Joiner and Cabinetmaker Chest of Drawers by hand – Part 2

In the previous post, I cut all of the parts of the chest of drawers, and glued up the panels for the case in the rough.  Now that the glue has cured overnight, I can begin milling the case sides to size.

To mill rough boards to size by hand, I use a jack plane, and a jointer plane, or try plane as it would be called in the period this chest is based on.  The jack plane is the coarsest set plane. It has a 2 inch wide iron with a curved edge, ground to an arc of a circle with about a 9 inch diameter.  After planing the board's face as flat as I could get it with the jack plane, I move on to using my jointer plane to get it as flat as possible.  The jointer plane has an iron a bit wider, and its edge has a smaller radius, and takes a thinner shaving.

The jack plane has a narrow iron with a small radius edge

I project the iron about 1/32" sometimes as much as 1/16

I begin using my jack plane, taking strokes across the surface of the board.  Boards are likely to have a cup or a bow across their width, so this process removes the curvature, while also exploiting the wood fibers; weakness across the grain.  Then I move on to diagonal strokes across the board in order to achieve flatness.  I follow the jack plane with the jointer plane, also in diagonal strokes, and once the jointer plane removes the scallops left by the jack plane's rank cut.  I finish with strokes along the grain.

The jack plane leaves a scalloped surface behind with its highly radiused
edge.  It's easiest observed in raking light.

I did not capture any photos of the winding sticks that I use to observe "wind," twist, in the board.  Winding sticks are simply a pair of narrow boards whose edges are parallel.  They are usually around 30 inches long or so, and I made mine out of dark wood and inlaid light colored wood in the corners of one of them.  I lay one at each end of the board I am flattening, and sight across the edge of the sticks.  Usually one side of the stick is higher.  That means that that corner of the board is higher than the rest of the board, and usually the corner diagonally across from that corner is also high.  I work across the grain on the high corners with my jointer plane until the winding sticks are parallel.  I then check a few more points of the board closer to the middle of its length, and make sure the sticks are parallel there too.  It is worth all the effort in getting these boards as flat as possible, because they provide the dimensions for the rest of the chest, so its best that you start out with them being accurate.

I then plane an edge straight and square.  For me its was the edge with the cherry edge banding, because I did not want to cut any of it off in order to achieve the width I need. Once one edge is straight and square, I measure the final width of the panel from the true edge in two places and strike a line between the two with a straightedge.  

After cutting the panels to width, I use my marking gauge set to the panel's final thickness to scribe a mark all around the edges and ends of the panel.  Then I use my jack plane and jointer plane to plane the board down to those lines. 

I use an iron with a straight edge to plane the ends of the boards to length

The projection of the iron should be perfectly even

I mate the edges of the sides of the case together and use a marking knife to layout the final length of the panels.  I do the same for the bottom of the case and the top rails.  I then strike a line all around both faces and edges with a square, and saw off the ends, and plane them until the knife lines disappear.  The boards for the chest's carcase are now milled the their final dimensions.