They say you can always tell a good workshop by the kind of drawers it makes. I go along with this for cabinetmaking in the traditional sense is all about boxes. Drawer making is neither more nor less than making a box fit very exactly inside another box. How that is done, the way the drawer slides inside the carcass with a piston like accuracy will tell you a great deal, both about the maker and about the workshop that he is operating within.

Whilst it is true to say that each workshop has its own way of doing things, and nowadays there are many ways of fitting drawers, ranging from metal or plastic drawer runners frequently used in kitchen or contract furniture desking right up to the classic hand made best quality drawer. This is not to say however that there are many ways of making a top quality drawer. Here, perhaps because skilled craftsmen have been making drawers for many hundreds of years, there has developed a distillation of procedure that has become recognised as best practice. I am quite sure that different workshops have slight variations upon this best practice. But by and Large, it is surprising how a craftsman trained (in the Arts and Crafts "Cotswold" tradition) to produce best quality hand made drawers, can be using a very similar process to somebody such as myself trained by an old Jewish cabinetmaker in the East End of London. What I am proposing is far from the definitive exposition of "best practice" for many other makers would have

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wrinkles and variations upon this theme. What I would like to put down in this and coming articles is a record of best practice as I know it. "Best practice" of classic cabinetmaking techniques have, I feel, to be stated clearly and loudly if they are not to be lost in a cloud of router shavings. Sadly we live in an age where both woodworking techniques are rapidly changing and the objectives of technical training are becoming less and less precise. For example a few years ago it would be reasonable to expect a college graduate to be able to make and fit a first class drawer, now sadly that would be an unreasonable expectation. For this reason I am going to go through this process step by step blow by blow — I will warn you now that the terminology may get complicated. We will be talking about the backs and the sides and the fronts and the bottoms. We will also be talking about the tops of the sides and the fronts of the bottoms — are you still with me?

The first thing with drawer making is to make sure the opening into which the drawer will be fitted is properly prepared. I won't go at this stage into the whole issue of carcass construction, yet what you will be faced with now essentially is a carcass or cabinet into which you wish to fit a drawer. You will have an opening or drawer aperture as I shall refer to it which will be roughly drawer shaped and the first thing you want to do is to check out that drawer aperture and just make sure that it is worthy of a best quality drawer. There are several things that can go wrong with your carcass which would make it impossible to fit a good drawer. The first one is that the drawer runners have gone in wind (pronounced wind to rhyme with kind)

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(see diagram 1). This is usually caused by some cock up with the routing jig that was used to house drawer runners into carcass dados, if however the runners are just screwed and glued then it is just plain sloppy workmanship. If the carcass runners are in wide and the drawer opening is large enough, you may be able to get in there with a shoulder plane, failing that then a large MDF board the size of the bottom of your drawer covered in coarse abrasive may well be the only way to deal with the situation.

A second problem with drawer apertures that frequently occurs with solid wood carcasses is that a small amount of bow is present on the carcass cheeks. These are the faces which the drawer will run up against and in many ways these are the surfaces that guide the opening and closing of the drawer. They must be absolutely straight and flat — I say MUST because I really mean it (see diagram 2). If the carcass shows the faintest sign of cupping or bowing, the only thing you can do is straighten it out with a shoulder plane. If your drawers are reasonable size, use a big shoulder plane, one with a good deal of heft. This is'.not a pleasant job and in many ways it is quite dispiriting, but it is important that it is done. Check that you have achieved a flat true surface with a straight edge and a movable inspection lamp. You are not looking for square here, you are looking for flat. Please bear in mind there is a difference between the two terms.

The next thing to check with your carcass is that it is flush on the front all the way around. It is always best to remember that a draw front is set slightly

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back from the front plane of the carcass just to avoid any slight discrepancies in carcass construction. You should always remember that design details such as this and other details like small beads and mouldings are there to hide constructional irregularities such as this. Next and this is most important, check that the aperture at the front of your carcass is not larger than the aperture at the back — now this is very important because you are fitting your drawer through this front opening and the size of your components will be determined by the size of this front opening. If as the drawer is pushed in, the opening gets smaller, then you may as well give up all hope of achieving a good fit). In the best possible world your drawer aperture should be exactly the same size along its entire depth, however there is here a dodge that may help you with the fitting of your drawers and save you an awful lot of time. Whilst it is the council of perfection to make your drawer opening exactly the same size all the way down its length, many workshops including my own, build carcasses with approximately a quarter of a millimetre splay to the rear, that means our carcasses are a quarter of a millimetre wider at the back than they are at the front. This splay just gives the kind of clearance that is really helpful when fitting the drawer. This splay is usually achieved before assembly by taking a couple of shaves off the back end of the appropriate carcass components (see diagram 3).

It is also good to remember that carcasses with removable backs are a damn sight easier to work with. If you have been silly enough to make the back of your cabinet a stressed constructional member, then you will pay the price

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now by having to fit your drawers into a dark and gloomy opening. There is sadly no way around this and perhaps you will learn your lesson and not be so silly next time. Lastly wax all the carcass opening very thoroughly, the drawer sides, the carcass sides and the runners. This is in addition to any finish you may have already applied. It is helpful when you are fitting the drawer because the wax will show up on the bare wood of the drawer side as a shiny spot where the drawer is fitting tightest. The fitting then becomes a straight forward procedure of entering the drawer, pushing it in until it jams, then taking it out and looking for the pressure point which is Indicated by the shiny spot. This is then judiciously removed with a bench plane, the drawer refitted and the procedure repeated until the drawer fits the opening. This is why the inside of the carcass is always properly waxed, but I am leaping ahead now by several stages and what we should consider first is the preparation of the material for the drawer components. Secondly the fitting of those components to the drawer opening, the assembly of the components and finally the fitting of the completed drawer to the opening.

