Wednesday 11 April 2018

Drill Press Upgrade - Part 9 Drawer Construction

4 drawers for the storage unit

The next part of the job was to make 4 drawer boxes from 12mm (1/2") birch ply. I didn't have any birch ply in stock but marine is just as good. I decided to use pinned rabbet joints for strength. This required the drawer fronts to be cut to 12mm less than the drawer width. This compensated for the 6x6mm rabbet to be cut on the front and rear drawer panels.

Typical rabbet joint



The router table was setup to cut 6 x 6 deep slots in the side panels. This setup was also used to cut the slot for the drawer bottom in every drawer panel. Then a 6mm spacer was temporarily affixed to the fence to cut the rabbets. This meant that only one setup of the router table was required.


Rabbet setup. The router table only needs setting once to cut both slots and rabbets using this technique.

The drawers were glued up and left overnight to cure. 6mm dowels were also inserted to lock the panels securely. This isn't as strong as a proper dovetail joint but is good enough for shop furniture.

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