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seven rails

Learned something prepping the rails that had gone over my head like a cement balloon. There is an order of operations with prepping the rails that I wasn't following. First op is to rip the rail to width. 2nd op is square one end and then square the opposite end and saw the rail to length. I was flattening/straightening one edge, squaring the ends, and finally sawing it to final width. The problem with that sequence? The ends were square to the original reference edge but not with the other one (width wasn't parallel end to end). For years I did prep that way obviously wandering in La La Land without knowing it. 

23 slats

I was able to get this many slats out of the off cuts from the stock prep.

my desk

33 slats on my desk that I will repeat on Miles's desk. I have a fondness for the look of this. They will be 3/4" wide by 3/8" thick. I doubt I'll use less then this number but I may add a couple more - to close the distant between the last slat and the legs.

44 slats

The width and thickness was different between the 5 batches of slats I did. To even all the slats I did one final ripping to width and thickness. The total operation of making the 44 slats took me 2hours.

cherry sawdust

Generated a bigger pile than I expected. There was also a fine sawdust in the shop that covered everything.

headache time

Didn't realize until after I was done with the front that I had made a hiccup. I was looking to get a continuous grain flow. I didn't want one drawer, I wanted two inset ones. The headache was caused by trying to figure out the length of the drawers.

the front rail

I first saw this done by Norm Abrams from the New Yankee Workshop. I think it was called the library table. I have done this once before without any problems. Trying to find the length of the drawers and the left, middle, and right dividers was making me feel like I had the IQ of a lima bean.

The result of this is the drawer inserts came out short. I just lost my continuous grain R to L.

hmm.......

Normally I would have used biscuits but I recently got a Stanley #59 doweling jig and I used it instead of biscuits. I did good on the alignment on the bottom but I was off on the top. I thought I had registered the jig but I did it wrong for the top one -either the divider or the top rail.

double, triple checking

I would have bet a lung I had done the registration correctly. Of the 4 registrations I was right on 3 and off on one. I was happy with the bottom - it came out dead flush on all 3 dividers. The fix was easy, glue in dowels and redrill for them. 

I couldn't wait

Twenty minutes after I glued the dowels in the errant holes I sawed off the proud and flushed them. Tried it with the center divider and I was flush top and bottom.

happy face

Dead on flush, top & bottom, on all three dividers.

it won't stretch

Got a 1/4" gap and I tried but I couldn't stretch it enough to close it up. Eyeballed it and I couldn't think of any way to 'fix' it. I can't use these drawers for slats as they aren't long enough. I will save them in the wood pile for a future use.

nope

I thought I was clever using a scrap of pine to figure out the length of the drawer. When I did it the pine was a snug fit in the opening. Turned out that the pine was the same length as the cherry drawer from the git go. Don't understand how that happened. But I did remember how I had done the previous front rail from many moons ago. 

On that one I had left the right and left outside dividers over length. On this one I had sawed the top and bottom to the same length as the back rails. I should have left the middle part over sized. Got me thinking about maybe redoing this. I have extra stock and the 'fix' for it. 

nice jig

One thing I have learned over the years is to leave jigs etc set up until everything is glued and cooking. This way it isn't a scramble to set the jig up again to 'fix' a me-steak.

accidental woodworker