Dark Chocolate and Sponge Cake (18)

A little bit of trial fitting still needed on the drawer bank framing, as I had to mark out the locations for the peg mortises on the tenons of connecting parts. Here’s the connection between rear strut, rear upper rail, and the middle panel supporting batten:

On top of the same connection the through tenons are clearer to see:

Another view:

Then there was the connection between front strut, front upper rail, and the middle panel batten to assemble:

This spearpoint connection seemed decent enough upon initial fit:

Another view of the same connection, this time from the other side:

Now onto the next task on the list, which is processing the 4 drawer bank rails for their end joinery. This work was complicated slightly by differences in the posts, front and rear, to which they connect. This left the joinery looking much the same, but with 1/16″ (1.6mm) differences in lengths here and there:

The protruding tenons you can see at the bottom will be formed into dovetail males soon enough, and those are also sized differently for front and rear rail sets.

Then I got busy on a component which associates to the drawer framing, a stiffener rail which is fitted below the drawer bank’s front lower rail. A portion of this piece has a mitered return all of 1/16″ thick. I obtained a metalworking 45˚ dovetail bit for trimming the mitered portion, and it worked most excellently at 3600rpm:

After the trim is completed, I am left with a little chisel work to do on the abutment afterwards with my skinniest 1mm wide chisel.

The clamped-on backing piece prevents spelching as the cutter exits:

The next task was to remove portions of the stick’s sides, front and back, as this stick has the x-section form of the lower half of an I-beam. After the material was removed, I tackled the clean up with a shoulder plane:

One has to be careful in using a plane like that with a cutter going all the way to the side of the plane body (a little bit beyond that, actually), as it would be easy to gouge the 45˚ portion of the profile with the plane. Managed to get through without mishap.

The completed stick, shown here at one end so you can see the section:

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Dark Chocolate and Sponge Cake (17)

Things have slowed in the shop, as I have been keeping my hours on the shorter side as the deep freeze has set in. I’m starting to consider the purchase of a heated jacket, and maybe gloves. It was 34˚F (1˚C) in the shop a few days ago, and only modestly warmer at 37˚F (2.7˚C) today. My right hand is starting to get weirdly achy, and the cold is largely responsible. It seems to me that since I have crested 50 years of age, my eyesight has gotten worse and now I am thinking my circulation also. I find that once my fingers get cold, they stay cold and take longer than seems reasonable to warm back up to normal.

Wearing gloves helps, but only marginally. I found my fingers were quite cold despite being gloved today, and while I do have thicker gloves I could use, dexterity suffers. And you don’t need to tell me that wearing gloves around spinning cutters is not exactly betting wisely.

Anyhow, enough wingeing for the time being. Though things be slow, they are progressing. Still working on the parts for the drawer bank, and most of them are through cut out now. The following picture shows some of the parts:

The two rails on the left are the upper drawer bank frame rails, front and rear, while the middle set of 4 are the top and bottom end rails, found transversely left and right.

A closer look at 3 of the 4 main rails, turned on side:

I’m generally striving this time to keep the number of times the pieces are assembled to one another, so unless I have to, I am avoiding putting the elements fully together at this time. Nevertheless, it is helpful to to a semi-mockup to confirm nothing obvious has been missed:

The front strut, having spearpoints top and bottom, is one of those exceptions, as it needs some trial fitting to take the last few shavings off to tune the fit in:

At this point, it looks to be getting pretty close. The doubled miter area closes up tight without any egregious sukima (gaps), but the housing portion could be taken down a few slices yet:

A tiny bit of the spearpoint was inadvertently dinged in removing it from the paring jig, but once the surfaces are finish planed that will be gone. I’ve already steamed 95% of the tiny ding out.

As you can see in this view, the strut is still about 0.01″ or so from being seated all the way down:

A look at the rear of the same connection shows the confluence of parts:

And the view from the underside reveals the through tenons from the strut:

The tenons will get wedged and glued at the time of final assembly. They are one of the few connections on this cabinet which resort to glue and non-demountable joints.

The 1/4″ (6.35mm) peg mortises I have been leaving to the hollow chisel mortiser, and that little bit of auger bit kiss on the left peg mortise does annoy slightly. However the peg which is to fit there, as it is done as an interference fit against the end grain portions of the peg mortise, should fill the area. I guess if someone lays on their back and looks up at the rail from below, with some good lighting, they may spot it, but I think it will turn out okay.

I slipped a few more of the pieces together part-way, just checking things out:

More:

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Dark Chocolate and Sponge Cake (16)

Next up in the layout and cutout scene are the parts which comprise the framing for the bank of 2 drawers in the middle of the cabinet. There are 4 rails which serve as the front and rear supports, 7 cross piece, and 2 vertical struts, pictured here upon 98% completion:

Another view, showing the outside faces:

As you can see, the strut which will separate the drawers at the front of the cabinet has spear point returns top and bottom, which the strut for the back of the cabinet, being concealed from view, lacks the spear points. Otherwise they are much same, with the other principal difference being that the rear strut, to the left in the above photos, has an additional mortise in the middle to accept a locking pin. The locking pin will anchor the middle of the rear panel of the cabinet to the back of the drawer bank.

As parts are completed, they may be stacked together. Here, I’ve added two of the middle crosspieces, the one on the left also serving as a batten for the middle shelf of the cabinet:

Now another part is completed and added, and you can see how the lower middle crosspiece, which guides the bottom runners of the drawers which flank it, is put together to form a triple-tenoned connection at each end:

A closer look-  the lower element has a dado on top to locate the piece above:

All these pieces have yet to be chamfered of course. Also, they will need to be fitted to the rails so as to mark the locations of the peg mortises.

