a tiny drawer

Dovetailed drawers have long been a staple of fine cabinetry. In today’s 'super-efficient' society they are often produced by machine (I’m not knocking that, in fact I own a dovetail jig that I use often) however sometimes the joint is used as much for visual appeal as it is for function. In these cases I opt for hand cutting them to get the proportions and subtleties of a fine handmade piece of furniture.

I start by laying out and cutting the tails on the sides of the drawers. I use a saw to cut to my layout lines and a sharp chisel to remove the waste.
It’s important to have crisp layout lines, so I use a knife that I keep honed to a razor sharp edge.

I then use the tail boards to layout the pins on (in this case) the drawer front.

A sharp chisel is used to chop away the bulk of the waste between the pins...

Leaving a clean and accurate surface for the tails.

Life is made much easier in the shop if the tools are kept sharp, so I generally keep an 8000 grit wet stone handy for a quick honing. It only takes about 10 to 15 seconds to restore an edge if it’s done often.

The next tail socket is done the same way.

Now is the time to do any other work on the parts of the drawer that might need work, such as smoothing inside surfaces and adding decorative scroll work.

It's finally time to add some glue and fit the drawer together.

The drawer bottom and back are fitted next, and are fine tuned to fit in their respective slots with a pass or two from a sharp block plane.

Once everything fits snugly it’s time to glue the pieces in place and finish any final scraping, planning or profiling.

Occasionally I find new uses for very old tools. In this case an old Bedrock 605 makes a good weight when gluing a base onto an 18th century pipe box!