Drawers!

The house has been waiting for drawers, longing for them, for years.  Always promised, yearned after, but never quite on the list of upcoming projects.  Next year.  After things settle in.  Seeming beyond reach.

Until now.

Well, there were the bedroom drawers (in the waterbed base), and those have been wonderfully normal.  But the bed requires eleven drawers, and yet we're at seven and holding.  Not so much a priority any more.

Did the pottery studio change things?  All that stuff needing a place to hide?  Hmm.  We built some drawers (four) last post.  Plywood drawers.  Complex.  No more plywood drawers since then (but still many more needed).

So what has changed?

Dovetails.

Aren't drawers with dovetail joints more high-end than plywood drawers?  Well, sure.  But it turns out they are actually less complicated than the plywood drawers — sort of.  If you have a good dovetail jig (Porter Cable for me), you can crank out drawers fast, well, after getting it all set up.

Setting up the jig (and the two routers) isn't entirely simple, but it came with a good set of instructions, and if you watch several youtube instruction videos, it's completely doable.  And if you pay attention to the directions, two or three times.  It works.  You do a first setup, then test the joint, then make adjustments if needed.

The jig comes with a couple of different template guides for different types and sizes of dovetail joints.  I started with the basic through-joint (half-blind joints will come later).

A drawer has two sides and a front and a back.  Dovetails need to be cut on each end of those four boards, but each end only takes ten or fifteen seconds.  First I cut the "tails" — that is, the cuts made with a dovetail router bit in the sides of the drawer.  For that, you use the side of the guide with the parallel fingers.

The router slides inside each of the fingers; there is a template guide installed on the router base that follows the guide's metal fingers.  Looks like this (with a tapered dovetail bit installed):

Cuts like this:

After cutting the ends of the sides of the drawers, you flip the guide over to cut the "pins" on the ends of the drawer front and back.  Actually, you could use a different sort of joint for the back, but I'm doing dovetails all around.

Notice that the "pins" fingers give you a tapered cut — wider at the front and narrower toward the back.  You also use a straight cutting router bit (instead of a dovetail bit).  It's much more efficient if you use two routers.  Otherwise, you would have to keep changing bits and router guides (different diameters), and calibrating the depth of cut with every change.  Two routers, yes!

What you get is a very nice, strong joint.

Drawers also have bottoms.  Cut a slot in the four pieces to accept the bottom, cut the bottom to size (nominal quarter-inch plywood for these drawers), and then glue everything together.  I put some wood glue in a small container and use a small cheap flux brush to spread the glue on all the surfaces.  Goes pretty quickly.  Then clamps.

I only needed a cross clamp to square the drawer one time.  Otherwise the joints kept the drawer square without any prodding.  Here are three drawers installed in the pottery studio cabinet.

But of course they needed fronts.  I made the wider fronts from 3/4" plywood, with a 3/4" square surround.  Sanded, edges rounded, painted white.

Narrower drawer fronts were cut from solid wood.  Here are the same three drawers with fronts and wire pulls.

I used full-extension drawer slides (20" in this case), with 20" deep drawers.  I also sometimes will, for example, use a 20" slide with a 22" drawer, in which case the drawer won't open all the way.  Personal choice.  With full-extension, everything in the drawer is fully accessible.

I made another dovetail drawer for the left side of the cabinet, then made the front for it, but unfortunately was thinking of the drawer width instead of the one-inch wider opening, so now I have an extra drawer front.  (No problem.  I'll just build a workshop cabinet that fits the too-narrow drawer front. :-)

I used birch for the shallower pottery studio (1/2" thick) drawer sides, and am using maple for the kitchen drawers, and will use cherry for the bathroom drawers.  I've run out of birch, so I'm going to shift drawer production to the kitchen and bathroom.  I use half-inch birch plywood for the deeper drawers, but I've also run out of that.

The drawer fronts in the kitchen will be made out of spalted maple, which is wood that is diseased (fungal or bacterial), giving it interesting patterns.  I have a bunch from a cut-down tree; it's twenty years old so it's fully dried out and stable.  I originally cut pieces sized for making electric guitar bodies, but I will likely not make very many more.  Hopefully there will be enough spalted maple for all the smaller kitchen drawer fronts.

This photo shows one of the billets, a drawer front cut to size, and a small end-grain cut-off to show more of what the wood looks like inside. 

I just made the first normal kitchen drawer (aside from earlier side-loading ones).  This is what it looks like from the front.

There will of course be more drawers below that (and about 50 or so more drawers in the kitchen).  The next photo shows the drawer open — for knives, with a thick felt lining on the bottom.

I will report progress on future drawer construction, but will not detail the construction basics — just show final results.  There may be a gap before that, however, as a big truck left a pottery kiln in my driveway today!  Next post — making that operational.