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A slow chest of drawers

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Re: A slow chest of drawers

Postby Mike G » 30 Mar 2021, 07:49

You don't have a skirting?
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Re: A slow chest of drawers

Postby Dr.Al » 30 Mar 2021, 08:05

spb wrote:Well, while nobody may know for sure how to keep the C-U-F away, there are some definite ways to invite it in. One of them is thinking "it's getting a bit late, maybe I should pack up for the night... oh, I'll just finish cutting these panels to length first, there's only two left."

These two should have been the same length, and of course they should have been the longer length.


:o Commiserations. I know exactly how that feels. :obscene-drinkingbuddies:

I think I'd go with option 3 but make sure the side panel is one the side that'll be least visible when in situ (i.e. not the side you see when you walk in the door). There's never a good option in these situations is there?
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Re: A slow chest of drawers

Postby spb » 30 Mar 2021, 09:56

Mike G wrote:You don't have a skirting?

I suppose that's option 5 - add a skirting to hide it.

However, the design called for continuous sides down to the floor with a slightly set-back base panel at the front and back, and the sides notched out at the bottom to sit over the room's skirting board. I didn't want to put an external skirting on it because it's going in a corner where space is tight already and I didn't want it to have to sit away from the wall and waste space. If I did that I'd probably have to reduce the width and depth of the main piece to keep the same footprint.
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Re: A slow chest of drawers

Postby spb » 30 Mar 2021, 10:00

Dr.Al wrote: :o Commiserations. I know exactly how that feels. :obscene-drinkingbuddies:

I was just thinking of your post while writing up mine, as it happens. Cheers.

I think I'd go with option 3 but make sure the side panel is one the side that'll be least visible when in situ (i.e. not the side you see when you walk in the door). There's never a good option in these situations is there?

Annoyingly I'd sort of already done that - carefully chosen the better-matched panel to be the most visible - and cocked up the good one. Wouldn't be a proper cock-up otherwise, would it?
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Re: A slow chest of drawers

Postby spb » 30 Mar 2021, 10:08

Woodbloke wrote:Welcome to the club Stephen! The 'fuf' has struck again! Commiserations offered and if I had a round pound for every time I've done that I've done that little trick I'd be driving a Rolls :lol:

Thanks, and I'm sure there'll be plenty to follow. There were a few such instances in the construction of my understairs storage, but those being in 3x2 and redwood with plenty of spare didn't sting as much. Hardwood's a bit different.

Option 3 seems to be sensible, but I'd worry a little about the colour variation. You may find that once it's complete, that difference in colour will be too much to tolerate and the whole piece would irritate you intensely. More importantly, you stand a very good chance of loosing the bucket of brownie points that you might have won from SWIMBO, so personally I would 'adapt and overcome' and make the job a little smaller - Rob

Yes, option 3 is to be approached carefully, but I think if I didn't at least investigate it I'd be wondering whether it would have worked.
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Re: A slow chest of drawers

Postby spb » 30 Mar 2021, 10:20

The morning has brought another idea.

As I mentioned above, the original design was for continuous sides down to the floor, with the bottom panel housed (or sliding-dovetailed) in to them to form the box structure. If I instead dovetail the box on all four corners, and sit the whole thing on a separate base to raise it off the floor (somewhat like this chest inherited from my father, then I'd only have to make it 20mm narrower instead of 100mm shorter. Plus, if in future it moves to a less space-constrained location and I decide a skirt would look better, the base could be replaced with a new one quite simply.

I think this one might end up the winner; it achieves the immediate goal without permanently compromising the finished piece since the option of adding a skirt is still there.
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Re: A slow chest of drawers

Postby TrimTheKing » 30 Mar 2021, 11:47

I might not be understanding correctly but how does that buy you back your internal length for short hanging?
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Re: A slow chest of drawers

Postby spb » 30 Mar 2021, 11:59

It'd mean the side panel wouldn't have to go down to the floor, but could start 100mm up and go up to the same final height.
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Re: A slow chest of drawers

Postby TrimTheKing » 30 Mar 2021, 12:04

Ah okay, I get you. Ta.
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Re: A slow chest of drawers

Postby spb » 30 Mar 2021, 22:04

A shorter session on this today. A new set of garden tools arrived, so a good chunk of the evening was spent using those; it would have been rude not to.

spb wrote:The morning has brought another idea.

