Let's back up a bit.
The bunk beds are finished. At least as finished as they are going to be until the lumber has completely dried out.
Kenny, Jenne and the kiddos said that they were fine to sleep on, so I'm not too worried about that project.
More recently, I took a bunch of stock into the school to make some rip cuts on the table saw. I can rip using the radial saw at the house, but it's about 1 degree out of square and I'm not really looking forward to figuring that one out. So anyway, the stock was ripped for the oak bookcase, a wall mounted cabinet for the garage/shop and the case for a router table that I want to build as well.
Got all of that loaded onto the trailer at the school and brought it home only to throw it into the garage for the night.
Today I woke up, took the kiddo to daycare, walked into the garage to work on the bookcase and built two drawers instead.
Now, in all fairness, the drawers go to a cabinet that I built for the garage months ago that was never finished. The drawers have reduced the cabinet top clutter. They have made it such that dust has a significantly harder time entering the cabinet.
The fact of the matter is, that I walked into the garage this morning with one intention, and ended up doing something completely different.
Since I built two drawers today, I may as well go into how that was done.
First off, the stock for the drawer sides and back was ripped months ago at the school so all I needed to do was measure the depth for the drawer and I'd be off to the races.
Now, I didn't make all of the measurements and go from there. I didn't draw up plans and work from them either. I did what cabinet makers and furniture makers used to do...measured and cut everything to fit as I went. This allows me to make something that's truly custom, and allows me to slack just a bit.
As I said, I cut the drawer sides first on the miter saw and then set up a router to cut rabbets on the ends.
I use the cheap, aluminum depth/height gauge from Sears for setting the height of my router bits. It was inexpensive and it's also fairly accurate. I went from there to setting up my edge guide and then "sneaking up" on the fit of the rabbets with a piece of scrap that was once part of the drawer sides.
Once these were done, I clamped them into the cabinet and measured for the fronts and backs.
From here I was able to cut the drawer fronts and backs, cut dadoes in the bottom edges of all of the pieces for the bottom, and then measure and cut the bottoms. I did a dry fit of all of the parts before putting them together with glue and nails, and I'm somewhat glad that I did as my measurements for the fronts and backs were off by about 1/16 of an inch. With all of the parts cut, I sanded up to 220.
Now for assembly:
I only add glue to the rabbets. This allows the panel for the bottom to shrink and expand with humidity changes within the dado. You will see the pneumatic nailer in the picture above as well. After I glue and clamp, I use the nailer for the final joint structure. It also allows me to take the clamps off of the work.
With this done, I set the drawers on the slides and attached the fronts. To attach the fronts, I put the drawer all the way in, set some shims on the top of the door below, and then carefully pulled out the whole drawer and then clamped the front to the box with a couple of f-clamps.
I opted to use my new Kreg Jig to attach the fronts to the boxes. The Kreg Jr. is the one in the photo, but I used the full size guy on a couple as well. Fairly pleased with the job that the Kreg Jid did.
Drawer fronts attached, I pulled the slides out with the drawers and attached them to the cases with screws and then attached hardware.
Final step was adding stuff to the drawers.
I did make a jig to cut the dadoes on the bookcase today however. So I've started.
Anyway, time for some sleep. The cabinet is almost done, I'll need to cut some trim for the edges, but other than that, I'm done with another project.
I think that I can have the bookcase finished by Friday. This works well as we have more company coming for the weekend!
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