Drawer Making

Here is my set up for routing the 4 mm grooves for the drawer bottoms. My shop made fence has a couple of Mag Switches which lock it down and is fitted with the super accurate Flip Stop system. The two stops are to limit the travel for the left and right hand drawer sides. All the cuts were referenced from the bottom edge, as were the dovetails when the pins were marked.

The grooves all cleanly routed, you can see the stopped cuts. The back of the drawer (at bottom) has two light cuts each side which established the right height for the drawer bottom to slide in. I didn't cut this off as the bottom edge was used to mark out the tenons.

Here is my router table / spindle moulder which I used quite happily with a very small 4 mm cutter, despite the fact it only runs at 8,000 rpm instead of the 22,000 rpm recommended by manufacturers for small cutters. I find it grabs less, has never left a burn mark and I've never had a cutter break. I bought this a few years ago after using one at Andrew Crawford's workshop.

Here are the tiny through mortises and corresponding tenons for the back, cut and fitted.

Now it's time to reduce the backs to size and finish off on the shooting board.

The last thing to do before gluing up the drawers was cutting the wedge slots. As the tenons are just 5 mm square I used my finest Japanese saw to leave the smallest of kerfs. All I need now are 32 tiny walnut wedges!