These drawers will change your life

hey everybody i'm jason bent welcome back to the channel in this week's video i'm going to be covering a drawer construction method which is commonly referred to as the quarter quarter quarter method this is a great technique to make drawers especially if you have a lot of drawers to make because you basically set up your table saw one time and you never have to touch it you can make all of your cuts and then you can just assemble everything but what i want to talk about more importantly is one what is this type of drawer construction which i'm going to bring you in close to show you all of the different characteristics of this drawer construction i'm also going to walk you through a step-by-step process on how i set everything up and then bring everything together but more importantly i want to talk about a little bit of confusion with the name quarter quarter quarter method quarter quarter quarter is implying that you're using exactly half inch plywood and we all know that 9.9 times out of 10 you're not using exact half inch plywood it can be bought and it can be sourced and typically you're going to find it in baltic birch but in this scenario where i'm using baltic birch it is not exactly a half inch so why i say that the title of the drawer construction can be confusing to some people is because if you go and set everything up at a quarter of an inch and you don't have half inch material it's not going to come out right so for me i like to actually call this the half method and when i say half i'm referring to half of the thickness of the material you're using and if you follow these steps you could use this with any material size right now i want to bring you in and show you a quick little demo piece that i created to kind of talk to you about the actual construction and what this method entails and then we're going to go over to the table saw and i'm going to set everything up and we're going to run through it i'm going to show you two pieces i'm going to show you what would be a drawer side and i'm also going to talk about the drawer front or the drawer back so starting with the drawer side what i'm showing you is an interior view and this consists of two different things you have some dados and you have a groove dado across the grain groove with the grain the spacing from the edge is the same on both ends as it is the bottom and now we have a drawer front or back and this is again the interior view and as you see there is a groove down at the bottom and if we were to flip this around now we're looking at the exterior view so if you were looking at a cabinet dead on with no drawer front this would be the side that you'd be looking at now the key difference here is obviously it's on the exterior so you do not see a groove to accept a bottom panel but over here on the ends you have a rabbet and that rabbet is cut on both ends exactly the same as i'm sure you can guess by now the purpose of this is that that rabbit slides into the dado on the side panel same thing on this side and what it gives you if done correctly is a perfectly flush front and then when i show you on the inside you can now see that continuous groove all the way around now let me bring you in for an overhead view so you can see the joint better to better illustrate what i was talking about with a close-up this is the view from the top this is the side this is the front or the back slides right in just like that giving you a nice flush finish here and everything fits together real nice now you'll see that there's a little bit of wiggle room in there and that's fine we're going to talk about that during setup and that is going to allow the space for the glue and it's going to end up making this a nice tight strong joint before we get into the demonstration i want to cover the materials that i'm going to be using and a couple of key considerations when going through this especially if you were trying to figure out how to go about breaking down the sizes that you need and all of that the first thing that i want to say is if you're using side mount drawer slides this is a fantastic technique if you use a lot of bloom under mount drawer slides the way that i'm going to be showing you in this video does not set up well for bloom undermount drawer slides the reason is is because you need half inch clearance under your drawer box in order to use the bloom under mount drawer slides now there is a work around but when i get into the example it completely negates the purpose of me showing you this specific style because you would have to make a change to the fence the way i'm going to show you is you're going to set it one time and you're going to cut all of your joinery without moving anything the next thing i want to point out is the bottom panel you can either use a quarter inch or six mil or a half inch or 12 mil piece of plywood either one works one will give you a quarter inch reveal underneath the other will give you a flat flush bottom in this video i will be using the six mil or quarter inch plywood again this material is baltic birch and the thickness of this is 11.98 so it's just under 12. now for my bottom panel we have a thickness of 6.3 so just over six and when we get to setting up the table saw that's not going to be a problem and i'll tell you why to determine the size of the pieces that you need if you want a 20 inch drawer in depth your sides are going to be 20 inches now if i wanted my drawer to be 12 inches wide we know that the sides are both half inch so that leaves me a span of 11 inches however remember that we are cutting rabbets and we need roughly a quarter inch on both ends so therefore we need to make sure that we cut our front and backs to 11 and a half so that we account for those dados in the sides now for your panel a general rule of thumb is whatever the width of your front and back are that is the width of your panel and i usually like to subtract about a sixteenth of an inch or about two millimeters or so just to give myself a little bit of room for the total depth i'm going to take the length of my side and i'm going to subtract a half inch so if this was 20 inches i know that the depth of my panel needs to be 19 and a half and then again i'm probably gonna subtract about a sixteenth of an inch or roughly two millimeters now let's go set up the table saw the first thing i want to do is i want to set the height of the blade and i said we were using 12 millimeter plywood so i want to set this to six millimeters and the way that i'm doing that is i'm using a six millimeter spacer block these things are extremely helpful especially for tasks like this so i'm going to slowly start to lower it and i want to be referencing one of the flat grind teeth so i'm going to go down until right now i can move my finger across and i'm perfectly in alignment so now what i like to do is actually move this a little bit back and forth just to make sure that it doesn't peak right over the top of it it looks like i'm perfect right there that's the peak and i'm directly straight across so we have the height of the blade set now we want to go ahead and set the fence distance from the blade and guess what i can use the exact same spacer block now i'll switch the angle for you a little bit to help you help give you a better visual but as you can see right now my fence isn't set where it needs to be just yet because i can move this six millimeter spacer block