Talk to most beginning woodworkers about what gives them the most anxiety, and you might be surprised to hear that it’s not buying tools, planning projects or even tackling necessary joints such as the Mortise and Tenon…

It’s building drawers.

As amazing as it may sound, drawers have this ability to freeze a woodworker in his or her tracks.  However, when you consider that a drawer is just a box inside a box, building drawers can actually be one of the easier parts of building a cabinet.

There are some things you do have to consider when building a drawer.  First of all, it should be truly square to fit inside the case and operate smoothly, so proper assembly is a key.

Secondly, drawers are also exposed to tremendous pulling forces on the front corners.  Consider that a drawer may be opened tens of thousands of times in its lifetime, and, if it’s like the drawers in the dressers in my kids’ rooms, those drawers may be jammed full of clothes and have to be forced open.

Finally, drawers aren’t just functional pieces.  Many times, they add to the overall look of the piece, so making them tough and beautiful is important.

As far as materials go for drawer construction, few things are as useful as 1/2″ cabinet grade plywood.  This stuff is easy to work with, very stable and strong. You can also either edge band or install a piece of solid wood on the top edges to hid the plies in the plywood if you wish.

Materials such as melamine coated particleboard are also stable and easy to clean, but I have seen my share of particleboard sided drawers fall apart if abused and exposed to water… something that can happen in bathrooms and kitchens.

Solid wood drawers are stunning and allow the widest variety of drawer joinery methods, and are excellent choices for furniture projects.  Frequently, a ‘secondary wood’ such as poplar, pine, alder or red oak will be used to make the drawer sides, saving the prized cherry, maple, walnut or other exotic wood for the visible outside of the case.

The joinery methods which connect the back of the drawer to the sides are very easy – these joints don’t normally take much abuse.  So, setting the drawer back into a dado with some glue and bradding it into place should do the trick.  Pocket screws can also work.  Dovetailing or fancier joints can be done for drawer backs, but it would be considered overkill unless the drawer opens both sides of the case (a push through drawer) or it’s done for aesthetic reasons.

Drawer front joinery is where the challenges lie, and there are many different methods for joining them.  While not all joints will work in every situation, each can play a role in drawer construction.

• Reinforced butt/rabbet  joints – Simply butting the sides to the front by gluing and bradding or screwing the sides to the front can work for light-duty drawers and utility models out in a work shop.  While they may work for a while, over time it’s unlikely that the drawer will hold together well.  With that being said, I have used pocket screws to join the sides of some pantry drawers from solid red oak in a project I built six years ago, and they are still holding together well even with tough use.
• Wooden-fastener aided joints – Dowels and biscuits can  be very useful in constructing drawer front joints because they are set into place through the two boards with modern glues, which tends to anchor them in place and allows the forces to focus on a larger surface than can be provided with a brad.  In fact, cabinet makers will frequently use contrasting wood through dowels or the Miller Dowel system to give a stylish appearance and plenty of strength.
• Locking dado/groove joints – By cutting a series of dadoes or rabbets into the front and sides of the drawer, you can create an interlocking joint with a table saw or with a router equipped with a straight or drawer lock type bit.  These joints can be mass produced, making cutting a bank of drawers a piece of cake.  Of course, you want to be as accurate in your setups as possible, but, once the heights are set, it’s off to the races.  Sliding dovetails also fall into this category.  They are really slick joints, but they can be kind of finicky to use in drawer joinery.
• Interlocking joints – Through dovetails, half blind dovetails, and box or finger joints have set the standard for drawer front joinery for centuries.  While finger and box joints can be outstanding for this kind of application – especially with today’s modern adhesives, the dovetail joint’s mechanical interlock ensures that little short of a stick of dynamite will cause the joints to fail.  These joints are often seen as the true sign of quality, but they may be overkill for smaller drawers and against other capable joints.

By the way, if you don’t have a dovetail jig capable of cutting half-blind dovetails, or you don’t want to learn how to master cutting these joints, all isn’t lost.  By cutting through dovetails with a jig or by hand – or cutting dovetail splines as with a Kehoe jig – and attaching a ‘false’ or ‘added’ drawer front, you gain the appearance of a half-blind dovetail joint and you can stretch your supply of good project wood by resawing thicker boards down to a thinner size.  I prefer this method, because it also allows me to get the drawer face absolutely centered in the project opening.

Drawer bottoms can be made out of plywood, some other sheet good or solid wood.  You can simply route grooves into the insides of the four box sides with a router, dado blade or with multiple passes on a regular table saw blade.  Just be careful about having the dado on the drawer front hidden when the drawer is assembled…  you can plan to have it fall where a socket will fall if using dovetails or box joints, or by having the drawer sides extend to the front of the drawer box for other kinds of drawers.

