Woodworking Blog

It took something like four months, but I finally finished cutting all of the dovetails for the 10 drawers on this project. The pictures here show the drawers in place, not stained or anything, so the color variations of the cherry are still very apparent. I'm going to have to tear down my shop for the move next month very soon. So I don't know how much more of this project I'll get finished before I have to rebuild the whole work environment. This is quickly becoming a contender for my longest build ever. But, boy, am I glad to have the dovetails done. Overall, my dovetails are a solid journeyman's job. If I had to grade the quality of all 10 drawers right now, I'd give myself a B minus.

In the last couple of days, I've managed to sneak in some time to build a couple more tool fixtures for my wall hanging tool cabinet. I haven't grabbed any photos of it yet. I'll take one as soon as I get all four of my primary woodworking hammers mounted. So far, I have my el cheapo rubber tipped hammer mounted in a bracket at the bottom of the left door. I use that one for horsing out mortises and with my cheaper chisels for taking out the waste from around dovetails. And I also have a bracket installed for my bright orange dead-blow hammer.  I still have the Blue Spruce wooden round mallet to mount, and my Warrington hammer. They're all going to be tightly packed near the bottom of the inside of the left door.

I had to get the Arduino timer mounted on the track so Liam can run some tests for his science expo before this weekend.  Wednesday, I drilled holes in the sides of the track at 25cm from the top and 30cm from the bottom to mount the 'light beam' LEDs on the right side and the photoresistor sensors on the left side (as you look from the top of the track to the bottom.) Used hot glue to position the LEDs in the holes. Then I powered the LEDs so I could see exactly where the beam of light hit the opposite rail. That's when I drilled the holes for the sensors. Then I hot glued the sensors in place.

Since I need to get Liam to do his measurements soon, I just wired the LEDs into the breadboard to feed the Arduino inputs using jury rigged wires for now. It's not pretty, but it works. I ran his pinewood derby car down the track and took the first measurement at about midnight last night! Yay!  :-) 

I'm getting approximately 1.036 seconds for it to run with no extra weight, plus or minus about 0.006 seconds. I repeated the run about 15 times and got readings from around 1.029 to 1.042 seconds. Not too shabby.

February 14-16, 2014 -It just takes a long time to complete a project when you're a perfectionist and you're not that good. :-)

This past weekend, I completed the dovetails on drawers #4 and #5 of the jewelry armoire project. I dry fit them, installed the drawer bottoms, and fit them to the case. That's the state in which I'm leaving each of the drawers for the moment. Working from the top of the case to the bottom, each set of dovetails gets to be a bigger job. Drawer #5 is the first with three tails on each corner.

Quality-wise, Drawer #4 was a disaster. One of the half blind corners was a fairly good job, initially, but then to get the final fit without blowing out the front, I ended up butchering one of the two tails. Driving the tails in when they're just a bit too tight ends up cracking the front of the drawer face, since I've only left about an eighth of an inch in front of these half-blinds; it can be a risky operation. Sanding down the ends of the tails slightly just prior to driving them into the drawer fronts has turned out to be a prudent step.

Drawer #5, on the other hand, turned out pretty good. Four solid corners without any major gaps in the joints. Practice does help.   --- Latest photos

I decided to do dovetailed drawers rather than the simple rabbeted sides I had originally planned, mostly because of how well the sides and feet of this project turned out. Basically, if I had completed things in my normal crappy manner, I would have said 'screw it' by this point and opted for the simple solution.

That said, I have not truly cut dovetails for almost a year. That's the key down side of being an amateur woodworker. The real skills for handwork take practice, and a hobbyist often doesn't get much. However, even given that fact, I've done enough of them over the past 3 years that I'm hoping these won't turn out horribly. (I set a high bar for myself, no?)

So I've gotten the extra poplar to make the drawer sides and backs, and the 1/4" plywood to make the bottoms, and I've thicknessed all of the drawer parts. And I opted to cut the slots for the drawer bottoms now, rather than after the side joinery is cut. I'm building these sort of the same way I've done simple boxes, and I dont' see a reason not to do that now.

Now it's time to cut the dovetails. I use what I think of as the Gochnour method, only because watching his videos on the FineWoodworking website is how I learned it.  I could just as well call it the Klaus method or the Becksvoort method. I start by laying the tails out on the drawer sides using a combination square and a bevel. I tried out a dedicated dovetail angle marker from Veritas a couple years ago and liked them so much that I ended up getting all three, the saddle square, the 1:6 ratio, and the 1:8 ratio ones. For these, I'm using the less agressive 1:6 angles.