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Thread: Using Up Shop Scraps – Bow Front Cabinet Build Lots of Pics

  1. #1
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    Using Up Shop Scraps – Bow Front Cabinet Build Lots of Pics

    My fundamental problem is my family doesn’t need/want any more furniture. Fact is both our 20 something boys and Sherrie and me we have way more furniture than we need. The problem for me is obvious - I enjoyed continuing to build furniture, however what am I going to do with it? I appreciate any advice or suggestions!

    As a consequence of “No room in the House”, this project is intended for shop storage -only place where I control design choices. My intent is to use up some of the scraps of nice hardwoods in the shop to build a cabinet with lots of drawers for screws, fasteners, etc. This cabinet is roughly 48” long, X 15” wide X 32” high – same height as my secondary workbench so as to be useful as an assembly table etc. Aside from the unique scrap wood drawer fronts, the rest the cabinet is “Whitewood” from the local Borg. I’m not sure what it really is but seems to work like Eastern White Pine – awesome for hand tools.


    I didn’t plan on posting this build so some build pictures are missing. Horizontal shelves are joined to carcass sides via, though, wedged mortises & tenon joinery – sorry no pictures. Frankly, I focus on getting the mortise dimensions correct on the show surface which led to lots of blowout on the no show/ inside surfaces of the carcasses. If I had to do over again, would have plowed dadoes on inside to capture some of the blowout.



    Here is surfacing/dimensioning tabletop and horizontal dividers. There is a 2 inch curve along front surface – e.g. 13 inches wide at carcass sides and 15 inches wide in the middle. Really fun to shape with spoke shave.







    Next step was creating sliding dovetail joint to join vertical carcass sides to top. Creating the male dovetail components was super easy using a dedicated ECE dovetail plane.






    For the corresponding grooves I use an electric router with dovetail bit. I’m not precious about hand tool techniques – for me this is an ideal application for electric router. I intended for the top to overhang carcass by 1 Ό” on sides and front, but somehow miscalculated the front. At the time seemed like I was ripping off more stock than usual for transition from rough to final dimensions- I should have paided attention to that suspicion! My design/build thought was greatest variation in overall carcass dimensions would be in through, wedged M&T joining carcass horizontal shelves to carcass sides, so I created the sliding dovetails connect carcass sides to top after assembly which worked out to good fit.

  2. #2
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    Cabinet has 3 rows of drawers, 15 on the top, 13 in the middle, and 11 at the bottom. I tried very best to plow cross grain dadoes on corresponding rails for the vertical dividers using an electric router. Not surprisingly, somehow my math was off and the grooves didn’t line up!!! In a fit of practical application, I used a T-square referencing off carcass top to Mark out location for vertical divider dadoes in the horizontal rail below. I applied this method across all 3 rows of drawers which yielded satisfactory results – vertical dividers were square with case geometry.





    I used a bench hook to crosscut vertical dividers to consistent lengths.



    Here’s some pictures of carcass with horizontal shelves/rails and vertical dividers in place.






    Next step was building the drawers that fit the spaces. My typical approaches to fit the drawer fronts to the opening and build the rest of the drawer components later. As you can imagine, crosscutting and shooting drawer fronts was an important job here’s how I do it:








    Here’s a pic of drawer fronts fitted in appropriate openings.



    Next was creating loooots of sides/\bottoms for the drawers. Pic of shop built crosscut Jig I used to saw consistently dimensioned drawer parts. I know I should just spring for a real miter box, but I’m way too confused about what model number box I need to fit my 28 inch, 12 PPI crosscut miter saw. Any suggestions please let me know!







    As you can imagine, cutting components for 32 drawers is a big job. Of course I ended up getting multiple parts mixed up, lost etc. despite my best triangle marking- opps!




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    I wanted through dovetails for the sides/ backs because there relatively straight forward to cut and provided strength for narrow drawer components. I started with half blind dovetails in the first half dozen drawer fronts using a trim router to remove most of the waste:













    After half dozen I got burned out with tediousness of the process and went with simple nailed rabbits joints for the majority of the drawers.




    After cutting sides and backs are all 32 drawers I was ready to start dovetailing. Needless to say lots of sawing and chopping! For thin stock like this I think the Lee Nielsen .015” thick plate dovetail saw is ideal.






    Chopping out the pins in this saw pine was more difficult than expected. I try to keep all my planes and chisels at the same 35° secondary bevel angle just for simplicity. However even though my chisel really sharp I was getting more crushing than clean cutting so I reground chisels to 25° primary and 30° secondary bevel angles which seemed to help.