I prefer 1/2″ plywood for drawer bottoms, and I will rabbet it to fit into a slightly undersized dado (3/8″ seems to work well) to get a tight no-slop fit.  This is unless the drawer is going to be small and not carrying a lot of weight.  Then, I’ll choose 1/4″ plywood.

Solid wood drawer bottoms are a very classic touch, but you have to remember to allow for seasonal wood expansion and contraction – so don’t glue the bottom into the box.  A squirt of glue in the middle of the drawer front dado and a screw to secure the bottom to the back of the drawer should be sufficient.  You can build these drawer bottoms like a raised panel door if  you want to give the drawer bottom a little more mass and not have to create an extra wide dado in the sides.

One easy way to install drawer bottoms is to cut the dado only into the front and two sides of the drawer box.  Make your drawer back the same height as the top of the drawer sides to the top of the dado.  This way, you can slip the drawer bottom into place past the drawer back and secure it to the bottom of the drawer back.  By building this way, you can replace the drawer bottom easily should something happen to it, instead of having to pull the entire drawer apart if you captured all four sides of the bottom.

Armed with a little bit of knowledge and some confidence, if you haven’t yet tried building drawers for your projects, now’s a good time to give it a shot.

Drawers in woodworking projects can be very useful.  They can be dainty affairs, holding just a few pens and pencils, or they can be massive and built to withstand an entire file drawer’s worth of files and papers.

During last season’s kitchen cabinet opus, Norm Abram even advised that it would be more convenient for the home cook to replace cabinets with doors with banks of full-extension drawers in lower cabinets, making it easier to reach everything held within.

While drawer construction might be intimidating to the average woodworker, choosing a method for the drawers to operate smoothly and hold the weight can pose its own challenges.

Wooden runner systems can be tricky to build, so that’s why companies have developed an array of different styles of metal drawer runners.  Side mount, bottom mount, 3/4 extension, full extension and full extension over-travels are just some of the different varieties of runners out there.

While these runners are great, they can look out of place on a period reproduction piece, an they might be overkill on smaller drawers.  Also, woodworkers have built their own slide systems for centuries with great results.

So, this week, we want to know what you think about metal drawer runners and how you might use them.

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Installing Plastic Laminate

While it may not spring to mind as a first choice of materials to work with, woodworkers have used miles of plastic laminate on their projects.  Whether to create a tough writing surface for a student’s desk, a counter top for a busy kitchen or as a way to build doors which can double as dry-erase boards, plastic laminates are versatile, relatively inexpensive and, unfortunately, have a reputation for being difficult to work with.

This page, brought to you by Woodworker’s Journal and Skil Tools, gives a good tutorial on the basics of installing plastic laminates.  The process is laid out in easy step-by-step photo instructions and offers some pretty slick tips for working with the stuff.

This is the newest tool in my arsenal – a fresh-out-of-the-package Veritas Dovetail Saw.  It may have arrived at my home just yesterday, but the journey to this tool has taken nearly a decade.

When I first started woodworking, my first saw was a Craftsman fine toothed panel saw.  It was a great saw for what I was doing, but it was huge and – yes – I was also lured away by the siren’s song of power tools.  Through  the following years, I have gotten my hands on some large  big-box Japanese style saws, a reversible ‘dovetail’ saw that flipped on its offset handle and some entry-level Japanese style saws from some of the larger online woodworking retailers.  They all did so-so work, and I always found myself making excuses for my poor saw work.

I thought I was in the clear about a year ago when I bought a new dozuki from Lee Valley.  It did cut beautifully, but the problem I had was that getting a grip on the traditional handle was kind of tricky.  I found myself gripping the saw slightly differently every time I picked it up, and my cuts would suffer.

While at the recent Woodworking Show in Tampa, I made a beeline to the Lee Valley booth.  There they were, all of the tools in the catalogs that I had drooled over for years.  Planes, chisels and measuring devices as far as the booth stretched.  While looking at all of the goodies, I saw the new Veritas Dovetail Saw sitting on a shelf.  I had read so many reviews of it, and I had been told by several woodworkers that I might be more successful with a western-style saw, I just had to pick it up and give it a try.  I was hooked and ordered one on the spot.

The saw is exceptionally well made, which has been my experience with all of the hand tools I have used from the Veritas line.  It’s a substantially built saw with absolutely no wiggle or slop in the handle (which is held to the saw with post and nut similar to a plane handle).  The grip, which has been modeled after an antique saw’s, seems to fit my hand perfectly.  The grip seems small at first, but you have to realize it’s not designed for you to clench your fist over.  Simply wrap your thumb and three fingers around the handle, and point your index finger down the saw’s spine.  This way, you will be ‘pointing’ to where your saw should go.  This is a very comfortable grip, and no matter how many times I picked up the saw, my hand rested in exactly the same spot.