Well, I'm committed to this one now - I've cut both the side pieces to the shorter length now. Which means the next job is the one I've not been looking forward to.

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Time to sharpen up the scrub plane. This is mine:

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It's an old grotty No. 4 with no lateral adjuster (it should have, it was just missing when I acquired it) and negative life in the iron (again as I acquired it) - if I squared the edge off, the top of the bevel would hit the cutout comfortably. Still, it works quite well as a scrub, where I want that sort of camber anyway. Of course, that means there's no close-set chipbreaker here...

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...with completely predictable results on this tricky grain.

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Good thing that's all going to disappear soon. With the edges beveled down to just above the line all around, I decided not to repeat last night's mistake and called it a night there.
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Re: A slow chest of drawers

Postby spb » 08 Jan 2022, 22:58

Well, I did say this would be slow. It's not been abandoned, just shelved while I was informed I had more pressing projects to attend to. After getting back from Christmas with the family, though, and with weather that wasn't favourable to fixing the back garden, I managed to pick it up again.

Of course, putting a half-cut joint away for eight months brings its own set of problems:

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Clamping the pieces to a bit of oak that was straight and square fixed it up, though. I used the same method to mark out the remaining joints for the case.

Image
Image

Everyone who said this was tricky timber to work with, you weren't wrong. I think it was the coping saw that did this, but I didn't notice until later, and couldn't find the piece to glue it back in. Luckily it's on the inside of the case and shouldn't be visible in the end.

Image

With the four large dovetails cut, I thought I'd cut the rebates for the back panel. Since they needed to be stopped on both ends, I used electricity in the name of speeding things up a bit, but didn't take photos. What I did get pictures of, though, was the CUF's next visit, which always seem to coincide with me deciding that power tools will work faster than hand tools.

This was the housing for the vertical divider panel, cut into the top and bottom panels and supposed to be stopped 20mm from the front. Of course, having decided that I needed to rotate the panel so that I was routing in the right direction, I didn't account for the fact that I was now starting the cut at the front.

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I'm sure there'll be a close-enough matching piece in the dovetail waste somewhere to fill it in. Fortunately that's the bottom panel, so won't be quite as visible as the top. What it should have looked like:

Image
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Re: A slow chest of drawers

Postby spb » 14 Feb 2022, 01:26

Finally it feels like a bit of actual progress is happening. Having routed out the housings for the centre divider, and had the CUF visit that always seems to come when I reach for power tools out of laziness, the tongues were done by hand, with a #78:

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Of course, the timber continued to be difficult, and even with the nicker freshly sharpened would not happily leave a clean edge.

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The initial fit was... almost OK: Image

I couldn't get a good photo of the detail, but the problem was that the shoulders of the tongue were sloping away slightly. A bit of cleanup with a chisel, some fettling of the dovetails (with a rasp rather than a chisel, due to the splintery nature of the timber), and I finally have a dry fit of the carcass. The clamp on the front is unfortunately needed to pull the top and bottom panels flat, since they decided to cup over the course of the lengthy delays.

Image

If I'd anticipated this I might have thought of using a sliding dovetail instead of a plain tongue in a housing, but it's a bit late for that now. It doesn't take a whole lot of force to close it up, so in the absence of any bright ideas I'll just have to hope the glue will be enough in the final thing.

