Wednesday, April 9, 2008

Tall Chest of Drawers - Drawer Parts

Cutting the Drawer Fronts to Length (saw guard up for clarity)

I have ripped all drawer sides (front, back, two sides) to their respective widths. With a simple jig attached to the miter guage, I cut the sides to length.



Layout for Drawer Front Pull Holes

All the curves for the pull holes have the same radius. For esthetic reasons, I decrease their size slightly on each drawer going upwards. Note that I have penciled in the orientation (out for outward face of drawer front, top for the top edge) to prevent mistakes. In the above photo the stick with the mark on it is a story stick. A story stick is used to transfer a measurement among the different parts. I’ve read this term in several books on furniture building, but the term doesn’t appear in the latest edition of my Random House Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary. The listings go from “story line” to “storyteller.”

Cutting out the Hand Holes


Smoothing the Sawn Edge with a 2″ (5cm) Diameter Drum Sander Mounted on a Drill Press

The Hand Holes Finished

The next step is to rabbet the sides of the drawer fronts in preparartion for making the blind dove tail joints, which will join the front and sides of the drawer.
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Sunday, March 2, 2008

Tall Chest of Drawers - Panels & Web Frames

Panel (right) Fits in Groove of Central Style (left) to Allow Movement

The panel must have room to expand laterally with changes in humidity. (Wherever this chest goes after having been built in the northern end of Sonoran Desert, it will expand.) At this point the only design change I would make in the chest would be to make the moulded edge of the panel extend more into the panel. The panel could have been thinner, but I didn’t make it thinner for two reasons: 1, I don’t have that capacity to resaw the panel, and, 2, the direction of the grain in the panel is at 90 degrees of what would be ideal.

Ripping Wood for the Web Frames

The web frames strengthens the carcass keeping it from moving out of square in the plane of the drawers. Here I’m using clear pine instead of poplar. It was available and is half the cost of poplar. Although I chose pine boards that were straight, as soon as I ripped one, each half bowed about an inch out of straight. I’ll cut that one for the shorter sides of the web frame.


Sled to Cut Long Boards

Once I’ve ripped the boards for the web frame to width, I use a sled with a stop to cut the lengths quickly and accurately.
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Friday, February 15, 2008

Tall Chest of Drawers - Tenons

Tenon

I have cut all the mortises in the stiles. Next I cut the tenons on the connecting pieces. The shoulders have to be cut very carefully so that they match all the way around the tenon. Part of the strength and all of the appearance of the mortise-tenon joint depend on the shoulders resting flat against the surface around the mortise. I even up the slightly rough surface of the cheeks of the tenon with a chisel. There are other ways to cut tenons depending on the tools available. (The photograph doesn’t show it, but I always clamp the piece to be cut to the miter fence. I also use a stop on the fence to make sure all the cuts are the same. Follow all the safety recommendations for the tools you use.)

Tenon Readied to Fit

I have marked the tenon (5 in this case) to match to a specific mortise. There are sixteen joints, and they are not all the same dimension. It’s easy to get confused. Here I have evened the cheeks with a sharp chisel. I also have shortened the tenon by about 1/16″ (15mm.) The reason for this is to allow a little space at the bottom of the joint where any excess glue can go. I chamfered the leading edge of the tenon to make it easier to fit into the mortise.

I now go back to corresponding mortise and clean it up so that the tenon fits snugly, but not too tight. If the joint fit is too tight, there is no way for the entrapped air in the mortise to get by the sticky glue. The tenon will be thoroughly and only partially stuck in the mortise. No amount of hammering will drive it all the way into the mortise, nor can it be extracted without drilling a relief hole into the mortise from the side. In the meantime, the glue is drying. Talk about a headache.

There are several websites that cover the fashioning of joints, but the single best book I’ve ever found that covers the making of all joints is Woodworking Techniques: joints and their applications by R. J. DeCristoforo published by Reston Publishing Co., Inc. Reston, Virginia. This book is long out of print, but you can find it on the web for less than $10US. The author was a talented craftsman and prolific writer of how to books.

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Thursday, February 7, 2008

Tall Chest of Drawers - Stiles

I‘ve cut the stiles, the four upright corner pieces, to size leaving an extra couple of inches at the top end until I cut the mortises near the top end. They are within a half inch of the stile tops, and I don’t want them to break out while I’m cutting them.

Figure 1

I mark on each stile the location and orientation it will have in the dresser. This very important, since it’s easy to get confused while working on the individual stiles. I’m particularly careful since the front stiles are mirror images, the back stiles are mirror images and each pair of the front and back stiles must match. I clamp the stiles together (Figure 1) to make the measurements from the bottom end of the stiles. (Figure 2) I tack a board to the end to make the measuring easier. I mark the location on the stiles of the sixteen mortises to be cut and double check my dimensions.

Figure 2

Once I’ve marked the location and size of each mortise, I begin cutting the mortises with a 3/8″ diameter brad point drill on my drill press. (Figure 3) Then I will cut out the remaining wood from the mortises with a wood chisel.

Figure 3

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Sunday, February 3, 2008

Tall Chest of Drawers

Selecting Lumber

I’m going to build another dresser like the first, save for a few minor changes.  Since there has been so much interest in this project, I decided to photograph and post more details of its construction.  The first thing, of course, is to select the maple lumber.  In Albuquerque there is only one source of supply, Albuquerque Hardwoods.  They treat their customers like there isn’t any competition too.  A few months back when we purchased wood at Albuquerque Hardwoods, two or three warehouse hands stood around us admonishing us that we weren’t to go any deeper in a stack than three layers to select lumber.  This happened twice.  This time the warehouse hands were strangely silent.  In these kinds of male dominated unfriendly environments, I always take my wife.  It keeps the testosterone in check.  The woman in the pink jacket is Cathy, my wife.  She also thinks better on her feet than I do.

Selecting wood here is not like picking it off a shelf or out of bin in a big box store like Home Depot or Loews.  In those stores the widths, thicknesses and lengths are standard and wood in the U.S. is either Ponderosa Pine or Southern Yellow Pine for construction and Boxwood and Red Oak for project uses.  For other wood species, there are places like Albuquerque Hardwoods.  The wood is planed to thickness two sides and has an even rip on one edge.  The widths are random.  The lengths in a bundle are about the same.  This time the planks were 14 ft (4.3m) long. The lengths can be 8 ft (2.4m), 10 ft (3m) or 12 ft (3.7m.)  It was tricky carrying two 14 ft (4.3m) planks in a pickup truck with a 6ft (1.8m) bed.  The uncertainty about the lengths makes it hard to prepare a layout of the required wood ahead of time.  I planned on 10 ft lengths, so we had to do some recalculating on the spot.

Laying Out the Parts

When I got back to my studio, I laid out the furniture pieces on the boards.  As luck would have it, I could not have planned it better - no waste.  The 6 quarter thick boards (3.8cm) were a different matter.  Last time the lumberyard had 5 ft (152cm) lengths from which I cut 57″ (145cm.)  This time the thick boards were 8 ft long, so I have enough left over for legs or the like on another project.

The maple lumber I bought was straight, but the grain runs almost entirely parallel to the wide surface, the least desirable configuration.  For furniture, I would have like a few pieces to be quarter sawn, the grain running perpendicular to the wide surface.  Somewhere, someone, somehow is

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