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    In an effort to keep the weight down, I thickness the drawer sides/backs to 3/8” – Ό”, which was too thin to plow a rabbit to accept the drawer bottom (my usual drawer construction). Consequently I built slips that could be glued onto the inside of drawer sides to accommodate the bottom, by rabbiting a bunch of Ό” thick stock on the router table, then ripping in half.







    Although the drawer slips/bottoms contributed to a pretty solid drawer construction, they turned out to be more work than I anticipated as I was too impatient to glue/clamp slips to drawer sides and wait for them to dry so I ended up nailing small brads through the outside of the drawer sides and into the slips to hold them in place.




    Once all drawers were assembled, next step was to plane the surfaces of the drawer fronts to correspond to the curved front of the cabinet. This all went pretty well except for a few drawer fronts where I really should’ve used thicker (3/4”) stock to accommodate the curve but only had ½” thick available.




    Finally here are the completed drawers fitted to the cabinet. I chose flush fit drawers to try and keep the weight down, and candidly because I’m a bit of a show off. In reality, I think only woodworkers care about how well/poorly drawers fit! On a serious note, trying to get the reveal between the drawer fronts and dividers right reminded me of how important it is to use a design/build strategy that allows for easy placement of drawer stops you can adjust to get exactly the reveal you’re looking for. I went with simple glue blocks on the runners at the rear of the drawers.







    Next step is finishing and maybe some inlay for the top? What’s the best kind of finish I should use to try and preserve the color of the drawer fronts? Normally I like to use an oil varnish mix to bring out the figure but that also tends to darken/homogenize the colors of the tropical woods. I welcome and appreciate any suggestions?

    Thanks for looking, all the best Mike

  5. #5
    Mike you amaze. Beautiful work on a shop fixture. My poor aged brain would never be able to mark, find or use that number of drawer fronts :-).

    I have much the same problem, when I start talking about a new project MsBubba gets a panic look and quickly tries to change the subject or distract me. BTW, I'm on to her.

    ken

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    Thanks for sharing again Mike. Lots going on here on this "Harlequin" chest build. Comments:

    I thought "whitewood" was a special growth wood created for the use of woodworking gurus to demonstrate their dovetailing/half lapping/M&T/etc prowess on. Has anyone ever seen it in the wild? And what part of the chicken do "chicken tenders" come from anyway?

    So you are saying that maybe plow dados in the vertical dividers to fit the shelves into? Then go ahead and create the through mortises in the dados? Why not I'd say.

    Couldn't keep the dados for the drawers lined up? I'm shocked! never happens to me - that was a design feature.

    "The #6 round head screws are in the red front drawer - no, the dark red drawer front and not the dark red with a sap line across the bottom, no that's the purple drawer front, I said the dark red one!"

    I'm with Ken, no way to keep 32 drawer parts sorted out. Lots of years ago, I used to fab up replacement kitchen drawers and never kept 100% of them straight.

    Are the drawer bottoms glued/nailed to the drawer slips?

    The chest back? Is there one? One piece, ship lapped? T&G? frame and panel?

    As usual, very nice work Mike and the curved front sets it apart from the rest of them.
    David

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    A good miter box for the saw would be a Stanley No. 358.....or a Langdon No. 74......

    Now...do all them drawers with finger/box joints......

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    A wonderful looking piece.

    jtk
    "A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty."
    - Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965)

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    Great looking piece, Mike, and a nice practical way to use shop cut offs. The bowfront design is a nice touch. And yes, if you enjoy doing it, why not a little extra touch of something to the top.

    I’m guessing you might already have a decent miter box somewhere in that shop....
    24CB5B40-9D9C-4470-AFDE-0396D933D0F4.jpeg

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    Hmm..
    Dungeon Clean-up, more room.JPG
    Careful..they seem to multiply......

  11. #11
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    Quote Originally Posted by David Eisenhauer View Post
    Thanks for sharing again Mike. Lots going on here on this "Harlequin" chest build. Comments:

    I thought "whitewood" was a special growth wood created for the use of woodworking gurus to demonstrate their dovetailing/half lapping/M&T/etc prowess on. Has anyone ever seen it in the wild? And what part of the chicken do "chicken tenders" come from anyway?

    So you are saying that maybe plow dados in the vertical dividers to fit the shelves into? Then go ahead and create the through mortises in the dados? Why not I'd say.

    Couldn't keep the dados for the drawers lined up? I'm shocked! never happens to me - that was a design feature.

    "The #6 round head screws are in the red front drawer - no, the dark red drawer front and not the dark red with a sap line across the bottom, no that's the purple drawer front, I said the dark red one!"

    I'm with Ken, no way to keep 32 drawer parts sorted out. Lots of years ago, I used to fab up replacement kitchen drawers and never kept 100% of them straight.