To make a successful drawer, it is necessary that each individual component of each drawer is fitted to each individual drawer opening. First we will consider the drawer sides. The material you would use for the drawer sides is quite important. Drawers take a lot wear, particularly if they are loaded up with the family silver. For this reason I think oak is the favourite choice of hardwood for a top quality drawer side. Drawer sides are often called liners, though it escapes me as to why this should be, however I digress. Choose a

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nice close grained hardwaring timber like oak. Make sure that it is stable timber that is not likely to cup or twist, for this reason quarter sawn oak is a popular choice. Run the stuff through your planer down to a suitable thickness. Depending on the size of your drawers, a thickness of between 10mm and 5 mm would be suitable. Diagram 4 shows one of the advantages of using drawer slips. This is where you particularly want to have very thin and delicate drawer sides, this would be on a piece of furniture like a ladies dressing table or a desk with very small drawers. In this case a drawer slip would be added to increase the thickness of the drawer side at the base. This would provide additional wearing surface and it would provide something into which the drawer bottoms could be grooved. It is common practice to also apply a decorative mould on this drawer slip, a scratched bead or mould can be used to great effect here. Fitting and applying drawer slips is great sport. I will come back to this later in the article meanwhile back to the drawer sides.

Your material will be planed to an appropriate thickness and cut to slightly oversize. Now select your components and pair them up for each drawer that you are making. First make sure that you have selected the grain of the wood to run from front to back, put a face mark on the inside of each component. Now you can make a mark like a small quadrant on the front outside corner of each drawer side. If you are making a pile of drawers, it is also good practice to number them or to code them with a coloured stick on spot. This is essential for if you are making a pile of drawers, for you have got to be

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able to orientate each component correctly and quickly. The drawer front and the drawer back are also marked in a similar way again with a face mark to the inside and to the bottom of the drawer and a half circle in the centre along the centre outside bottom edge of each component (see diagram 5), again a number or coloured coded spot can be placed in the centre of each half circle. In this way your components can be collected and oriented, stacked, muddled up and put back together in the right order without any fear or danger. Remember you are making each component to fit a given opening so you do not want to get one drawer side mixed up with another one and you do not want to get one drawer side going in the wrong way round — so organise yourself properly! It is helpful if you are making a pile of drawers to have a table or temporary bench behind you so that whilst you are working at the bench your components are neatly stacked and readily to hand, and not cluttering up your bench. A bit of organisation with drawer making goes a long way and can in the long run save you a lot of time and money.

Next take a bench plane and set up a shooting board between the dogs of your bench (see diagram 6). For anybody who is unfamiliar with the shooting board, this is a wonderful piece of equipment used primarily with thin, small components that need surfaces hand planed on them at right angles to existing surfaces. Imagine the problem of hand planing the flat square surface on the bottom of a very thin drawer side. Your great big metal plane would be wobbling around all over the place, yet if you put it in a shooting board the attitude of the plane to the job is controlled, it is "jigged up" making the

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whole operation much quicker, simpler and more accurate. In this instance you're planing along the grain with the objective of just taking out the machine marks left by the jointer or thicknesser. One shave with a finely set hand plane should do the job.

Next you can square the front of the drawer sides from this face edge, a simple saw cut on a table saw is all you require, but it really does need to be square. Do all the fronts of your drawer sides at the same time from the same setting. The next job is to cut your drawer sides to length. This can be done with your drawer sides in pairs on the table saw against a stop. Try to arrange it so the rag of the saw is on the inside. When you are determining the length of your drawer sides, allow a little for carcass movement if you are fitting to a solid wood carcass, also allow for the carcass back and allow for 5 mm or so for the drawer bottom to protrude beyond the drawer back.

You now have components that have been dimensioned on three sides and rough dimensioned along the fourth side. You now need to fit each individual drawer side into the carcass opening, this can be done by offering up the drawer side to the opening and making a small pencil mark at either end. You now plane, again using the shooting board, to near that mark. As you approach your mark try offering the component up to the opening and fitting one shave at a time. Don't go for too tight a fit here, the drawer sides should run within the opening nicely but they shouldn't be tight.

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Finally lightly clean the inside of each drawer side with your bench plane. To do this, first check the area of your bench that you are going to use is dead flat, lay the drawer side on the bench against the bench top and with a finely set bench plane just take one shaving off the whole of the inside surface. Here again your objective is to just take off the machining marks left by your planer thieknesser without altering appreciably the thickness of the component. A useful tip here is to take two parallel chalk lines across the width or your drawer, then starting from the far side lightly plane out the two chalk lines with a series of parallel passes of your bench plane. Chalk lines will show up very clearly the parts of the job where you have missed a bit. What they will not show you is where you are going over the same area twice so be careful.

This leaves us with our drawer side components nicely prepared and fitted to their respective openings. Put them on one side, you must however remember to always put them "in stick" so that air will reach all sides of the components (see diagram 7). This is particularly important on warm summer days, I have seen a drawer component carelessly left on the surface of the bench with one side exposed to the sun and one side in contact with the bench. This carefully machined component turned into a twisted piece of rubbish within half an hour. Next month we will talk about the fitting of the drawer backs and the drawer fronts to the same openings and the joinery of those components to our drawer sides. We may then get the opportunity of fitting the little blighters into the carcass.