Here's my workbench on wheels
and I want to make some drawers to go along the top of it
along, and I've already done the most difficult part which is
figuring out which pieces of wood to use.
So, this'll be the front sides and backs
and these pieces will be the drawer bottoms.
So, here's how the four drawers are gonna fit together
and I was thinking of assembling it just with dados
But, then for the front
I wouldn't want that dado to come all the way to the top
because that would look a little bit ugly.
So I was thinking more of a stop dado, and then I was thinking,
well a stop dado is really a lot like a mortise
so, why not just mortise it together with a pantorouter?
So, I'll make a double mortise and tenon joint here
and to align this, I'm just gonna find the center
of this piece of wood by scratching it in here.
And, then I'll put the router exactly in between
by just pushing the pin into one of the holes, here.
And, then I'll make sure the bit is centered on
the piece of wood, here. And, make sure I have this
on here square. And, then just move the fences
up against the work piece. I want the bit to be vertically
in the center, so I'm just gonna loosen the template, here.
And, line up this line in here with the top edge
of my work piece.
And, then with the pin in the slot, that lines up the
bit vertically centered in the work piece.
Now, I can adjust the size of the tenon with the taper
on the templates, and that means I should cut
a test mortise first, so I can make sure the tenon will fit.
And, I'll just tilt that up against the bit.
And, I had the clamp in the wrong place.
And, I want this mortise to be 17 millimeters deep
so I'll move the bit up against the work piece,
and then move the front stop so it's 17 millimeters
forward of that.
And, now we're ready to cut a mortise.
Now, I have it jigged up for making the mortises
near the ends of the sides.
Well, here's a couple of screw ups, big ones.
First one is, I forgot to set the depth stop
when I cut the first set of mortises, here,
and it milled right through the wood and into the table.
Now, I can sort of fix this, or at least hide this
because this table can be flipped over, so I can put
the scar on the bottom side. The other screw up was
that somehow I managed to get this on here just a tiny
little bit crooked, and that makes both the mortise
and the tenon crooked, but in opposite directions
which means the error doubles, and so the drawers
have a tendency to go together like this
that's just a bad thing, so I worked around that
by twisting this the other way,
and then going over the mortises again, which unfortunately
does make them a little bit loose.
But, at least I won't have twisted drawers.
Now, for the drawer fronts, I need to put the mortises
closer to the end, so I couldn't put a stop on the bottom
and so I put one here, and I'm using the side stops
here and now I can cut the left sides of all the drawers.
So, with the fronts a little bit taller that the sides
I no longer have these in the middle
so when I flip this around,
the mortises are now actually further to the right.
So, on here I moved all my stops further to the left,
which would put the mortises further to the right.
Now, I need to cut a groove along the bottom to accept
this plywood to act as a bottom. And, for that I prefer
to use a table saw, and I stacked 3 Skill saw blades
in here, and because some of these grooves are gonna have to
stop before the end, I marked on the fence where that blade
starts and stops.
I hate wasting this nice Baltic Birch plywood
but I realized that if I cut the pieces for the bottom
just a bit too short, I could get 2 pieces out of the
same part with no waste and then I'll just splice
another piece on the back by gluing a piece of plywood
on the bottom, and no one will know the difference.
So, I got my plywood splice glued on the back of this drawer
and I thought I'd glue the next one already before
I put it together, while I wait for this one to dry,
and I've got another one that's spliced together
and this one's ready to go,
I do question my sanity every time I scrounge material like that.
With the drawers complete, now I need to make some
wooden drawer slides to attach to here so the drawers
can be up here.
My slide design is just a piece of wood
that's gonna get screwed into the side that
the drawers slide on. And, then I've got another piece
that goes against this side here, and it's notched
so that I only have half an inch of space here
And, I made it so I have just the right thickness, so that if later on
I want to switch it over to some metal drawer slides,
these'll fit right in.
I set it up so that most of this cut to the notch
can be done on the table saw.
And, I have a stop behind the blade, so that I cut
just the right distance.
I prefer to refill my glue bottle way before it's empty
so I don't have to squeeze so hard to get the glue to come.
Well, I just barely have enough clamps.
At least of that size.
So, this is the same height as the drawer
plus I have a shim in here to give it a bit of slack.
I glued on these blocks here, so the drawers
wouldn't tip down too far when they're pulled out.
Ha, the gap is almost parallel. So, the reason I used this
wood for these drawers is because they already had
varnish on that was in good shape
But it's already quite scratched up
and I realized,
this stuff is shellac, and it's just not very durable at all
so I'm gonna have to strip these and re-varnish them.
I guess the best thing about shellac is
how easily it comes off. Now I need to make some handles
and I figure about this design would be good.
But with the drawers now a light colour, I figure
a dark handle would be good. So, I'm gonna cut these
out of a scrap of Mahogany.
I'm using an improvised drawer drilling jig.
It's amazing how much money you can spend on
that sort of thing, if you buy one.
Now, before I'm gonna mount these handles on here,
I want to varnish the front, and before I varnish the front,
I want to round over the corners, so that they're nice
and round, using a little hand plane
The only problem with this workbench is
it came out way too nice to get welding splatter
all over it