    Are the drawer bottoms glued/nailed to the drawer slips?

    The chest back? Is there one? One piece, ship lapped? T&G? frame and panel?

    As usual, very nice work Mike and the curved front sets it apart from the rest of them.


    David,

    I have no idea what Home Depot describes as "Whitewood". I do have to say, super fun for hand tool work! I have no joinery prowess whatsoever to demonstrate, but if I did, I would choose mahogany as more receptive to edge tools and less likely to crush as compared to the soft Eastern pine.

    As I mentioned, when I started building this was simple shop furniture and so I went with the expeditious route of chopping the through mortises to join the shelves to carcass sides from the outside show surface only. Consequently lots of blowout on the backside. If I had higher standards I would've gone with the standard drill all the way through the mortise and then chop from both sides to get cleaner mortises – my bad for being in a hurry.

    Slips for drawer bottoms were glued/nailed in place and then 1/8" thick plywood bottoms are simply glued into the rabbits on the slips. This method has the advantage that drawer bottoms don't have to perfectly fit – rabbit will cover any mistakes. Derek has a much more elegant approach on his website. Candidly, my drawer bottoms don't look great – 1/8"rabbit on the slips projects up from the plywood drawer bottoms. If there were fewer drawers and a more serious approach, I would definitely try Derek's approach and probably fail.

    Hadn't thought about the carcass back but your question prompts me to consider T&G solid wood back for the bottom behind exposed shelves where the back may be visible. For the rows of drawers above I'm thinking plywood it's probably okay.

    Cheers, Mike

  12. #12
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    Quote Originally Posted by ken hatch View Post
    Mike you amaze. Beautiful work on a shop fixture. My poor aged brain would never be able to mark, find or use that number of drawer fronts :-).

    I have much the same problem, when I start talking about a new project MsBubba gets a panic look and quickly tries to change the subject or distract me. BTW, I'm on to her.

    ken
    Ken, glad to know I'm not the only one whose better half starts to panic when I start talking about "new project"!

    BTW, I'm still counting on you and your better half visit next time you swing through SoCal. I mapped out an extensive guide to divey taqueria's I think you would enjoy. I recently discovered a truck stop adjacent to a gas station where Spanish is the predominant language and the food is awesome – just saying those are my favorite places.

    Cheers Mike

  13. #13
    Quote Originally Posted by Mike Allen1010 View Post
    Ken, glad to know I'm not the only one whose better half starts to panic when I start talking about "new project"!

    BTW, I'm still counting on you and your better half visit next time you swing through SoCal. I mapped out an extensive guide to divey taqueria's I think you would enjoy. I recently discovered a truck stop adjacent to a gas station where Spanish is the predominant language and the food is awesome – just saying those are my favorite places.

    Cheers Mike
    Mike,

    You can count on it, I retire/go part time next January. It may not be before but for sure after. Show me a taco and I'll follow you anywhere. BTW, did you see the video of Baily (E. Warren's) dog stealing the burrito yesterday, he's my soul mate.

    ken

  14. #14
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    Quote Originally Posted by Phil Mueller View Post
    Great looking piece, Mike, and a nice practical way to use shop cut offs. The bowfront design is a nice touch. And yes, if you enjoy doing it, why not a little extra touch of something to the top.

    I’m guessing you might already have a decent miter box somewhere in that shop....
    24CB5B40-9D9C-4470-AFDE-0396D933D0F4.jpeg
    Phil,

    Great to hear from you! Regarding decoration on the top, my "go to" inlay is the compass rose, which I am not sure is a good fit? Maybe this means I need to broaden my horizons? Any suggestions/advice about inlay designs are much appreciated!

    As you acutely detected, at one time I did have an excellent miter box obtained from a good friend who not only shared his knowledge about this arcane subject but also generously gifted me an excellent example (much thanks, that would be you!). I hope you don't mind that I passed that miter box along to a fellow Creeker who needed it more than me.

    Cheers, Mike

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    Quote Originally Posted by steven c newman View Post
    A good miter box for the saw would be a Stanley No. 358.....or a Langdon No. 74......

    Now...do all them drawers with finger/box joints......
    Steven,

    I really appreciate your suggestion about the type/brand miter box that would work for me! I confess I'm super confused about the various brands/models and your advice is super helpful! (I guess I can't just post a "want to buy" thread here?)

    BTW, I really enjoy your posts and have been following your build thread on the 2 drawer chest with interest. I appreciate the time and effort you invested in sharing pics and descriptions about your projects the tools/techniques you use. I always look forward to your posts.

    All the best, Mike

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