Last month we talked about how the drawer sides were prepared and fitted to the carcass. This month we will look at the drawer back and the drawer front. The drawer back is probably the most important of the four components in assuring a good fit for the drawer that you are attempting to make. The fit of the drawer is determined by two things in particular, the first is whether the carcass itself is straight and true. If the drawer runners are in wind or if the carcass side is bowed then your chance of getting a good fit is about the same as that of a snowball in hell. The second and perhaps most important thing to be understood is that the fit of the drawer is created by the width of the drawer in relation to the drawer opening. The fit of a drawer is not greatly determined by its height. One of the mistakes many novices make is to make drawer fronts and sides that are too tight a fit in the drawer opening. Timber expands across its width and a very closely fitting drawer placed in a damp room will expand quite appreciably, making it too stiff to comfortably open. It is also good advice not to fit drawer components on a very wet and damp day for your timber will then, before fitting have swollen to accommodate the higher humidity only to shrink back maybe too much on a more normal drier morning. Where F- ~

2. my workshop is situated in Devon, the climate is naturally damp, therefore we tend to fit our drawers possibly a little tighter than one would normally do. I do this on the safe assumption that my furniture will eventually be delivered "up country" to a warm and snug centrally heated home. I don’t in that situation want my drawers to rattle around. So if the fit is not really regulated by the height of the drawer, it is much more regulated by its width, that is the length of the drawer back and the drawer front. It is especially important that you understand this point. For if you can fit the drawer back to exactly the size of the opening then joint the drawer up properly, you should only have a few shaves to take off either drawer side to get the whole drawer fitting properly. This is the ideal and the objective of best quality drawer making. Your fit is gained at this stage — the stage of cutting out the components, the drawer is then careful jointed and assembled and with a few shaves of a plane will fit the opening exactly and precisely. Now fitting the drawer back too the opening is a little bit tricky and let me explain why. If you look at diagram 9, you will see that the drawer back does not extend the full height of the opening, there is a gap below it to accommodate the drawer bottom and there is a gap above it to accommodate an air gap. This gap is essential if the drawer is to enter the opening smoothly and if it is to prevent and air dam building up behind the drawer which would prevent the drawer being closed properly. You will note top of the drawer back is rounded over. fr

3. The material for the drawer back will be of exactly the same thickness as the material used for drawer sides. It should come to the bench dimensioned slightly narrower that the height of the aperture for the reasons stated above and slightly longer than the drawer opening. Do not be tempted to cut the drawer back to the finished width ab (see diagram 8) leave it the height as shown ac (diagram 8) the scrap BC is taken off at a later stage but you do need to have a reference surface and that is given by the bottom of the drawer aperture. Take the drawer back, leave the bottom edge straight from the jointer as you will be taking this surface off later, clean the inside surface lightly with a bench plane and check the thickness. As outlined in a previous article, mark the outside middle bottom with a semi circle or a coloured spot with a colour chosen to match with the three other components of the drawer. An alternative to this would be to number each set of drawer components. The width of the drawer back is ripped to 1 mm less than the drawer aperture. Having done this you can begin work on the ends of this component. Offer each end up to the aperture in turn using the base edge as a reference surface and mark off the top and bottom on either side. It should then be possible to shoot to these marks using the shooting board but this time you will be shooting across the grain. It is essential that your plane is set for a very fine cut and the blade is nice and sharp, hold the job tight against the cross bearer of the shooting board and try not to shoot right through so avoiding the

