Step 12 - Drawer Boxes
All thumbnail pictures can be enlarged by clicking them.
 This morning I'm trimming the drawer box parts to final size. As always, this means some careful set-up, for the tolerances in these parts is no more than 1/64th of an inch. Too tight and the drawers won't run easily, too loose and they'll slop around in their slots. Not only does this feel cheap, but it can promote extra wear on the parts involved, so I shoot for perfection.
 It took the whole morning and part of the afternoon to trim the parts to size and get them good and square, and here are the results.
 Next we start milling the grooves and dadoes that are needed for the drawer parts to fit together properly; One groove near the lower edge houses the drawer bottom, a pair of dadoes near the back of the drawer hold the back in place, and a pair of large grooves down the outside of each drawer side will run on the drawer guides. This last one is tricky.
 Each time I set up the dado head for a groove or dado, I run a test cut in a piece of scrap wood to check the fit; the dado can be fine tuned with a series of thin steel shims to achieve a perfect fit. Here I'm test fitting the drawer guide groove, making sure it runs freely, but without 'slop'. It took three tries to get it just right.
 After the drawer box parts are completed, I use masking tape to temporarily assemble the drawers and test their fit. Note that the bottoms are not installed yet, there is no point in cutting those until I'm sure the rest fits properly. If needed, I will tweak the fit with sandpaper wrapped around a narrow block of hardwood.
  After all the parts -- including the bottoms -- are to done and fitted together, I check to be sure the drawers are square. These ones turned out well, as they should if I'm careful to cut all the mating parts perfectly square... but sometimes, something somewhere goes wrong and I need to make adjustments (or cut a new part) before we apply glue and make everything permanent.
When it came time to cut the drawer bottoms, I ran into a problem. My plywood storage is under the area where I vertically stack lumber that is acclimating for an upcoming project (or left over from a past project and not yet removed), and there is currently so much lumber stacked there that I could not get at the plywood behind it. So I had to move it all outside, get my plywood, then move it back inside because it might rain tonight.
Whew! That's enough for today.
| Man Hours: | 6 |
| Non-billable | 3 |
| Materials: | 6 SF of 1/8" BBP |
| 
