end of the rabbit is against the table saw so now I've got all the pieces cut and you can see again how this works here's the groove on the side for the drawer and there's the little dado and the rabbet from the side slips right in like this so the rabbit goes in to the dado and the groove is on the back side the front and the back so then the drawer bottom can slide right in and the joint is really tight there's just enough room in there for glue and that's all that's left all I have to do is cut a drawer bottom for that drawer and if I use quarter-inch plywood and I mean full quarter-inch just like I'm using Baltic birch plywood for the sides if I use and it's perfect it's exactly 1/2 an inch if I use a full quarter inch plywood for the bottom everything works out perfectly now I said earlier you can also use half inch plywood for the bottom if you're building a drawer that needs to be really strong or a box or if you want to bolt it or screw it down to something like I did for the box I built for my boat you may want to use half inch plywood and if you do same set up all you have to do is take the plywood and run it through your setup here on edge and you'll rabbet the plywood all the way around it'll slide right into that quarter inch groove just like quarter-inch plywood but it'll be flush with the bottoms of the sides all the way around perfectly so here's the groove for the bottom so if I put this half-inch plywood into that groove look at that perfectly flush on the bottom end fits in the groove perfectly so now I've got a half inch drawer bottoms the setup on the saw is the most critical part of this whole system if you get that down you get it down real good man you will just love this because you'll be able to knock out drawers and boxes just that fast I'm gonna lift the blade up out of the table saw so I can remove it and show you what I've done here but before I do let me show you what I've done with the blade before we do anything I'm gonna set the calipers right on the outside edge of the tooth the cutting edge of the truth and look it's exactly a quarter of an inch now that doesn't mean you can take your dado blades and I'm just talking about the two outer blades you can't just take them and sandwich them together and expect to get exactly a quarter of an inch it'll be under that let me show you what happens take this blade off so check this out I've got two pieces of paper sandwiched in between those Blaze regular paper and if you look at these and measure them with a dial caliper you'll see that they measure almost exactly a 64th of an inch and that's how much I had to grow I had to spread those two blades in order to hit that quarter-inch and trust me you've got to do that you can't just sandwich the blades together and expect this to work if you're working with exact half-inch plywood if you're working with something else that's not Baltic birch yeah you may be fooling around coming up with some funny dado number but this is the system I use it's exactly a quarter of an inch now let's put these blades back in or they were so now we have the dado blade set we have two more things we have to set we have to set the fence up an exact distance from the from the blade quarter of an inch and we have to set up the height of the blade that has to be a quarter of an inch - you can do this several different ways you can take a piece of quarter inch plywood and then lower the blade until the blade is just a hair higher than the plywood take another piece of anything any kind of scrap lay it on top and push it down pretty snug and drop the blade until that piece just kisses the quarter inch plywood underneath and do that a few times go ahead and crank the blade up a little bit and it'll raise the piece it'll raise the top piece of hair and you'll feel it and then drop it down until it just kisses the top of this quarter inch piece and now your blade is exactly a quarter inch off the table so the next thing to do is to set up the distance between the blade and the fence and to do that you can use the same quarter inch plywood just bring it right up against that blade snug defense up against it and when you slide the piece through it should just start to move the blade it should really move the blade it should just kind of rock the blade a little bit like it's doing right here it's just rocking the blade a little bit if it starts moving the blade then it's too tight if the blade doesn't move at all then it's too loose and that's it I want to look at dial calipers for a second here because for years these things just boy they were the bane of my life because I could never figure out how to use them if you're a carpenter like me chances are you're not going to be that comfortable working with a metric or an or a adult caliper that works in thousandths of an inch this style caliper actually reads down to a 64th of an inch you don't see it because it the smallest increment you see is 1/16 of an inch there's fifteen sixteenths there's a sixteenth there's an eighth there's a quarter but it also in between those numbers the big line in between that's 1/32 of an inch and the smaller lines are sixty fourths so what's a 64th of an inch well I just showed you two pieces of notebook paper and that's really as close as I need to get with the kind of work I do it's kind of like a 64th of an inch it's like a glue joint now this caliper is digital you saw me using it earlier and it will read in fractions of an inch to down to a 64th of an inch the advantage to a digital caliper is it'll tell you exactly where you are especially once you're over an inch now let's take those pieces over on my assembly table and I'll show you how to put these drawers together so here's our four pieces I like to dry fit these first just to make sure that I cut the bottom the right size the bottom slides right in just like so let me flush these up and flush this one up there we go and then this side goes on perfect fit so let me show you how I measure for the bottom of the time it's really easy to figure out the size at the bottom all you have to do is measure the length of the two ends because that's the exact width or the bottom and I'd like to subtract maybe a sixteenth of an inch for that just to leave a little bit of room in this groove for glue now the length of the bottom is another story the best way to measure that is just to take your tape measure and push it into the groove to the dado on one end and measure to the dado on the opposite end you can see that measures seventeen and a half inches kind of tight so I'd cut the length of the bottom a sixteenth of an inch less seventeen and seven sixteenths so I like to glue these up when they're flat I'll put a little glue on each shoulder and I'll put a little bit of glue on the top of that groove and I even like to glue the bottom so I know I know that's a big deal but for a small drawer I don't think the bottoms are going to change that much sigh that much in size because of the humidity or wood movement so I like to glue the bottoms in too especially on a box where I want the box to be super rigid and kind of structural it's not going to come apart I like to glue both sides of the grooves and the dedos so as I slip that bottom in it'll get plenty of glue on it then I can take the side or the ends and slip them in both sides and slide the bottom in and it's kind of self aligning once the bottom goes into that groove it adjust this end so that they're flush and tight and then the last side can go on all you need to clamp is that front and the back of the drawer you don't have to clamp anywhere here because your joint is now getting pressured from just the two ends and that's it you don't need big long clamps you don't need four clamps or six clamps all you need are two for the front in the back once the glue sets up or if you're kind of impatient you don't want to wait for the glue to set up you can tack this I'm using a 21 gauge 1 inch nail right here I'm going to shoot right through the end grain of the side and the nail is going to penetrate the tongue on the end and lock this thing together so I'm just going to put my nail in real close to the edge of the side and that's it I can pull these clamps off right now because it's all pinned together right through that kind of a little tongue and groove lock joint that's the quarter quarter quarter some of you are gonna think right away wow that's so cool I need to take one of my old table saws and dedicate it to making drawers put that quarter inch dado blade in there get it set up just perfect and never touch it and that is why I have two portable table saws in my shop

