My screw up.....

15 hours ago15 hr

This is a small update on a serpentine front sideboard I'm attempting to build. I had detailed making these drawer fronts some time ago in this thread.

My progress has been very slow, and made worse by how hard this thing has been to do. Anyway, I had go to the point of sitting the drawers in place in the carcase only to find my problem. Maybe I skipped my meds, or maybe it a senior moment, or just plain ineptness on my part. This will sound like I'm making excuses (I probably am), but my wife is handicapped so I also do caregiver and all household chores and of course the outdoor stuff. So my time in the shop might be 15 minutes a day, with an occasional sprinkling of 1 hour stints. So when I made this mistake I have all kinds of excuses for doing it, but the truth is it shouldn't have happened. Couple that with me making this project much harder than it should be (building drawers first, then the carcase) and the result is this screw up. The piece has a full width drawer in the center, and 2 smaller drawers at the top. I vacuum pressed the 2 drawer fronts and cut one in half for the upper 2 drawers. Then I went ahead and finished the drawer boxes, intending to build the carcase to fit them. The story goes on for several paragraphs that I'll skip, but here's what happened: the 2 half fronts needed t be fit in the same way they were pressed but instead I made the right side drawer with the front upside down. This results in the curves (as well as the grain) not matching the trim pieces as well as the second drawer. I'm now faced with disassembling the original and make a new box keeping the front oriented correctly. There was a dozen way for me to avoid this, and none of them worked; I screwed up. here's some pics, the close up is the misaligned front, and how it looks when I sit the drawer in there upside down. BTW another genius move I made was to use brass dowels to hold the fronts to the boxes, that complicates my disassembly process quite a bit. So after carefully considering my next steps (which included just letting it be) I decided to go ahead and fix my mistake. This worked out a little better than I hoped. After carefully resawing the drawer front off the box, it was just a matter of making a new bottom and sides. I only had one goof. My saw is a Sawstop, and I figured I'd just put in bypass to cut through the brass pins...only I got so wrapped up in the precision of the cut I forgot to turn on the bypass. Nothing happened, I had heard in the past embedded metal won't trigger the brake,,,,but essentially I lucked out. Anyway the pics show the joint I had to saw out and the result. This did take a little clean up with a paring chisel and shoulder plane, but it cleaned up nicely. The one thing I kicked around was the groove where the original bottom was. I used the RT to flush trim the bottom off the drawer front and sanded it smooth. I had planned to put another piece of veneer on the inside surface to hid that groove. (These drawer fronts are laminated for the bending and them veneered.) I still had the form I used and sawed it in half for the veneering; but in the end I decided to just let it go. It really is in a place that very few folks will notice it. then you can see the improved fit in the last pic...and now the grain matches across the 2 small drawers. So the pics. The first one is the misalignment, it looks a lot worse than it shows in the pic. The second one shows what it should look like (I turned the drawer upside down). The drawer joint I'm fussing with is in the third pic, you can see the brass dowels I so wisely used. But it cut out nicely, and once everything was back together it all lines up as it should