Wall mounted Plane and Tool Cabinet - Part 5 - Drawer parts (Dovetail boards)

To a non-woodworker dovetail joints are like a puzzle from Escher and have a certain mystique about them. In reality they are strong and easy for a woodworker to do but do take time, practice and patience to get right. The most important thing when dovetailing by hand is to cut square to the face of the board. The tails can be any shape or any angle you want and cutting them square will make subsequent operations so much easier.
My minimal toolkit for dovetailing drawer parts (and yes I also do dovetailing with a router template as seen in the carcass of the cabinet) comprises the following:

• Marking gauge - I like the Veritas one
• Various bench chisels
• Right and left hand skew chisels
• Brass hammer
• Dead blow hammer
• Dovetail saw - I like the Veritas pull saw
• Crosscut saw
• Hand brush
• Rule - I favour the Incra tee bar rule
• Marking implements - 0.5mm mechanical pencil with HB leads
• Dovetail gauge - 1:8 Veritas gauge is good for hardwood
• Shop music system playing your favourite relaxing tunes (I like cool jazz when dovetailing)

Some dovetailing tools

Wall mounted Plane and Tool Cabinet - Part 4 - Internal Door

The internal door was made simply by measuring the internal dimensions of the carcass and cutting the upright stiles to this dimension short by about 3/32" (2.5 mm). This gives more than adequate clearance for the door to clear the carcass. There isn't much danger of wood movement as both the door and the carcass are made from birch plywood.
The cross stretchers were cut to size. I had calculated that the swing of the relatively deep door (5") would miss the carcass if the closed gap at the non hinge side was about 9/16" for the trailing edge to clear.
I gave the door 7/8" gap.

Then door was simply constructed by gluing and screwing the butt joints. The ply panel was also glued and screwed into place. I decided to change the design slightly and positioned the ply panel 1" in from what would become the front. This way I could use both sides of the door to hand items.
The screw head holes were plugged with more walnut plugs. Finally both sides of the exposed ply ends were covered with walnut bindings.

Edge banding glued in place after removing the
forest of clamps and waiting to be trimmed

I really like my chisel plane
it is great for removing squeeze out

Wall mounted Plane and Tool Cabinet - Part 3 - External Door

Trimming the edge banding was done with a bearing guided flush trim router bit. However this leaves a radius in the inside of each internal corner that needed removing with a combination of chisels and chisel plane. The chisel plane was also used to flush up to the plywood as sometimes the router bit leaves a few proud edges.

Using a chisel to clear the round corner

Followed up by the chisel plane

The door parts were made next. As I didn;t have enough walnut width for the entire door, this was being made with what I had on my shelves after all, I made a few glue ups. I did use some dark Titebond II rather than the Titebond II shown

Wall mounted Plane and Tool Cabinet - Part 2 - Carcase

Most people know how to make rectangular utility/kitchen/wall boxes but if you don't here is how I did it.
The carcase is made from multiply Baltic birch plywood 18mm thick (3/4").
First of all the stock was roughly cut down using a circular saw and then cut to size on the table saw. The rear edges of the sides, top and bottom panels had a rabbet (rebate) machined in using the router table. The rear panel was also rabbetted to sit within the frame. I also machined a dado (housing or trench) into each of the side panels to locate the top of the integral drawer box.

The joints for the carcase were cut utilizing a dovetail routing jig. I decided that hand cutting so many of them were not for me this time so I broke out my little used routing jig. The default setup for my jig is half blind dove tails so I simply used this option

Open box after the initial glue up