RICK HELMS WOODWORKING

SHAKER LIBRARY TABLE

PART III:  BUILDING THE DRAWERS AND FINISHING THE TABLE

Say hello to my little Father's Day present. Elaine went all out this year and bought me a Porter Cable deluxe dovetail jig.

I learned how to cut dovetails by hand years ago by watching Roy Underhill do it on The Woodwright's Shop on PBS. After watching the show a couple of times, I went out to the shop, grabbed some scrap walnut, and built Elaine a dovetailed box with a mechanical pencil, a ruler, and a dozuki backsaw.

I hate cutting handmade dovetails. I can do them, but I'd rather not. That's why I love my new dovetail jig!

The reason I'm crowing about my new jig is that I decided to make two drawers for the library table, and this little baby arrived just in time to construct them, thereby saving me hours of tedious hand sawing and fitting.

For the drawers, I decided to use pre-dimensioned poplar instead of dimensioning my own material. The poplar is available cheaply at Home Despot, and it's almost infinitely renewable. I also like poplar because it smells like bacon when you machine it. But that's not important now. I used 4"x 1/2" x 4' boards for the drawers. The drawers themselves are only three inches high, so my first job was to rip the poplar boards down to 3" width on my tablesaw. No pics, because you've seen me do this before. You've also seen me do crosscuts on the crosscut sled, so no pics of that either. Think of it as an opportunity to exercise your imagination. Let's just say I wound up with two sets of poplar of the proper dimensions to build the drawers.

Here I'm cutting dovetails for the drawers on the Porter Cable jig. Both sides of the dovetail are cut at the same time, using a dovetail bit in my Porter Cable plunge router. The workpieces are positioned underneath a routing template, and the router has a brass template guide screwed into the base. The workpieces are staggered by about a half inch (or the width of a single dovetail), so that the end joint will be flush. It takes a couple of tries using scrap to set up the spacer, but once it's done I can cut dovetails all day long with the same setup.

In these pix, I'm routing out half-blind dovetails. That means you can only see the dovetail from one side of the joint. Once the jig is set up, it takes about a minute to rout out each joint. Using a pencil, ruler, and dozuki backsaw, it would take me about a half hour to do each joint. See why I love my new jig?

Behold the end result! Perfectly fitted dovetails with just one pass of the plunge router!

This one hasn't been sanded or glued yet. It's a lot prettier after sanding. I just fitted it together to demonstrate what a great tool this dovetail jig is.

I still need to construct the drawer bottoms before I can do any gluing.

I will make the drawer bottoms from quarter-inch thick birch plywood. In order to get a good solid fit, I need to cut a dado on the bottom inside edge of the drawer. I could do this on my router table, but I've found that it's much quicker and easier to cut small dadoes on my tablesaw. A dado is just a recessed channel in which the drawer bottom rides. Since my saw blade isn't a quarter inch thick, I have to cut the dadoes in two stages. I raise the blade to cut one quarter inch deep, and run the pieces through one by one. Then I move the rip fence over about an eighth of an inch, and run them through again. The result is a dado just a millimeter or two over a quarter inch wide (to compensate for swelling due to humidity), and a quarter inch deep.

After cutting the dadoes, I fit the drawer back together (remembering NOT to glue yet! That would be disastrous!).

Fitting the drawer bottoms couldn't be easier. I place the assembled-but-not-glued drawer over the plywood, and mark the inside dimensions of the drawer on the plywood with a pencil (left picture). Then I mark another line a quarter inch outside the perimeter of the original marking (center picture). This will be the part of the drawer that rides in the dado slot. Finally, I cut out the drawer bottom on my bandsaw (right picture).

Now I can do the final assembly on the drawer. I run a little bit of glue into the blind dovetails (just a few drops--a little goes a long way here!), and slide the bottom into the dadoes. I don't glue the drawer bottom in. It can't fall out because it's captured in the dado slots, and I need it to be able to move a little as it expands and contracts in different temperatures and humidities, since if it were glued it it might crack in a few years.

A few taps with a mallet, a few swipes with some sandpaper to clean up the dovetails, and the drawer casing is finished!

I still need to attach the drawer fronts. Before I do, though, I need to clean them up a little. Remember that the entire front skirt--including the drawer fronts--were cut from a single board, to keep the grain continuous, and then glued to make the final skirt. The drawer fronts now are too wide to move freely in the drawer openings, so  I need to thin them down a little. I could do this on my jointer, but it has a tendency to produce snipe. Instead, I'll resort to (gasp!) a hand tool. Here, I'm thinning the drawer fronts with a bench plane. I take one pass on the top, and then one on the bottom, fit the piece in the drawer holes to see if they are loose enough, and then repeat until I have the right fit. Takes a little time, but the result is very satisfactory. I'll attach the drawer fronts to the drawer casings just before I do the sanding and finishing.
So, it's finally time to glue the table together!

This table is five feet long. I don't have any clamps long enough to do a job like that, so I have to improvise using my workbench end vice as a huge clamp.

First, I clamp a two-by-four to one end of the workbench as a squared fence. Then I install several bench dogs in the end vice, glue up the mortise and tenon joints, and then clamp the whole thing together with the end vise. Later, I'll do the same thing with the front skirt.

Since the table is only one foot deep, gluing the side skirts into place is a snap, since I have plenty of clamps that size.

I'm not ready yet to finish the table. There are a few things that still need to be done first.

In the picture on the left, I've cut a couple of pieces of scrap poplar with 45 degree angles on my compound miter saw. Then, I glue and nail them into place to act as corner braces on each end of the table.

In the center and right pictures, I also had to build runners for the drawers. I made these out of scrap poplar also. This is why I keep my scrap wood around--why waste it when you can use it for small pieces sometime in the future.

You can see that I've gone ahead and attached the sapele drawer fronts to the drawer casings (right picture). I found some nice wooden drawer pulls at--of all places--WalMart, for about two bucks. I'll attach them just before applying the finish to the table.

I also constructed three attachment points for the tabletop, again using scrap poplar. Basically, I made two cleats which I glued and nailed into the front and back skirts of the table, and then I nailed another flat piece onto them, flush with the top of the skirts. There is one on each side of the drawers.
Here's the finished table frame, ready to attach the top.

I particularly like this picture because you can see how all the mortises and tenons fit together, and how the internal components are arranged to strengthen the table and keep the drawers centered.

All that's left is to center the top on the table frame, screw it down, and apply the finish!

And here's the finished project!

I'm a big fan of General Finishes' gel stains and gel poly finishing products. Many woodworkers are wary of poly finishes, because they aren't 'natural', whatever that means. They'd rather use shellac or lacquer to finish their projects.

I've been very pleased with how poly has worked for me. For this project, I sanded to 320 grit, and then used General's Dark Mahogany gel stain as a first coat, and applied four more coats of wipe-on satin poly clear coat.

I'm very happy about the way this one turned out, and Elaine is thrilled to get her library table. And, now that you you know how it was made, you can make one too!

Total build time was about two weeks, working two hours a day or so. The entire project probably took a total of twenty hours of actual construction, with most glue-ups curing overnight.

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