here and it's not moving the teeth so i need to keep coming over just a little bit it's very very close all right maybe that's a little bit too tight what we're looking for is for it to not move the entire time i'm pushing it just a little bit so it's just kissing that spacer block so right now we are good to go the setup is done so i take a little bit of extra time to make sure that everything is perfectly dialed in it is six millimeters high the blade it is six millimeters away from the fence the reason we're using six millimeters is because it is half of this material and that is what is going to make all of this work the first cuts that i'm going to make are going to be the dados in the side pieces in order to make those dados i'm just using my stock miter gauge sliding this up against the fence and before everybody freaks out hear me out and then i'm going to be pushing this through flipping it around and making the same cut on the other side now the reason i said before everybody freaks out inevitably i'm going to get the safety police telling me how dangerous this is and as with all of my videos do what you are comfortable with at no point do i feel like this is a dangerous cut i am not removing a sliver of material in between the blade and the fence i'm cutting a dado that is six millimeters high six millimeters away from the end again do what you're comfortable with but in all honesty there's no other way to do this unless i set all of this up with a spacer block to give me that clearance but there's not going to be anything left between the blade and the fence so let's make the cuts the next step that we're going to do is we're going to go ahead and cut all of the grooves on all pieces right now that will accept the panel i'm going to place this face down we're going to push it through and cut that groove on both sides and then i will cut the groove on the front and back so let's go ahead and make that cut [Music] so [Music] we only have a couple of more cuts to make and that is the rabbit that's going to go on the end of here and you might be wondering well how am i going to cut those rabbets well i have to cut it vertically and we'll talk about that here in just a moment but what we want to make sure is that the rabbets are not cut on the same side as the groove so this needs to get flipped around i want to cut off the rabbit on the external portion of the drawer front now to do this there's a couple different things you can do i'm going to show you the way that i like to do it again do what you're comfortable with but i like to utilize one of these pads and i just simply push it through supporting it at the top not putting any pressure i'm just keeping it nice and flat to the table and flat up against the fence and i'm going to push this all the way through until i complete the cut something else that you can do if you don't feel comfortable doing that is creating a sacrificial fence and i'm not going to change my setup now that i've already had it dialed in but i just wanted to show you that with a sacrificial fence you can basically extend the height of the fence up to help support the work piece and in some applications i think that's very valuable especially the longer the piece with a piece that's this tall i feel perfectly fine moving it through just keep in mind that if you did end up using a sacrificial fence and clamping it to your fence or however you would attach it just understand that when you set this up you would need to set all of your measurements for the blade off of this before you start making any of the cuts so now go ahead and make these final cuts and then we'll put everything together earlier i had mentioned that i have this plate here specifically for this application and the reason that is notice how right in here i still have support for my offcut piece that is why i continue to use this one let me give you an example of where this could become extremely dangerous so let's take this one out and let's put in my full dado throat plate let's slide this over and let's just say that you know that's my six millimeters i'm sure you can already see what the problem is so as i go to push this through i have nothing supporting that material so that's something i really want to point out and make very clear is that you don't want to use something like this i would absolutely recommend having a completely different throat plate for this application being this but what you wouldn't want to do is as you push this through it can fall down into where the blade is this is where i would feel very uncomfortable utilizing this technique but again just to reiterate the difference between the two as i put this in here there's plenty of support directly next to the blade at no point is my piece ever going to be unsupported by a material underneath it so again i use this specifically for it it works great just a suggestion and also a safety consideration that i wanted to make clear i've got all my pieces cut they're back over the assembly table so let's go ahead and throw this thing together really quick and i'm not actually going to glue this up simply because these are usable scraps that i can use on other demonstrations like this however when i'm going to glue these up i always like to lay the glue out first right so i get the glue in the dados i typically don't glue in my bottom panel that's just a personal preference and when i put the glue in the dados it'll get around the rabbets and everything else so for the most part it's just glue in the dados and i throw this thing together so to start assembling this thing i'm actually just gonna place my panel in like that good fit i'm gonna go ahead and take one of my sides pop that together go ahead and take my other side pop that in it's starting to get nice and rigid i take my last side piece here pop that on and just like that i have a nice sturdy drawer the corners came up real nice everything is nice and flush in the front and back i've got a little bit of space in there for that glue and that glue squeeze out check for square of the box and it is it is dead on square now for clamping um one of the things i like about these is i just have to clamp the front in the back so i can pop that on there like that put this one in the front just like that tighten that down tighten that down get my nice glue squeeze out everything is nice and flush and there's your box and the great thing about it is because of the construction it's an extremely strong joint where you're going to be pulling and pushing on this drawer over the years so that is the quarter quarter quarter or in my case the half drawer method but really really great construction if you have to do a lot of drawers that's going to do it for this video i hope you guys found that helpful if you guys have any questions feel free to leave them down in the comment section below and if you guys want to find out more about me and what i do head over to benswoodworking.com until next time everybody get out in the shop try something new and i'll see you in the next video thanks

Channel: Bent's Woodworking & More

Views: 174,807

Keywords: woodworking, woodworking tips, woodworking tips and tricks, how to, woodworking how to, woodworking channel, instruction, Jason bent, bents woodworking, woodworking tools, beginner woodworking, woodworking for beginners

Id: XE3E5l__qKA

Length: 15min 47sec (947 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 21 2022