Joiner and Cabinetmaker Chest of Drawers by hand – Part the First

It is now Term 4 at my high school, and I am one of many students involved in a W.I.S.E. project.  I read The Joiner and Cabinetmaker from Lost Art Press when I was in eighth grade, and I knew I wanted to build the Chest of Drawers Thomas does when he becomes a journeyman.  As soon as I found out about the Wise Individualized Senior Experience, I knew that I would finish off my senior year by building the chest.  The W.I.S.E. program allows students to pursue an internship or a project and drop certain classes during the final term of senior year.

Photo courtesy of Popular Woodworking

I will be building the chest of drawers completely by hand, the same way Thomas does in the book.  I will be building it out of cheap wood, poplar, and veneering it in hardwood, cherry, with a small deviation from the book which is making the drawer bottoms out of aromatic red cedar for the pleasant aroma, ease of workability, and its natural resistance to rot and insects. The purpose of all of this is to experience what a cabinetmaker's apprentice would go through in his seven year journey from apprentice to journeyman.  I only have a little more than a month, so my expectations for this will be to complete this project, getting a feel for what it is like to build furniture the way it was done in the nineteenth century.

I bought lumber two weeks ago in order for it to have time to acclimate to my shop before I began planing the boards.  It was raining that day, and very hard.  I stickered the boards in my garage and set of two fans to circulate air in order to dry out the boards.

Setting them on edge only turned
them into in very short, wide dominoes

The proper solution

After they had dried out, I began cutting them to rough length and width.  I compiled a short video of the process.

Pile of sawdust after sawing all the boards by hand

In the book, Thomas glues up his boards in the rough.  This goes against everything I know, so I milled up the boards for the bottom, then glued them, and for the sides I jointed each edge, and then glued them.

This causes some problems, because there is no reference face to make sure the edge is square.  I essentially had to establish straight and square in space.  What I did was use my jack and jointer planes to carefully straighten and smooth one edge, and once I decided it was accurate enough, I compared it to each edge that would be mated to another to ensure that they were accurate as well.  It helped that the board I designated as reference was already S4S lumber, but I had to start somewhere. The photo below shows my first attempt at straightening one of the board's edges and comparing it to the reference board.  You can see light at the seam at each end of the board.

Light shining through the seam of the two boards at their ends

I then took stopped shavings with my jointer plane until I could see light in the center of the seam. That gap in the center will create a spring joint, and I will only need to use one clamp for gluing the boards together, even though Thomas keeps the boards in his vise after using a simple rub joint for the boards.  I used a clamp to close up the gap in the center of the boards to make sure that I could close it up with just one clamp, and that there were no gaps in the glue joint.

The glue joint after some adjustment

The glue joint after testing the glue joint with a clamp

I managed to get all three sides of the carcase glued together today. My next step will be adding the cherry edge banding and milling the panels to their final sizes.  The top of the case is attached to a web frame, not a wide panel like the other three sides, so here are the three carcase panels: