The Bow Fronted Cabinet

The Bow Fronted Cabinet has been finished and herewith a few pics of the final piece.  A couple overall showing the cabinet....

..with the door closed.

Opening the door shows the interior, with a fixed and moveable shelf, together with two small drawers....

...one shown open with turned Indian Ebony pulls.

Corner construction with through dovetails of differing widths with a final shot of the...

...rear panel detail, showing the hanging hole slots.

Domestic Goddess?

I've been in the habit over the last couple of years of stamping my initials 'RJS' on the back of each piece that I do, but as well as that, I also got hold of a set of letter stamps from Axminster and punch on the date, which, if you know your Roman numerals, reads '2013'.

Clever stuff eh?

Except that your truly, being mind numbingly dense on some (most would say all) occasions became a bit 'X' factor happy and used said letter twice, whereas it should have been once.

Big...'Oh crap...how the bloody hell do I remove it?'

I was just about to feed the entire project through the bandsaw, when I remembered that salvation could possibly be at hand...

My very old and very trusty iron!

Dunk a bit of rag in clean water, set the iron to max-nuke capability and let the steam do the work.  As you can see from the pic, it's removed virtually all of the second 'X' indentation and you'd have to look very hard to see see any faint shadow of the previous letter.

I'm quite handy with one of these things and if like me, your work ends up with all sorts of dings and dents an old iron is one of the most useful bits of kit in the shop.

Domestic Goddess?...

The jury's still out.....

TIT Co Ltd.

Bags are packed and in the words of the 60's tune, "I'm ready to go".  Ten nights in Barbados staying at the SoCo Hotel.

Luvly Jubbly!

Sneaky Stuff...I & II

This cabinet, for some reason best known to itself, appears to be coming  together reasonably well.

To date, apart from one blindingly obvious 'cock up' there haven't been too many serious blunders and if all goes to plan, it should be finished reasonably soon.

That said, Plan 'A' was for the 'Titanic' to get to NYC in one piece.

However, it seems likely that nothing quite so calamitous is going to happen, so the pic above shows the back being fitted into the rebate. The very wide rail at the bottom will in fact, be behind the drawer unit, but if you look at the width of the remaining carcase side, there isn't enough space to fit the keyhole slot to hang the cabinet....something that's irritated me for a while.

Enter the first little sneaky 'fix'.  By gluing on another separate 50mm block slightly narrower than the rebate, it now...

...provides enough material to make the hanging slot and all I needed to do was to cut out a corresponding housing in the edge of the back panel stile.

I also thought it would  be a good idea to join the fixed shelf to the back panel...but how to mark out the  exact position of the biscuits slots?  The answer was surprisingly simple.

Enter the second sneaky fix.  Bang veneer pins, (arrowed) into the dead centre of the biscuit slots in the shelf, nip of the heads so they're just proud (gnats maybe?) and offer up the back panel.

A light tap with a soft maul as the panel locates is enough to leave a couple of tiny holes to mark the position of the corresponding slots.

Not so much 'righty tighty'...definitely 'sneaky beaky'.

Righty tighty...more gnats.

Here begineth the lesson...fitting dovetails, part deux.  In compiling this entry, I make the not unnatural assumption that anyone taking the time and effort to read this will be able to cut to a line.  What follows are my own deductions on how this particular joint goes together, but you've probably worked it all out already.

Shown below is a gash off-cut of elm, split into two, with the shoulder lines marked and one dovetail cut, approx 25mm wide.  The shoulder line has been chiseled...I never leave them straight from the saw as the fuzzy edge is simply not accurate enough.

Once the tail(s) has been cut, use whatever method you like to transfer the tail(s) onto the other half to mark the socket(s).  I'm using a Robert Ingham jig here which I made a few years ago.

This, though is where the process gets cunning.  Many people assume that the end of the tail and the surface of the socket board should be flush.

Big, biggy mistake!

Dovetails go together by the shoulder line (arrowed above) pulling tightly against the inside face of the socket board and the only way to make this happen is have the dovetail....

...proud by half-a-gnats.  Once the socket has been cut, the tail should have some easement chiseled onto the inside leading edges...

...so that the joint can then be tested.  You'll find that as the tail is tapped into the socket, the shoulder line on the tail section tends to go backwards by the merest fraction, making the joint very, very tight...almost impossible to go together as the dovetail is now the same fraction larger than the socket.

Difficult to get your head round, but logical eventually!

The way to make the joint fit is to ease the sides of the socket with a wide paring chisel, just enough to remove...

...the saw marks and check to visually see that the sides are dead square.  Never, ever, try to ease the joint by paring the tails themselves...disaster awaits if you do that!
If everything has gone according to plan, you should find that the tail will tap down into the bottom...

....of the socket.  If it's really too tight, then take off just the merest whisper again with the paring chisel.  The joint shown above is unglued and you can see the slight projections which are planed off.

Dovetails seem to be the modern 'Holy Grail' of woodworkers today which is odd to me as there are a lot more difficult, cantankerous bits of joinery out there.

Ask any Japanese carpenter...

Distraction...strike one!

Before the innermost secrets and wonders of making super tight dovetails are revealed (and it's not difficult) a slight distraction for your mirth and general entertainment.

I do suggest that you hold on 'righty tighty' to your seat as if your not, you'll probably fall off it!

The first pic (above) shows two bits of oak, the lower being the bottom piece of my bow fronted cabinet.  The dovetails have been cut and the housing for the drawer divider machined as well...so far so good.

The top piece is the fixed shelf.  Click on the pic and you'll see that the shoulders line up perfectly, the housing joint has been magnificently machined to a smoooooooth sliding fit in the cabinet sides and the stopped housing joint for the divider lines up 'spot on'....

....except that if you look really carefully and have been paying full attention, you'll also realise that the stopped housing on the underside has been machined from the wrong bloody edge!

Hands up if you've been there, got the T shirt, worn it till it's a frayed rag and then torn it up for dusters?

I told you sit tight...

Righty Tighty...

In the previous post I was wittering on about marking out dovetails...not a particularly difficult thing to do.

Once you know how it's done!

However, here's a slightly different approach which I think, in my misguided wisdom, looks more interesting.

On the face of it it just looks like a row of dovetails being fitted into their respective sockets but if you click on the pic, you'll see that first and foremost, there's an odd number...7.

Second and foremost, each tail increases in width by 2mm from each side, with one central tail being the widest, but...all the pins are the same thickness.  This isn't difficult to achieve, but means that the proportions need to be worked out exactly on paper before the tails are marked.

Third and foremost, those joints are really tight, with the sides of the sockets being releived slightly with a Japanese paring chisel.  Even so, they still need a fairly large rubber maul to knock them together.

If anyone's remotely interested, I can show how it's done next time.

Probably not though.....