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:
There’s a tiny 1/16″ square rebate along the front edge. The tenons are 5mm thick, a little less than 7/32″.
The tenon on the end of the stiffener rail is a half-dovetail (sorry for the blurry photo):
It’s just about the end of the month and I am pretty much on pace to complete the frame cut out on this cabinet. Once that is completed, I will look to tackle the two drawers, and the two doors, and the demountable back frame and panel unit.
Weather however is not looking promising. Today was 35˚ F in the shop, about 2˚C, and I could just manage 4 hours of work before I packed it in. However a deep freeze is setting in as of this evening with night time temps well below freezing, and this will continue for several days it appears, so I will probably not be going into the shop for a spell. I’ve brought some planes home to sharpen and have some work to do on the next TAJCD Volume, so I’ll have plenty to do I’m sure. Thanks for tuning in and we’ll see you next time.