Dark Chocolate and Sponge Cake (32)

The next step with this futon cabinet build was drawer fitting. The first thing I did was to see if the dry-fit drawers, without any adjusting, were decently close to the framed opening size, without being undersize in width, and happily this turned out to be the result:

As it turned out, each drawer side’s running surfaces needed but two or three strokes with a plane to obtain the required drawer box width:

Once the drawer boxes were looking good, I trimmed the drawer fronts to width, slightly inside of the drawer box width, and then proceeded to adjust by plane until the fronts were fitting into their openings:

The fit is slightly difficult to gauge since the drawer fronts will be receiving multiple coats of a film-building finish, and I wanted to size the fronts so that they would fit without rubbing the surrounding frame after the finish was done. I’m allowing for a gap at top and bottom edges of 0.015″ at the moment, but may increase this:

Another view – some further hand planing to the top edge of the drawer fronts done in situ:

From the back you can see how the whole thing ties together more or less:

I need to sort something out with drawer stops, and I think the simplest way to provide adjustable stops would be via bolted-in blocks, however I am now questioning whether the blocks need to have any adjustability at all and if simply gluing in blocks, say, might just be a fine alternative. I can think of ways to do it with joinery, mind you….

Seemed like as good a time as any to drill the drawer fronts for the handles, and see how they look slid into position:

With that looking more or less sorted, I turned my attention to the last bit of joinery work on the cabinet’s frame elements: the front doors. After cutting out the four rails and completing their tenons, the last step on the connections was to form the jaguchi, a little flap of wood with a miter on the end of the rail to give a clean fit at the junction between rail and still. This allows the chamfer to flow smoothly around the connection.

To cut the mitered surface, I employ an 8-flute metalworking 45˚ dovetail bit, keeping a little piece of wood clamped the the exit face to keep spelching to a zero level:

Here’s a look at the largely-completed joints at one end, the upper rails at the top:

Then the rails could be fitted to the stiles. This one is nearly drawn up:

It looks like the haunched portion of the tenon may be a hair long, and that keeps the mitered flap from coming tight to the chamfered arris on the stile. Another view:

The doors main framing elements are set aside for the time being. I then tackled the work on the dovetailed battens, of which there are four per door, two tenons per batten. Here I’m cleaning up the tenon shoulders, two battens ganged:

I’ve made the doors only about 1″ (25mm) thick, and with the panel occupying some 3/8″ (9.5mm) of that thickness, there isn’t a lot of room for the battens in terms of depth.

Battens serve mainly to interlock with the panels with sliding dovetails to provide the doors with a means of resisting shear loading from gravity which would otherwise lead the doors to sag, and secondarily the battens can aid in keeping panels flat. The taller the batten sections, the greater will be their stiffness and ability to keep the panel flat. With the panels being quartersawn mahogany, I do not anticipate any issues with cupping or the like, however I did want the battens to be reasonably stiff in that direction all the same.

My solution to the apparently cramped space on the stiles for the battens was to make the battens deeper, so they actually stick out beyond the plane of the door, and space them so that they do not run into any interior framing elements, and scallop their ends to as to allow them to terminate cleanly into the stiles.

Here’s a look at the scalloped transitions on the end of the battens:

Another view:

After fitting the battens to all the involved mortises on the door stiles, a dry fit assembly of the door frame could get underway:

Here’s how the connection looks on the hinge stile of the door where the lower rail meets:

Once the door was together in dry-fit, it could be placed in the opening to see if things were looking copacetic:

The door is nice and square and seems to fit well generally:

The process was repeated with the other door’s frame members, and a while later I could put the assembled second door into place for a look-see:

As the rail tenons are proud on the stile exit faces for the time-being, the doors cannot close up in the middle, so the second door’s hanging stile rests atop the tenons:

Another view:

That completes the joinery work on the framing elements, so another milestone in the build is reached.

Remaining joinery work involves the panels for the doors and the demountable cabinet back. Lotsa sliding dovetails to come. The drawer fronts are getting their finish now and hoping to have the drawers glued up before too long.

Thanks for visiting the Carpentry Way. Post 33 is next in this thread.