Chest of drawers....The making of - Part 1

I am currently making a pair of chest of drawers. It is a long process making anything with drawers in, as the drawers themselves take a while to make.

Although the drawers are the last thing to make, getting the timber machined up for them at the start of the project is a good idea as it allows the wood to dry and settle.

So here is how I do this part of the process.

First of all, select the timber you are going to use for the drawers. In this case, I am using American cherry.  It is a good wood, as it has few defects, comes in good size planks, supplied dry, and is stable.

I got some big planks sent to me. Each was about 3.4m long, about 160mm wide and 50mm thick. For those who want to know, it was 7 cubic feet of timber.

The downsize of these long lengths was they didn't fit in the lift up to the workshop. They had to be carried up the stairs to the 3rd floor.

The planks laying down are the American cheery used to make the drawer boxes.

Next I work out how to cut these planks up to make the best usage of the wood. I worked out that from a 1.2m length, this wood give me a piece for the drawer side, and a piece for the front (or back) of the drawer.

I cut the large planks into these length, and machined them on four faces giving a final thickness ranging from 46mm to 51mm.

The cherry machined up into 1.2m lengths.

Now comes the hard slog.  These planks are then ripped (a woodworking term that means cutting along the length of the grain) into strips 15mm thick.

So each plank has two edges, that is two cuts on the band saw to give two pieces, and then the rough surfaces on the plank from the cut are then cleaned up (and squared) with a couple of passes on the jointer. Repeat until all the wood has been processed.

Here are all the strips of wood straight from the band saw

I got about 150 strips of wood from the planks.  These can now sit while I make the carcass of the chests. During this time the wood will dry more and become more stable.

Lucky all those pieces, when arranged nicely, fitted under my bench.

The timber neatly stacked up under my workbench

So what will I ultimately do with all these strips of wood? Yes stick them back together! Ha ha ha.......utter madness!


Next I will be starting to make the carcasses. Funny enough, this also starts with cutting more wood into smaller pieces.......



For more information please visit either my bespoke fine furniture website, or my handmade jewellery boxes website.
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I forgot the pictures

In the dark and distant past, when dinosaurs ruled the Earth........

.....okay, not that long ago but in the summer last year, I did a blog post on the making of a chest of drawers. Remember?  Probably not.

Well, I forgot to post the pictures of the completed piece. So here they are.

Notice how the drawer fronts curve alternate left and right.

The drawers are made from maple, and use dovetails in
their construction.

The drawer fronts have fumed oak on their edges - it helps to
show the curve on the drawer fronts and adds a visual detail
to the finished piece.

Next time I promise I will post the pictures sooner.




To see more of my furniture, have a look at my website and the pictures in the gallery section.

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The final stages

"Previously on Jonathan Pearce Fine Furniture....

.....I had glued the drawer frames to the carcass sides. Stay tuned for this weeks episode."

Once the sides had been glued together, it only seems logical that the top and bottom are attached. Yep, that is what happened. Here you can see the completed carcass, minus the back panel and foot assembly.

Carcass all glued up

The carcass is standing on a white platform the is square, flat and level. If it was standing on something that was out of true, then the carcass could also be pushed out of true. Something you don't want when fitting drawers. You see this out of true effect on flat packed furniture. When it is screwed together and doors fitted, often it is impossible to get good alignment. This is often because the floor is not level and is influencing the carcass.


Once the carcass is complete, the next stage is making the drawer boxes. It is a long process with many individual steps, most of which go unnoticed. But the thing that people do notice is the dovetails.

Each drawer has twenty dovetail joints, and with five drawers gives a total of one hundred dovetails!

I do my joints by cutting the tails first, and then marking up and cutting the pins. Some people do the reverse process. Neither is incorrect, just personal preference.

Marking up the 'pins' from the dovetails.

Finished - one hundred dovetail joints!

These drawers will have 'slips' and two central runners. A drawer slip is a small piece of wood that is glued to the inside bottom edges of the drawer sides. It gives the drawer more wood to run on, and also has a groove cut into it for the drawer bottom.

Drawer runners have three grooves - two for the drawer bottoms and one for a piece of wood that exactly fits into the runners (used to guide the drawer in and out of the carcass).

Drawer slips (on the left) and runners (on the right).

In this picture I am fitting the drawer fronts to the drawer boxes. Using yellow shims and masking tape to hold the drawer fronts, I can ensure that the gaps between the fronts are even.

Almost finished....just a need to fix the drawer fronts with screws, a final sanding and a final oiling.


To see more of my furniture, have a look at my website and the pictures in the gallery section.

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For the Gold Cup?

Mid summer has gone....the nights are now drawing in (of sorts, I am sure for a time the sun sets later than it did on the solstice)...soon be Xmas! 