Next job is the drawer runners, which means it's back to everyone's favourite part of the process, squaring up and thicknessing stock by hand.
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Re: A slow chest of drawers

Postby Mike G » 14 Feb 2022, 07:58

I'd forgotten all about this one. Nice to see some progress, Stephen.
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Re: A slow chest of drawers

Postby NickM » 14 Feb 2022, 10:17

Looking good. I’m sure the little errors/bits of breakout can be repaired. Obviously getting everything perfect first time is the goal, but learning how to hide the inevitable mistakes is an important aspect. It is to me at least :D
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Re: A slow chest of drawers

Postby Alf » 14 Feb 2022, 10:57

Ack, that stuff's a bugger to plane crossgrain. You did a good job under the circumstances. :eusa-clap:

fwiw (not much) I think I might have gone with pre-scoring with a gauge or knife, and then follow up with a knife as you progress rather than try and persuade the nicker to cooperate. It may have contributed to the sloping shoulder problem. More often it's technique though, but no idea how #78-savvy you are and really don't want to offer up egg-sucking lessons! :D
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Re: A slow chest of drawers

Postby spb » 14 Feb 2022, 12:08

Alf wrote:fwiw (not much) I think I might have gone with pre-scoring with a gauge or knife, and then follow up with a knife as you progress rather than try and persuade the nicker to cooperate. It may have contributed to the sloping shoulder problem. More often it's technique though, but no idea how #78-savvy you are and really don't want to offer up egg-sucking lessons! :D

The answer to that one is 'not very'; this is the second or third project I've used it on, and the first that wasn't in nice compliant redwood. I did pre-score with the marking knife, but didn't then repeat the process, which may well have contributed.
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Re: A slow chest of drawers

Postby Alf » 14 Feb 2022, 12:44

Yeah, the wood doesn't help at all. Sometimes I think we're too hard on ourselves and don't make allowances for the fact we're often having to use timber that Ye Olde Hande Toole User would have never dreamt of having anything to do with.

Anyway, keeping the blessed thing vertical is usually most of the battle. IME don't be tempted to get your right hand to "help" by trying to push slightly right-wards in a misguided attempt to keep the fence tight - you'll just end up tipping the plane. Equally don't try pushing with the guiding hand on the fence because you risk pulling the fence away from the work. Both hands should contribute to keeping everything vertical, but some people have found a stick-in-the-fence visual indicator useful:

combi009.jpg
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Basically it exaggerates any tipping and, er, "tips" you off. :). Very handy when you're labouring against some uncooperative wood and finding a good rhythm difficult to achieve.
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Re: A slow chest of drawers

Postby spb » 14 Feb 2022, 13:17

Thanks - the basic principle is something I'd figured out, and it sounds like it's just a question of practice to actually do it. Maybe in some less cantankerous timber.
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Re: A slow chest of drawers

Postby NickM » 14 Feb 2022, 13:19

I like the stick in the fence idea!

I never think about grain direction enough in advance. When I come to cut a groove (in the long grain) I always seem to to be cutting against the grain! It’s infuriating.
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Re: A slow chest of drawers

Postby spb » 21 Feb 2022, 00:01

Another short session today, but getting on for an important part. Over the last week or so, in between family duties and storm damage, I'd been dimensioning the front drawer runners - the ones that will be visible. Only the front and top surfaces are really critical for these, so I was a bit lax with the thicknessing stage - as long as the front edge is parallel and there aren't any high spots to bind on the drawer below, I'm not too bothered if the thickness isn't completely consistent.

With those done, it was time to get them in place, and that means finalising the drawer sizes. One of the many useful things on WoodBin is a drawer size calculator, which I used to get some ideas. As much as I like the Hambridge method in theory, the sizes it suggested were a bit too different for this application (and my widest board is a bit less than 260mm...)

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A geometric progression with a ration of 1.1 seemed more reasonable:

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I tweaked them a bit into more convenient numbers, and wrote those down along with the height from the base to the top of each runner. You can't mislay your notebook if it's your workbench:

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The exact layout for the joints that fix them to the case is also worth getting down for reference. This is what it's going to be, referenced from the front edge of the case and the top of the runner:

Image

My plan here is to cut the tenons on one end of all the runners, then offer them up to the case to mark the shoulder lines on the other ends. While laying them out, I realised that I really don't have enough marking gauges - since I'm cutting four of them before I can lay out the shoulder lines on the other four, I want to keep the settings for both sides of the tenon on the mortice gauge, but that leaves only one to mark the two ends. Fortunately, while the thickness of the tenon is crucial, its width isn't, so that line can just be measured with a ruler and cut by eye.

