18th Century Drawer Construction

I thought I would share the rest of the steps for constructing a drawer as they did in the second half of the 18th century, the source for my information comes from this wonderful book.

Here you can see all the pieces for the drawer, the base, front and back, sides and inside dividers. The front and sides has a tiny 0.6mm groove along the bottom edge for the bottom of the drawer to slide in as well as grooves for the dividers. The base of the drawer is 1mm thick and tapers on three of the edges to 0.5mm.

I used a 3.1mm hart 70 degree bur for cutting the taper on the drawer base. Never try and cut the full width in one cut, you will put too much strain on both your tool and piece of wood. I normally set the full depth and then go wider until the desired finished width in a few cuts. Here you can see I started by cutting almost nothing, I increased the width by 0.2mm for each cut until I have gone in a total of 1mm. For the last 0.5mm I added 0.1mm for each cut, it sounds slower than what it really is.

Here I am doing the last cut, you can see on the top left hand corner that the wood has split a bit even though I was so careful, fortunately I measured wrong and they were too long in any case and I could get rid of the split :-), some mistakes counts in your favor, but that doesn't happen often.

Because of the way the dovetails work, you have to slip the sides into the back and front, here the first side is glued in place.

After the second side is glued in place you can slide the base in, the back has been cut lower so that the base slides over it. In real drawers the base is just slid in place and then nailed into the back, since the wood is so thin I didn't try and nail it, I used glue all around. Because of the taper the base is nice and flush with the bottom edges of the front and sides.

The last step was to glue in the little dividers, because of the blind groove in the front I glued in the small dividers first and then the big one after dry-fitting and making sure everything is nice and square before grabbing the glue bottle.

Finished drawers, the one on the top is just less than 5mm high and I used a 1mm inverted cone bur for these dovetails.

Enjoy the rest of the week
Elga

Dovetails

Idske, this post is specially for you :-)

I have long wanted to try my hand at making dovetails and finally plucked up the courage, I basically followed Harry Smith's instructions in his book The Art of Making Furniture in Miniature. He however didn't have a compound table and had to mark the distance between each dovetail by hand. Well, let me show you how I made mine on my drill press that has a compound table. My subject is a tiny 7mm high drawer.

 I made quite a few practice pieces to get the spacing of the pins right, it will depend on the depth of your drawer and the size of the cutter you use. I used a 1/16" inverted cone cutter in my drill press, on this drawer there is only place for the two half pins on each end plus one pin in the center on the drawer front and two tails on the drawer side.

Here I am busy cutting the small little groove where the tails will fit in on the drawer fronts, you will see it doesn't go all the way through the wood thickness, normally one would use blind dovetails for the front of a drawer. I made through dovetails on the back of the drawer but forgot to take a photo.

In his book Harry Smith cuts the tails on the drawer sides by hand, but I decided to try it on my drill press and was quite happy with the results.

My hubby came home and took some of the next photos, of course you need to always hold your wood down very firmly or the cutter will just grab it and send it spinning away or worse into your face or eye. In this photo I have started cutting the tails on the drawer sides, to do this you need to hold the drawer side upright, I used a jig to keep the wood nice and square to the cutter. The wheel on the left moves the compound table from left to right or right to left and the front wheel moves the table backwards and forwards. I found that I had to cut very slowly otherwise the cutter would just break the wood as it is so thin.

Instead of moving the table the whole time, I just flip the wood to cut on each end, it gives you a perfect symmetrical cut-out on each side.

I did move the table for the central cutout between the two tails, once again I had to make a few practice pieces until I had the spacing perfect. When I make more than one drawer that is the same size I will do the first cut on each drawer piece before I move the table for the next cut, it just saves a lot of time.

The drawer isn't glued together yet as I still need to cut rebates on the bottom inside of each drawer for the base. You can see that the back dovetail goes all the way through. Oh, yes, of course the cutter leaves you with a rounded edge on the groove in the drawer front, I just gently file the tails on the drawer side on the inside until the side fits in nice and flush with the drawer front.

The back view of the through dovetails, not quite perfect but not too shabby for a first try at making dovetails on the drill press. One last tip, I always read as much as I can on a new technique in full scale, knowing how they do it in full scale at least helps me visualize how it should look and then to figure out how to do it in miniature.

Enjoy what is left of the week
Elga