But before then, there are a couple of shows I will be attending, so that means I am making a couple of new items.

One thing I am making is a chest of drawers. I know this as I have started it. If there is time, I may also make a coffee table. We shall see.

Five drawers in this one. Made of oak. Curved drawers fronts.  Fumed oak detail on the drawer fronts. Got the idea?  No?? Here are a couple of simple SketchUp images.

Made from oak. Curved drawer fronts, that curve alternate right-left.

A close-up showing how the curving drawer fronts will look.

So these images give an idea what I am making. Wanna see some 'work in progress' pictures? If you do, then scroll down. If you don't, then you are done for now.

A big pile of wood, rough cut to size, ready to machine.
I have another two piles as well. Takes a fair bit of timber
to make a chest of drawers.

The drawer boxes are made from smaller pieces of wood that have been
glue together. It makes the construction of the drawers more stable, which
is very important to stop them sticking and binding in the carcass.
The gadget being used is a special clamping system that helps keep the
pieces of wood flat while the glue dries.

Here I am doing a test fit of the components that make up the carcass - two sides,
a top, a bottom and five drawer frames. The test fit ensure all the joinery is correct.

Here is the final phase of carcass to drawer frame glue-up. It is a multi phase
process. First of all the frames are individually glued to one carcass side. Once this
is done, and in one big hit, the frames are then glues to the other side.

That is it for now.....check back later to see how I am getting on.

To see more of my furniture, have a look at my website and the pictures in the gallery section.

Follow me on Facebook or read my tweets on Twitter.

Good enough to eat

Here are some pictures of the chest of drawers I mentioned a few posts ago, the one entitled 'January'.

It is made from steamed pear, walnut and maple.........custard anyone?

To see more of my furniture, have a look at my website and the pictures in the gallery section.

Follow me on Facebook or read my tweets on Twitter.

January

Don't be fooled into thinking that the title of this blog means that I will do monthly updates on what I have been up to. Oh no.

January is an answer to a question. Not the answer to the ultimate question, but the question "How long did it take you to make?"  I can now answer by saying "January" rather than "blah blah number of hours".

What did I make in January? I made a chest of drawers in American walnut and steamed pear.  Here we go with the pictures.

These strips of timber will make the sides of the drawers.
They are the first wood machined for the project, as I want
it to stand and acclimatise for as long as possible.

This is a big plank of steamed pear. I did actually
cross cut it with a hand saw!

Four pieces of wood. These will become the cabinet legs.

I have five of these frames. They hold the sides of the carcass
together, and the drawers run on them.

The drawer frames being fixed to the carcass sides.

Here is the completed carcass (minus the top).

The last drawer box glue-up. This is the biggest of the five drawers.

Here the drawer boxes have been fitted into the cabinet carcass.

The handles for the drawers are handmade from pear.

Using yellow plastic shims while attaching the drawer fronts
to the drawer boxes.

And here is the finished piece.

 

This chest of drawers is currently on show at an exhibition called 21st Century Furniture IV, being held in The Millinery Works Gallery, London.

Please check my website if you want to find out more about my furniture, follow me on my Facebook pages, or see what I am talking about on Twitter.

 

Past and present

I have been busy the last few weeks - helping someone in the workshop making a table in fact.

The chance came up that I could help make a table that is a nine-tenths scale reproduction of a table that William Wilberforce used to sign the document that abolished the slave trade. The original table is held in The Museum in Docklands, London.

The we made was about five foot round, eight curved faced drawers and a leather top writing surface. The table stood on a traditional style curved leg assembly on four brass castors. The wood used was a mixture of modern material for hidden areas (ply and the like), with mahogany being used for all the visible surfaces.

Two of us working on it, and it was finished in about five weeks. Not bad going!

So now I am back to making my own pieces. I have come up with a range of product I want to make that allow people to have bespoke furniture, but at more affordable prices. These pieces won't be a cheap as the Nordic/Oak/Pine warehouse places, but won't be as expensive as high end pieces (but I can still make them if required!). All the pieces can be made larger/smaller as required.

The first piece I am making is a chest of drawers. It is being made so one half is white and the other is black. It looks as if someone has got two chests, cut them in half and stuck them back together again. A bit two-tone perhaps?

I am just at the phase now where I am spraying the black half...and it is a right pain, as you need to be very careful not to get dust and dirt on the surface as it really shows. And in a dusty workshop that is hard!

A couple of pints please

I came in on Monday morning and checked the kiln to see how much water had come out of the wood over the weekend. I was really surprised, as there was half a bucket, which was about a couple of pints.

I checked the moisture content of the wood, and it has dropped down to about 11%. This is a good enough level to allow me to start to machine the wood up closer to its final thickness, and then putting it back in the kiln to dry out a bit more.