4. possibility of break out on the far corner. In this way the drawer back can be fitted to whatever shape the drawer aperture is. It is very rare that carcasses and drawer apertures are dead square and this fitting process allows for this. Having cut one end of the drawer back to fit, very carefully cut the other end of the drawer back. This is a critical part of the operation and right at this point you are determining the fit of your drawer so do it carefully. It is literally a "one shave fit", one shave too few and it won’t go in, one shave too many and it will be too sloppy. Having fitted the back but before you remove the face edge reference surface, it is possible to use a drawer back as a template for marking out the drawer front. This is a dodge that saves a little bit of time and ensures the accuracy of the drawer fit. Be very careful in how you select your material for drawer fronts. I know it is very tempting to pick the most decorative stuff for the drawer fronts, but you really do need very stable material as well. Imagine what would happen if your drawer fronts were to twist once it had been planed up but before the drawer were assembled (see diagram 10). A slight twist in the drawer front is greatly accentuated by attaching the drawer side. A drawer made in this way will never fit a carcass properly. In order to check your drawer front for what is called "wind" we often use a shop made tool called winding sticks, these are shown in diagram 11. This is quite a simple tool — winding sticks are quite simple in performance being a pair of very accurately dimensioned pieces of wood, the nearest bar can be fitted with

5. two inlaid dark strips of wood to make their use slightly easier. The idea is by placing them on a surface and sighting from point x to point y, it is possible for you to see more clearly whether a board or component is in wind. Having checked the drawer front for wind, mark the inside with a face mark and mark the outside centre lower edge with a half circle, inside the half circle it is possible to place either a coloured dot or a number corresponding to the other numbers on the set of components. Please please don’t forget to mark your components in this way. If you are making half a dozen drawers and you get your components muddled up, you will be very sorry because you will never get them back the same way again. Next we can begin fitting the drawer front to the opening. Firstly shoot the face edge square to the first side on the shooting board. As drawer fronts are usually thicker than drawer sides or drawer backs, it may not be so easy to use a shooting board. Drawer fronts are thicker than drawer sides and drawer backs because they have to accommodate a reasonable length of dovetail (see diagram 8). Remember it is the drawer front that somebody tugs when they are opening the drawer, at that moment all of the stress is transferred to the dovetails. Bearing in mind that this drawer could well be loaded up with the family silver, you can imagine the energy that has to be transferred through these joints each time a drawer is opened or closed. For this reason, drawer fronts are usually of a thickness of between 15 and 20 mm depending upon the size of the drawer. For my money I reckon 20 mm is a bit too big to put on a

6. shooting board, so I tend to do this freehand with a bench plane. Once the drawer front bottom edge has been quickly cleaned of its machine marks and left square to the inside you can use this as a reference surface for fitting to the drawer aperture. Now remember the drawer back has already been fitted in there, so it is possible to use that as a template to mark out the length of the drawer front (see diagram 12), be careful that you get your components the right way round — both face sides should be together and the two outside surfaces should be to the outside and pointing in the same direction. The drawer front is the most difficult component of the four to fit to that opening, basically you are attempting to fit three surfaces at once, the two ends of the drawer front and the top. My favourite method is to do the top first because this is the least critical in dimension. I mentioned earlier that drawer fronts expand and contract with the ambient humidity, so I would recommend fitting your first drawer front with maybe 1/4 mm gap at this point; this just leaves the two ends to fiL This is often done so that the drawer front will only just enter the aperture by a millimetre of two. It is prevented from going the whole way in by a slight 1 degree tapered fit, the reason for this will become clear when the drawer is assembled and is fitted to the aperture. Then that small taper will then enable the drawer front to have a nice clean planed edge (see diagram 13). Now the drawer front is fitted into the drawer aperture, it is important to remember to run the grooves on the inside of the drawer front and the inside a

7. of both drawer sides to accept the drawer bottom. We tend to use cedar of Lebanon for drawer bottoms as this gives a pleasant fragrant effect, it also keeps away moths. Where drawer slips are used, it is only necessary to groove the drawer front but to guage the rear one third of the inside faces of the drawer sides with the measure taken from the bottom of the drawer front to the top of the grooves into which the drawer bottom will be fitting — does that make sense? This guage line will then be able to assist you in the location of your drawer backs and drawer slips at a later stage. Having done this, you can perform the last preparatory operation on the drawer front which is to clean the inside surface lightly with a bench plane to remove any machine marks. Finally you can rip and plane the drawer back to its final width (see diagram

9). The top of the drawer back can also be cut to a distance 5 mm lower than the drawer sides. A nicely finished drawer back has a slightly rounded over top not completed rounded, just softened with a few light passes of a bench plane.

Next month we will join these little blighters together and knock them up.