Power and hand together (4): preparing the drawer parts

[Derek Cohen]

The night stands have two drawers each. Last time we looked at the Tiny Drawer. The main drawer will be bow-fronted.



This post is about preparing the drawer parts - sawing them to size, and the tools and process used. Tomorrow I will be dovetailing the parts together to make the drawer, but I thought some here would be interested in seeing the machines and planes used to create a piston-fit drawer.

The usual way to rip boards to width is with a table saw, against a rip fence. This one is a Hammer K3, and the rip fence is augmented with the JessEm Clear Cut Stock Guides. They do a fabulous job of forcing a board against the fence, and this prevents any wandering.



But another way to do this is to use a parallel guide on the slider. This is a particularly safe way of sawing, and is a lot easier to set up.



Crosscutting to square one end on the slider ...



... and then cutting to size with the depth stop ...



The machines do the coarse work, getting the boards close to size. The fine fitting is done with hand planes.

A Stanley #52 shooting board cleaning up the ends ..



Here is a large shooting board planing the height of the drawer sides to fit the case (it sits on the outfeed of the K3 today) ...





Removing any machine marks and smoothing the faces ..



Labeled and ready to go with the next stage ...



Tomorrow ...



Regards from Perth

Derek

[Derek Cohen]

The half-blinds at the front are complete. It can be seen here that they are cut well back on the board to allow for the curve to be shaped ...



These are self-explanatory ...



Drawer fronts will be curved, first on the outside, and then the inside curved parallel to the front.







Regards from Perth

Derek

[Jim Ritter]

Beautiful work Derek.
Jim

[Derek Cohen]

Thanks Jim. Good to hear you are about once again.

Regards from Perth

Derek

[Keegan Shields]

Very cool Derek thanks for posting.

I always have difficulty curving inside faces where I need to remove a bit of material, so I'm excited to see how you approach it.

[Jim Koepke]

Looking good.

jtk

[Tony Shea]

So nice Derek. Those half blind dovetails remind me of a desk that I'm still working on here and there. Unfortunately my drawer fronts were concave and I wanted the thin leftover section of the front similar to what yours have. Once I had my half-blinds fitted, perfectly I might add, I cut the curve to match the desk front edge. I didn't account for the curve getting even closer to the internal portion of the dovetail socket and ended up with a paper thin front in those spots. I didn't dare leave this and decided to remake 3 drawer fronts, and the 2 side fronts required some odd angles.

Having said this, your curve is convex and will be perfectly fine. I'm looking forward to seeing this project come together and am really interested in what the design for the base will be. Thanks for posting this project Derek and remember "Haters are going to hate." It's a no wonder David Weaver doesn't hang out here anymore.