Chest of Drawers in American Cherry

Owing to a long hiatus in the publication of this monumental blog, the details on the construction of this piece have receded into the darkest and deepest  recesses of my pea sized brain, but worry not, dear peruser, it's been peppered with the most horrendous cockups so much so that at one time it had to be completely scrapped and remade.

For your delight, later on in this entry, I'll relate the very last occurrence of a 'faux pas terrible' 

Herewith some pics of the final, finished piece:

Firstly, a front view. The carcass is made from a core of 15mm mdf with 2mm bandsawn American cherry veneers laid over the top. From the second drawer down, the handles are morticed progressively 2mm higher each time, thus the lowest pull is 8mm above the centre line. 

The rear view.  Here there's a book matched panel...no problems thus far.  Finish overall is two coats of Osmo-PolyX with wax over the top.

Onto the drawers...

As can be seen from the pic, these are centre hung using a wide maple muntin, which means that you don't have to worry about fitting them to the cabinet sides, but it does mean that you need to apply a false planted front to the drawer box:

The advantage is that you can easily obtain a very snug fitting drawer...that feeler gauge is about 0.3mm or thereabouts.

Drawer bottoms are Cedar of Lebanon and possibly a trifling on the thick side...the next time I make some of these sorts of drawers, I need to play around and find a way of making them thinner.

Drawer pulls are always the most difficult decision to do, but simple usually always works so they were made from Indian ebony..

..morticed into the fronts.  The shaping was done with rasps, files and then finished of with sandpaper down to about 400g.

So now there's only the plinth..

The pic shows the construction; doweled and morticed.  The dowels were made using the Dowlmax system, which in this user's very 'umble opinion is the best thing since bread was first sliced by the Romans.

What's not shown are the pocket holes that I used to join the plinth to the unit.  I used the UJK Mini-Pocket Hole Jig from Axminster which worked very nicely...difficult to fault.

I know this is going to be incredulous for you to believe and you're best sat down, well away from your coffee (in case it's spluttered all over the screen) but when I tried another trial assembly, I found that on one of the short sides, the pocket holes were not on the inside of the frame...

...but on the bloody outside!

To cut a hideous story sideways, I had to completely re-jig and remake one short side.  The miracle of it is that a) I just about had enough material left over and b) nothing else went wrong.

It's now installed and I'm back onto the Elm Cabinet IV, which should be entertaining.