July 25, 2010

Sawdust in my drawers

It took a little longer than I thought it would, but the drawer boxes for the kitchen cabinets are done. They don't have faces yet, because I haven't quite decided how to handle those. I opted to dovetail all of the joints, because dovetails are strong and because I like the way they look.

I didn't cut them by hand; for one thing, I've never done that before, and I'm not going to learn in the middle of a major project, and for another thing, they're kitchen drawers. Instead, I used the Stots Dovetail Template Master to make the jigs used to rout the dovetails. You follow the directions to make a dovetail template using the Stots template; you can tweak it, adjust it, destroy it, etc., and just make a new one when you're done. The template you make works a lot like the General template, I expect. These are through dovetails, as opposed to half-blind dovetails. I have a Harbor Freight dovetail jig that does very nice half-blind dovetails, but since I was working with 1/2" stock and applying drawer faces, I didn't think those would be appropriate.

Sooo ... here are the drawers. It's another piece of the puzzle. Next, the doors, which should be a learning experience. They're poplar, incidentally, milled to 1/2" thick as I've said. It's pretty good wood, but it does sport some of the characteristic green, brown, and purple patches that make poplar a good secondary rather than primary wood for a project.

1 comment:

Rosemary said...

I only understood about every third word of that post, but those dovetails sure are purdy. So what's next--the cabinet doors?