this is not the same box but is the way I start building one.
I have to print out 10 exact patterns. The tenth one is just solid with no holes for drawers.
All the pieces I cut out for the drawers are later glued together except for the front of the drawer and the back of the drawer.
I use dowels to line up everything . If I don't use the dowels when clamping two pieces together it could slip just a hair one way or the other and cause lots of extra sanding or cause for the trash can. Each set of holes has to be in a different place than the next side of the pieces. And you can't drill the next side until the first side is marked and drilled and glued.
Drawers are somewhere around 5 1/2 to 6" deep. The body being one solidly glued up mass with no cuts joining each drawer keeps it all from warping from season changes..
I use brasing or stainless steel rods for drawer pulls before I start spraying the clear lacquer so they will stay looking good and not tarnish.
I also put a wider drawer front on to cover up the possible gaps from sanding and creating a back looking mess. And here also the dowels help to line up the drawer fronts.
So far, all the sawing was with the scroll saw so the reason I call my boxes scroll saw jewelry boxes.
Now before I glue the front of the drawer on and the back of the drawer on I first mark where the cavity of the drawer will be and cut that area out with a band saw. Then using the dowel holes I first pt in the pieces I can now glue the on and they will have bee lined up before the cavities of the drawers were sawn in...
Its not a good idea to be drinking beer when all this is taking place for all these holes I drill has to have a stop set on the drill press or else...
There is way more preparation in one of these boxes and a few more weeks involved.. I cut the last 4 boxes I made out outside my motor home while sitting in an rv park in Colo.. I had all the wood glued together for each piece I needed and would only glue on one pattern one at a time as I started to scroll saw each piece out... Gluing a pattern on two or three days before the sawing takes place the pattern will shrink and stretch and some might ruin to not be usable. I always took two or three extra patterns and pieces of prepared wood just in case... I have also found two different printers will make different size patterns even though I use the same pattern in two different printers..Not good when I am having to make multiple patterns and needing some more away from the printer I first used.
When cutting out this many of the same thing and needing them as close to each other as I can get them, I find I have to start my scroll saw cutting from the same place and go in the same direction on all the pieces... Going two different directions on two different pieces a person has a tendency to lean or push the wood just enough to make differences and I get get bad line up problems and then add that many more pieces it gets too wild....Yes it ruined my very first wide box because of this...
Using the dowel system where at least 3 dowels and most of the time 4 dowels on each side of all the pieces I can get things more manageable when its time to sand it all smooth on the inside and the outside and all the drawers.. All these have to stay in line as to how they were sawn so lots of marking goes on and off. Don't even know if this is understandable or not??
And I can sure see the difference in my sawing from starting in the morning or just before I quit at night. Those lines can sure get wavy.
Jess
- John Morris and Cal
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