This is also a slightly unusual M&T joint in that the mortices run across the grain, not along, so there's no benefit to setting the width by the available chisel and I can use whatever's convenient for other reasons. In this case, I want 10mm setback from the front edge to keep well clear of the visible parts, and then the rest of the dimensions are just to get the largest most robust tenon while still having a clear shoulder all round.

Remember how I said I wasn't worried about the thicknessing being too accurate?

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With them all laid out, I sawed the shoulders, started chiselling the cheeks, and was immediately glad of following the rule of halves.

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I considered sawing the cheeks as well at this point, but there's something quite satisfying about the way the waste curls away from a paring cut.

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With one tenon cut on each of the four runners, it was time to pencil the runner heights on to the case - I'll do the proper marking with a knife later, with the two opposite panels clamped together, but for now I need the case still assembled in order to mark the lengths - offer them up, and mark the opposite shoulders.

Unfortunately, that was the point that my worklight batteries ran out, so it has to wait for next time.
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Re: A slow chest of drawers

Postby Mike G » 21 Feb 2022, 08:39

spb wrote:......The exact layout for the joints that fix them to the case is also worth getting down for reference. This is what it's going to be, referenced from the front edge of the case and the top of the runner:

Image.....


That quite a large mortice in that width of timber. Leaving 3mm cheeks is something of a gamble. In fact, you'll do well to chop them all out without one or two blowing out. The normal rule of thumb is about one third of the width of the wood, so in your case around 7mm, but that's a bit fiddly, so I would up that to 10 so that I could chop the ends out in one hit with a 10mm chisel.

Can you explain again what you mean by these joints being across the grain. I didn't follow.
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Re: A slow chest of drawers

Postby spb » 21 Feb 2022, 11:10

Mike G wrote:
spb wrote:That quite a large mortice in that width of timber. Leaving 3mm cheeks is something of a gamble. In fact, you'll do well to chop them all out without one or two blowing out. The normal rule of thumb is about one third of the width of the wood, so in your case around 7mm, but that's a bit fiddly, so I would up that to 10 so that I could chop the ends out in one hit with a 10mm chisel.

Can you explain again what you mean by these joints being across the grain. I didn't follow.

That layout is for where the visible drawer runners - running side to side - join the case panels. The vertical line on the right-hand side of the diagram is the front edge of the case, and that's the grain direction for those panels.

The joints between the runners, where the pieces are equal thickness, will have smaller mortices to fit the material, and will be chopped conventionally so sized to the chisel.
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Re: A slow chest of drawers

Postby Mike G » 21 Feb 2022, 11:40

Ah, OK, I've got it now. So the 3mm shoulders are only on the tenons. In effect you are doing a stopped housing joint. So, this is where you might try a sliding dovetail for the fun of it, thus making a mechanical fixing rather than relying on glue.
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Re: A slow chest of drawers

Postby AndyT » 21 Feb 2022, 11:49

I was puzzled too, but I've looked back at the drawing in your opening post and I think I understand now.

Your side to side supports will be mortised into the solid sides of the chest and that's the joint you just showed. You'll then cut front to back drawer runners and mortise those into the side to side supports, which they will match in thickness.

That brings a potential problem if you glue all the joints. The ends, being wide, solid boards, will vary in with with the seasons. If the runners are fixed into those boards at both ends, you could get cracking, since the runners won't shrink in length.

There are at least two ways round this. One is to house the runners into the sides, unglued, except at the front, with a slotted screw at the back for support.

The other is to cut the runners a little short and leave the back M&T unglued, so it can open up a bit if needed, hidden away unseen.

You can also combine those methods.

Apologies if you know all this and have got it planned out, but I wouldn't want you to regret a mistake later.
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Re: A slow chest of drawers

Postby spb » 21 Feb 2022, 12:48

AndyT wrote:The other is to cut the runners a little short and leave the back M&T unglued, so it can open up a bit if needed, hidden away unseen.

This is roughly the plan - side-to-side pieces at the front and back, morticed / housed into the side panels and supporting the front-to-back ones via unglued M&T joints. I think the back ones will have housings that extend from the back edge to ease assembly, but at the front I want the joinery to be hidden.
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