The long and short of it is, that by Wednesday I was ready to take the wood to the final dimension and actually start to make the table!

For the last few days I have been doing the joints in the table that actually hold it all together. As there are thirty-six components in the table (excluding the pieces that make up there drawers, and that is another thirty-two), I guess you can see why I am still doing them today!

Cabinet handle design

I had an idea for the handles.

I wanted some sort of long handle that runs from top to bottom of my cabinet. I then came up with the idea of having two handles on each drawer front.

Then came the idea of having the handles curved running from the bottom most drawer and merging into one on the top most drawer.

I wasn't sure, so I cut out the shape that I wanted and using double sided sticky tape (in the best Blue Peter fashion) stuck the cardboard handle shapes to the drawer fronts, as you can see in the picture.

It is well worth checking something like this first, as the is lots of work involved actually making the real handles from wood!

No polo neck jumpers

I have now broken up for a few days over Christmas, but will be back in the workshop next week.

For the last couple of days I have been putting coats of oil on the carcass. This involves sanding it down, hoover off the dust, apply the oil, lets it dry over night. Then repeat the process. It takes time to get a nice smooth finish, but it is worth doing it correctly as a poor finish can let down a finished piece.

Here is a picture of the tall boy with the drawers and top fitted.


I will be working on the handles next...but I need to get my head round how I am going to make them yet. That is something to do over the next few days in between a mince pie or two.

Have a good Christmas everybody!

21 days later

For the last few weeks I have been making the drawers for my cabinet.

When I was training, we were told to allow three days per drawer, so with the seven drawers I am making gives a total of 21 days. No wonder it seems like I have been making them forever!
Let me tell you why making a drawer takes so long, and I am sure you are thinking ‘it is only an open top box’.

Well, you are correct, as a drawer is basically and open top box. But it has to be a box that is square, stable, fit into a hole, and have dovetail joints to make life fun. Each drawer I am making has twelve separate components, giving an overall total of 84 components – and that excludes the frames the drawers run on (an extra 48 components if you are interested).

The sides of the drawer must be made from timber that is dry and stable. Ideally it should be made from wood that is quarter sawn as it is very stable and does not move significantly, but finding good quality wood sawn this way is very hard. I have made my drawer sides from American cherry as it come shipped very dry, and the way I have cut it gives me sides that are near enough quarter sawn.

The joints on drawers are traditionally done as dovetails as these are very strong and resist the forces put on a drawer each time it is open. A jig can be purchased to machine cut the joints, but on my drawers they are all hand cut – you get a much more elegant joint if they are hand cut.
For the drawer bottoms, I am using Cedar of Lebanon. This is a traditional wood for drawer bottoms as it has a wonderful smell that is supposed to keep at bay any insect attack. I do personally love the aroma you get when a cedar-bottomed drawer is opened.

But that still doesn’t really say why it will take about 21 days to make the drawers…just believe me, it does!

Gluing the carcass - phase two

In the previous post, I was gluing the drawer frames to the carcass sides. The next stage is to glue the back panel and legs to the side assembly.

Once again it is done in a couple of stages. First I glued the two back legs to the back panel. Once this was dry these two assemblies come together. All that is missing are the two front legs. These two are glued on one at a time. It just makes it easier and less chance of mishaps.


Here you can see the final leg being glued on. It did the front leg glue-up with the carcass standing vertically. This is to ensure the legs are level and the carcass does not wobble.

And here it is...one glued up carcass.

Now I am working on the drawers.

Gluing the carcass - phase one.

I have been doing the first of many glue-ups today. This is always where it gets very stressful as if something is stuck in the wrong place then it usually means starting that piece again. Hence care must be taken!

What I have been doing is taking the drawer frames (the things that the drawer sits on and runs on) and gluing them to the carcass sides. As I have eight frames, each with four joins, that gives a total if my maths is correct of thirty two joints. The best way to attack this is in stages, which is just what I have been doing.

To make things easy, I glued the frames to one carcass side first - but only a couple of frames at a time. This then lead to the big glue-up when I had to glue the other carcass side to the frames. This had to be done in one big hit.


This picture shows that final glue-up, during which I had to use all the clamps I own, plus a couple of others from the workshop. You can never have too many clamps!

The next stage will be to assemble the back panel and gluing on the legs. But that is for another day.

My current project.

At the moment, the project I am working on is a tallboy chest of drawers standing 1.4 meters tall.

It is made from English cherry and American walnut, and has seven drawers each slightly larger than the one above. The sides, back and drawer fronts are made from the cherry, while the legs are made from the walnut.

The legs of the tallboy are tapered in a curved shape, similar to the boxes in my website gallery.

I think it will look good when complete.