Here are some pictures of the dovetailing on the second drawer:
Pretty cool, huh? Bet you’re wondering how I managed to get the board to just change like that right in the middle. You’re probably also wondering what the hell can go in a drawer that short…
As per my usual routine, I cut the tail boards each in there entirety then the pin boards. More specifically, I cut the rear pin board (the one with the through tails) and then the front piece (the half blinds). The gaps on the one side of the front half-blinds were perplexing to me. At the time, I guessed that the marks were not nearly accurate enough. Interestingly, to me anyway, when I chiseled out the pin sockets on the other side, I intentionally marked it closer AND left a little. They fit like as shown without any further adjustment. First time I haven’t had to fine tune a fit after the initial waste removal. I think I have to be even more accurate with my layouts lines for the depth.
One of the other sins of this particular drawer is visible on the rear board. I couldn’t thickness the board to the desired dimension and remove all of the rough sawing from the mill. The cost of resawing the board I suppose. I can live with it since the flaw can only be seen when the drawer is taken out. Frankly, I don’t see that happening all that often. Of course, I could have forgone the dovetails on the rear for similar reasons- but that was a compromise I didn’t like.
These are about as good as my skills are capable of at this time. I’d still like to get them better. Those gaps on the half blinds, in particular, are disappointing. The through-tails came out very well. The main flaw there is that depth of the tail cut doesn’t match up with the pin board thickness as well as it should. The result is gaps between the bottom of the tails and the inside face of the pin board. I’ll need to try to come up with a better way of aligning the tail and pin boards when transferring the tail layout to eliminate that.
Details. Details. Details. The basics of this stuff is pretty straight forward. Cut some wood, fit it together, make a box. But doing that all well is where all the details come into play. Some of the most important details have nothing to do with cutting the wood either. Most of them can only be learned by doing, failing, thinking, and redoing. I guess that’s why I keep doing it. I must say, the payoff is the moment sense of accomplishment when it does go right.
At the very least, it makes the weekend go by fast.