Small Chest With Drawers

My wife has had this tiny little jewelry chest.  It's nothing special, but something about it always appealed to me.  It's a small, four-drawer, painted box.

The inspiration

Side view

You can see that it has tiny little bun feet and the drawers have curved fronts that are quite proud of the front of the case.

I didn't bother taking too close a look at how this piece was made, as I'm pretty sure it's some made-in-China crap.  So I decided on some rough dimensions (8" x 6" x 4") and put tools to wood.

The carcase is made from 3/8" thick pine.  The top and bottom are dovetailed into the sides and there's a groove along the back to receive a 1/8" plywood back.  The 1/8" groove is a good excuse to use my old wooden plough plane.  It's the only plane I have that has an iron that thin.

Underside of top

The sides have the 1/8" groove, as well as three stopped dadoes that receive the 1/4" thick drawer dividers.  There rear dovetail pin is wider than the others to leave room for the groove.

Inside face of left side

The three drawer dividers get a little step to conceal the dadoes and bring their fronts flush with the case front.  The stock on hand was not quite wide enough to allow the dividers to extend all the way to the back of the case.  No problem though - they do their job fine.

Drawer dividers

The case came together nicely.  It was a really good exercise in careful marking out.

A first dry-fit

After gluing up the case, I plugged the groove holes on the top of the case and trimmed the plugs smooth.  For the drawers, the fronts and sides are poplar, the backs are pine and the bottoms are 1/8" plywood.  The sides are connected to the front by a single half-blind dovetail and to the back by a through dovetail.  Thin, soft wood is so forgiving when cutting dovetails.  The drawer front has a 1/8" deep x 5/16" wide rabbet on its underside to accept the plywood bottom and the other drawer parts were made to be flush with that rabbet so that the drawer bottom could be glued to the undersides of the front rabbet, the sides and the back.

Drawer parts

At first I was just going to copy the shape of the drawer fronts of the existing chest, but then I thought maybe I'd try something different.  I recalled seeing some "serpentine" fronts on full sized chests of drawers and I thought that might be interesting.  I had no idea if it would look good, but what the hell - this is just a fun project.  So I made a template and a prototype.

Template being used to scribe the shape of the drawer front

This looks nicer than I thought it might

I remember on some serpentine chest I saw somewhere that the drawer dividers had the same shape as the drawer fronts.  After thinking about it, I nixed the idea and it still looks OK.

A couple more details to take care of - drawer pulls and feet.  I couldn't find any drawer pulls tiny enough to fit this chest.  So I experimented with some large nails and found one that seems to be sized right.

Using a cut off nail as a drawer pull

For the feet I thought I'd make some kind of "bracket" feet - two mitered pieces at each corner of the case bottom.

Mitered both ends of a 1/2" x 1/2" pine blank

Made a little template and transferred the shape to the blank.
This half-foot is about 1 1/8" long.

Chiseled and fine-rasped to the lines

Then glued the miters of each pair of bracket feet

Then glued them to the bottom of the case (glue not yet added in this photo)

Here's the feet glued to the bottom (they're not all cleaned up yet)

These look great from the front.  But they look a little funny from the side, where the dovetail joints are seen.

I guess that's why large case pieces have bracket feet that are proud of the case
and mouldings to cover the dovetails

I gave the drawers and the case a coat of shellac, more as a sealer than as a finish.  My wife is going to paint this piece (as practice for another future project), so hopefully the paint will hide the dovetails above the bracket feet.

And here she is, minus final painting.  I'll add the pulls after that.

Glamour shot

All for now.  Catch you on the flip-flop.