Tool Cabinet - Part 5 - Finishing Up The Drawers

Well I'll start off by saying I did a pretty lousy job of taking pictures of the drawer build.  I usually have my son with me and he reminds me along the way.  He was off doing kids stuff so I was flying solo.  You can get the jist of what is going on but there isn't any consistency to the photos (some shots of a large drawer followed up by a shot of a smaller drawer).

This first shot is of the large middle drawer.  As with the carcass, being in the tails first camp, I start there. I ganged both the left and right sides together when marking out (and from what I remember, cutting as well).

I then move on to cutting out the pin waste in the tail boards.  I threw this in just to show off my new fret (jewlers) saw.  I absolutely love this saw.  It is super light weight and has a great design to holding and tightening the blade.  I haven't broken a blade yet (after about 6 drawers and some very hard Birdseye Maple).

After cutting out the pin waste in the tail board I mark out the pins on the drawer face.  I mentioned in a previous post that these would be half-blind dovetails.  I kind of cheated here.  I made the drawers as through dovetails and then glued on a 1/8" face to each drawer.  I wasn't really trying to avoid cutting half-blinds but instead I wanted to bookmatch the face on each drawer bay.  I resawed some Birdseye Maple and created a 1/8" thick veneer.  I then used this for the faces of the drawers. This process will be clearer as the post goes on.

Just a shot of the drawer face and two sides. I didn't get any shots of the drawer back (not sure why).

Here is where I'm gluing on the drawer face veneer.  I exhausted most of my small clamps.

After the drawer has been glued together and cleaned up I cut the grooves in the sides.  I made these cuts on the router table and cleaned up the rounded ends with a chisel and small router plane.  In the close up you can see how the veneer face creates the halfblind look.

This is a shot of the drawer runners.  They are 1/2" wide by about 11 1/2" long.  I cut oversized holes to allow for slight adjustments during the install as well as wood movement from the side boards.

Here I'm attaching the drawer slides.  I used spacers between drawers to help with consistency in spacing.  Even with these my gaps weren't perfectly consistent.

A shot of the final product. There is still some cleanup work to do but the drawers are pretty much finished.  Each drawer bay has the book-matched face that spans across all the drawers (kind of hard to tell in the photo). When I get a finish on it the matching should really stand out.