The saw’s teeth are angled back to 60 degrees, which is drastically different than my dozuki’s teeth, which are 90 degrees to the blade.  The product literature says it’s filed that way because it makes the saw easier to start… something I have struggled with on cheaper saws.

After handling the saw for a while, I just had to put it to use.  I clamped a piece of red oak in my vise and started cutting.  The saw starts easily by slightly tipping the nose down and pushing gently.  Not having to worry about my grip, I was able to focus on my body positioning and arm mechanics.  The saw cuts exceptionally well, taking about a dozen strokes with very minimal downward pressure to cut a one inch deep kerf.  The stiff blade and minimal tooth set helped keep the saw on track as I worked it through the cut.

The results were impressive.  Here is the board I used with the Veritas saw cuts in the group to the left and cuts made by my dozuki on the right.  While the Japanese saw’s kerf was slightly narrower, the Veritas blade cut a very fine kerf as well.

After playing with the saw for a while, I finally buffed the blade with a little furniture paste wax, set the blade guard over the teeth and put it in the saw drawer of my tool chest.

A tool like this will be getting lots of use in my shop!

My Kids’ Step Stool

• April 2000

Being a dad is one of the best things that has ever happened to me.  Watching my two sons grow up from birth has filled me with awe and amazement.  From hearing them cry for the first time to hearing them figure out their math homework has been nothing short of a miracle.

Oh, sure, it’s had its ‘moments’, but those rough times have been more than compensated for in all of the good stuff.

One of the toughest things to do as a parent is to let your kids discover their independence.  When that three-minute-old child is handed to you, he or she is 100% dependent on you.  Later, they will learn how to turn over, sit, stand, talk, eat for themselves, walk… then run.  All of this is preparation for the day they leave home and make their own way in the world.

To help my boys on their road to independence and self-reliance, I built this – a plain pine step stool.  After all, kids are pretty short and can’t reach all of the adult-sized amenities. Very roughly based on a Shaker design, it was – to that time – the most involved project I had ever tackled.

I built the sides out of pre-glued pine panels I picked up at the local Home Depot.  Those panels are pretty convenient for the beginner woodworker – they have tight joints and are made of solid wood.  The piece I bought was long enough for me to cut out both sides.

After I notched out for the step with my jigsaw, I also notched out for a back stretcher.  I saw this piece done for the fancier step stools Norm Abram built on the New Yankee Workshop and figured it would help strengthen the piece.

The step treads and back stretcher were cut from leftovers of the panel . Assembly was pretty easy – some glue and finish nails. I glued and nailed the little stretchers under the fronts of the treads to give them extra support.

I sanded the piece down with my 1/4 sheet finish sander and brushed on two coats of Minwax’s Poly Shades honey pine to give it a ‘pinier’ look.

While this step stool wasn’t made of high-end exotic hardwoods and put together with dovetail joints, it has held up for the past nine years under some pretty tough use.  Its primary home was parked in the kids’ bathroom, so the little fellas could reach the sink to brush their teeth and wash hands.  The stool even served the boys well in the kitchen where my wife and I gave them their first cooking lessons.

And, amazingly enough, my wife and I would use the stool to stand on when we painted the rooms in our home.  It was just tall enough to make trimming out the ceiling an easier chore.

Today, the piece is just as solid as it was the day it was completed.  It’s still sturdy and easily holds the weight of my boys (Who both now tip the scales over 65 pounds) and their dad (Who tips the scales at a much higher weight than when he built it).

While I would build something like this much differently now, this project wasn’t as tough as you might expect, and was pretty easy to build for a beginner with few basic tools.

There’s something to be said for momentum when you are working on woodworking projects.  For some projects, you can go from the first milling operation to totally done in a day.  For other projects, it may take longer because they are more involved.

And, then, there are those projects that linger.  You know the ones I’m talking about – “Oh, I have to make the drawers and doors, but, hey, the weather is beautiful and I need those special pieces of hardware…”

Before you know it, that bathroom vanity without the doors has become a long-standing family joke with your unfinished project at the punch line.

So, how long has it taken you to complete your longest-delayed project?  It’s OK, we won’t laugh at you!

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An (Addictive) Woodworkers’ Game

So, do you think you have a set of high quality calibrated eyeballs?  Can you bisect an angle on sight or put your finger on the exact middle of a circle without measuring?

If so, have we got a challenge for you.  ToolCrib.com has posted a simple yet maddening woodworker’s game on their site.  In this game, you will do three rounds of ‘eyeball’ measurements… how to make a parallelogram, how to find the center of a circle, how to find the midpoint of a line segment and other tasks.  Once you make your selection, the computer will calculate how far off from true you are.

So far, after *ahem* a ‘few’ rounds of play, my best score was 5.5 units… not bad, but not good enough to trust when doing a project installation.

I will give one word of warning… this game is addictive.  Set your computer alarm for a few hours from when you start so you don’t continue playing well past your bedtime!