Building the Chest

I officially started building the actual chest today. I’ve got about one month to complete it.

Drawer Dividers

This weekend I worked on creating the drawer dividers. There are eight dividers in the chest made of 1/2″ plywood with edge banding for the front edge. The plan called for a 3/4″ edging, but I decided on using a 2″ edging instead so that I could use the same edge parts for the drawer dividers and the back and front piece edging.

The plan also called for using finishing nails and glue to attach the edging. I decided to use a tongue and groove joint instead (I don’t own a biscuit jointer yet) so that I didn’t need to use nails to attach the edging.

Using the table saw I created a 5/32″ x 1/4″ tongue on each walnut piece and a corresponding groove on the plywood. To keep the plywood square on the table saw as I was making the cuts I also needed to make a tall auxiliary fence to support the piece.

Edge Joining for the wings

I started to create the sides (wings) for the chest this weekend also.

The sides are approximately 32″ x 12″ which is wider than any of the boards that I have available, so I needed to take two boards and edge glue them together to form a board of the required width.

Both sides and the top and bottom of the chest all require to piece together two or more lengths to reach the required width. For each of these the two panels that will be used were cut from the same 2″ thick rough cut walnut plank so that I could try and match the grain pattern easier.