The 4 rails came next, the layout of which took quite a while. Here I’m trimming the housing for the spear point on the front strut:

A look at the near-completed cut out in this area:

A while later, the joinery at the midpoints of each rail were largely roughed out, and in some portions complete:

Another view:

Given that the arrangement of parts at the top of this assembly, where a 3/8″ (9.5mm) thick  shelf panel will reside, and the arrangement at the bottom, where 1/2″ (12.7mm) thick dust panels reside, and where the drawer runner needs to be guided and supported, and given that the arrangement of framing is also different front (where there are doors) and back (where there is a demountable panel), there are as a result myriad little differences in the layout of rails top, bottom, front and back.  I had to take extra steps and double-checks to make sure I had reflected these differences in the layout.

I had a close call in rediscovering that the rear rails needed to have slightly wider and shorter end dovetails than those dovetails employed on the end of the front rails of the cabinet – this outcome due to a variety of reasons – and had already cut the rails to length before this discovery was made. Fortunately, I had taken measurements from the drawing depicting the (front) rails with the longer tenons, so now that this difference has been determined, I will luckily pay no penalty and the dreaded ‘board stretcher’ will not be required (I heard that they were on sale at Amazon though).

Another look at the rails mid-way through cut out:

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Dark Chocolate and Sponge Cake (15)

The shop, being unheated, has been a little unpleasant to hang out for the past couple of weeks, so shop hours have been reduced. I go as long as can, but once my hands get cold I start to worry about incurring another one of those slow-healing wrist or finger injuries. I’d rather not thanks.

I do like the clear days when the winter sunlight streaming in the side of my shop, generally making the midday hours a lot more enjoyable despite the cold.

Besides the main panels of this cabinet, comprising the top, the bottom, and the panel over the drawer bank, there are two additional sets of horizontally-oriented panels. These are the drawer floors, and then the drawer bank’s lower ‘dust panels’, tied in with the lower framing of the drawer bank.

The drawer floor panels were to finish at 3/8″ (9.5mm) however they had been left many months back at 1/2″ (12.7mm), and in the interim had cupped slightly. The panels are too wide even for my 19.75″ (500mm) jointer to deal with And given how wide they were for their thickness, they actually would be tough to joint properly, as the force required to feed such a wide board steadily over a jointer exceeds the board’s resistance to being flattened out, and a cupped board which gets pushed flat during the jointing cut rebounds to cupped condition afterwards, getting you nowhere but thinner.

So, flatting in this case is by way of hand planing:

The cup was about 1/16″ across the width, and I did more than a few passes at oblique angles to flatten out the board:

Mahogany is just so freakin’ tasty! And this is just the ‘genuine’ stuff, the “Sponge Cake” of this build. I’m battling delayed gratification in regards to finish planing the Cuban mahogany, which has been a delight for joinery cutting so far. It is something to which I look forward.

Once planed flat on one side, the two drawer floor boards were run through my planer to thickness them, a machine which, at 24.8″ (630mm), is just wide enough to accept the boards, themselves 23.875″ (606mm) wide.

After planing them flat, and with them remaining flat, I processed the tongues on the three edges of each board:

The two boards serving as dust panels required much the same, however they were glued up from a pair of vertical grain mahogany boards, and received a tongue all around. These boards were trimmed to width and length on the tablesaw, a last step to bring them to final dimension coming by way of hand plane, with the boards ganged so as to provide a wider registration surface.

Here I’m finding some amusement in the end grain shavings:

That’s a staged shot – the right hand shaving did not quite come out like that as the shaving itself has minimal integrity due to the way the wood is sliced and can’t sorta shoot out of the plane mouth in a nice line – I just wanted to show that the shaving was continuous. And it’s kinda cool to look at a translucent slice of the end grain of a board, especially given that the boards are near perfect vg.

Another look:

I took that shaving home to show my (bemused) wife, who thought it was kinda neat too.

One of the two panels had a small black hole that required patching. I’m not sure if it comes from a bug or is some sort of branch vestige. There have several of them in the Honduran mahogany, and if possible in the course of producing components of course I try to trim around such defects, but there was no way around having the odd one here and there unfortunately.

Anyway, this is how that patch came out:

Nothing is ever perfect, but I feel it is fairly hard to spot that patch unless you are looking for it, and to do that you’d have to look under the drawer bank with good lighting. And I think, if an eye does catch upon that patch, then seeing it is a cleanly fitted and cared-for thing transmits a positive message, I hope, to the viewer. What else are you gonna do – filling it with epoxy or similar seems like the only other option. I prefer the patching.

Curiously, while the waney edges of the Cuban mahogany were completely bug-eaten, there have been very few apparent bug holes within the rest of the material.

The panels for the drawer floors and the under-drawer dust panels are done, save for a finish planing:

One might wonder about finish planing a surface like a dust panel which will never likely be viewed by anyone, but it bugs me to see that telltale stationary planer ripple on wood surfaces, so it has got to be cleaned up, ‘proper like’.

The middle panels for the sides are also through to the same stage (not shown).

For the middle shelf, I cut a shallow dovetail trench on the underside and prepared the support batten as well:

Meanwhile, along with the panel work I’ve been sifting my way through the list of pieces I need to complete the framing of the cabinet, focussing first, as always, on the largest/longest pieces left on the list and working my way to smaller, more or less. So far so good.

On the left are the four sticks comprising the frame members for the sill, in the middle are the two pieces for the stiffening beams, and then the 4 sticks, on the right are the framing members for the drawer bank:

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Dark Chocolate and Sponge Cake (14)

31 Indoor Woodworkin