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4. Preparing the Drawer Parts


The night stands have two drawers each. Last time we looked at the Tiny Drawer. The main drawer will be bow-fronted.



This post is about preparing the drawer parts - sawing them to size, and the tools and process used. Tomorrow I will be dovetailing the parts together to make the drawer, but I thought some here would be interested in seeing the machines and planes used to create a piston-fit drawer.

The usual way to rip boards to width is with a table saw, against a rip fence. This one is a Hammer K3, and the rip fence is augmented with the JessEm Clear Cut Stock Guides. They do a fabulous job of forcing a board against the fence, and this prevents any wandering.



But another way to do this is to use a parallel guide on the slider. This is a particularly safe way of sawing, and is a lot easier to set up.



Crosscutting to square one end on the slider ...



... and then cutting to size with the depth stop ...



The machines do the coarse work, getting the boards close to size. The fine fitting is done with hand planes.

A Stanley #52 shooting board cleaning up the ends ..



Here is a large shooting board planing the height of the drawer sides to fit the case (it sits on the outfeed of the K3 today) ...





Removing any machine marks and smoothing the faces ..



Labeled and ready to go with the next stage ...



Tomorrow ...



Regards from Perth

Derek



May 2023