In an effort to reduce the scrap wood cluttering my tiny shop and to better organize things, I decided to build a small cabinet that will fit in the existing shelving space in the shop.
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| The space above the toolbox will get the cabinet |
The space is 25" wide, about 12" tall and 12" deep. I'll make the cabinet to fit the height and width, but it's going to be a bit deeper an stick out about 2" from the front of the shelving unit. After scavenging for and gluing up some pine and squaring it to the proper dimensions, I got to dovetailing the carcase.
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| Ganging the top and bottom to cut the tails |
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| After cleaning up the tails, used the tails to mark and cut the pins - got a good fit (pine is so forgiving!) |
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| The completed dovetailed outer carcase |
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| Fitted a vertical divider using stopped dadoes |
The plan is for 6 drawers on each side. The drawer sides will have grooves that slide on runners that are housed in dadoes in the case sides and divider.
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| Laying out the stopped dadoes that will house the runners |
Cutting these dadoes was a LOT of work! There are 20 of them, each 3/8" wide and over 13" long. The bottom drawers will just slide on the case bottom, so I didn't need runners for those.
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| The carcase with the runner dadoes complete |
Here's where I did some thinking about wood movement and how best to install the runners. I was concerned about gluing in cross-grain runners (though here in dry California I probably don't need to be too concerned), so I ended up making short pieces, gluing 6 of them in each dado and only gluing one end of each piece.
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| The center divider with runner pieces glued in place |
I didn't take as much care as I should have when laying out these dadoes. Because of that, each dado was not identical to it's neighboring dado and I had to fit the runner pieces carefully. What a PITA.
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| The carcase with runners in place |
Next time I'll write about the drawers and finishing.
