Here is a chest of drawers I built for my mother. She is an artist, and wanted more storage for her pastel paintings that are not yet finished. I think she had a rack of plywood shelves in mind, but you know how that goes.
Thanks to all the Creekers for advice as I figured my way through this project. These were my first dovetails, and I looked at lots of your work in figuring out how to do mine. The Neanders inspired me to plane the boards to glass-like smoothness, and a classified's find of a Steve Knight half-finished infill smoother made planing the drawer fronts possible. The project finishing forum helped me move from shellac as my first finishing choice to shellac followed by waterborne lacquer to give the wood more protection against cleaning the pastel dust.
The primary wood is cherry and bird's eye maple, both of which had been sitting in the loft of the barn for over 50 years. My grandfather (who died when I was 2) made beautiful furniture, but my father has never worked wood. The cherry had been glued up into wider sections which warped over time. I ripped them apart, reglued them, and used them for the carcase. The board of bird's eye maple was still rough sawn. There was just enough of it to leave me one spare drawer front just in case. Surprisingly, I didn't need it. Secondary wood is pine for the drawer bottoms, and douglas fir.
The design is my own, and I used Sketchup to plan it out. I wanted shallow drawers that would each hold a few unfinished paintings. I decided to hinge the top (thanks Van, for a good deal on those hinges) and spring load the top molding so she could display a work in progress to take advantage of the opportunity to see a piece from a new perspective as she walks into her studio--an attempt to aid in finding that "Aha, that's what it needs" moment. That's one of her paintings in the picture.
The molding was made with my grandfather's old delta molding cutter for the table saw. It was nice to figure out what the heck that thing was, and how to use it while still keeping all my fingers. I also used his lathe to make the pulls, though I did use Christian Becksvort's technique with a plug cutter to make the tenons.
My mom likes it. I hope you do to.
Thanks for looking,
Nelson
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Originally Posted by Paul Saffold
