Drawer bottom groove in dovetail

[David Clay]

I am building kitchen drawers using through dovetails (for the first time). I'm looking for suggestions on the best way to cut the grooves for the drawer bottom so that it doesn't show through the tails.

[Lance Norris]

Get a slot cutting router bit w/bearing. Amana and Whiteside make one thats sized for plywoods(undersized). Cut your dovetails and clamp your drawer box together temporarily, and mount your slot cutter into a router mounted in a router table. Put the box over the bit and cut the slots on the insides of the box. Disassemble the drawer box and you may have to square the slots at the end of the grooves with a chisel, or as an alternative, round the corners of the bottoms.

[Mark Singer]

Align it with apin on through dovetails. On half blind it will not show . Or you can just stop the groove on a router table

[glenn bradley]

Stopped dado will do the trick.

[Joe Chritz]

All those work well. Mark's is by far the easiest.

Joe

[Cliff Rohrabacher]

Align it with apin on through dovetails.

what do you mean by this? Clearly I'm missing a reference point or two.

Align what with what pin & where?

[Karl Brogger]

I align the groove with a pin as mark states. I cut mine with the dado head in the table saw. I did it once with a shaper and a feeder, it was fast, but it didn't do as good a job as the dado head did. There was tear-out here and there and didn't like that, (the cutter may be a bit dull as well). Plus I had to tear down, and set up a shaper again to do it. The nice thing with the feeder was that with two of us it took probably 15min to do almost 50 drawers.

[Anthony Whitesell]

Lee Valley sells a "box slotting bit" which looks promising for doing this.

[Alex Berkovsky]

Lee Valley sells a "box slotting bit" which looks promising for doing this.

Took the words right out of my mouth. I have one but did not get a chance to use it yet.

[Don Dorn]

I am building kitchen drawers using through dovetails (for the first time). I'm looking for suggestions on the best way to cut the grooves for the drawer bottom so that it doesn't show through the tails.

If you are going to use through dovetails, you are going to have grooves show through the front (assuming you pu pins on the drawer front and back ) unless you stop the groove before coming out the end of the board. I do the same thing but don't worry about it because I'm using a false drawer front which hides it. If you are not going to use false drawer fronts, you can easily hide it using half blindes by cutting the pins (the sides) on a pin which is the part that fits into the socket on the drawer front. This way, the groove is hidden and you don't have to worry about stopping it.

Those are the only ways I'm aware of. Lastly - if these are kitchen cupboards, I would seriously consider false drawer fronts. If you ever have to replace for any reason, you don't have to make a new drawer, just unscrew the front.