Channel: THISisCarpentry

Views: 1,129,986

Keywords:

Id: _Z3pMyNPfi0

Length: 14min 45sec (885 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 10 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/IHstore]

I like it

[u/dday35007]

Pretty cool. When I first saw the thumbnail, I thought he was wearing a bullet proof vest and was wondering where his shop was. :)

[u/FlamesFan89]

realistically, I think this could be accomplished with quarter inch plywood that isn't perfectly a quarter of an inch. Anyone who has put a pair of calipers on everyday plywood knows that it is RARELY the claimed thickness dimension. The key is doing the setup, just as he did in terms of setting the height, and fence position, so that they are set using the actual work piece, and not just a measurement. That way they will be perfect every time. Then the tricky part would be setting your dado stack to exactly the thickness of your drawer bottom material, but some trial and error with sheets of paper should work.

[u/markdesign]

I wish my plywood was exact 1/4 or 1/2. =(

[u/link_2_fate]

So I use a triton workstation with a Bosch circular saw.. Is it possible and safe to do the double blade!?

[u/TheScrubHobbyist]

Recently made some drawers for my desk this way. They really are stout and super easy to crank out.

[u/bms42]

Quick warning here:. You should never use your miter gauge and fence together in this fashion. The fact that these aren't through cuts mitigates the risk, but it would be better for him to put a small stop on that fence ahead of the blade to set up the cut, and to then run it through the blade on the miter gauge without the piece contacting the fence.

[u/NotUrAvgJoe13]

Honestly it looks so simple and very effective too. Definitely gonna try this one on my next drawer.