During the past two months we have talked about preparing the timber for drawer making. As I have previously explained the fit of a top quality drawer is gained not once the drawer is assembled, but in the preparation and the dimensioning of the drawer components. Each individual component of a drawer is fitted to the individual carcass opening. If you have any doubt about this please go back and re—read the articles in the two preceding copies of Woodworker for without a clear understanding of this you have not got a cat in hells chance of making a top quality drawer. During this article I shall be talking about jointing the four components of the drawer together. I have previously talked about dovetailing in general, now I shall be talking about a specific kind of dovetailing used most commonly in ~ drawer making — that is the "lap dovetail". This is the joint you use most commonly to attach the drawer sides to drawer fronts. I shall not in this article discuss in any great detail the joining of the drawer back to the drawer sides for this is done with a conventional "through dovetail". I won't go into great detail on this technique as I have talked about at some length in previous issues (Wc~xtw~rkcr No: ) .

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It is not necessary to fix drawer components together with dovetails. I have even seen so called craftsman with high public profiles attaching drawer sides to drawer fronts with biscuits, dowels and pins. But if you want a top quality drawer then dovetailing is the best way to go about it. Imagine the weight and stress exerted upon a drawer corner when a drawer loaded with the family silver is opened and then closed pretty briskly. A good well made dovetail joint has the mechanical strength to stay together even if the glue bonding the two pieces of timber together has disintegrated. This is the unique advantage that dovetailing offers in this particular application. A lap dovetail is used on the joining of the drawer front to the drawer side to conceal the joint once the drawer is closed. It is not necessary to do this and contemporary craftsmen have used through dovetailing to decorative effect, but this would not be a normal application of the technique. To begin jointing these four components together, first set a guage to about three quarters of the thickness of your drawer front — that is if you have a 20 mm thick drawer front your gage should be set to 15 mm. You will be guaging across the grain so it is necessary for you to have a nice sharp marking guage or alternatively a cutting guage. Guage a line around the front ends of your drawer sides, using the same guage, scribe a line down the ends of the drawer front (see diagram,~).

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Using a second gage (it is useful to have two or three marking guages so you can set individual guages and leave them set up for the duration of the job) set the guage to just very very slightly shy of the thickness of your drawer side. You can check at this point if your drawer back is also the same thickness as your drawer sides by using this gage. If this is the case you can use this one gage setting to put gage lines on just about all your components. With the gage line around the ends of the drawer back and around the ends of the rear of the drawer sides. You can also gage a line on the inside of the drawer fronts. I hope that you are following me, if not have a quick squint at drawing number Marking out for the position of dovetails, you should bear in mind the following convention. Drawer fronts usually have one more pin than drawer backs. At the top and the bottom, both drawer fronts and drawer sides you will have not full pins, but half pins (see diagran~. Where you put your pins, how fine they are and how many there are is usually determined by the kind of drawer that you are making. You would be foolish for example to put very fine pins on the drawers to a large clothes chest. These would be much more appropriate on for example a ladies dressing table or on the fine drawers of a gentlemans desk. The pins as shown in diagram4..are relatively fine and come to a quite acute point. This point is determined by the thickness of the curve of ones dovetail saw and is usually a sign of a fine and elegant handmade dovetailed drawer.

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Once the sides are guaged and the dovetails marked on the drawer sides, it is possible to cut the tails in the usual way. Saw down to the line, you can when you are doing this, take the two drawer sides and put them in the vice and saw them together. This saves a bit of time and makes sure that the drawer is visually balanced from both sides. Once you have sawn the guage line, clear the waste with a small frame saw and then pare to the line. Transfer the position of the tails to the drawer front in the same way as you would if this were through dovetail. Basically the best way to do this is to set the drawer front in your vice with the end to be marked about three inches above the surface of the bench. Then position your fore plane of its side about four or five inches away from this, rest the drawer side with one end on the area of end grain of your drawer front to be marked and its other end on the side of the plane. You can now exert a little bit of pressure with one hand and hold the whole shebang in one place whilst checking if the drawer side is in exactly the correct position on~ the drawer front. Once it is correctly positioned, very carefully scribe the position of the pins using a small knife. It is essential whilst you are doing this that the drawer side and the drawer front do not move in relation to one another (no you can't take it off and have a look and then put it back on again — or if you do you are asking for trouble). Cutting the pins in the drawer front is slightly more complicated than usual because these are lap dovetails, that is they don't go right through to the front

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of the drawer — they are concealed when the drawer is closed. Normally one would saw down to the guage line in one operation with the saw held parallel with the bench top, but when you are cutting lap dovetails you have a problem, because you can't do this sawing operation in the normal way. Usually I advocate that any sawing operation is done low down in the bench vice — this prevents any vibration and gives you more control over the piece, but when you are sawing lap dovetails, the only way to do it is to put the job high up in the bench vice and saw at an angle of about 45 degrees ~ ). Once you have sawn to the guage line, clear the waste by pairing back with a chisel If we have a lot of drawers to quite often we will employ a router to do this work. It is quite easy to set up a system whereby the waste could be cleared very accurately to both gage lines fairly quickly. To do this, put an 18 mm sheet of MDF on your bench just at the rear of your vice. This doesn't have to be a particularly large piece — about 15 inches square would do. Make sure it is ~clamped well to the bench, fit a fence that would prevent your router from cutting beyond the gage line on the end grain of your drawer front. Now set the cutter in your router to exactly the depth of the guage line on the inside face of your drawer front. Now with the drawer front clamped in the bench vice making sure it is dead flush with the surface of the MDF, it is possible to very carefully route out a large part of the waste between the pins. Make sure your router is running a small straight cutter (we usually find that a 1/8 inch straight high speed steel cutter is very good for this work). Once you have cleared most of the waste, you

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will have to pair out and clean the corners by hand as the router won't be able to clear the waste right up to the pins. To hel et into these tight little corners, we have got a pair of spe iallyf~p&dll~r~vonnd d wer making chisels (see diagram~). These are old 3/8 inch bevel edged chisels on which we have ground a bevel to the left and right that will just enable us to get into those tight little corners. Having cleaned out the waste, check for fit then wax the insides of the drawer. Your next task will be to knock the drawer up. Knocking up is a very good and accurate term, for that is exactly what you would do. You will need a flat true surface upon which to knock up a drawer because you will want to test that it is out of wind and capable of sitting nice and flat upon a true surface. Of course your bench top should be this true flat surface,m but a sheet of MDF will make a pretty good substitute if it is not. Don't I repear don't use clamps when knocking up a drawer. Clamps invariably impose stress and the delicate components of a drawer and should not be necessary if you have jointed the things together properly. Instead use a bit of glue carefully applied with a small brush and a hammer. You can if you re feeling protective of your delicate drawer making skills use a nylon faced hammer. Apply glue carefully and knock the thing together. Maker sure the drawer is out of wind, if necessary by twisting it with your hands until it is, sit it on your flat surface and check the square by measuring the diagonals of the inside of the drawer from corner to corner. Now leave it alone, you can if

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you are making a pile of drawers and knocking them all up at once, gently pile them one on top of another, but if this is your first drawer, it is best to leave it alone undisturbed until the glue cures. Don't got wiping away bits of squeezed out glue, wait until it has dried before you fiddle about with it, leave it alone, don't fuss with it. Now you can have a well deserved cup of tea and I'll see you next month to tell you how we go about fitting this drawer with a drawer bottom and putting it into the carcass.